Battle of Forbie

Battle context

The Battle of Forbie, fought in October 1244, was a decisive Ayyubid victory that effectively ended Christian military power in the Holy Land. The forces of the Egyptian Ayyubid Sultan as-Salih Ayyub, reinforced with Khwarezmian mercenaries, defeated the allied army — a coalition that included the Kingdom of Jerusalem alongside Ayyubid princes as-Salih Ismail, an-Nasir Dawud, and al-Mansur Ibrahim — inflicting casualties of approximately 7,500 on a force of around 5,000, a figure indicating near-total destruction of the allied army. Among those engaged on the crusader side were Walter IV of Brienne, the Grand Masters Guillaume de Chateauneuf and Armand de Périgord, and other senior commanders of the military orders, pointing to the scale of the leadership losses sustained. The battle's outcome was consequential enough to prompt the call for the Seventh Crusade, making it one of the pivotal engagements of the crusading period in terms of its political and military aftermath. Within the long arc of the Crusades, Forbie accelerated the terminal decline of the Latin presence in the Levant that had persisted since the First Crusade of 1095.