AS THE WALLS were abandoned, the sultan’s army broke in at more and more points, desperate now to participate in the plunder. When the Templars and Hospitallers moved their forces to try to retake the Accursed Tower, the defenses of Montmusard were denuded of men, and the Hama troops stationed on the right wing swept in. The leper knights of St. Lazarus, left sole guardians of these walls, were all killed.
The churches and monasteries were particularly targeted, both for their wealth and out of hatred of Christianity. Stories would be told of martyrdom for the faith. In the monastery of the Dominicans, as the defense collapsed, thirty monks refused to flee; they were joined by a large number of other friars and were killed saying mass. All but seven of the Dominicans were said to have died. Of the Franciscans, only five survived. Similarly, the Dominican nuns were reported to have been slaughtered in their church singing hymns. Other more apocryphal tales of glorious death circulated in different versions.
There were pockets of valiant resistance. Groups of crusaders fought on. “Completely trapped inside the city in squares and corners they offered armed resistance against the enemy entering and pushed them back… men from the religious orders and pious lay people of all social ranks persisted in this exhausting struggle for two days, their numbers slowly being whittled away, weighted down by their heavy armour and weakened by thirst, hunger and stress, until they were all killed in the name of Christ.”14 They were accorded the status of martyrs.
Nicolas de Hanapes lived the dictates of his own Book of Examples on how to act up to the moment of death. Determined to keep rallying the resistance and intent on martyrdom, he had to be forcibly carried away to the port, protesting loudly: “I am furious with you, dragging me away against my will, abandoning the flock in my care in such danger of being slaughtered.”15 He was ferried out to a Venetian merchant ship, but was not destined to survive. Accounts of his death vary, emphasizing both his saintliness and the contrasting baseness of behavior in the final collapse. Either the good prelate, solicitous to the last, allowed too many refugees to clamber aboard a small boat so that it capsized and he drowned, or, in an account given by the Templar, “a sailor grabbed his hand, but he slipped and fell into the sea and was drowned. It’s not clear if the man who took him by the hand let go of him on purpose because he had put his valuables on the ship, or if his hand slipped because he could not hold on. However it was, the good man died from drowning.”16 It is unlikely that Hanapes had concerned himself with the salvage of his worldly goods.
MANY OF THOSE trapped in the labyrinth of the city and unable to reach the port sought shelter in the city’s strongholds—the Templars’ castle and that of Hospitallers and the Teutonic Knights, the fortified towers in the Venetian and Pisan quarters, and possibly the royal castle. The Temple, which stood prominently on the seashore, was crammed with survivors. Trapped, they could look out over the water and watch the rescue ships departing. “When all the vessels had put on sail, those of the Temple who had gathered there gave a great cry, and the ships cast off and made for Cyprus, and those good men who were then come into the Temple were left to their fate.”17
One by one these strongholds were surrounded and were either taken or surrendered. The Hospital, in the middle of the city, surrendered under amnesty on May 20, along with the tower of the Teutonic Knights and probably the royal castle. The fate of the survivors is not certain; some of the nobility were kept alive as valuable assets for future ransom but Abu al-Fida suggests mass beheadings: “The sultan gave the command and they were beheaded around Acre to the last man.”18 The memory of King Richard’s treatment of the Muslim garrison a century earlier was widely recalled.
The Temple, however, held out. The Templar of Tyre left a detailed account of its substantial and magnificent fortified complex:
The larger part of the people—men, women, and children—sought shelter in the Temple fortress. There were more than ten thousand people there because the Temple was the strongest place in the city, like a castle, situated on a large site by the sea. At its entrance there was a strong tower, whose walls were twenty-three feet thick, and on each corner of the tower there was a turret, and on each turret stood the figure of a lion with raised paw, gilded and as big as a donkey. The four lions, the gilding and workmanship involved had cost 1500 Saracen bezants. It was a magnificent sight. On the other corner of the site, towards the street of the Pisans, there was another tower and near this tower, above the street of St. Anne was a very fine palace, which was the master’s residence.… The Temple compound also had another tower overlooking the sea, which had been built by Saladin a hundred years earlier. It was right by the sea so that the waves beat against it, and there were other fine building within the Temple, of which I make no mention here.19
Its formidable defenses and situation by the sea ensured that it could not be surrounded and could only be taken with extreme difficulty. The number of those who had taken shelter inside may have been inflated, but by all accounts, the Temple was a substantial complex that could accommodate a large number of people. Despite its strength, the situation of the survivors was hopeless. The position of the Temple on an exposed and rocky coast would have made large-scale evacuation impossible without a guarantee of safe conduct. With the death of Beaujeu, the Order had hastily elected Thibaud Gaudin as his replacement. Under his leadership, Pierre de Sevrey, Marshal of the Templars, parlayed for an amnesty on May 20. The sultan granted it. They could leave under safe conduct and embark to Cyprus without weapons and with one piece of clothing. This was accepted. They were given a white flag to hoist on the walls as a guarantee, and four hundred horsemen, under the emir Sayf al-Din Aqbugha al-Mansuri, entered the compound to supervise the evacuation.
The amnesty relied on mutual trust, but things went horribly wrong. With his troops tempted by the women and children inside, the emir lost control of the situation. “These men saw the great number of people there, and wanted to seize the women who pleased them and violate them. The Christians were unable to tolerate this, drew their weapons, attacked the Saracens, killing and decapitating all of them, so that none escaped alive.”20 The gates were shut, the bodies hurled over walls. “Then the Christians resolved to defend their bodies to the death.”21 They destroyed the banner of truce and threw it from the tower.
In fact, not quite all the Muslims trapped inside were killed. One anonymous survivor told a different story and made a miraculous escape:
The Sultan granted them amnesty through his envoys, the emir Sayf al-Din Baktamur al-Silahdar, Aylik al-Farisi al-Hajib (the secretary), the emir Sayf al-Din Aqbugha al-Mansuri al-Silahdar who was martyred in this tower, and Ibn al-Qadi Taqi al-Din Ibn Razin, who were to administer an oath to the Franks and evacuate them under safe conduct. But the rapacious throng fell upon them and killed one of the envoys (Sayf al-Din Aqbugha). Thereupon the Franks closed the gates and expelled the Muslims. When the tumult first broke out, the emirs left and thereby saved their lives. I, along with a companion named Qarabugha al-Shukri were among the group who went to the tower, and when the gates were closed we remained inside with many others. The Franks killed many people and then came to the place where a small number, including my companions and me, had taken refuge. We fought them for an hour, and most of our number, including my comrade, were killed. But I escaped with a group of ten persons who fled from them. Being outnumbered, we hurled ourselves into the sea. Some died, some were crippled, and some of us were spared for a time.22
Each side took the opportunity to accuse the other of bad faith. The Christians were charged not only with massacring the delegation sent to oversee the surrender but also with maliciously hamstringing the horses and mules, though in general, the Muslim sources acknowledge that the breaking of the truce was the result of those sent to manage the evacuation “looting and laying hands on the women and children who were with the Templars.”23
After the botched amnesty, there was a stand-off. The Templar of Tyre related that “the sultan was an
gered by this deed, but gave no visible sign of it. Instead he sent again to say that it was the folly of his men and the outrages that they had committed that had been the cause of the slaughter. He held no ill-will against the Christians and they could leave in safety trusting his word.”24 The Muslim sources state that, despite the events of the previous day, it was the Christians who again requested an amnesty, realizing the hopelessness of their situation.
At some point, a small boat managed to come up to the sea wall of the castle, and the marshal persuaded Thibaud Gaudin, the new Master of the Order, to leave with its treasury and a few noncombatants. Gaudin had been reluctant to abandon the castle to its fate. “He saw his position as grandmaster under attack and thought that he ought not to begin his term of office by abandoning the castle. He consulted the brothers, and with their consent went off to Cyprus, promising to send them help from there.”25 He got away first to the Templar castle at Sidon further up the coast. It seems likely that this was the last record of events directly witnessed by the anonymous Templar of Tyre. This most vivid chronicler of the fall of Acre, evidently a man of value to the Order, probably sailed off to safety with Gaudin, carrying with him the story of its fate.
ACCOUNTS OF ACRE’S last stand vary. The sultan repeated the same offer of amnesty as before. On May 21, Pierre de Sevrey went out to discuss the surrender with some other knights. They were promptly bound and beheaded in full view of the castle in reprisal for the killing of the emir. The Muslim sources state that he was accompanied by many knights and noncombatants, leaving the wounded inside. When they emerged, “more than two thousand of them were executed and the women and children were taken prisoner.”26 It seems more likely that Sevrey had gone out with just a small delegation to renegotiate terms with the sultan ahead of a final evacuation.
However it exactly happened, Khalil, “when he had the marshal and the men of the Temple in his grasp, cut off the heads of all the brothers and other men. The brothers still inside the tower, those who were not so ill that they could not help, when they heard tell that the marshal and the others had been executed, determined to hold out.”27 They threw five more Muslim captives from the tower and prepared for a last, desperate defense. Despite the reduced number of defenders, storming the fortress was a stiff challenge. Khalil set his miners to work bringing down the fortifications. As the walls crumbled, the defenders retreated into the last tower. By May 28, this final redoubt had been mined on all sides and shored up. All that was necessary was to light the fires underneath. Seeing that further resistance was pointless, the survivors surrendered or were captured. Most of the men were beheaded, with the sultan keeping the most valuable for ransom. The women and children were taken into slavery.
The Chronicle of St. Peter’s monastery at Erfurt in Germany gives a different account, written just a few months later, of a last act of defiance: “But when the Templars and the others who had fled there realised that they had no supplies and no hope of being supplied by human help, they made a virtue of necessity. With devoted prayer, and after confession, they committed their souls to Jesus Christ, rushed out strenuously on the Saracens and strongly threw down many of their adversaries. But at last they were all killed by the Saracens.”28
There followed a dramatic finale. In the Muslim accounts, “when the Franks had come out and most of the contents had been removed, the tower collapsed on a group of sightseers and on the looters inside, killing them all.”29 The Templar of Tyre obtained a version of events to the effect that when “those in the tower gave themselves up, such a great crowd of Saracens entered the tower that the supports [of the mine underneath] gave way, and the tower itself collapsed, and those brothers of the Temple and the Saracens who were inside were killed. In addition, when the tower collapsed, it fell into the street, and crushed more than two thousand Turks on horses.”30 But he could not have been there to see it. Whatever the exact details, the death throes of the Templars’ great castle took on dramatic symbolic significance as the final collapse of Christendom’s two-hundred-year adventure in the land where Jesus had lived and died.
14
“EVERYTHING WAS LOST”
SHORTLY AFTER, A boastful and threatening letter to Hethoum, Christian king of Cilician Armenia:
We, Sultan Khalil al-Ashraf, the Great Lord, the wise, the upright, the strong, the powerful… who brings justice to the oppressed and downtrodden, the builder of kingdoms, the sultan of Arabia, of the Turks and Persia, the conqueror of the armies of the Franks, the Armenians and the Mongols… to the honourable, wise, Hethoum, brave as a lion, of the race of Christ.…
We make known to you that we have conquered the city of Acre that was the seat of the true cross. We besieged it for a very few days because their soldiers with all their resources could not defend it, and we took their vast army by siege. We engaged and encircled them. They were unable to withstand us with so many being killed, no matter how many nobles and knights there were, and in one complete hour all of them were captured and swept away. Our glittering swords consumed all the Hospitallers and the Templars, betrayers of the city of Acre and its Franks… they did not evade destruction, nor the Teutonic knights. We levelled their churches to the ground, they were slaughtered on their own altars, and the Patriarch himself was delivered into tribulation. And you can see a vast amount of treasure has come into the hands of our men… and so many women that they were sold for a drachma a piece. And you can see the towers of Acre have been razed to the ground and turned to a wasteland.…
And you should know from the evidence of our letter that the bodies of the slain have been laid low by our siege engines and burned and reduced to dust. And the knights and barons who used to rule over them have been shackled, bound and imprisoned. And you, O King, if you take heed of what happened to Acre, you will be safe. If not, you will weep blood, as they did.… And if you comprehend what happened to them, it will be to your advantage to come personally with your lords and two years’ worth of tribute to our lofty doors, as a man who values his personal safety and his kingdom and does not try to evade our great power. You can be certain that nothing will escape me after the destruction of Acre. I suggest you think and act accordingly, before you fall into a mousetrap.1
It was an echo of Baybars’s lion clawing the rat.
HETHOUM WAS BEING served notice. It was swiftly followed by another letter to him in similar vein, announcing the destruction of the city of Tyre. Tyre was particularly significant, both to the crusaders and to their adversaries. A century earlier, it had represented perhaps Saladin’s greatest strategic mistake. After the devastating victory at Hattin, he had chosen to bypass it, leaving the crusaders a coastal foothold that enabled them to claw back territory and remain in the Holy Land for another century. Khalil was determined not to repeat the error. He set about erasing every remaining Christian enclave on the shores of Palestine and the Lebanon. On May 18, Tyre’s small garrison, twenty-five miles away, could see the smoke of burning Acre on the southern horizon. Next day, an army appeared before its walls. The city’s defenses were formidable, but the garrison was small; the defenders abandoned it without a fight and sailed away to Cyprus. Next it was the turn of the Templars at Sidon, further north, now commanded by Thibaud Gaudin bringing with him the Order’s treasury. The emir al-Shuja’i showed up with a huge army, and the Templars retreated to an offshore island. They resisted bravely, but when the Mamluks started to construct a causeway, they sailed away to Cyprus. One after another, the coastal strongholds went: Beirut, Haifa, the Templar castles at Chateau Pèlerin on July 30 and Tortosa on August 3—all were abandoned. By August, the only presence left to Christendom was the Templars’ occupation of the tiny island of Ruad, two miles off Tortosa.
Khalil engaged in maximum destruction. Castles were demolished, harbor installations destroyed. The fertile coastal plain was devastated, orchards burned or uprooted, mills demolished, irrigation systems ruined. No beachhead remained for a new crusade. Particular attention was paid to
Acre. Much of it was burned and the walls left to fall down. “God is pleased!” wrote the qadi Abu al-Tina.2 “After the destruction of the walls of Acre, the Infidelity (across the seas) will have nothing to find along our coasts.”
Both sides understood the significance of these events. It was all over in the Holy Land. “Thus,” wrote the Templar, “as you have been able to learn, was all of Syria lost, and the Saracens took and destroyed it all… this time everything was lost, so that altogether the Christians did not hold a palm’s breadth of land in Syria.”3 Islam knew this too. “Because of you,” the historian Ibn al-Furat later wrote, praising Khalil, “no town is left in which unbelief can repair, no hope for the Christian religion.”4 He was feted as “the probity of this world and religion… the subjugator of crosses, the conqueror of the coastal marches, the reviver of the Abbasid state.”5
The walls of St. Andrew’s church, in a drawing by Cornelis de Bruijn, still standing in the seventeenth century despite Khalil’s destruction of Acre. (Reyzen door de vermaardste Deelen van Klein Asia, Delft, 1698)
The death toll is impossible to compute. Of those within Acre, round figures of 30,000 were repeated in Christian accounts but are probably far too high. Many women and children disappeared into slavery; the “drachma a piece” trope was a familiar figure of speech in accounts of Islamic conquest but undoubtedly suggests many captives. The Dominican monk Ricoldo de Monte Croce, traveling in the Middle East, heard tell of nuns in the harems of the emirs and officers of Khalil’s army, and members of the military orders certainly survived as captives, some of whom were ransomed back. Others were too worthless to be enslaved. “I see old men,” he wrote, “young girls, children and infants, thin, pale, weak, begging their bread, and they long to be Saracen slaves rather than die of hunger.”6 Not a few of the survivors converted to Islam. A knight called Pierre was mentioned as being in the Mamluk sultan’s service in 1323. The only casualty figures recorded for the Muslims are unbelievably low: seven emirs, six other commanders, and eighty-three regular troops, though the ratio of officers to men in this figure was unusually high. Storming the walls must have taken a toll on both regular troops and the large number of volunteers at the siege, but beyond that, it is impossible to speculate.
The Accursed Tower Page 20
