The numberless disasters which accompanied the first expedition of Louis IX. against the infidels had not at all abated the ardour of that monarch, and he never laid down the cross after his return from Palestine. The sad news which he daily received from thence only served to inflame his zeal the more; and at length, in 1270, he resolved to make fresh efforts to liberate the Holy City, and the unfortunate Christians it contained, from the yoke of the Mussulmans. Most of his nobles were eager to accompany their prince, the faithful Joinville being almost the only one who refused to share the perils of his good lord and master. He said, in full assembly, that the last Crusade had ruined him; and that the king could not be advised to undertake this new expedition, without his councillors incurring mortal sin. The good seneschal was so weak and debilitated, that he could not bear the weight of his harness or get on horseback. The French army, consisting of sixty thousand men, embarked at Aigues-Mortes, on the first of July. They steered towards the coast of Barbary, where they soon arrived. On the western coast of Africa, opposite Sicily, is a peninsula, whose circumference is about forty-two miles. This peninsula advances into the sea between two gulfs, of which the one on the west offers a commodious port. The other, between the east and the south, communicates by a canal with a lake which extends three leagues into the land, and which modern geographers call the Gouletta. It was there that stood the great rival of Rome, spreading itself to the two shores of the sea. The conquests of the Romans, the ravages even of the Vandals, had not utterly destroyed the once proud city of Carthage; but in the seventh century, after being invaded and desolated by the Saracens, it became little more than a heap of ruins; a hamlet upon the port, called Marsa, a tower on the point of the cape, a tolerably strong castle upon the hill of Byrsa,--this was all that remained of that city whose power dominated so long over the Mediterranean and the coasts of Asia and Africa, and contended in three wars with Rome for empire and glory. At five leagues’ distance from this remarkable site, towards the south-east, a little beyond the Gouletta, stands Tunis, a place so ancient that Scipio made himself master of it before he attacked Carthage. At the time of Louis’ invasion, Tunis was one of the most flourishing cities of Africa. It contained ten thousand houses and three large faubourgs; the spoils of nations, the produce of an immense commerce had enriched it, and all that the art of fortification could invent, had been employed in defending the access to it.