Accordingly he convened a solemn parliament, when he announced to his assembled nobles his intention of undertaking a new crusade. At first many were greatly surprised and afflicted, thinking, writes the Sire de Joinville, “that those who had counselled the undertaking had committed an evil deed and a mortal sin.” Some, indeed, of the king’s most faithful servants openly refused to join his crusade, not through fear, but from wisdom, and with the intention perhaps of persuading him to abandon his fatal project; but the majority of the barons and feudal lords found it impossible to gainsay the will of their sovereign, and the example of the king was of still greater power than his orders. His three sons, the Counts of Toulouse, of Champagne, and of Flanders, took up the cross, as well as his brother, Charles of Anjou, who had recently been raised to the throne of Sicily, and many other princes of the royal house of France. The preparations for the crusade required three years, during which St. Louis, in the hope of persuading every Christian state to send its troops against the infidels, did his best, but without success, to put an end to the political quarrels that divided kings from their subjects. He embarked, in 1270, with his sons and his principal nobles, for Sardinia, which had been fixed upon as the rendezvous of the Crusaders. On his arrival there it was decided that Tunis should be attacked first. A French chronicler mentions that the king had been given to understand that “Tunis afforded great assistance to the Sultan of Cairo, which was very injurious to the Holy Land, and the barons believed that if that root of evil, the city of Tunis, were destroyed, it would be of much advantage to Christendom.” Other chroniclers, on the contrary, and amongst them Matthew Paris, give a more plausible motive for the expedition, viz., that the king had heard that the Moorish sovereign of that part of the coast had shown a disposition to embrace Christianity and join the western powers in their attempt to conquer Egypt. [Illustration: Fig. 111.--Disembarkation of St. Louis at Carthage.--Fac-simile of a Woodcut in the “Passaiges d’oultremer:” small folio, Paris, 1518.]