by Michael Haag
In a series of devastating campaigns Baybars captured Caesarea and Haifa in 1265, the Templar castle of Saphet in 1266, Jaffa and the Templar castle of Beaufort both in 1268, and then struck at Antioch in the north, which he captured that same year, treating its inhabitants with a murderous brutality that shocked even Muslim chroniclers. The Templar castle at Baghras in the Amanus mountains was now utterly isolated. Baghras had been their first castle, but now the Templars had no choice but to abandon it. Chastel Blanc of the Templars was surrendered in 1271 together with the Hospitallers’ great castle of Krak des Chevaliers. Baybars then marched on Montfort, between Acre and the Sea of Galilee, and that too was soon handed over to the Muslims by its garrison of Teutonic Knights.
The fall of the crusader castles to the Mamelukes needs some explanation. How could such magnificent structures, built at such vast cost and effort, incorporating the latest military design of the age and defended by men of undoubted courage, have so rapidly capitulated or been captured? There is no single answer. Several factors worked in combination.
The Templar castle of Beaufort, overlooking the southern end of the Bekaa valley in Lebanon, fell to Baybars in 1268 with the help of first-class military engineers. They assembled something like twenty-six siege engines – that is, battering rams and siege towers – as well as catapults, the wooden frames and metal parts bought from Venetian merchants sailing into Egyptian ports. In this case the Templars were overwhelmed by technology. But two years earlier, when the Templar castle of Saphet fell to Baybars, it had been down to treason.
Saphet was the castle in northern Galilee which the Templars had spent a fortune rebuilding less than thirty years earlier, a worthwhile expense as it guarded against raids of Bedouins and Turks who would formerly cross over the Jordan with impunity. Traders could safely conduct their pack animals and wagons between Acre and Galilee, farmers could cultivate their fields in security, and pilgrims could freely visit many sites associated with the ministry of Jesus. Muslim sources acknowledged its efficacy by describing Saphet as ‘an obstruction in the throat of Syria and a blockage in the chest of Islam’7 – that is until Baybars brought about its downfall in 1266. He did so not by attack – he tried three times that year and failed – but by sowing dissent between the small garrison of Templars and the much larger numbers of Syrian Christian servants and native troops inside. He promised the latter free passage and so many wanted to defect that the defence of the castle was called into question. The Templars agreed to negotiate and a safe conduct was arranged for Templar knights and locals alike. But when the gates were opened, Baybars grabbed all the women and children and sold them into slavery and decapitated all the knights and other men.
The willingness of the Templar garrison at Saphet to negotiate points to another factor at work: a sense of isolation and of being overwhelmed, which seems to have played an important part in the fall of the Templar castle of Chastel Blanc and the Hospitallers’ Krak des Chevaliers to Baybars within two months of one another in 1271. Both castles stood in the Jebel al-Sariya, that mountain range separating the interior from the sea; but both became increasingly isolated amid the Muslim advance. Perhaps also the Templar master at Tortosa thought it wiser to concentrate his forces on the coast, but whatever the reason he ordered the evacuation of Chastel Blanc.
Likewise Krak des Chevaliers was not taken but given away. The Hospitallers could no longer raise sufficient manpower to garrison the castle and for its diminished complement of Hospitaller knights the waiting became a terrible immurement. After a month’s siege, Baybars delivered a forged note purportedly from their master at Tripoli, urging them to surrender. Their defences and supplies might have allowed them to hold out for years, but it must have seemed to them that Krak was drifting anchorless and rudderless on an irresistible Muslim tide. Weary, dejected and demoralised, on 8 April 1271 the Hospitallers accepted Baybars’ offer of safe conduct to the sea.
With all their great inland fortresses taken, the Franks were pinned to their remaining coastal defences, crucially Acre and Tripoli, both powerfully fortified cities, and the Templars’ stronghold of Tortosa, which had held out against Saladin, and their castle of Chastel Pelerin, south of Haifa. But meanwhile the Franks gained some relief when Prince Edward, the future Edward I of England, led a fresh crusade to the East and in 1272 persuaded Baybars to agree to a ten-year truce.
Acre, capital of the kingdom of Jerusalem and headquarters of the military orders, was the most powerfully defended city in Outremer. And according to the Templar of Tyre, who knew it well,
The Temple was the strongest place of the city, largely situated along the seashore, like a castle. At its entrance it had a high and strong tower, the wall of which was twenty-eight feet thick. On each side of the tower was a smaller tower, and on each of these was a gilded lion passant, as large as an ox [. . .] On the other side, near the street of the Pisans, there was another tower, and near this tower on the Street of St Anne, was a large and noble palace, which was the Master’s [. . .] There was another ancient tower on the seashore, which Saladin had built one hundred years before, in which the Temple kept its treasure, and it was so close to the sea that the waves washed against it. Within the Temple area there were other beautiful and noble houses, which I will not describe here.8
In 1273 the Templars elected a new Grand Master, William of Beaujeu, a man with considerable experience of fighting in the East and administering the order. One of his first missions was to attend the Church Council of Lyon, which was convened by the pope in 1274 for the principal purpose of launching a new crusade. At the council William spoke against a proposal to send five hundred knights and two thousand infantry to the Holy Land as the vanguard of a mass levy like that of the First Crusade, arguing that unruly hordes of enthusiasts would not serve the needs of Outremer. Instead, a permanent garrison was required, which would be reinforced from time to time by small contingents of professional soldiers. And he also argued for an economic blockade of Egypt, the Mamelukes’ power base.
Such a blockade would not be possible, however, as long as Outremer depended on the ships of the Italian maritime republics, for these were the very same merchant marines who since the Latin massacre at Constantinople had turned to trading so profitably with Egypt. The Venetians, for example, supplied Baybars with the metal and timber that he needed for his arms and siege engines, and the Genoese even provided him with Mameluke slaves. Instead, the Christians needed to gain the naval ascendancy in the Eastern Mediterranean. William’s advice was accepted, and the council ordered the Templars and the Hospitallers to build their own fleets of warships.
William of Beaujeu had arrived at this plan not least because he recognised the contribution that was already being made by the French monarchy to sustaining the existence of Outremer. William’s own uncle had fought with Louis IX in Egypt, and through his paternal grandmother he was related to the Capets, the French royal family. The kings of France were already paying for a permanent force of knights and crossbowmen at Acre, and the ambitious Charles of Anjou, who was king of Sicily and the younger brother of Louis IX, was helping to extend French power throughout the Mediterranean. But William’s plans were overthrown by a popular uprising in 1282 known as the Sicilian Vespers, which sent Charles fleeing from the island to Naples.
Pope Martin IV, who was himself French, now declared a crusade against the Sicilian rebels and their supporters, the house of Aragon in Spain. Worse, he ordered funds held at the Paris Temple and intended for Outremer to be diverted to the house of Anjou in support of their war against fellow Christians to regain control over Sicily. Christians throughout Europe, and in particular the Templars, were outraged, and a few years later, after the fall of Tripoli in 1289, one Templar told Martin’s successor Pope Nicholas IV, ‘You could have succoured the Holy Land with the power of kings and the strength of the other faithful of Christ but you have armed kings against a king, intending to attack a Christian king and the Christian Sicilians to recover
the island of Sicily which, kicking against the pricks, took up just arms’9 – another example of the growing trend to put secular interests over religious ideals.
Charles of Anjou’s ambitions to build a Mediterranean empire and to combine his kingdom of Sicily with the kingdom of Jerusalem had kept Baybars’ own ambitions somewhat in check. But in 1277 Baybars died, and after a brief power struggle the most capable among the Mamelukes was elevated to the sultanate, Baybars’ brilliant commander Qalaun. The Sicilian Vespers, followed by Charles’ death in 1285, removed any Mameluke hesitation in pursuing the destruction of the Christian states in the East.
Within six years the few crusader possessions along the coast would fall and the two-hundred-year struggle to defend Christianity in the East would end.
Medieval Christians believed that God’s judgement was revealed through history, and that he often declared his will by determining the outcome of a battle. As St Bernard had written in his panegyric In Praise of the New Knighthood, a Templar was a knight of Christ and ‘the instrument of God for the punishment of malefactors and for the defence of the just’. A defeat in battle could mean that the Christians were paying the price for some sin. Confession, prayers and penance would cleanse their souls and lead to ultimate victory. But what were Christians now to make of the repeated defeats in the Holy Land? After Baybars captured Caesarea and Haifa in 1265, a Provençal troubadour called Bonomel, who may have been a Templar, sang that given this, ‘Then it is really foolish to fight the Turks, now that Jesus Christ no longer opposes them [. . .] Daily they impose new defeats on us: for God, who used to watch on our behalf, is now asleep, and Bafometz [Mohammed] puts forth his power to support the sultan.’10 Another Provençal poet wrote that because God and Our Lady wanted Christian troops to be killed he would become a Muslim. As defeats continued, it became impossible to attribute Muslim victories to the sins of the generality of Christians, and increasingly the military orders, and especially the Templars, attracted the suspicion and resentment of a disillusioned Christian world.
22
The Fall of Acre
AT ACRE the old merchant communities of Genoa, Pisa, Venice, Amalfi and Marseille were joined by new trading colonies from Florence, Lucca and Ancona in Italy, by bankers from Siena, merchants from Montpellier and Barcelona, and by English merchants too. In turn traders from Acre were found in Egypt, Asia Minor, Constantinople, Kiev and at the great fairs of Champagne in France. The commercial interests of the city so far outweighed the religious that its coins were struck in Arabic for circulation in the surrounding Arabic-speaking countries.
According to Ludolph of Suchem, who visited Acre long after its fall but had reports from people who remembered how life had been there,
The public squares, or streets, within the city were exceedingly neat, all the walls of the houses of like height with one another and built without exception of hewn stones, being wondrously adorned with glass windows and painting. Moreover, all the palaces and houses of the city were built not simply to serve ordinary needs but designed with a care for human comfort and enjoyment, being fitted up inside and decorated outside with glass, painting, hangings, and other ornament, as each man was able. The public places of the city were covered over with silken sheets or other splendid stuffs for shade. [. . .] Not only the richest merchants but the most diverse folk dwelt there [. . .] all the strange and rare things which are to be found in the world were brought thither.
Ludolph, as he listened to those memories, was overcome with the sensation of a long lost world where ‘all the inhabitants of the city deemed themselves like the Romans of old and carried themselves like noble lords, as indeed they were’.1
The ten-year truce agreed in 1272 between Baybars and the Franks had allowed the Mamelukes to direct their energy towards renewed Mongol threats, in this case directed by Baybars’ successor Qalaun, who came to power in 1279. Qalaun then made fresh agreements with the Franks, in 1282 a ten-year truce with the Templars at Tortosa, and in 1283 a truce with Acre, also for ten years. Almost immediately, however, Qalaun resumed Mameluke aggression against parts of Outremer not covered in the agreements, starting with the Maronite Christian community in the Lebanese highlands, which was ravaged by a Muslim army in 1283; soon enough he found excuses to break his agreements with the Templars and Acre too. Now the coastal cities and castles began to go the way of the inland defences; in 1285 Qalaun took the Hospitaller castle of Margat, perched on a salient of the Jebel al-Sariya overlooking the sea, the Muslims celebrating the event from the heights of the citadel with the call to prayer which ‘resounded with praise and thanks to God for having cast down the adorers of the Messiah’;2 and in 1287 he easily took the port city of Latakia after its walls were damaged in an earthquake.
Yet in 1286, in the midst of these campaigns and with extraordinary insouciance, the Franks celebrated the visit of King Henry II of Cyprus, who had come to assume the crown of Jerusalem. The Templar of Tyre recorded the festivities at Acre, when the king
held a feast lasting fifteen days at the Auberge of the Hospital of Saint John. And it was the most splendid feast they had seen for a hundred years [. . .] They enacted the tales of the Round Table and the Queen of Femenie, which consisted of knights dressed as women jousting together. Then those who should have been dressed as monks dressed up as nuns, and they jousted together.3
Beyond the walls of Acre, however, the outlook was grim. In 1289 Qalaun overwhelmed Tripoli. ‘The Muslim troops forced their way in and the citizens fled to the harbour. A few got to safety on ships’, recorded the chronicler Abu al-Feda, who was an eyewitness to the events, ‘but most of the men were killed and the children taken captive.’ When the killing and looting were finished, Qalaun razed the city to the ground. But that still left a small island across the harbour, and on it the church of St Thomas. ‘When Tripoli was taken a great many Franks fled with their women to the island and the church. The Muslim troops flung themselves into the sea and swam with their horses to the island, where they killed all the men and took the women, children and possessions. After the looting I went by boat to the island, and found it heaped with putrefying corpses; it was impossible to land there because of the stench.’4
Finally turning his attention to Acre, and vowing not to leave a single Christian alive in the city, Qalaun set out from Cairo in November 1290, but he fell ill and died along the way. His son Sultan al-Ashraf Khalil pledged to continue the war against the Franks, and in early spring 1291 his immense forces, gathered from Syria and Egypt, converged on Acre, ‘cutting down and wasting all the vineyards and fruit trees and all the gardens and orchards, which are most lovely thereabout’,5 instead planting the environs with over a hundred siege engines, including various kinds of catapults. On 5 April al-Ashraf Khalil himself arrived, and the siege began. At most the Franks were able to muster about a thousand knights or mounted sergeants and fourteen thousand foot soldiers; the civilian population of Acre was thirty to forty thousand, and every able-bodied man took his place on the ramparts. Although the Mamelukes could not blockade the town by sea, they had complete control of the land, and their numbers grew with a continuous number of recruits and volunteers who joined the regulars, so that eventually al-Ashraf Khalil’s troops outnumbered the defenders by at least ten to one.
But the defenders were prepared and, confident in the strength of their fortifications and supplied by sea, they put up the most determined resistance. On 15 April, William of Beaujeu, the Templar Grand Master, led a night attack on a section of the Muslim lines. At first surprise won them the advantage, but the Christians got caught up in the enemy’s tent ropes and were eventually beaten back. Under a hail of arrows and a bombardment of stones by the catapults, Mameluke engineers were able to advance close against the walls and mine the defences. In the second month of the siege breaches appeared, and fighting became incessant. On 16 May the Mamelukes pressed so heavily on St Anthony’s Gate at the angle where the city walls joined those of Montmusard th
at the defenders made a desperate attempt to put their women and children aboard ships to safety. Ludolph of Suchem recorded how ‘they fled to the sea, desiring to sail to Cyprus, and whereas at first there was no wind at all at sea, of a sudden so great a storm arose that no other ship, either great or small, could come near the shore, and many who essayed to swim off to the ships were drowned’.6
On 15 May, after six weeks of constant battering, the Tower of Henry II commanding the vital north-east salient of the city’s walls was taken by the Mamelukes. William of Beaujeu was fatally wounded trying to force the enemy back. He was placed on a shield and carried to the Temple enclave, where he was buried before the high altar while the desperate fighting continued outside. By now townspeople were pressing onto the quays to board whatever ships they could to escape from the doomed city. Merchant captains made fortunes extorting money from the rich desperate to escape, as did also, it is thought, Roger of Flor, captain of a Templar galley called The Falcon, who used his profits to found his later career as a pirate. But there were also noble acts.
