Fifth Crusade

The Fifth Crusade, fought from 1217 to 1221, was a campaign by Western European Christian forces to recover Jerusalem by first conquering Egypt, the center of Ayyubid power, rather than attacking the Holy Land directly. After an initial and largely unproductive expedition into the Levant in 1217, the main Crusader army, joined by the papal legate Pelagius, landed in Egypt and besieged the strategic port of Damietta on the Nile delta, finally capturing it in November 1219 after a long siege. Rather than accept the Ayyubid sultan al-Kamil's offer to trade Jerusalem for the Crusaders' withdrawal from Egypt, the Crusader leadership pressed on toward Cairo in 1221, only to be trapped by the annual Nile flood after al-Kamil's forces cut their supply lines. Surrounded and facing starvation, the Crusader army was forced to surrender and evacuate Egypt entirely, returning Damietta to Ayyubid control and ending the campaign in failure.