Francis before the Sultan
Francis walks into a Muslim court alone
The Fifth Crusade is besieging the Egyptian city of Damietta. Francis of Assisi, who has come to the Crusade not to fight but to preach, watches the battle with growing horror. He tells the Crusade leaders they will lose. They ignore him. They attack. They lose badly.
And then Francis does something that makes even his friends think he has lost his mind: he crosses the front lines with a single companion, Brother Illuminato, and asks to be taken to Sultan Malik al-Kamil.
The soldiers who capture him assume he is a spy or an emissary. He tells them he is a servant of God come to show the Sultan the way of salvation. They beat him. They bring him before the Sultan anyway.
Malik al-Kamil is a cultivated man, a nephew of Saladin, genuinely curious about religion. He and Francis spend several days in conversation. The Sultan listens. He does not convert. He offers Francis gifts, which Francis refuses. He offers Francis safe conduct back to the Crusader lines, which Francis accepts.
The Sultan reportedly tells his court afterward that he had never met a Christian like this one.
Francis returns to the Crusader camp. The Crusade continues. Damietta eventually falls to the Crusaders and then is lost again.
But for a few days in 1219, a man in a borrowed habit and a Muslim sultan sat together and talked about God. No swords. No armies. Just two men and a conversation.
“I am a Christian. Take me to your master.”
— Francis of Assisi, to the soldiers who captured him, 1219 AD
“Blessed are the peacemakers, for they shall be called sons of God.”
Francis walked across the front lines of a Crusade to have a conversation.
He did not go to win an argument or to achieve a conversion. He went because he believed that the Sultan was a human being who deserved to hear the gospel from someone who was not trying to kill him.
The conversation that followed — two men talking about God across the most violent religious divide of the medieval world — did not end the war. It did not convert the Sultan. What it did was demonstrate that there was another way: not the sword, not the barricade, but the conversation.
Francis was the only person at the Crusade who tried it.
What conversation are you not having because crossing the front line seems too dangerous? And what would it cost to try it anyway?