The Accursed Tower

by Roger Crowley

  THE FIGHTING UNFOLDED in a series of confused and bloody snapshots, all seen from the Christian perspective, in which any sequence and narrative is jumbled and incoherent. The hurling of Greek fire was particularly frightening, and its effects appalling. The Templar watched with his own eyes as “one poor English valé was so badly hit by Greek fire hurled by the Saracens that his surcoat burst into flames. There was no one to help him. His face was burned, then his whole body. He burned like a cauldron of pitch, and he died there. When this happened he was on foot, as his horse had been killed under him.”17

  Others gave bloody accounts of the hand-to-hand fighting:

  You could see many with heads severed from their necks, and from their shoulder blades, hands from arms, other split up to their breastbones, or run through with a spear or swords, or cut in two. Men were dying covered in blood or writhing in pain or with their eyes rolling in their heads, one with his head twisted back and another lying on his stomach, another with his tongue lolling dying in great pain, and others again, though mortally wounded, making feeble attempts to get up again and fight. The slaughter on both sides was so great that it was impossible to step anywhere without treading on corpses.18

  The death or withdrawal of key figures was the probable cause of the final collapse of morale. Villiers and other Hospitallers trying to stem the advance of the Mamluks had evidently fallen back behind internal street barricades, but here Villiers was “stricken nigh to death by a lance through the barricade.”19 Somewhere near the Accursed Tower, the defense suffered another psychological blow, to which the Templar of Tyre may have been an eyewitness:

  In this place a great disaster happened, one that allowed the Saracens to enter the city more easily and demoralized our people. The occasion was that a javelin was aimed at the master of the Temple [Beaujeu] just as he was raising his left hand. He had no shield, only a spear in his right, and this missile struck him under the armpit and its shaft embedded itself in his body to a palm’s depth. It entered through a gap where the armour plates didn’t join. This was not his heavy breastplate but light armour for donning quickly at an alarm.

  When he realised he was mortally wounded, he turned to go. Some of those there thought he was leaving to save himself. His standard bearer saw him turn and followed behind him, then all his household troops. As he was going, a good twenty crusaders from the Valley of Spoleto [in Italy] saw him departing and cried out: “O sir, for the love of God, don’t go! For otherwise the city will certainly be lost!” And he replied to them in a loud voice, so that all could hear: “Sirs, I can do nothing more, for I am dying. See the wound!”

  And then we saw the javelin fixed in his body. And at these words he dropped his spear on the ground, his head slumped and he started to fall from his horse. But his household people jumped from their horses and held him up, lifted him down from his horse and laid him on a big wide shield which they found discarded on the ground.

  From the Templar’s account, it seemed that they carried him away between the inner and outer walls

  with the intention of entering the city through St. Anthony’s gate, but they found it closed. They found a small door [in the inner wall] reached by a bridge over the fosse into the residence of Lady Maria of Antioch.… There his men removed his armour, cutting the plates off his shoulders, but could do nothing more because of the severity of the wound. Still in his épaulières [shoulder protection] they covered him with a blanket and carried him towards the seashore onto the beach between the slaughterhouse where they kill animals and the house of the lord of Tyre.

  The intention was to get him away by ship.

  The Mamluks’ advance into the town was now unstoppable. In small spaces, the tactics of their shield-bearing troops provided an unbreachable wall. “The Saracens would pause for a bit, then raise their shields, move forward a little, and when men advanced on them, they immediately locked their shields and stopped. All day they never stopped hurling Greek fire and javelins. This kind of contest continued until mid-morning.”20 They pulled down men on the roofs attempting to bombard them with rocks and pushed forward.

  At some point after the withdrawal of the wounded Beaujeu, the defense at St. Anthony’s Gate also gave way completely. The Mamluks managed to set fire to the outer face of the gate, while those on the tower above continued to rain down stones and crossbow bolts, but this resistance was unsustainable. “At last,” in the words of the Christian chroniclers, “the gates collapsed, and a suffocating multitude of infidels burst in beneath the arch, on horses with their lances, and ran the Christians through.”21

  Unopposed, the walls were scaled, gates were opened, and the incursion turned into a flood. “As men learned what had happened, and saw that the Master had been carried away, each began abandoning his position and set himself to flee. For the Saracens… passed through the Accursed Tower and went straight by the church of St. Romano and burned the great trebuchet of the Pisans.”22

  FOR THE WOUNDED Jean de Villiers personally, the situation was critical. He remembered:

  A great multitude of Saracens entered the city, on all sides, by land and by sea [along the seashore], moving along the walls, which were pierced and broken, and running through the streets of the city until they came to our barricades… We and our brethren, of whom the greater number were sore stricken and wounded to death, resisted them as long as we could. And as some of us were lying thus half-dead and helpless before our enemies, our sergeant and our body-servant came, and carried off ourselves, wounded almost to death, and our other brethren, at great risk of life and limb.23

  The Hospitallers were being driven back. Villiers was stretchered down to the harbor. Clermont was still managing a rear-guard action along with other small detachments trapped in the city’s labyrinth. Elsewhere, organized resistance had turned to flight.

  While some of the Mamluks were moving fast into the heart of the city, others were vigorously attacking the gates and walls down toward the harbor. The St. Nicholas Gate was opened from within. “They went down the straight street to the convent of the Teutonic Knights and put to the sword everyone they met on their way.”24 At their hospice near the church of St. Nicholas, the Teutonic Knights were wiped out; at the nearby church of St. Leonard, the English order of the Knights of St. Thomas was overpowered.

  While his retinue attempted to evacuate the stricken Beaujeu in choppy seas, a cry went up that the nearby tower gate of the Patriarch, defended by Grandson and Grailly, had fallen, so that the harbor itself risked imminent attack. There was panic among Beaujeu’s retainers: “Some of his household threw themselves into the sea to get to the two barques that were there. There were only these because the sea was so wildly tempestuous and the waves so huge that vessels couldn’t manage, and because of this many people were lost.”25 It was now a rush for individual survival.

  Given the deteriorating conditions, it was decided to abandon the attempt to get Beaujeu away. Terror-stricken and without ceremony, “others of his household carried him to the Temple fortress with the help of other people, and they took him inside—not going through the main gate, which they didn’t want to open, but via a courtyard where manure was piled.”26

  Everywhere people were in full flight, and the flames were spreading into the heart of the city: “The Saracen set light to the siege engines and to the wooden barricades, so that the land was lit up by the fire.”27 In places, resistance went on. Some fought heroically to the end, though the balance of praise and blame depends on the slant of individual sources.

  Within the confines of the Templars’ castle, the dying Beaujeu caught the far-off noise of battle fading in his ears and was shielded from the truth:

  He lingered on all that day without speaking, for after they took him down from his horse he had not spoken, beyond a word to the people in the Temple that on hearing the clamour of people fleeing the slaughter he asked what it was; and they just told him that men were fighting, and he commanded them to leave him in peace. Aft
er that he spoke no more, but gave up his soul to God. He was buried before his tabernacle which was the altar where they sang mass. And God has his soul. What great damage his death caused!28

  The Temple, a secure stronghold, had become a gathering point for those seeking shelter. “There was the marshal, Pierre de Sevrey, and some brothers of the Templars, and some other brothers lying there wounded, and some secular knights, and women and burgesses and many other people.”29

  There was, however, still a rear-guard action to be fought. Among those who had fallen back on the Temple in the face of the remorseless advance of the Mamluks was Matthieu de Clermont, Marshal of the Hospital of St. John. He saw Beaujeu lying dead and resolved on one more do-or-die attempt to reverse the tide of events, and “returned to the battle, gathering around him all his brethren, for he would not abandon any of them, and some of the Templars went with him, and they came to a square of the Genoese quarter which was empty of houses, and there Matthieu plunged into combat.”30 In this small, closed arena, Clermont, mounted on his warhorse, fought literally to a standstill. His end prompted heroic and possibly creative descriptions of man and beast in their last moments: “His war horse was utterly exhausted and was unable to charge any further. It resisted the spurs and stood in the middle of the street as if rooted to the spot where it was hit by a spear and fell prostrate on the ground. With his horse collapsed he was run through by spears. So the faithful warrior knight of Christ gave up his soul to his creator.”31

  Down on the seashore, the Mamluk cavalry had managed to prize off the latticework spiked iron fence running into the sea, positioned there purposely to prevent horsemen entering the town along the beach. They galloped forward, encircling the defenders from behind.

  Then a great number of Saracens on horseback came in. Sir Jean de Grailly and Sir Othon de Grandson and the men of the king of France put up stubborn resistance, so that there many were dead and wounded. But Sir Jean de Grailly and Sir Othon de Grandson could not withstand the Saracen pressure, and they withdrew from the place and saved themselves, with Sir Jean de Grailly wounded. Henry, King of Jerusalem and Cyprus, when he saw the extent of the catastrophe, came to the Master of the Hospital, and clearly seeing that no strategy or help could now make any difference, they saved themselves and boarded their galleys.32

  Villiers probably left on these ships. In the blame game that followed the fall of Acre, the chroniclers, from the safety of monasteries and libraries and using the accounts of eyewitnesses, would draw up their own charge sheets of who fought and who ran away, apportioning blame and praise according to national and religious loyalties. But at this point, it was everyone for themselves.

  13

  THE TERRIBLE DAY

  Noon, May 18 to May 28, 1291

  “KNOW THAT THAT day was terrible to behold,” the Templar of Tyre recalled in anguish.1 There could be no mercy for a city that had not surrendered. Now, with the sultan’s army reaching deep into the town and fire raging, all organized resistance collapsed. There was a universal rush down the narrow lanes toward the harbor: “The ladies and the burgesses and the unmarried maidens and other lesser folk ran fleeing through the streets, with their children in their arms, weeping and despairing, and fleeing to the sailors imploring them to save them from death.”2 Villiers recorded no more orderly retreat among the lower ranks of the Hospitallers. “Our serjeants, our yeomen and our hired soldiers and others began utterly to despair, and to fly towards the ships, throwing down their arms and armour.”3

  There were far too few ships, and the sea was rough, churned by the wind, and the shortcomings of the harbor made any attempt at orderly evacuation impossible. Offshore, there were some sailing vessels and transport galleys of the Venetians and six galleys belonging to the papacy and the King of Cyprus. Coincidentally, two Genoese galleys had arrived to trade under their commander Andrea Peleau, and, belying the general reputation of Genoa, these “did a great deal of good, as everyone knows, for they rescued people from the seashore and put them aboard the sailing ships and other vessels.”4 This was difficult and dangerous work, given the weather conditions, which required transfer from rowing boats tossed on the turbulent sea. The Templars and the Hospitallers appear not to have made deep preparations for the possibility of an evacuation, though the Templars had one very large sailing ship there, The Falco—described as “the greatest that had been built at that time,” most likely capable of taking at least 1,500 people.5 It was commanded by Roger de Flor, who despite being a member of the Order, had a controversial reputation tinged with accusations of mercenary adventuring and piracy.

  It was mainly the wealthy and the titled who got away from a city of fire and slaughter. King Henry and Amalric, Grandson, the wounded Villiers and Grailly, and their men boarded their ships and sailed off to Cyprus. Roger de Flor, in The Falco, “brought away ladies and damsels and great treasure and many important people.”6 Quite a lot of this treasure seems to have gone to line his own pocket and earned him a subsequent charge of profiting from human misery: holding these wealthy noblewomen to ransom for their portable jewels and gold as they begged to be saved from the burning city, refusing the poor. Scathing criticism also fell on many of the notables able to pay their way out. The Genoese galley captains alone gained praise for disinterestedly ferrying less well-off citizens out to the sailing ships and saving lives, but the weather and the available shipping meant that only a fraction escaped.

  At the water’s edge, the scenes became frantic: the wealthy running to the quay offering their valuables to be taken off, the poor with their children begging for pity. Attempts to ferry people out to the merchant vessels tossing offshore in the heavy swell were chaotic. People fought for places in fishing boats and small skiffs. Overloaded, some capsized in the swell. Many of the desperate, caught between the prospect of murder and rape and the sea, tried to swim out to the ships. Women clutching their infants to their breasts waded into the water and drowned. The surface of the sea was reddened with the bodies of the slain. Those left faced the consequences.

  Descriptions of the slaughter throughout the city exist in a series of jumbled accounts of terror and self-sacrifice. As awful as anything was the noise: “The terrified wailing of men, women and children, deprived of the chance to flee—some in the middle of eating, were trapped miserably or cornered in the squares, streets, houses and corners of the city.”7 All order broke down. It became a case of individual survival. In the words of a chronicler: “The bonds of natural piety were broken. The father didn’t think of the son, the brother of the brother, the husband of the wife. A man didn’t stretch out his hand to help his neighbour.”8

  Death in the sea, from a manuscript illustration of the siege of Acre. (Oliver Poole, redrawn from Crusader Manuscript Illumination at Saint-Jean D’Acre, 1275–1291, Princeton, 1976)

  Everywhere scenes of terror and confusion: fires raged and screams rang through the streets; “riderless horses, astonished and panicked by the tumultuous noise and the din and shouting from all sides, tore hither and thither through the squares, looking desperately around with gaping eyes as if searching for their lords and owners, until reins were thrown over their necks and they were captured and led away by the enemy.”9 People were suffocated in the crush of the crowds trying to flee toward the harbor. The Templar recalled “the pitiful sight of the little children, knocked down and disembowelled as the horses trampled them. Nor is there a man in the world who has so hard a heart that he would not have wept at the sight of this slaughter; and I’m sure that all Christian people wept who saw these things. Even Saracens, as we discovered later, felt pity and wept.”10 In the midst of this carnival of brutality, some Muslims were apparently moved to tears by the fate of these children, but with nearly all organized resistance gone, general slaughter and pillaging were more the order of the day. The attackers went from house to house rooting out defenders and killing the men. “The slaves, rabble and mob started to plunder.”11 The women and children were prize
s, led away in chains or raped. Fighting broke out among the victors:

  And when the Saracens came across them, one grabbed the mother, another the child, and carried them away from place to place, and separated the one from the other. In one instance there was a quarrel between two Saracens over a woman and she was killed by them; in another a woman was led away captive, and the infant at her breast was hurled to the ground and the horses rode over it, and so it died. There were some pregnant women caught in the crush who suffocated and died, and the baby in her womb also. And there were cases where a woman’s husband or child was lying ill or wounded by an arrow in the house, and she abandoned them and fled, and the Saracens slew them all.12

  The looting was feverish and spectacular. Despite the apparent removal of much of the city’s wealth before the siege, the Muslim sources recorded that, in addition to the human prizes, there were still rich pickings to be had: “treasure, crystal vessels inlaid with gold and pearls which could not be valued, and likewise silver and gold vessels,” considerable quantities of Venetian currency and bullion in the form of ingots. In the frenzy to grab, many beautiful works of art were smashed for their raw materials, and Muslims were killed in the competition for loot. The largest rewards fell to the aggressive and the canny: “A number of common people profited from what they bought from the gains of the slaves, the camel-drivers, the rabble and others of the troops and their followers.”13