It was during the reign of the Hafsite prince Abou Abd Allah Muhamed el Mostancer, that the first French expedition to Tunis took place. In the month of July 1270 the fleet of Louis IX. arrived at Cagliari in Sardinia. At a great council held here the king announced his intention of making an attack on the “country of Tunis,” the primary object of the seventh crusade. The following are the reasons which he gave for his determination:—“Tunis,” said St. Louis, “faces Sicily, and is on the high road to the Holy Land. Tunis can always harass our communications with the East; we must leave no enemies behind us, and we must therefore conquer it first of all.” On the 17th July Louis of France and the princes in his train anchored their ships off Cape Carthage. The landing of the invaders was unopposed, and the king contented himself with entrenching his army amidst the ruins which then covered the site of the great city. “The Arabs,” says M. Pellissier, “encouraged by the inaction of the crusaders, came every day to skirmish in the vicinity of the camp. If one pursued them they fled, but when the French returned to their quarters, tired out by a bootless chase, the Arabs turned round and assailed them with arrows and javelins. This is exactly how they treat us to-day.”[13] M. Pellissier must have contemplated with the eye of prophecy the campaign of 1881. Days and weeks passed by and the sorties of the Arabs became more frequent, the soldiers entreated to be allowed to march against them, but the king insisted on waiting for his brother, Charles of Sicily. Then, as six hundred and eleven years later, came the ravages of dysentery and fever. One after another the great chieftains shared the fate of the common soldiers, and the fair hill overlooking the blue waves and purple mountains of the Gulf of Tunis became, as it had often become before, a vast hecatomb. The king himself was at last struck down with the fell disease. The Arabs sang in chorus the following song of victory:— “O Frenchmen, Tunis is the sister of Cairo, prepare yourselves for every kind of misfortunes. This time the house of Lokman[14] will be a tomb, And your keepers shall be Monker and Menákir.”[15]