The Accursed Tower

by Roger Crowley

  With Khalil’s death, the Mamluk sultanate descended into a period of chaotic bloodshed that made the stable ruthlessness of Baybars and Qalawun seem like a golden age. The sultanate changed hands three times in five years. Lajin himself was sultan from 1296–1298, until the assassin’s knife struck him down. Of all the emirs involved in the siege of Acre, it appears that al-Fakhri, Beaujeu’s double agent, was one of the most fortunate. Despite Khalil’s suspicions, he seems to have died peacefully in his bed in Cairo in 1306. The Templar chronicler vanished in Cyprus, anonymous to the last. His record of events stopped around 1314.

  Among the last surviving protagonists of the great event was Othon de Grandson. He died in Switzerland at the age of ninety. He had been in and out of the Holy Land all his life on behalf of his lord and close friend, Edward I of England. In 1271, nearly sixty years earlier—more than a lifetime back by the standards of the Middle Ages—he had fought alongside Edward on his sorties from Acre and had accompanied the Templars and Hospitallers on an ill-fated venture into Christian Armenia to resist the Mamluks in 1292–1293. The mailed figure on his tomb in Lausanne cathedral is the only surviving likeness of any of those who had fought at Acre. And hauntingly, fifty years after the city’s fall, the pilgrim Ludolf von Suchem stumbled on two aged woodcutters living near the Dead Sea who spoke French. They turned out to be Templars. They had worked for the sultan, married, and fathered children. They and their families were brought back to Europe and feted at the papal court at Avignon, bewildered and exotic specimens from a lost world.

  EPILOGUE

  A HABITATION FOR SNAKES

  ACCORDING TO THE Syrian nobleman Abu al-Fida, Acre’s churches and walls were demolished. The city was razed to the ground. Rocks were dumped in the harbor to render it unusable to ships. The aim was to deny any foothold to future crusader armies, but the destruction was not nearly as complete as was claimed. Christian pilgrims and travelers were still able to make journeys to the Holy Land and to go to Jerusalem, and Acre continued to be visited.

  When Ludolf von Suchem passed through in 1340, much was still visible despite the Saracens’ attempts “to utterly subvert and destroy down to their foundations all the walls, towers, castles and palaces, lest the Christians should rebuild them. Yet in hardly any places have they been able to beat them down to the height of a man, but all the churches, walls and towers, and very many castles and palaces remain almost entire, and if it pleased God, could with great care be restored throughout to their former state.”1 He was able to describe the city’s outline in detail and reconstruct in his mind’s eye a nostalgic picture of the city at its peak. A small garrison was stationed there, living off pigeons and partridges that roosted among the ruins. Strangely, as early as 1304, the Venetians had concluded a treaty with the local governor to reside and trade in Acre, though little evidence exists that they did so. Slowly, much of its shattered outline was covered by windblown sand from the long beach, but for hundreds of years the ghostly ruins of its churches and great palaces were still visible as a landmark for passing ships. Like an image of Ozymandias, its remnants fascinated and haunted passing travelers.

  James of Verona arrived in 1335, “lamenting and sighing” for what it had been, now a desolate spot, “a habitation only for snakes and wild animals” and a few Saracens, yet he was still able to see “fine towers and many palaces and many large buildings.”2 Successive visitors left valuable, if at times contradictory, accounts of the walls. Francesco Suriano in 1460 described “three sets of walls, an arbalest [crossbow] shot apart, with moats in the form of escarpments built of cut stones, with towers within moats forty paces apart, with very strong forts.” Evidence of the siege still lay round about. He saw “a mound half a mile long a short distance from the city as a defence against artillery. And to this day the stones of the bombardment look like a flock of sheep on the ground.”3 Henry Maundrell, who came in 1697, also noted these stone balls scattered on the ground “of at least thirteen or fourteen inches diameter, which were part of the ammunition used in battering the city.”4 Although the place looked devastated to another English traveler, George Sandys, he, too, described it as “strong, double immured, fortified with bulwarks and towers; to each wall a ditch, lined with stone, and under those diverse secret posterns… but the huge walls turned topsy turvey, and lying like rocks upon the foundations.”5 Richard Pococke, in 1738, took its fortifications to be quite modern: “a double rampart and a fosse, lined with stone; the inner rampart defended with semi-circular bastions.”6 It was a ghost town of crumbling structures. The cellars of the houses filled up with rainwater so that the whole place gave off a dreadful stench, cloaked at seasons by a thick miasmic vapor. From the late seventeenth century, artists started to come in search of the romantic Orient. In 1682, the Dutch artist Cornelis de Bruijn drew some of the remaining buildings. Three years later, a French artist, Gravier d’Ortières, sent to Acre by Louis XIV, created a panorama of the whole city from the deck of a ship. The long, low profile picks out the prominent remains of a church on the headland; the still impressive bulk of the Hospitallers’ palace; towers and arches; and outside the walls, desultory, crumbling ruins stretching to the foot of the hill on which Khalil had pitched his red tent.

  Acre from the sea in the drawing of Gravier d’Ortières showing the bulk of the Hospitallers’ fortress and the skeleton of the church of St. John. (Bibliothèque Nationale de France)

  By the end of the eighteenth century, much of this had gone, been rebuilt, or been refashioned. What was left of the medieval walls was demolished and the stone used to make new buildings and the fortifications that repulsed Napoleon in 1799. New mosques and caravanserais were constructed; the foundations of churches, Italian warehouses, and towers had been subsumed into Ottoman structures.

  NOWADAYS, IT IS possible to look down from the impressive ramparts of the old city and imagine the defense and an army encamped outside in the streets of modern Akko, but appearances are deceptive. These walls were built in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries; the medieval walls with their lines of towers, stone-lined ditches, and ominously named towers have vanished. Just tiny stretches at the foot of a wall are still visible. The crusader city is a series of tantalizing fragments over-built with later Ottoman buildings, but the twisting lanes opening onto tiny squares probably follow the crusader footprint, which in turn follow an earlier Arab layout. A chunk of rock by the sea walls marks the sight of the Pisan harbor; another stump standing alone in the sea is all that is left of the so-called Tower of Flies, which guarded the entrance to the port. Acre is a honeycomb of historic structures built one on another—the Arab on the Hellenistic and the Roman, the Crusader on the Arab, the Ottoman on the Crusader. There are deep underground layers. Many houses have arched cellars and undercrofts, with further hollow vaults yet unexplored, evidence of the long accumulation of human habitation. Across the street from where the Templars’ castle once stood, a doorway leads down into the darkness, a monument to the wealth of their heyday. A three-hundred-yard stone tunnel, dimly lit, with the whispering sound of running water, passes under the city. You emerge blinking at the far end, close to the port. Up toward the present city walls, portions of the Hospitallers’ compound still stand, a warren of pillared halls, vaults, and courtyards; at the entrance lie some of the giant stone balls probably launched by Khalil’s catapults.

  The impressive castle where the Templars made their last stand has completely gone; instead, a shallow basin of sea in which the outlines of its foundations are just visible. It’s a pleasant spot to sit and gaze out at the water and the passing ships, the place where the defenders once looked in vain to the west. From here you can now catch both the sound of church bells and the call to prayer. People come to this sea wall to drink coffee by the lighthouse, to promenade and meet their friends. The sound of Arabic technopop blasts out from speed boats taking tourists on thrill rides around the bay. They churn up dramatic bow waves as they turn. Joy riders scream.
After dark, just the slap of water, the fruit stalls still lit, the lighthouse and the moon.

  ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

  MY THANKS ARE due to many people during the writing and production of this book. Firstly to Dan Gerstle who commissioned it, Lara Heimert who ensured a smooth transition, and the team at Basic for their professionalism, enthusiasm, and helpfulness throughout in the making of a better book. Behind them stand ranks of advisers and contributors. I am deeply grateful to my two doughty translators, Martin Dow for access to unreachable Arabic sources and advice and to Steve Elliott for German translations. Ron Morton and Stan and Tom Ginn commented on the manuscript as general readers, while two anonymous academic readers tried their best to correct some of my doctrinal errors over the crusades. Oliver Poole redrew medieval miniatures for the pages of this book with remarkable skill. In Acre, my thanks are due to Danny Syon of the Israel Antiquities Authority for giving me time, good advice, and access to unpublished research and photographs of the archaeology. I enjoyed the friendship and hospitality of Joseph Gable and his family with whom I stayed in Acre and who gave me an insight into life in this most extraordinary of cities. Andrew Abado took me on a fascinating guided tour of its labyrinths. Mike Fulton answered my questions on trebuchets and toned down my wildest imaginings about the power of medieval catapult technology. Denys Pringle explained all that’s known of the naming of the Accursed Tower. Andrew Lownie, my agent, continues energetically to promote my work. Lastly, as ever, my thanks are to Jan, a wise voice.

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  Credit: Oliver Poole

  Roger Crowley was born in 1951 into a naval family and educated at Cambridge University. The author of numerous bestselling books, including 1453 and Empires of the Sea, Crowley lives in Gloucestershire, UK.

  THE EVIDENCE FOR THE FALL OF ACRE

  THIS BOOKS RESTS on two centuries of crusader scholarship. The reverberations of the events of 1291 were felt across the whole of Europe, and generations of historians have been assiduous in seeking out reports, letters, chronicles, and church and state records that touch on the final collapse of Outremer as seen from the Christian viewpoint. Despite this, the number of eyewitness accounts is quite small. First and foremost, of course, is that of the so-called Templar of Tyre, on which I have drawn heavily. The Templar remains a fascinating figure in his own right; his mysterious role as an intelligence agent and speaker of Arabic gave him access to inside knowledge both of decision-making processes within the heart of the Acre establishment and of the Mamluk world. He is by turns revealing and knowingly discreet. “I could tell you who they were if I were so inclined.” Some of the incidents he describes, such as the horrifying death of an English soldier hit by Greek fire and the mortal wound inflicted on Guillaume de Beaujeu, suggest that he was there as an eyewitness, and yet he gives no hint of personal involvement. Did he fight—there is no indication that he did—or was he just a man of letters? And how did he escape from the burning city? He vanishes from the scene into obscurity. As our most detailed surviving account, he possibly skews the record favorably toward the Templars and exaggerates the importance of Beaujeu’s mortal wound to the final collapse.

  Alongside the Templar, I have particularly relied on two other anonymous Latin chronicles that seem to have collected the accounts of survivors of the fall: the so-called Excidium Aconis (The Destruction of Acre), and another simply known as Thadeus, after its author. In addition, there are fragmentary letters, such as that of the grand master of the Hospitallers, Jean de Villiers; the report of the Greek monk Arsenius to the pope; and suggestive details from other chronicles and records.

  The Islamic version of events has been far less picked over. The pioneering analysis of these in the West is Donald Little’s paper reviewing all the available material and constructing a genealogy of reliability and attribution. I have found this an invaluable guide to the Arabic sources and to understanding their perspectives on the events of 1291. But as he points out, while these are highly informative on the “before and after” of the siege—the politics, the decision-making, and the aftermath—they are less helpful on military matters. There are a few precious autobiographical eyewitness accounts; among these are Abu al-Fida’s description of dragging the trebuchets to the siege, Baybars al-Mansuri’s construction of an ingenious screen to thwart the defenders’ catapults from the siege works, and an anonymous Mamluk soldier’s desperate fight for survival trapped on the Templars’ tower at the very end. The narrative and sequencing of events during the siege in the Islamic sources is jumbled and confusing. We learn far more from Christian sources about Mamluk fighting techniques—particularly during the final assault—than we do from the Arabic ones. Nevertheless, by cross-referencing incidents from these sources with those from the Templar and others, I believe it is possible to give a reasonably balanced account.

  Beyond the written accounts, there is also the evidence on—and in—the ground. The city of Acre is a fascinating historical site, its layers of occupation lying one on top of another in rich confusion, but as I indicated in the epilogue, it is extremely difficult to understand. A fundamental problem in any account of the events of 1291 that makes continuous mentions of towers and barbicans, the inner and outer walls, and the role of ditches and salients is that we have little reliable information about exactly where they were or what they looked like—beyond an acceptable belief that they would have been in line with the kinds of structures and defensive strategies adopted in many other crusader fortifications in the Holy Land.

  For the relative position and identification of the walls and towers, we are largely dependent on the work of Marino Sanudo Torsello, who visited the city in 1286 during the last desperate phase of tower building before the Mamluks came. Maps were drawn in conjunction with his account in various versions, one of which appears here, that enable us to locate the main features, though even these can be misleading. One version of Torsello’s map puts the Accursed Tower on the outer wall, though it was quite patently on the inner one, and Torsello himself must have known this as he was in the city when the King’s Tower was being constructed to protect it shortly before the fall. The psychological importance of the Accursed Tower, as in the Mathew Paris map here and 3, sometimes trumps the facts. The tower in this map is circular. There is good reason to believe that there was a preference for circular defensive structures in strategic locations; though more laborious to build, they were considered harder for miners to bring down than the corners of square towers, but unfortunately, there is no archaeological evidence to go on.

  Much of the wall and the towers and stone-lined ditches were still visible well into the eighteenth century, and travelers’ accounts of visiting the site, as well as the artists’ portrayals, provide valuable evidence even if they are somewhat contradictory. We learn, for example, from the observations of Francesco Suriano that Khalil’s army constructed a long earth bank to protect its camp and of the impressive number of artillery balls still littering the site centuries later “like a flock of sheep” that give evidence of the massive work of the trebuchets, but the walls and towers themselves, and the exact course of Acre’s outer walls, remain elusive. On my visit to Acre, Danny Syon of the Israel Antiquities Authority showed me the one small stretch of stones at the base of the eighteenth-century city wall that is all that’s left above ground of the original crusader structure. Decades of archaeological work have uncovered tantalizing glimpses of walls, ditches and towers, shops, streets, and houses, but the development of the town of New Akko has now covered the ground that was visible in aerial photographs a century ago so that the historic suburb of Montmusard and the line of the walls has completely vanished.

  One of the consequences of this has been an ongoing debate among archaeologists and historians about the size of crusader Acre, particularly how far east its outer walls extended towar
d the Touron, the hill from which Khalil conducted his operations, and at what point these walls met the seashore. There are minimalist and maximalist positions on this. In 1997, Benjamin Kedar made a persuasive case for Acre having been far larger than had been previously thought. Those favoring this view have relied on some archaeological evidence as well as the long panorama of Gravier d’Ortières, drawn in 1689, a section of which is reproduced here. His panorama seems to show the ruins of built structures quite close to the Touron, though it has been countered that there would very likely have been free-standing buildings, bridges, et cetera, outside the city walls, and the accuracy of Gravier’s perspective is questionable. In deciding how to brief the necessary map to understand events in the book, I eventually followed the maximalist position as set out in a map by Denys Pringle based on Kedar’s work, which elongates the footprint of Acre east toward the Touron, with no certainty, in the absence of archaeological evidence, that it is definitive. All that can be said is that the map at the front of this book is reasonably uncontroversial in relation to the twists and turns of the walls, the relative positions of towers and gates, and the disposition of Mamluk army units in accord with the contemporary sources.

  Over decades of archaeological work, during the course of building work and hurried salvage digs, some evidence of the fighting that took place has emerged from the ground: the base of a round tower at the far northern end of the walls beyond which the Pisans must have launched their surprise amphibious attack early in the siege, sections of moat and occasional fragments of tower elsewhere. In 1991, the construction of a courthouse in New Akko gave rise to the discovery and excavation of a square tower, with walls ten feet thick at the base, that had been destroyed by fire. The litter of burnt beams and smashed pottery bear witness to the final destruction. It has been suggested that this tower was on the outer line of walls near the most vulnerable salient and that possibly it was the Tower of the Venetians. A similar excavation inside the eighteenth-century walls undertaken in 2004 revealed the extensive torching of buildings in direct line of the final Mamluk assault, evidence that “the land was lit up by fire,” as the Templar of Tyre put it. A destruction layer of this kind has been discovered at various sites in the city, littered with shattered thirteenth-century pottery and glass, coins, carbonized wood, and collapsed roofs—time capsule evidence that crusader Acre came to an abrupt full stop in May 1291. The forlorn ruins were then covered by windblown sand for hundreds of years until the town was resurrected by the construction of new buildings on top during the Ottoman period.