23. Acre in 1291
them, a great mangonel brought by the army of Hamah on the middle Orontes from Hisn al-Akrad, the magnificent fortress of Crac des Chevaliers captured by Baibars in 1271, was transported in a hundred carts and took a month to be hauled the 125 miles or so to Acre. As the Franks by this stage had no field army, Khalil’s passage and investment of the city were unopposed. His combined forces were large enough to surround Acre completely on the landward side. His strategy was simple: pound the walls to rubble, create breaches and then use his superiority of numbers to overwhelm the defenders. The Muslim army probably numbered more than the total civilian population of Acre, which may have stood at around 30–40,000. Some wild estimates claimed the attackers had over 200,000 troops. However large, numbers were the key.
Facing the sultan, the Franks in Acre were not without some advantages. Although the military establishment was comparatively modest, it was still substantial, perhaps 1,000 knights and sergeants with another 14,000 infantry. Reinforced by a few western crusaders, such as Othon of Grandson and his English regiment and a division from Cyprus, the Acre garrison was led and dominated by the military orders, whose discipline, resourcefulness and courage prevented the defence from descending into chaos or panic. Able-bodied civilians were enlisted, and the Venetians and Pisans played a full part, the Venetians manning an especially effective catapult. Accurately assessing the odds, many women, children and the elderly had been evacuated before the siege began, reducing the drain on food and emotion, but many, not least the poorest, remained. The one great advantage the Franks possessed was control of the sea. This allowed supplies to reach the beleaguered city, and King Henry of Cyprus- Jerusalem to arrive with last-minute, if limited, reinforcement on 4 May. The sea also provided a means of attacking the Muslim camps on land, as armoured ships carrying archers, crossbowmen and, in at least one case, a large mangonel, bombarded the flanks of the besiegers’ positions where they came down to the shore. However, these attacks inflicted bloody but only superficial damage on the enemy; the mangonel soon broke up in heavy seas.
While the Franks could resist in reasonable security using the twelve towers that studded the outer walls of the city, without a massive infusion of new troops and in the absence of a land force they were doomed to wait for a seemingly inevitable end. Their only realistic chance of survival lay in disrupting the Muslims by inflicting unexpected or unacceptable casualties, thereby opening up the very real fissures in the political high command around the sultan (who was to be assassinated by members of his own government in Egypt only two years later). The spy network run by William of Beaujeu, Master of the Temple, was almost certainly well apprised of such tensions. The only military means to expose any Muslim rivalries was stubborn defence and repeated forays, sometimes at night, into the Muslim camps. These were vividly remembered by veterans such as Ismai ‘il Abu’l- Fida, an Ayyubid princeling from Hamah, even if his sharpest memory concerned a botched night attack in which Frankish soldiers tripped over guy-ropes and one fell into an emir’s latrine, where he was finished off.131
In reality, only a large western fleet (which did not exist) or a miracle could save Acre. As casualties grew, anxieties over the defenders’ ability to man the whole length of the walls put a stop to the attacks on the Muslim camp. In desperation, soon after King Henry’s arrival an attempt was made to negotiate with the sultan that only served to clarify that Khalil was determined on conquest not accommodation. As the weary days of May passed, Muslim sappers began to have increasing success in undermining the bastions and towers of the outer wall, all the time supported by a hail of missiles, including jars of explosive material, and arrows. By 16 May, the outer enceinte between the walls was abandoned.
The final Muslim assault on the now depleted, hungry and exhausted Frankish defenders came on 18 May, to the accompaniment of a blizzard of arrows and missiles and the encouragement of the usual military drums, cymbals and trumpets. The defences were soon penetrated and fierce street-by-street, hand-to-hand fighting ensued. Few escaped wounds; hundreds if not thousands were killed before the Christians broke for the port. There, ghastly scenes of mayhem, panic, confusion and despair marked the ragged evacuation of survivors. Too few boats caused overcrowding, capsizing and a nasty trade in selling places on the larger vessels. A Catalan Templar captain, Roger Flor, later famous as a freebooter across the Near East, allegedly made a fortune on money extorted from fleeing Frankish noblewomen. Western accounts are lit by stories of heroism and stoicism, none more moving than that displayed by the mortally wounded William of Beaujeu, and tales of rape and violent atrocities. Many of the leaders, including King Henry, managed to escape. Those that stayed were either slaughtered or captured to spend the rest of their lives as slaves or prisoners, the usual sequel to such military disasters. By the evening of 18 May, most of Acre was in Khalil’s hands. The fortified Templar quarter, jutting out into the sea at the south-west angle of the city, managed to hold out for another ten days. An attempted parley ended in bloodshed, as Egyptian troops attempted to seize the women and boys sheltering in the Temple complex, and the Templars who had agreed terms with the sultan were summarily executed. Only the halt and the lame remained in the Templar buildings when the final moments came on 28 May. The only consolation afforded the last defenders of Frankish Acre – or perhaps the admiring but absent chronicler who described it – may have been that, as the sultan’s troops advanced into the compound, its walls, which had been sapped for over a week, finally collapsed, burying victors and vanquished, perhaps appropriately, in a shared grave.
Once the final resistance had been cleared by the end of May, it became apparent that no immediate counter-attack or succour were possible. The sultan, according to one of his officers, after massacring all surviving defenders, commanded that the city of Acre be ‘demolished and razed to the ground’.132 There was to be no possibility of a repeat of the Third Crusade. By August all the remaining mainland bases had been surrendered or evacuated: Tyre, Sidon, Beirut, Tortosa and Athlit. One eyewitness of the final siege escaped the fall of Acre, an Arabic-speaking Frankish Cypriot who had served on the mainland for over twenty years, ending as the Master of the Temple’s secretary and occasional secret agent. He recounted with hammer-blow clarity the heroic death of his employer and the last days of Frankish Acre. This man, whose only home was Outremer, put the events of 1291 in perspective: ‘Thus was all of Syria lost… This time everything was lost so that altogether the Christians held not so much as a palm’s breadth of land in Syria.’133
Lamenting western contemporaries did not know it. They and their successors for many generations refused to accept it. A century later, Cypriot noblewomen were still seen going about in public in deep mourning for the loss of Acre.134 Yet, on its own terms, the attempt by western Europeans to establish and secure rule over the Holy Land and the Holy Places of their religion in the name of Christ had ended in failure.
The Later Crusades
25
The Eastern Crusades in the Later Middle Ages
The evacuation of Frankish holdings on the mainland of Palestine marked a period in the history of the crusades, but not their end. Over subsequent generations, the failure to mount a large, still less effective, western European military campaign against the Mamluks or, later, the Ottoman Turks, shifted the emphasis of wars of the cross while transforming their nature. They became diffused over widely separated front lines in Iberia, the Balkans, eastern, central and northern Europe, narrowly conceived and recruited political campaigns in Italy and small enterprises – often little more than piratical raids – in the Levant. The absence of international action altered the role of crusade ideology, rhetoric, liturgy, ceremony, politics and finance. Crusading did not decline after 1291. It changed, as it had over the previous two centuries since the First Crusade.
This explains the apparent contradiction of crusading throughout the later middle ages; its ineffectiveness failed to destroy sustained communal commitment to the idea or understanding of its ideology and ideals. This was not caused by some sort of collective escapism or mental atrophy. Rather, the crusade mentality, transmitted through long habit, current liturgy and constant renewal in fresh appeals for alms, tax, purchase of indulgences and, occasionally, armed service, framed a way of regarding the world. This mentality, widely dispersed through society, allowed the expression of faith and identity through social rituals and religious institutions without the necessity of individual political or military action. The relative scarcity of
