The Source

by James A. Michener

  At Ma Coeur, Volkmar and his knights launched a day-and-night activity. All peasants living outside the walls were ordered to make ready to move inside and to bring their beasts, and when this was done Volkmar told them, “If any are afraid, you may leave now.” A few Muslims headed south to join the Mamelukes; but where could the Christians go, even if they so desired?

  The knights were perplexed when Volkmar paid considerable attention to brushwood, but without discovering his purpose they humored his whim and directed peasants to lug large piles of the brush inside the castle walls. Other men were let down on ropes to check the huge cisterns, thirty and forty feet deep, and they reported that thanks to the secret well, the castle had enough water to serve two thousand people for two years, should the siege last so long. Comparable supplies of food were also in storage: fruits, nuts, dried fish and meat, chickens, some pigs whose very shadows alarmed the Muslims, and immense stores of grain. Few castles in the Holy Land over the past two hundred years had escaped sieges, and some had held out for thirty or forty months unassailable behind their walls. But in those happier days there had always been the assurance that sooner or later relief would come from Antioch or Cyprus. But this time where would the rescuers be?

  When supplies were checked Volkmar and his knights inspected the lines of defense. The outer wall of the town no longer seemed so stout as when Gunter of Cologne had built it two centuries before, but it was in good repair and was protected by the glacis; if properly defended this wall could frustrate an enemy for five or six days. The narrow alleys of the town also presented opportunities for defense, and the mosque and the three Christian churches would provide strong rallying points: indeed, the Basilica of St. Mary Magdalene could be converted into a minor fortress which ought to hold for several weeks. The deep moat protecting the castle wall would be hard to cross, while the wall itself was surely impregnable. Behind it rose the castle, a self-contained unit with its own ponderous walls well able to withstand an enemy for months. And all was in repair.

  Satisfied on these points Count Volkmar next turned to the most difficult question facing him: what to do with his wife and son? He assembled his knights and said, “If there is one who would prefer sailing from Acre, perhaps to Germany …” The discussion had gone no further. The countess said that she had been born in the Holy Land, that her father had withstood seven sieges, and she four. And her son said, “At Saphet I heard what the Mameluke captain said and at the Horns of Hattin young Volkmar stood with his father, didn’t he?”

  “He did,” Volkmar replied. He then asked, “Do any of the knights prefer Acre?” None did, and the waiting began.

  On a stormy morning in late February, 1291, the man on the watch-tower announced, not loudly nor with excitement, “They are coming.”

  Dispassionately the knights lined the battlements to inspect the Mamelukes as they rode easily up from the southern plains. There was no great dust, no shouting. The vast columns moved slowly, for they felt no excitement; when they finished with Ma Coeur they would proceed to Acre and one siege was pretty much like another: generals stayed in the rear and half-naked foot soldiers went up against the walls. Any Ma Coeur peasants who happened to be working outside the town moved quietly within, except a handful who set off across the fields to join the Mamelukes. No one tried to prevent them.

  By noon the purposeful column was nearing the walls of the town, but no one on either side fired arrows or launched spears. The impressive thing was that the columns kept coming forward in staggering numbers. “There must be fifty thousand people down there,” one of the knights calculated. The figure was not unreasonable.

  As soon as the horde was sighted, Volkmar went to the quiet room where he and Muzaffar had dined at the beginning of the truce, and he wrote to Acre:

  A Mameluke army of considerable size is now approaching from the south. It seems to be accompanied by so many siege engines that I cannot believe they are all intended for Ma Coeur, so I suppose you must expect them next. All here is well, and we shall withstand until we have been slain on the last battlements. We shall send you the customary signals, but we do not expect your few knights to ride to our defense. To do so would be folly. May God bless us both in these hours of trial, and may He send divine rescue from some quarter that we cannot now perceive.

  He carried the message to one of the keeps, where it was tied by a silken thread to the leg of a pigeon, which, as soon as it was released, circled higher and higher above the castle until it established a reckoning, then sped for Acre.

  All during the day the columns moved forward, the largest army Count Volkmar had ever seen, and at dusk his knights agreed that it must number well over a hundred thousand—while Ma Coeur had only some sixty knights and a thousand unarmed peasants. He posted his sentries, then went to bed and slept well.

  For two days nothing happened, except that the Mamelukes sent their slaves fanning out across the countryside, chopping down all trees except olives, stripping the trunks and moving into separate depots both the resulting posts and the broken branches. At the same time the soldiers pushed up from the rear the great wooden engines of war, creaking noisily and moving slowly: the monstrous ballistas which could be cranked tight, then sprung to arch rocks of two hundred pounds into the castle compound; lighter sheitanis, the Satanic ones, for lighter loads; enormous swaying towers with retractable drawbridges which would be dropped across the walls of Ma Coeur; wooden bridges to throw over the moat; rams with bulbous iron heads to smash down gateways; ladders, scaling hooks, grapples and buckets for burning pitch; next, the most effective weapon of all, the mangonel, a rope-wound bow which required three men to operate and which, when sprung, released an arrow capable of crashing through the strongest shield; and finally, the most frightening, the slow-moving turtle creeping steadily forward as if it had a life of its own. In the days ahead the men on the battlements would come to know each of these weapons well, and already they held them in respect.

  It was not only the presence of the engines that impressed the Crusaders; it was their astonishing number. Where an ordinary siege might have one tower, the Mamelukes had five, plus two dozen turtles, and so many horsemen they could not be counted. When all was in readiness the Mameluke general signaled by three white flags his desire for a parley, and in accordance with the custom of the age the gates of the town were opened, the drawbridge was lowered across the moat, and the main gate to the castle was thrown open to admit the general and six of his top assistants, who thus had a chance to study carefully the nature of the defenses they must finally subdue. With a kind of grim fascination Volkmar noticed that among the six were the mustachioed governor who had treated the pilgrims so graciously at Tabarie and the baldheaded man with the scar who had captained the garrison at Saphet. The Mamelukes looked straight ahead.

  Their general was a short, red-faced man of forty, bearded and with long mustaches. He wore a turban beset with jewels, and no metal armor, but a costume of heavily quilted brocade richly adorned with gold and silver. His shoes were similarly decorated and came to sharp points that rose at the tip. He was armed with a short curved sword whose handle was encrusted with jewels, and he carried in his right hand an ebony baton, also bejeweled. He was a man of considerable importance and wished to get right down to work, for he had been given a terminal date by which Acre must fall and he wanted to waste no unnecessary days at the preliminary siege of Ma Coeur.

  Count Volkmar mustered his knights in the courtyard so they could be seen, and directed peasants bearing lances to move about the other portions of the castle. Then he waited till the enemy general appeared, dismounted and approached, extending the hand of friendship. Volkmar took it. The men shook hands, whereupon the other Mamelukes dismounted. The leaders gathered at a table near the parapet and the Mameluke spoke first, using Arabic, which he handled awkwardly.

  “Our preparations you see. You wish to surrender? Now?”

  “Under what terms?”

  “Your peasan
ts, Muslim, Christian, can stay. They’ll farm their land as now,” the Mameluke began, and Volkmar smiled, thinking: They aren’t going to make the same mistakes we made at the beginning. The little general continued, “No knights killed. You select four. The rest become slaves.” At this Volkmar drew back, and the general concluded, “You, your wife, your family and the four knights. Safe-conduct to Acre.”

  Coldly, and with a courage he was not aware he possessed, Volkmar asked, “The same safe-conduct that you gave the defenders of Saphet?”

  The Mameluke general masked his anger—if indeed he felt any. “Since then we learned,” he said.

  “To each of your proposals, no.” Volkmar spoke without accenting any word.

  “The sultan directed me. I must ask you a second time.”

  “And I am bound by my conscience to answer for the second time, no.”

  The red-faced Mameluke bowed. Contemptuously he surveyed the castle and the assembled knights. “You may delay us perhaps one week.” He bowed again, and at the gate called back, “No man up there will come through this gate alive.” And he was off.

  Still he made no move. His mangonels were primed and his turtles were ready, but he spent two more days bringing the towers up to the walls of the fortress, after which he signaled for another parley; but when the gates were opened he did not ascend to the castle but directed an assistant to speak with the villagers, after which some sixty peasants followed him out through the gates. The Christians among them were started on their way to the slave markets of Damascus and Aleppo.

  Shortly after dawn on the twenty-fifth of February the siege began. The fat general in the padded suit gave signal for his trumpeters to sound alarms, and the vast army inched forward, all engines moving at the same time toward the main gate and applying such a steady pressure that by mid-afternoon the enemy was within the walls of the town. Stunned by the failure of his outer defenses, which he had calculated could resist for at least five days, Volkmar ordered his troops to fight in the streets, where determined cadres occupied the mosque, the Roman and Maronite churches and the basilica, while their companions retreated across the bridge, which was raised behind them. All who did not make their way into the castle were methodically butchered by the Mamelukes, almost without passion. The invaders did not even bother to save attractive young girls for harems; they raped them in the streets, then slaughtered them. To prove to the defenders how mortal this siege was to be, Mameluke slaves were then given the job of beheading all corpses. The ballistas were cranked up and one by one the heads were lobbed into the castle compound, where Volkmar’s men saw the grinning, rolling faces of their friends.

  Count Volkmar retired to draft his next report to the men of Acre, and in it he reported his dismay at the easy collapse of the city wall:

  It was a wall such as I have seen withstand an ordinary army for many days, and it was courageously defended, but the Mamelukes have summoned an army of a size not hitherto known in these parts. At first, our knights estimated them to be near a hundred thousand, but I thought more like sixty. Now we are agreed that they are more than two hundred thousand, with so many engines that they cast solid shadows. They will find our castle difficult indeed and I am not apprehensive about an early defeat. We pray to God each day, and to the sweet Jesus Christ who brought our ancestors to these shores.

  And with this message the next pigeon was dispatched.

  Of the four defenses upon which the castle depended—glacis, town wall, moat, castle wall—the first two had given way, but knights still controlled the three churches and the mosque. Early next morning the Mameluke general inspected the town and gave orders for the reduction of those four religious buildings, and before the sun was well up the attack began. At the same time slaves began throwing rubble into the moat at those points where the wooden assault towers would be hauled into position against the castle wall. Where the moat protected the main tower the outer edge of the moat was chopped away, forming a steep path leading to the bottom of the ditch, and down this path crawled, at a hauntingly slow pace, the ominous turtles.

  They were low sheds, not more than three feet high and neither wide nor long, but of immensely strong construction. Under them miners, protected from rocks or Greek fire from above, could gnaw out a tunnel beneath the foundations of the main tower. An ordinary tunnel would be so narrow that when it opened on the other side of the tower, men crawling through could easily be killed as they merged, but it was not an ordinary tunnel which the men beneath the turtles were digging.

  To the edge of the moat were moved the largest ballistas, and when they were in position they began lobbing huge rocks into the castle buildings, and the Mamelukes cheered as one giant boulder crashed through the stone lacework of the grand hall, ripping away part of the wall. Next the mangonels were cranked up and their lethal arrows placed against the strings, and when the machine let go, the arrows winged with sickening force against the men of the wall, and if a defender was caught by such an arrow it went completely through him and he toppled backward from the parapet.

  Count Volkmar’s men were not powerless. When the slaves approached the moat to cast their rubble, arrows and rocks drove them back and many were killed; when the turtles tried to work their way into the bottom of the moat the defenders dropped large round rocks down the face of the wall, and the flange at the bottom would send the rocks careening through the massed troops, tearing away legs and arms. But their most effective weapons were the clay jugs of Greek fire—naphtha and sulphurous compounds, set ablaze by red-hot flints—that burned even on water and could be extinguished only by vinegar or talc. It blinded soldiers or burned away their faces, and constantly, from each round tower so carefully positioned by Gunter, a stream of iron-tipped arrows sped at any Mameluke who tried to approach the glassy-surfaced walls. At this point Count Volkmar decided to conserve his pigeons, so as midnight approached he directed his men to haul onto the highest tower of the castle a pile of brush, and he and his son climbed the winding stairs with a torch, throwing vast shadows on the rock; and they lit the brushwood in the ancient manner so as to signal throughout the hills of Galilee and across to Acre itself the fact that at the castle of Ma Coeur all was well.

  The arrogant boast of the Mameluke general that he would invest the castle within a week had long since been proved empty: he had leveled the mosque; he had taken the Roman and the Maronite churches and had torn them down, but the Basilica of St. Mary Magdalene still resisted, and at the end of the third week the siege had bogged down in the bottom of the moat, except for three towers that had been inched close to the main walls, where for the time being they rested, inactive. Each morning the ballistas would hurl great rocks and the mangonels would let fly their piercing arrows, but the siege seemed to have ground to a halt; so each night at midnight the count and his son sent the signal: “The fires of Ma Coeur are still burning.”

  But the miners were at work. Deep in the heart of old Makor, down below the level of the Roman times, below the potsherds of the Greeks and Babylonians, the Mameluke slaves were digging a tunnel under the main tower of the outer wall. As they inched forward, other slaves came behind bearing stout wooden props which they forced into position to support the tunnel. And at the close of each day one of the Mameluke captains entered the tunnel with a white string to measure how far the digging had proceeded, and when all were satisfied that it must have gone well beyond the inner face of the wall, the general ordered a huge cave to be widened under the tower foundations.

  Now the miners dug rapidly, and hundreds of posts were lugged through the darkness to shore up the cave until the vast emptiness looked like a forest that had died. At this point all work ceased and attacks on the castle were halted, while the three white flags were once more prominently displayed, after which the red-faced Mameluke general and his assistants rode over the drawbridge and into the beleaguered fortress. Nodding gravely he dismounted and ordered the scar-headed captain from Saphet to stretch out the measuring st
ring, while another drew with chalk the circumference of the underground cave. Then he said, “Knight, our cave lies under this tower.”

  Count Volkmar looked at the ominous circle and said, “I believe you.”

  “We have not yet moved in the brush,” the Mameluke said in his broken Arabic. “We offer one last chance. Then the brush.”

  “The terms?” Volkmar asked.

  “As before.” There was a pause. “Your answer?”

  “As before.”

  “Farewell. We shall not speak again.”

  “Yes, we shall,” Volkmar contradicted. “For when you get through that wall you must also get into the castle. And every night at midnight I shall speak to you with my signal fire. It will take you much longer than the week you said.”

  The Mameluke made no reply, and that afternoon the defenders of the castle watched as long lines of slaves carried brush into the cave. But the torment of the digging had stopped, and in the quiet respite Volkmar dispatched one of his last pigeons, bearing fatal news that would be correctly interpreted in Acre:

  The basilica has fallen. The mining has ended, they have shown me the circumference of the cave under the principal tower, and the brush has been moved in. We wait in silence, but we cannot hope. The tower must fall, and then we shall be forced into the castle. Go to the church of SS. Peter and Andrew, the patrons of Galilee, and pray for us. We shall hold out for weeks but seek your plea for divine help.