by Robert Payne
Suddenly, the city councillors heard that Qalawun had died soon after marching out of Cairo, and they exulted. They thought the danger was past. But with his dying breath, the seventy-year-old sultan had commanded his son al-Ashraf Khalil to continue the expedition against Acre, and not to rest until the city was in ruins. He also commanded his son to leave his body unburied until the day Acre fell.
About 40,000 cavalry and 160,000 foot soldiers converged on Acre. Huge mangonels, called “black oxen,” were dragged through the mud and sleet of a particularly hard winter. There were two hundred of them, more than had ever been gathered together against a single city. Two towering siege engines called “the Victorious” and “the Furious,” which took the form of giant catapults, were also brought to Acre on carts drawn by a hundred pairs of oxen. By sheer force of numbers, and by the weight of his military machinery, Khalil expected to overwhelm the last fortress of the Crusaders.
The siege of Acre began on April 5, 1291, when Khalil arrived before the city with great pomp. The defenders were vastly outnumbered by Khalil’s army, yet during the first weeks of the siege they fought brilliantly. Sometimes they opened the great gates, thus taunting the enemy to enter. They refused to play the defensive role the enemy assigned to them, and they often made small sorties outside the city walls. On the night of April 15, under a full moon, a small army of Franks attacked the camp of the prince of Hama, who was taken by surprise. Most of the Franks were Templars, who fought with their accustomed fury. Many lost their lives, but the Muslims also suffered. With the first light, the prince of Hama had the pleasure of stringing together the heads of some of the Crusaders and placing them like a wreath around the neck of a captured horse and sending it as a present to Khalil. The Crusaders could have done the very same thing with Muslim heads.
A few days later, the Hospitallers made a sortie through the Gate of St. Anthony. It was a very dark night, the Hospitallers moved stealthily, and they were about to spring on the camp when suddenly the night was made bright by thousands of torches held in the hands of white-robed Muslims. Khalil’s men had got wind of the affair, and they sprang a surprise on those who had hoped to surprise them. There followed a fierce battle by the light of torches, with two thousand slain on each side. Such sorties proved to be too costly and were discontinued.
On May 4, a new commander arrived in Acre. He was King Henry II of Lusignan and Cyprus, brother of the prince of Tyre, who came with forty ships from Cyprus. He had about a hundred horsemen, two thousand foot soldiers, and plentiful supplies. He was greeted with processions and hymns, as though he were the destined savior of Acre.
Khalil heard of his coming and deliberately increased his fire, pounding the walls with rocks and launching a vast quantity of Greek fire. His sappers were at work attempting to undermine the tower named for the king. Other towers were also being mined. The noise inside the city was deafening. The walls trembled, and the booming of the sultan’s kettledrums could be heard throughout the city. Against the enemy mines, the Franks built countermines; sometimes the mines met, and there would be fierce hand-to-hand fighting deep beneath the city walls.
King Henry decided upon one last effort of diplomacy. He sent two envoys, William of Cafran and William of Villiers, to Khalil to ask for an armistice, and also to ask why he had broken the truce. What were his real grievances? Could the war be stopped?
Khalil refused to answer any questions. Standing outside his tent and surrounded by his generals, he announced that only one thing interested him: Had they brought him the keys to the city? “It is more than our lives are worth to ask our citizens to surrender,” they answered. Khalil declared that he wanted the city, not the people in it, who could go free. Out of his admiration for the king’s courage, he was prepared to let the people of Acre take their possessions with them when they left the city. Just at that moment a stone flung from a catapult mounted on the Tower of the Legate fell close to Khalil’s tent. Khalil was so enraged that he drew his sword, and was ready to kill the envoys. One of his chief emirs restrained him, saying it was unworthy of Khalil “to stain his sword with pig blood.” The knights returned to Acre with the certain knowledge that the siege would continue.
The city of Acre was provided with all the defensive machinery known up to this time. A double row of walls, each row provided with towers, faced inland. These walls followed a somewhat jagged line, with a sharp angle which was considered to be the weakest link in the chain. Here the towers proliferated. There was the Tower of the Countess of Blois, the English Tower, the Towr of King Hugh and the Tower of King Henry II. They were all on the outer wall. On the inner wall was the Accursed Tower, which faced the Tower of King Henry II directly. This section was under the command of the prince of Tyre, the brother of the king. On his right were French and English knights under the command of John of Grailly and Otto of Grandson, and beyond these were the militia of the Venetians; then came the Pisans, and then the army of the commune of Acre. The defense was well coordinated, and there was a system of communication by trumpet that was as effective as any modern system of communication.
Khalil’s main task, as he saw it, was to break through the fortifications at their weakest point. The English Tower and the Tower of the Countess of Blois were mined. The Tower of St. Nicholas, on the southern line of defenses, was also mined. One by one, the towers were falling; sections of the outer wall were crumbling under the impact of the huge rocks hurled by the siege engines; the rubble was filling the ditches between the two walls.
On May 15, the Tower of King Henry II, which had been recently built on the king’s orders, crumbled, and the Muslims entered the ruins and took possession of it. An attack on St. Anthony’s Gate was repulsed with heavy losses on both sides. Matthew of Clermont, the Master of the Hospital, took the leading part in the bitter fighting at the gate, where the Templars distinguished themselves. That they were able to throw back the Muslims seemed a miracle. But the army was exhausted; time was running out; and every day the Muslims were gaining another tower, another strip of wall. The fighting men left in the city were outnumbered by Khalil’s men, twenty to one.
May 17 was an ominously quiet day. Khalil was preparing his troops for a general assault. Thirty thousand troops were being amassed outside the walls, with another thirty thousand held in reserve. Khalil issued an order to his treasury to pay any Muslim who captured a Christian lance the sum of a thousand dirhams. Mullahs and dervishes brought the troops to a high pitch of excitement by promising them that Acre would be leveled to the ground and that no Christian would be left alive in the Holy Land.
Early the following day, May 18, a thick mist concealed the advance of Khalil’s troops through the almond orchards. Their first objective was the Accursed Tower, set in the inner wall at the angle of the salient. Here King Henry II and the elite of the Crusader army steadied themselves to receive the brunt of the attack. Here too, the Templars and Hospitallers, always rivals, fought together—perhaps for the first time—in perfect harmony. But their efforts were unavailing. The Muslims captured the Accursed Tower.
Matthew of Clermont led a charge designed to free the tower from the Muslims, and was thrown back. In this counterattack, William of Beaujeu, Master of the Temple, was mortally wounded by an arrow that entered his armpit below the right shoulder.
The best died. Matthew of Clermont, who fought so vigorously at the Accursed Tower, set in the inner wall at the angle of the salient. Here King Henry II and the lite of the Crusader army steadied themselves to receive the great danger everywhere, he was killed before the day was out. Of the army of Templars only ten survived, and of the Hospitallers only seven. On that day when the Muslims poured through the narrow streets of Acre like avenging angels, massacring everyone in their path, the likelihood of any Crusader’s surviving was infinitesimal. The city was burning, and Muslims were everywhere. King Henry II wisely permitted himself to be carried on board a ship for Cyprus, since a captured king was too great a gift to the enemy
. The aged Patriarch Nicholas of Hanape was less fortunate. Followed by his flock, he went down to the harbor to be taken on a small skiff to a ship. But seeing the people crowding the shore, he felt pity on them and allowed them to come swimming out to his skiff. So many swam to him and clambered on board that it sank: the patriarch was drowned and so were all those who swam out to him. The dockside was crowded with women and children begging to be taken to Cyprus.
About this time Peter of Flor, a Catalan adventurer, who had fought with the Templars, took charge of a Templar galley and invited the rich noblewomen of Acre to accompany him to Cyprus, their passage money being all the jewels and all the gold they possessed. In this way he amassed the foundations of his immense fortune.
Earlier, on May 8, Khalil had ordered an attack on the fortresslike Temple, which formed a salient in the southwest corner of Acre, facing the sea. Crowded with refugees, men, women, and children, Pisans, Venetians, and Genoese, the Temple appeared to be impregnable, even in its last hours. It was heavily fortified, with many towers, all of them emblazoned with lions of hammered bronze, and with great gates which were thought to be impenetrable. The Temple would hold out for ten days. After two or three days Khalil offered terms. All who had sought refuge in the Temple could leave under a safe-conduct if they surrendered their weapons and took with them nothing more than the clothes they wore. Khalil sent them a white banner as a sign that they were under his protection, together with an emir and a regiment of soldiers to see that the terms of the surrender were carried out. It appeared that the last Christians in Acre would be able to depart peacefully, but that was not to be so.
The emir and his regiment of soldiers were allowed to enter the fortress. In full sight of the Crusaders, they began to maltreat the girls and boys they found. The Christians flew at the Muslims, murdering them all. The corpses were thrown into the street outside the Temple, and the white banner was tossed on the mound of corpses.
Such acts were not designed to please Khalil, who regarded all further resistance as an affront. He offered to negotiate with Peter of Sevrey, the Marshal of the Templars, and urged him to come with a small escort to his tent under a safe-conduct. The moment Peter reached the tent he was trussed up and beheaded, as were the members of his escort. All this could be seen from the walls of the Temple. The hapless survivors realized that Khalil had no intention of letting them go.
They defended themselves as best they could. Khalil had given orders that the landward walls of the Temple should be mined, and on May 18—the day of the general assault—part of the walls came crumbling down. The sappers planted great balks of timber to prevent any further damage to the Temple, so that the Muslims could rush in and massacre the Christians, while two thousand cavalry guarded the road outside to prevent anyone from escaping. But the balks of timber were not strong enough to support the huge building. The timbers collapsed and the whole Temple collapsed with them. As the Temple came crashing down, everyone in it, including the Muslim soldiers, was killed, and the cavalry guarding the road died under the weight of stone that fell on them. Within a few minutes, where there had been a huge edifice, there was only a vast mound of rubble and a great silence.
On this day, Friday May 18, 1291, with the destruction of its last outpost, the Kingdom of Jerusalem came to an end. The Crusades had ended as they began, in treachery and massacre.
There remained the mopping-up campaign, which Khalil entered upon almost casually. All the remaining fortresses along the seacoast surrendered without a struggle. Tyre, which had twice resisted Saladin’s armies, was simply abandoned when the enemy approached. Sidon fell to the Muslims. Many of the people escaped to Cyprus, but many more were captured by the Muslims and were killed or sold in the marketplaces of Cairo and Damascus. The Templar castles of Tortosa and Athlit, and the cities of Beirut and Tortosa, all surrendered. There remained to the Templars only the waterless island of Ruad, two miles off the coast of Tortosa, which they retained for another twelve years.
The coast of Palestine became a desert. In their fury, the Muslims were determined to extirpate every trace of the Christians who had once dominated the seaports here. Where there had been orchards, they left only dead trees; where there had been buildings, they left only rubble. An Arab historian wrote that no Christian would ever set foot on these shores until Judgment Day.
The Crusades, however, were not quite over.
The Last Throw
of the Dice
AFTER the fall of the Kingdom of Jerusalem in the Holy Land, shock waves traveled through Europe. Every bishop summoned the faithful to tell them that Christ’s Sepulchre had been irretrievably lost to them. Among the people there was no rage, only a vague sense of loss. For two hundred years they had been hearing about the Crusades, their triumphs, and their failures, and they had little emotion left for the dead who lay buried among the ruins of Acre. The days of the Crusades were over, and they had other matters to attend to. Moreover, they were grateful that they were no longer to be taxed to pay for the Crusades.
But the Crusades were not yet entirely a thing of the past. To end the story with the fall of Acre is to leave out the last brilliant flaring-up of the Crusader spirit, the sudden emergence of a new, heaven-sent opportunity to establish God’s kingdom firmly in the Holy Land. The Mamelukes might seem to be in total control; they had reduced most of the seacoast cities to rubble; they stabled their horses in Jerusalem; but they were not in any practical sense ruling over Palestine, which had become a desert. There remained Armenia, which would survive for 175 years, almost forgotten by the West, under Christian kings who descended from the family of Lusignan. There remained the armed Templars who had taken refuge on the island of Cyprus. There were not very many of them, but they could call upon the Templars in Europe to swell their ranks. Above all, there remained the Mongol army of the Ilkhan Ghazan, and this army, when well led, could sweep everything in its path. Ghazan had been converted to Islam, but he felt kindly toward the Christians and unkindly toward the Sultan of Egypt.
In the summer of 1292, a year after the fall of Acre, the Templars on Cyprus elected a new Master, Jacques de Molay, who was the Marshal of the Templar army, and expert in all military affairs from the construction of fortresses to tactics and strategy. His election was fraught with extraordinary consequences.
Jacques de Molay, who would bear an extraordinary weight of destiny on his shoulders, was a man almost without a history. He was born near Besançon in eastern France to a family of the minor nobility. He was about twenty-one years old when he entered the order, in 1265, at Beaunein the wine-growing region near Dijon. Thereafter, he spent his whole life in the service of the Templars. He was one of those steadfast soldiers who disappear into the army, for nothing very much was heard of him until he became Marshal.
He quarreled with King Henry of Lusignan, because he wanted to retain complete control of the Templars, while the king wanted to command all the forces on the island. The quarrel became violent, and in August 1298, the pope came out openly on the side of the Master. The pope urged Henry of Lusignan, King of Cyprus, to set aside his quarrels with the Templars, because it was beyond doubt that they contributed to the safety of the kingdom and an open break would only jeopardize the lives of everyone in Cyprus. Boniface VIII was not overstating the case on behalf of the Master of the Temple. The number of Templars on the island was probably no more than five hundred, but they were a disciplined force. Jacques de Molay was a fighting knight, and if the Crusaders ever fought again they would need someone like him to lead them.
For nearly seven years the Mameluke army remained quiescent, partly because Egypt was being ravaged by a plague and partly because the army needed time to absorb the treasure it had pillaged from Palestine. Then suddenly two fully equipped Mameluke divisions stormed Alexandretta and advanced into Cilicia to attack Sis and Adana, slaughtering as they went. One by one, the castles of Armenia were demolished. King Constantine of Armenia, acting on behalf of Hethum, the rightful
king, who had been wounded in a palace intrigue, summoned the help of the Mongols. The Ilkhan Ghazan offered to lead a combined Armenian and Mongol army against the Mamelukes.
Messengers were sent to Cyprus to warn the king of the coming battles. A small army was hastily put together and ferried to the port of St. Symeon in the autumn of 1299. Here they made contact with Mongol forces encamped in the ruins of Antioch. Jacques de Molay was given command of thirty thousand Mongol soldiers. Hethum, recovered from his wounds, took command of the Armenian army. He had been partially blinded during the palace intrigue, but his sight had returned and he was able to see the immense army brought up by the Mongols. Altogether there were more than a hundred thousand troops: three or four thousand from Cyprus, perhaps fifteen thousand from Armenia, a small army of Georgians, all the rest Mongols. Ghazan decided that the time had come to rid Syria of the Mamelukes.
Hethum, who knew the Mongol emperor well, and indeed was related to him—Ghazan had married a princess of the Armenian royal family—accompanied the huge army on the march to Hims. Ghazan was very small and he had the wizened features of a Mongol. Hethum thought that in all his army there were not two thousand men as small as the emperor, and there were few who were as ugly; neither were there any so generous, brave, high-minded, or sweet-tempered. Ghazan told Hethum that his intention, once he had swept Syria and Palestine clear of the Mamelukes, was to give that land to the Christians.
