Whatever preexisting frictions there might have been within the city, the deteriorating situation made Henry’s task impossible from the start. He may have arrived with a fanfare and a royal flourish, but the young king was a realist. He quickly concluded that his reinforcements were insufficient to sway the tide of events given an unmatchable opponent, and try as he might, he lacked overall authority to heal the city’s internal tensions nor was he able to staunch the leakage of people. He decided to sue for peace.
KHALIL POSSIBLY ALSO had some interest in a negotiated outcome, given the stirrings of opposition within the inner circles of Mamluk power. A ceasefire was arranged. For a brief period on May 7, the war machines fell silent and the bombardment stopped. In the comparative quiet, Khalil came down from his hilltop position and had a small tent set up outside the walls opposite one of the tower gates, that of the Patriarch close to the sea. Two unarmed envoys emerged—a knight, Guillaume de Villiers, and a Templar from Beaujeu’s household, Guillaume de Cafran. They prostrated themselves three times before the sultan. Khalil was blunt. “Have you brought me the keys of the town?” he asked.3 The messengers replied that Acre could not lightly be given up, but they had come to ask for mercy for its people. It seems that they were offering to pay tribute in order to retain Acre.
Khalil’s reply was aimed at a bloodless victory and contained a touch of magnanimity. Negotiated surrender usually meant the departure of the people under safe conduct but with almost no possessions. He offered more. “I will grant you this much grace, that you only have to give me the stones of the city, and you may carry off everything else, and leave and go away. I will do this for the sake of your king, who has come here and who is a youth, as I once was. But I won’t do anything more for you.”4
Khalil’s advisers had been averse to any negotiation from the start. Victory seemed to be at hand—they were on the brink of driving the infidels back into the sea. They begged him not to abandon his father’s sacred cause, because “this fortress is one of their great ones, and only these unbelievers remain in all the lands of the coast. It was the firm decision of the martyr, the father of al-Ashraf [Khalil], to conquer it, and the sultan decided at the beginning of his reign to conquer it as his father had decided. Muslims have been wounded, and they have been killed; there is no use in peace, and we are close to conquering it.” At the same time, great shouts went up from the Muslim camp as they got word of the sultan’s offer. Fired with the popular zeal of jihad, and doubtless with the attraction of plunder, the rank and file who had taken up the cause and followed the army—the common people, the urban mob, and the camel drivers, as well as the Mamluk soldiers—cried out that the siege should continue: “O our master, the sultan in the martyr’s tomb would not come to an agreement with those cursed ones!”5
The envoys, who had been briefed as to their remit, had little room for maneuver; Henry had evidently drawn a line at surrendering the city. Aware of the opprobrium of the Christian world ringing in their ears at the loss of the last foothold in the Holy Land, they replied that they could not “because the people overseas would regard us as traitors.” “Then you should go away,” were Khalil’s concluding words to the envoys, “because I shall give you nothing more!”6
At that moment, any departing niceties were shattered by the crash of a large stone, fired from a trebuchet from the nearby tower gate of the Patriarch. “I don’t know by what accident this happened,” the Templar of Tyre wrote. “It came so near the tent where the sultan and the messengers were, that the sultan out of instinctive bravado, not wishing to do them any real harm, leaped up, put his hand to his sword, drew it out a palm’s length, and cried. ‘Ah! You filthy swine, what’s to stop me chopping off your heads?’”7
One of his emirs, Sanjar al-Shuja’i, prompted him to stay his hand: “Sir, God forbid that you should soil the iron of your sword with the blood of pigs! The traitors are those who fired the shot. You should let these men go, as they are here with you.”8 It was an honest acknowledgment of the terms under which the envoys had come and their innocence of any responsibility.
And so, the Templar concluded wearily, “the messengers returned to Acre, and thereupon the two sides resumed the labour of firing their trebuchets at one another, as enemies are accustomed to do.”9 The brief opportunity for negotiation had come and gone.
IF MORALE AND hope were draining away in the Christian camp, Khalil’s suspicions of some of the emirs remained, and of two particularly, Alam al-Din al-Hamawi and Husam al-Din Lajin, who had been supporters of the murdered Turuntay, rival for the sultanate on Qalawun’s death. The flight to Damascus of Lajin’s attendant, al-Fakhri, evidently brought matters to a head. On the day after the failed negotiations, the army was shaken by rumors of trouble in the camp. Khalil had dispatched a fast courier to the governor of Damascus to arrest al-Fakhri. His goods were confiscated, and he was returned under armed escort to Acre.
Lajin knew he too was compromised when someone came to warn him of the sultan’s intention to arrest him. Fearing for his life, he loaded his baggage under cover of night and was preparing to flee. His departure was spotted by another emir, Alam al-Dawadari, loyal to the sultan’s cause, who was camped nearby. Spurring his horse to a gallop, he rode after the fleeing Lajin, caught up with him, and begged him to return: “Don’t be the cause of damage to the Muslim cause. For if the Franks learn that you have taken flight they will become stronger, to our disadvantage, just at the moment that the town is on the point of being taken.”10 Lajin returned. The day after, the sultan ordered Lajin to his presence, gave him robes of honor, and reassured him. This mollifying attitude lasted two days. On the third, he arrested Lajin and sent him under guard to the fortress of Safad. In the long run, Khalil’s wariness of Lajin would be confirmed in fatal circumstances.
But the confident shouts of the people and the reasoning that persuaded Lajin back seemed fully justified in the days that followed. Under incessant bombardment, the mines had crept further forward, and with them the mobile wicker screens that protected the troops of Sanjar al-Shuja’i. They inched toward the critical apex of the wall and the projecting barbican of Hugh III. In the week after the failed negotiations, the implications of the Mamluks’ advances became clear. On Tuesday, May 8, this barbican, probably now untenable through mining, was abandoned by the defenders. They set fire to it, destroyed the walkway that connected it to the outer wall, and retreated into the King’s Tower behind. “The city was in a bad way,” recorded the Templar, “because… the [outer] wall was mined and the tower [barbican] also.”11 The King’s round tower, lynchpin of the defenses on the outer wall and defender of the Accursed Tower on the inner, was now exposed.
This was the start of a disastrous week for the defenders. In the underground chambers they had constructed along this sector, the assiduous Aleppo miners lit fires that weakened the foundations in several places. One by one, the outer facades of towers slumped and walls collapsed. Along the wall from the King’s Tower on one side, the tower of the Countess of Blois crumbled; on the other, the English Tower; then further in both directions, sections of the outer wall adjacent to the critical gate of St. Anthony and that of St. Nicholas. The ominous sound of masonry crashing into the ditch outside sank spirits in the town still lower. The emir al-Shuja’i’s men were also at work mining the King’s Tower itself.
The siege of Acre in a manuscript illustration. Miners with picks, protected by archers, undermine the base of the walls. (Oliver Poole, redrawn from Crusader Manuscript Illumination at Saint-Jean D’Acre, 1275–1291, Princeton, 1976)
As the situation worsened, more were trying to leave the stricken city. Spring was the season when merchant ships put in at Acre; those who could pay their passage, wealthy merchants from the Italian communities and members of the noble classes, were already on their way out as the walls crumbled. By mid-May, 3,000 had left. Many of the old and infirm and the women and children were also evacuated, together with precious holy relics, the city�
�s treasury, and the goods and possessions of citizens. This was done while the weather was still fine and entrance to Acre’s port could be easily managed. Most were ferried to Cyprus. According to some sources, this flight was accelerated by King Henry himself in events that ensued, the exact timing and veracity of which is uncertain, but it is clear that on May 15, morale in the city was draining away.
On that day, the efforts of Khalil’s miners were rewarded with a key strategic prize. The King’s Tower, at the exposed eastern salient of the outer walls, which protected the Accursed Tower, was undermined. Possibly it had been compromised by the defenders’ own countermining, but to the dismay of the Templar watching, it was so weakened that “the front face fell forward in a heap into the ditch, so that it was impossible to pass over the top of the stones.”12 This provided a major opportunity for the besiegers but also posed a challenge. The ditch, and the land approaching it, were so strewn with jumbled masonry that no easy attack could be launched to take control of the tower and so penetrate the outer wall, which was still being resolutely and desperately defended, without being dangerously exposed. The practical engineering skills and resources of the Mamluk army improvised an ingenious solution. Baybars al-Mansuri, one of the sultan’s emirs, set himself to pondering the problem of how to construct a causeway for a full assault:
Amidst all this I was searching for a place at which opportunity might knock, a corner which might permit a stratagem, but found none. While I was exercising my thoughts and letting my sight and perceptions roam, I suddenly noticed that one of the towers damaged by trebuchets could now be reached. Between this tower and the walls a wide-open space had been uncovered, but, being surmounted by crossbows, could not be traversed unless a screen were erected over the entire area to protect anyone who entered. So I availed myself of some felt, stitching all of it together in the shape of a large cloud, long and wide. Between two posts opposite the dilapidated tower, I placed a pulley rigged with ropes, similar to a ship’s. There I hoisted the felt cloud into place as a dam. This was done under the wing of night, unbeknownst to the Akkans, who when they arose in the morning and saw the screen, fired mangonel and arrows against it. When a stone fell into the screen, the felt would slacken beneath it and break its thrust, and the crossbow men could not penetrate it with their arrows. We were able to pass, and found a way to cross, and a wall separated us and the enemy. We started to fill up the ditch which was between the walls using horses’ nosebags filled with earth, together with whatever timber made it level so that it became a passable road, and it was a blessed sight.13
From within the city, the Templar of Tyre could also observe the speed and efficiency with which the Mamluks capitalized on the situation, which reflected their enterprise, levels of organization, and vast human resources. “The Saracens made small sacks of hemp cloth, filled them with sand, and each horseman carried one on the neck of his horse and threw it down to the men at the barricades who were in that sector. When night fell these men carried the sacks and laid them over the stones and levelled them like a paved road.”14 The way to the stricken tower was now open.
According to the self-congratulating Baybars al-Mansuri, the sultan was delighted with his stratagem. He resolved to launch an all-out assault the following day in two places: at the tottering King’s Tower and at the wall to its west, toward the city’s main gate, that of St. Anthony.
It was King Henry’s troops, displaced from the destroyed barbican, who were now manning these walls alongside those of the Teutonic Knights. During May 15, a determined attack on this section had been beaten back. Everywhere nerves were strained and men were exhausted. Next morning, confused accounts of a collapse of morale on this sector filtered into the town; conflicting time scales and possibly post hoc blame crept into the Christian chronicles.
The relations between Henry’s men and their codefendants seem to have been poor. At sunset on May 15, they had handed over control of the sector to the Teutonic Knights under their grand master according to the eight-hour rotation of shifts. Henry’s troops were due to take over again the following dawn. The anonymous author of The Destruction of Acre, who drew on eyewitness accounts, claimed that when day broke on the sixteenth, they were nowhere to be seen. The charge was that King Henry, seeing that nothing further could be done to broker a peaceful outcome or gain authoritative control over the city’s various factions, had quietly embarked on his ships and fled with the men he had brought, together with a substantial portion of the nobility of the town.
Henry, perhaps realizing that the situation was hopeless and the discord among the defenders so great, reasonably decided that it would be better for the king of Jerusalem to survive another day. He was accused of gross cowardice. “O would that the winds and the sea had sunk them to the depths!” came the chronicler’s curse.15 The truth of this is unverifiable, but the Templar of Tyre, a generally sober eyewitness, claimed that King Henry was still in Acre two days later. Could he have been shielding the monarch out of loyalty? More likely, the events that were about to unfold required both an explanation and a scapegoat, and in the tangled loyalties and partisan accounts that survived the siege, the anonymous author had access to accounts hostile to the king.
Whatever the circumstances, as day broke, the sultan’s attack on the section of wall in question—that toward St. Anthony’s Gate—appears to have fallen on a weakened defense. The Syrian army, no longer led by Lajin, advanced behind a line of shields, as crossbow bolts, arrows, and javelins rained onto the walls. The assault was well planned, and there were insufficient defenders to resist this tide. As the wave swept forward, a corps of men filled up the ditch with anything at hand; wood, stones, earth, timber, the bodies of dead horses—all were hurled in to level an approach up the steep slope to the walls rising above them. Ladders were propped against the walls. The defenders bombarded them with rocks, hurled javelins, and fired crossbow bolts. There was hand-to-hand fighting, men hammering at each other at close quarters with swords, clubs, and spears “like smiths beating hot metal… so that many died from the blows on both sides.”16 In the din and the carnage, the defenders were unable to sustain the assault “with the advance of a multitude of crossbow men, javelin and stone throwers.”17 The sparsely defended sector was overwhelmed. The survivors were forced a crossbow shot’s length back into the city, abandoning their wounded and dead. The critical gate tower of St. Anthony, the entrance into the heart of the city, was now in Mamluk hands, though the gate itself was still sealed shut.
The uproar carried into the city, with a crowd of people fleeing from the front line. Relations between the various factions and military orders remained strained. Some were reluctant to help because they had never participated in the initial breaking of the treaty, others preferred to barricade their own sections, but news of the breach at last stimulated a general call to arms. The Marshal of the Hospital, Matthieu de Clermont, rallied a few knights to arms. Swiftly mounted, they emerged from the nearby gates of the Hospital “armed and plated, heads protected by polished helmets, braceroles fitted round their arms and seated on their war horses with lances raised,” in the words of a chronicler, to find themselves engulfed in a rout of fleeing men, “terrified though not yet wounded,” impeding their progress. Clermont turned fiercely on the panic-stricken troops abandoning the walls: “Are you mad? Fleeing with your armour intact, your helmets and shields unshattered, your bodies still unwounded? I beg you for the faith of the Church, return to the fight!” Digging his spurs into his horse, Clermont plunged forward into the mêlée, with the hope of personally confronting the sultan. He picked out one of the emirs, “who seemed to be the bravest,” pierced him through the chest with his lance, and swept him from his horse. Reaching for his sword, hacking and hewing, chopping off heads, slicing backbones and running through the lightly-armored Muslims, Clermont wreaked carnage. The psychological momentum altered. The Muslims paused, then turned “like sheep fleeing the wolf.”18
However, Khalil h
ad the resources to launch other coordinated attacks at the same time. Further up the wall, he was now using the causeway of sacks of sand built by the stratagem of Baybars al-Mansuri to attack the stricken King’s Tower. Toward the hour of vespers (sunset), his men poured forward. The Templar saw that “half of the vault, on the side facing the town, was still intact,” and it was stoutly defended by a large number of men, “but it made no difference, the Saracens took the tower anyway and hoisted the sultan’s flag on it. In response we loaded our catapults, positioned them to aim at the tower and fired them. We killed some of the Saracens but were unable to drive them back.” The King’s Tower was lost. Desperate to prevent any further advance, the defenders had built “a structure of wood, covered with leather, called a cat, and put men inside it, so that the Saracens who had taken the tower could advance no further.”19 This resistance of the men in the cat halted the advance, but the Accursed Tower was now exposed, and the defenders had been pushed back to the inner wall on a long section between the gates of St. Nicolas and St. Anthony. Holding the Accursed Tower was now key to survival.
The Accursed Tower Page 17
