The Accursed Tower

by Roger Crowley

  There was little soul searching by the victors over the final slaughter. The events of a century earlier were well remembered, and their echo was captured by Islamic writers. “In my view,” wrote the Arab chronicler al-Yunini, “this was their reward for what they did when they conquered Akka from the martyred Sultan Salah al-Din [Saladin]. Although they had granted amnesty to the Muslim inhabitants, they betrayed them after the victory, killing all except a few high-ranking emirs. These were sold for so much money that an emir was sold for 50,000 dirhams and more. Thus God requited the unbelievers for what they did to the Muslims.”7 “O you yellow-faced Christians,” wrote a poet, “the vengeance of God has come down upon you.”8

  Miraculous correspondences were found emphasizing that this was justice for Richard the Lionheart’s massacre. Abu al-Fida, present at the siege and well aware that the final assault had taken place on May 18, 1291 (by the Christian calendar), sought to emphasize the symmetry of events by altering the date by a month to June 1291. “By a strange coincidence the Franks had captured Acre, taking it from Saladin at noon on Friday, 17 Jumada II [July 12, 1191], took the Muslims in it and killed them. God Almighty in His prescience decreed that it should be conquered in this year on Friday, 17 Jumada II [June 17, 1291], at the hands of sultan al-Malik al-Ashraf Salah al-Din. So the conquest was like the day the Franks took possession of it, and likewise the titles of the two sultans.”9

  In the Islamic world, the siege spawned apocryphal stories. One of the emirs charged with demolishing Acre found a lead tablet written in Greek. It was translated in Damascus and read: “Written in the year 222. And recorded on it that men of the community of the prophet of the Arabs shall trample this land. He is a prophet to whom religion and law has been shown, and his religion is the greatest of religions, and his law the greatest of laws, he cleans the earth of unbelief and his law shall remain till the end of time. His community shall possess all the regions of Persians and the Franks and others, and if they enter the year 700 his community shall possess all the lands of the Franks.”10 More likely, the “translator” had sold the emir a fraudulent souvenir.

  Khalil’s boast to Hethoum about the booty was probably an exaggeration—much had been spirited away—but not an extraordinary one. There were tales of people becoming rich both from treasure and from slaves. “The gain of some of them reached the total of two thousand dinars and more from those who plundered and sold to the common people. A person known as Siraj al-Din Zabyan had a profit in Akka of around one thousand seven hundred dinars and twenty-two thousand dirhams. He arrived at the town in the company of three trains of camels carrying merchandise.”11 There was also a considerable amount of plunder of marble columns and architectural materials, including the magnificent Gothic portal of St. Andrew’s church, which was incorporated into a madrasah in Cairo.

  On June 7, Khalil left Acre for Damascus. There, he received a rapturous reception:

  The entire city had been decorated, and sheets of satin had been laid along his triumphal path through the city leading to the palace of the governor. The regal sultan was proceeded by 280 fettered prisoners. One bore a reversed Frankish banner, another carried a banner and spear from which the hair of slain comrades was suspended. Al-Ashraf was greeted by the whole population of Damascus and the surrounding countryside lining the route, ulama [legal scholars], mosque officials, Sufi sheiks, Christians and Jews, all holding candles even though the parade took place before noon.12

  A second, even more opulent parade was held in Cairo for the all-conquering hero. Khalil finished where he had started six months earlier—at his father’s tomb, where he gave thanks for his victory. Again, a need for circularity was attributed to these events to link Khalil to the great deeds of Saladin. It provided implicit criticism even of the sultan’s worthy predecessors, Baybars and Qalawun. “God saved Akka from the hands of the unbelievers,” wrote Baybars al-Mansuri, “by the hand of al-Malik al-Ashraf Salah al-Din [Khalil], in the same way as its conquest was first by the hand of Salah al-Din Yusuf ibn Ayyub [Saladin], and it stayed in their hands one hundred and three years. None of the Ayyubid kings and none of the rulers of the Turkish state after them stood up to return it.”13

  THE BEDRAGGLED REFUGEES who made it to Cyprus were destitute; most brought almost nothing with them, and the influx caused inflation in the island. “Food was very scarce. Even houses which had been rented for ten bezants a year increased in price to a hundred bezants a year.”14 They became at the same time objects of charity—King Henry provided some measure of poor relief—and contempt. “And all their friends in Cyprus disowned them, nor did they make any friendly mention of them,” wrote the Templar of Tyre, who may have personally suffered in this way.15 Thibaud Gaudin, the new grand master of the Templars, seems to have fallen into deep depression on the island.

  It was the Greek monk Arsenius, a pilgrim unwittingly caught up in the siege, who brought the terrible news to the pope in August. He gave a dramatic recounting of the facts and cast blame widely—on the Venetians and the Pisans, on the military orders for discord, on King Henry for fleeing. Even the pope was criticized to his face for his distracted obsession with the question of the ownership of Sicily. “Holy father, if thou hadst not heard our sorrow, out of the bitterness of my heart will I reveal it. Would to God that thou hadst not been so intent on the recovery of Sicily.”16

  ARSENIUS LAID THE blame for the final calamity not only on the sinfulness of people but also on the Vatican’s own failure to attend properly to the support of the Holy Land. And, he went on, “it was a real miracle that God did not permit the island of Cyprus to be taken by the infidels”—a gambit that the ambitious sultan was soon considering.17

  The fall of Acre had been on the edge of possibility for years; it was seen in informed circles as a setback but not a final outcome. It did not stir the level of lamentation that the loss of Jerusalem had a century earlier. If it was God’s punishment for sin, the situation might be recoverable. Those, such as the Templar of Tyre, closer to the events and more realistic, knew better. He had firsthand experience of the formidable military skill of the Mamluks. This time, Christendom had lost every foothold on the shores of the Holy Land, and they had all been obliterated. A major crusade for 1293 had been planned by Pope Nicholas IV, but he was dead within the year. Ricoldo de Monte Croce, traveling in Iraq and also fully aware of the power of Islam, read in these events the possibility of the End of Days: “If the Saracens continue to do as they did in two years to Tripoli and Acre, in several years there will be no Christians left in the whole world.”18

  Survivor blame and survivor guilt inevitably followed. In the accounts that circulated, the crown of martyrdom was bestowed on those, such as Clermont, who went down fighting. Nicolas de Hanapes was the only person in the whole history of the Holy Land crusades to be canonized by the papacy. At the same time, the finger of suspicion was pointed at the leading figures who made it out alive. Like survivors of the Titanic, Othon de Grandson and Jean de Grailly were accused of fleeing “with their armour untouched.”19 Grandson was additionally charged with having made off with a considerable amount of money, yet there was evidence that Grailly had been wounded, and on Cyprus Grandson was so poor that the pope ordered the dean of St. Paul’s in London to pay him a stipend. Jean de Villiers finished his letter, in which he described briefly the part that the Hospitallers had played, on a keening note that suggests a hinted apology for having survived at all. They had gone down almost to the last man. “God knows it,” he wrote, proceeding to explain the circumstances surrounding his personal survival. It had been involuntary and willed from Above; wounded and almost dead, he had been carried off by his servants to a ship. “And so we and part of our brethren escaped, since it pleased God that it should be so, of whom the greater number were sore wounded without hope of recovery, and we had ourselves taken to the island of Cyprus. There we have remained until the date this letter was written in great sadness of heart, overwhelmed with very great s
orrow.”20 It was perhaps a particular source of shame to the grand master of the Hospitallers that he had lived when Beaujeu, that of the Templars, had died fighting. In this climate, King Henry, guilty by association, felt obliged to seek pardon from the pope.

  Judgment on conduct during the siege remained a burning topic and frequently reflected partisan interests. Generally, the chroniclers tended to favor the Hospitallers in this respect, with the heroically portrayed death of Clermont contrasted with the tardier response of Beaujeu, but retrospective blame would attach to both the orders, in which their discords and self-interest figured heavily. Both were uniquely identified with the Holy Land crusades, particularly the Templars, the original military order with its 172 years of unbroken service in the Holy Land. With the Holy Land lost, their raison d’être was called into question. The military orders were at the heart of the crusading project. They were now vulnerable, open to accusations of selfishness and hypocrisy from all quarters.

  In the wake of the fall of Acre, many new crusading strategies were proposed, among them to merge the military orders into one body; to use the total Christian control of the sea to strike at the Mamluks by economic blockade of Alexandria, cutting off its access to goods, military slaves, war materials, and tax revenues from the spice trade; or to forego a general call to crusade in favor of professional forces, centered on the military orders, with national support from the crowned heads of Europe. The most detailed of these proposals was the treatise of Marino Sanudo Torsello, who had visited Acre in 1286. He was deeply knowledgeable about the trade routes that nourished the Mamluk dynasty. His carefully though-out strategy involved a return to the great crusading plans of Louis IX—to strike first at Egypt.

  Church taxes were levied to fund such enterprises; successive popes convened councils. For a while, popular enthusiasm for crusading remained high. In 1309, thousands of peasants and townspeople from across Europe made their way to Mediterranean ports to beg for a general crusade, which rapidly petered out for lack of papal support. Crusading required the leadership of great kings. Both Edward I of England and Philip IV of France committed to go but neither made it. There were always higher national priorities—rivalries, wars to fight, disputes to settle. The grand masters of the Templars and the Hospitallers both spurned the idea of a merger. And a maritime strategy depended ultimately on the participation of Venice and Genoa, neither of whom were willing to forego the lucrative trade with the Islamic world. The crusading taxes disappeared into the papal coffers, and lack of coherent secular leadership and political will, and the frightening costs involved, stymied practical action. As one astringent chronicler put it about the papacy of Clement V, at the start of the fourteenth century, “The Pope had the money and his Marquis the nephew had part of it, and the King [of France] and others who had taken the cross did not set out, and the Saracens are still there in peace, and I think they may sleep on undisturbed.”21 By 1370, all concrete plans for recovering the Holy Land were dead.

  Yet the dream of Jerusalem died hard. On Cyprus, noblewomen wore black mourning for the loss of the Holy Land for a century. It continued to exert a hold on the chivalric imagination of the aristocracy of Europe, and theoretical schemes for reclaiming Jerusalem continued to be generated for hundreds of years. Manuel I, king of Portugal at the time that Vasco da Gama first sailed to India and a man given to messianic dreams, envisaged a pincer movement against the now dying Mamluk dynasty. He attempted to persuade the kings of England, France, and Spain to embark on a ship-borne Mediterranean crusade to the Holy Land, while a Portuguese fleet would simultaneously attack from the Indian ocean. Not short of ambition, he envisaged a raid on Medina, kidnapping the body of Muhammad and holding it to ransom in exchange for Jerusalem. Such schemes collapsed without a sound. By the start of the sixteenth century, the Ottomans had become the focus of all Christian military effort, and the prospect of retaking the Holy Land had slipped away.

  Faced with a challenge to their existence, the Hospitallers cannily repositioned themselves. Retreating from Cyprus, they besieged the Greek Christian island of Rhodes, captured it in 1308, and managed to present themselves as the front line of Christian reconquest, waging piratical war against Islam and for a time maintaining a foothold at Bodrum on the coast of Turkey. As “the shield of Christendom,” they survived another five hundred years, first in Rhodes, then at Malta, holding the line against the Ottoman Empire. The Teutonic Knights fell back on their second front, fighting the pagans in northern Europe. The Templars were less swift footed. They no longer had a role; they were distrusted as a state within a state—and they were enviably wealthy. Papal discussions about merging the two orders came to nothing. In France, the heartland of their order, they came under the vengeful gaze of King Philip IV. Their downfall was sudden and dramatic. Under accusations of idolatry, magic, and sodomy, the roundups started in 1307. Show trials and confessions under torture ensured their destruction. The evidence presented of their heroic defense at Acre counted for nothing. By 1314, they were finished, with the last grand master burning at the stake with a defiant shout: “God knows who is wrong and has sinned. Soon misfortune will come to those who have wrongly condemned us. God will avenge our death!”22 Both Philip and the pope were dead within the year.

  The end of the Templars—their redundancy and their problematic status in a Europe gradually coalescing into nation-states—was symptomatic of a gradual alteration in the consciousness of Western Christendom. Among religious men, the collapse of the Holy Land marked something of a spiritual crisis. The belief that Christianity would achieve a final victory over Islam could not be sustained. More broadly, there was a slow shift in faith. People were no longer so easily moved by the simple spiritual fervor that had sparked the early mass crusades, no longer so convinced by the promise of redemption from sin. In any case, the crusading impulse could be fulfilled nearer to home against pagans in the forests of Prussia and Lithuania or against the Moors on the plains and in the mountains of the Iberian Peninsula. Crusading in the Holy Land had become the business of professional armies carried there on the ships of the Italian maritime republics. Neither soldiers nor ships were available. European monarchs were occupied with their own fights. England and France were moving toward a war that would absorb them for a century. The Venetians and the Genoese, whose commitment was always compromised by the lure of trade with the Islamic world, were engaged in long-running trade contests. The papacy itself had been tarnished by its substitute crusades against the Holy Roman Empire in Sicily and by the practice of selling indulgences—payment for remission of sins.

  The world of the thirteenth century was different from that of the eleventh. Europe was being gradually lifted out of existential pessimism. A commercial revolution saw money replacing barter, the slow decline of feudal ties, the growth of urban populations, and the invention of new financial instruments—banking, insurance, and bills of exchange—that facilitated the expansion of trade and the improvements in material prosperity that would only be slowed by the Black Death. In Persia, the Mongol dynasty converted to Islam, depriving Christendom of a potential ally. For two hundred years, the spark that Pope Urban had lit burned brightly. The appeal of fighting for the Holy Land had caught the imagination with its heady mix of medieval chivalry, armed aggression legitimized by fighting for Christ, its promises of salvation and redemption of sins, its vivid reimagining of the place of Christ’s life. But in the long run, the crusades were unsustainable. Supply lines were too long, support too sporadic, and internal divisions within its kingdoms too great to create long-term strategies and standing armies. Ultimately, defeat was inevitable.

  KHALIL’S LETTER TO Christian Armenia was not an idle threat. The following year, he invaded and sacked parts of Hethoum’s kingdom; but the king himself avoided the promised fate, and the sultan’s bombastic self-belief and vaulting ambition would prove his undoing. He conceived a grand campaign to conquer Baghdad from the Mongols and ordered the construction of a hundred s
hips for the conquest scheme of Cyprus. Nothing came of either. Such projects alienated leading emirs, who were alarmed by his lack of judgment and perceived him a danger to themselves and the Mamluk state. His suspicions against Lajin at the siege of Acre came home to roost. In December 1293, a group of emirs, including Lajin, hatched a plot to kill him. Now exiled in Cyprus, the Templar of Tyre was able to obtain some kind of account of the event that closed the circle on the fall of Acre:

  And as it happened, one day out hunting, they attacked and killed him. And the one who struck him first was his uncle, Baydara, his mother’s brother, but he struck so ineffectively that it wasn’t a mortal blow. Then an emir called Lajin struck him, saying to Baydara “You do not strike like a man who wants to be sultan, but I will deliver a manly blow.” And he struck him so hard that he was cut in half, and thus was Christianity avenged of the evil that he did.23