This article records tradition as it has been passed down and reported. Its sources are not yet part of the atlas's verified catalogue.
Called by the Fourth Lateran Council under Pope Innocent III, the Fifth Crusade abandoned the Fourth Crusade's direct Levantine target in favor of Egypt, judged by its planners to be the strategic key that would force the return of Jerusalem. Led in the field by the papal legate Cardinal Pelagius, King Andrew II of Hungary and, later, John of Brienne, titular King of Jerusalem, its multinational forces besieged and captured the Nile port of Damietta in 1219 after an eighteen month siege, facing the Ayyubid Sultanate under al-Adil and, from 1218, his son al-Kamil, who had succeeded to command of Egypt's defense during the long siege itself.
Before the crusaders' final advance toward Cairo, al-Kamil offered to trade Jerusalem itself for Damietta, an offer Pelagius, wielding the campaign's overall command as papal legate, refused outright. The crusader army pressed on regardless and was trapped by the annual Nile flood at al-Mansurah in 1221, forced to surrender Damietta and withdraw from Egypt entirely in exchange for its own survival. The campaign ended in failure, having come within one accepted offer of recovering Jerusalem by treaty rather than by the battle it never actually won on the ground.