God's War: A New History of the Crusades (133 page)

Throughout the 1270s and 1280s, men and money were sent to the Holy Land by popes and western rulers. As the Frankish position in Palestine disintegrated, small companies led by well-connected crusaders appeared at Acre temporarily to stiffen local resistance and the permanent western garrisons funded by concerned, perhaps guilty kings in Europe: Countess Alice of Blois and Count Florent of Holland in 1287; John of Grailly in 1288; the Savoyard intimate of Edward I Othon of Grandson in 1290. None of these did anything to reverse the decline. The politics of western Europe militated against a new crusade just as firmly as the politics of the Near East. The intervention of Charles of Anjou’s attempt to annexe the kingdom of Jerusalem in 1277 briefly seemed to offer a remedy.
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Yet his ambition only served to challenge the unity of Outremer and provoke a damaging war in the west, known
as the War of the Sicilian Vespers, after Sicily rebelled against Angevin rule in 1282. This pitted Aragon against Charles of Anjou and his French allies, smashing precisely the coalition assembled by Louis IX and sought by Gregory X. In 1285, Philip III of France died on crusade, like his father, but it had been against the Aragonese not the Mamluks. Edward I’s priorities lay in the conquest of Wales (to 1284) shortly to be followed by his involvement in the Scottish succession, which increasingly dominated the last years of his reign (1290–1307). His alliance with France had become a distant memory as relations deteriorated into war over the status of Edward’s French duchy of Gascony (1294). The legacy of the imperial interregnum (1250–73) prevented any unified German contribution. Although the last great Mongol attack on eastern Europe had ended in 1260, because of civil war breaking out in the Far East over the succession to the khanate, attempts to arrange an anti-Muslim alliance proved as elusive as before, while the rulers of eastern Europe occupied themselves with consolidating their own borders. Just as the power of kings promised more effective crusading, it largely precluded any alternative initiatives from their nobles. The gulf between capacity and policy came to match that between idealism and will.

The divisions of the west disrupted Outremer during Charles of Anjou’s attempt to wrest the kingship of Jerusalem from the kings of Cyprus (1277–85). Yet even after Charles’s death in 1285 and the restoration of a single nominal authority under Henry II of Cyprus and I of Jerusalem, no prospect of permanent defence on the mainland was possible without impractically massive outside assistance. As Sultan Kalawun tightened the noose, each Frankish lordship faced its own demise in autonomous desperation, some accepting Mamluk over-lordship or condominium, others, like Tripoli, suffering conquest and butchery. The last act, begun by Kalavun in 1290 against Acre, continued after his death under his successor al-Ashraf Khalil. The siege of Acre lasted from 6 April 1291 until 18 May, when the city fell. The frenzied defence and countless acts of bravery – on both sides – ring in the memory.

Khalil’s assault on Acre was designed to be final. The sultan, following preparations already put in train by his father, gathered troops, engineers and siege machines from across northern Syria, Damascus and Egypt. The well-maintained double walls of Acre presented a formidable obstacle, so the siege was to be a contest of throwing machines. One of

23. Acre in 1291

them, a great mangonel brought by the army of Hamah on the middle Orontes from Hisn al-Akrad, the magnificent fortress of Crac des Chevaliers captured by Baibars in 1271, was transported in a hundred carts and took a month to be hauled the 125 miles or so to Acre. As the Franks by this stage had no field army, Khalil’s passage and investment of the city were unopposed. His combined forces were large enough to surround Acre completely on the landward side. His strategy was simple: pound the walls to rubble, create breaches and then use his superiority of numbers to overwhelm the defenders. The Muslim army probably numbered more than the total civilian population of Acre, which may have stood at around 30–40,000. Some wild estimates claimed the attackers had over 200,000 troops. However large, numbers were the key.

Facing the sultan, the Franks in Acre were not without some advantages. Although the military establishment was comparatively modest, it was still substantial, perhaps 1,000 knights and sergeants with another 14,000 infantry. Reinforced by a few western crusaders, such as Othon of Grandson and his English regiment and a division from Cyprus, the Acre garrison was led and dominated by the military orders, whose discipline, resourcefulness and courage prevented the defence from descending into chaos or panic. Able-bodied civilians were enlisted, and the Venetians and Pisans played a full part, the Venetians manning an especially effective catapult. Accurately assessing the odds, many women, children and the elderly had been evacuated before the siege began, reducing the drain on food and emotion, but many, not least the poorest, remained. The one great advantage the Franks possessed was control of the sea. This allowed supplies to reach the beleaguered city, and King Henry of Cyprus-Jerusalem to arrive with last-minute, if limited, reinforcement on 4 May. The sea also provided a means of attacking the Muslim camps on land, as armoured ships carrying archers, crossbowmen and, in at least one case, a large mangonel, bombarded the flanks of the besiegers’ positions where they came down to the shore. However, these attacks inflicted bloody but only superficial damage on the enemy; the mangonel soon broke up in heavy seas.

While the Franks could resist in reasonable security using the twelve towers that studded the outer walls of the city, without a massive infusion of new troops and in the absence of a land force they were doomed to wait for a seemingly inevitable end. Their only realistic
chance of survival lay in disrupting the Muslims by inflicting unexpected or unacceptable casualties, thereby opening up the very real fissures in the political high command around the sultan (who was to be assassinated by members of his own government in Egypt only two years later). The spy network run by William of Beaujeu, Master of the Temple, was almost certainly well apprised of such tensions. The only military means to expose any Muslim rivalries was stubborn defence and repeated forays, sometimes at night, into the Muslim camps. These were vividly remembered by veterans such as Ismai ‘il Abu’l-Fida, an Ayyubid princeling from Hamah, even if his sharpest memory concerned a botched night attack in which Frankish soldiers tripped over guy-ropes and one fell into an emir’s latrine, where he was finished off.
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In reality, only a large western fleet (which did not exist) or a miracle could save Acre. As casualties grew, anxieties over the defenders’ ability to man the whole length of the walls put a stop to the attacks on the Muslim camp. In desperation, soon after King Henry’s arrival an attempt was made to negotiate with the sultan that only served to clarify that Khalil was determined on conquest not accommodation. As the weary days of May passed, Muslim sappers began to have increasing success in undermining the bastions and towers of the outer wall, all the time supported by a hail of missiles, including jars of explosive material, and arrows. By 16 May, the outer enceinte between the walls was abandoned.

The final Muslim assault on the now depleted, hungry and exhausted Frankish defenders came on 18 May, to the accompaniment of a blizzard of arrows and missiles and the encouragement of the usual military drums, cymbals and trumpets. The defences were soon penetrated and fierce street-by-street, hand-to-hand fighting ensued. Few escaped wounds; hundreds if not thousands were killed before the Christians broke for the port. There, ghastly scenes of mayhem, panic, confusion and despair marked the ragged evacuation of survivors. Too few boats caused overcrowding, capsizing and a nasty trade in selling places on the larger vessels. A Catalan Templar captain, Roger Flor, later famous as a freebooter across the Near East, allegedly made a fortune on money extorted from fleeing Frankish noblewomen. Western accounts are lit by stories of heroism and stoicism, none more moving than that displayed by the mortally wounded William of Beaujeu, and tales of rape and violent atrocities. Many of the leaders, including King Henry, managed to escape. Those that stayed were either slaughtered or captured
to spend the rest of their lives as slaves or prisoners, the usual sequel to such military disasters. By the evening of 18 May, most of Acre was in Khalil’s hands. The fortified Templar quarter, jutting out into the sea at the south-west angle of the city, managed to hold out for another ten days. An attempted parley ended in bloodshed, as Egyptian troops attempted to seize the women and boys sheltering in the Temple complex, and the Templars who had agreed terms with the sultan were summarily executed. Only the halt and the lame remained in the Templar buildings when the final moments came on 28 May. The only consolation afforded the last defenders of Frankish Acre – or perhaps the admiring but absent chronicler who described it – may have been that, as the sultan’s troops advanced into the compound, its walls, which had been sapped for over a week, finally collapsed, burying victors and vanquished, perhaps appropriately, in a shared grave.

Once the final resistance had been cleared by the end of May, it became apparent that no immediate counter-attack or succour were possible. The sultan, according to one of his officers, after massacring all surviving defenders, commanded that the city of Acre be ‘demolished and razed to the ground’.
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There was to be no possibility of a repeat of the Third Crusade. By August all the remaining mainland bases had been surrendered or evacuated: Tyre, Sidon, Beirut, Tortosa and Athlit. One eyewitness of the final siege escaped the fall of Acre, an Arabic-speaking Frankish Cypriot who had served on the mainland for over twenty years, ending as the Master of the Temple’s secretary and occasional secret agent. He recounted with hammer-blow clarity the heroic death of his employer and the last days of Frankish Acre. This man, whose only home was Outremer, put the events of 1291 in perspective: ‘Thus was all of Syria lost… This time everything was lost so that altogether the Christians held not so much as a palm’s breadth of land in Syria.’
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Lamenting western contemporaries did not know it. They and their successors for many generations refused to accept it. A century later, Cypriot noblewomen were still seen going about in public in deep mourning for the loss of Acre.
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Yet, on its own terms, the attempt by western Europeans to establish and secure rule over the Holy Land and the Holy Places of their religion in the name of Christ had ended in failure.

The Later Crusades

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The Eastern Crusades in the Later Middle Ages

The evacuation of Frankish holdings on the mainland of Palestine marked a period in the history of the crusades, but not their end. Over subsequent generations, the failure to mount a large, still less effective, western European military campaign against the Mamluks or, later, the Ottoman Turks, shifted the emphasis of wars of the cross while transforming their nature. They became diffused over widely separated front lines in Iberia, the Balkans, eastern, central and northern Europe, narrowly conceived and recruited political campaigns in Italy and small enterprises – often little more than piratical raids – in the Levant. The absence of international action altered the role of crusade ideology, rhetoric, liturgy, ceremony, politics and finance. Crusading did not decline after 1291. It changed, as it had over the previous two centuries since the First Crusade.

This explains the apparent contradiction of crusading throughout the later middle ages; its ineffectiveness failed to destroy sustained communal commitment to the idea or understanding of its ideology and ideals. This was not caused by some sort of collective escapism or mental atrophy. Rather, the crusade mentality, transmitted through long habit, current liturgy and constant renewal in fresh appeals for alms, tax, purchase of indulgences and, occasionally, armed service, framed a way of regarding the world. This mentality, widely dispersed through society, allowed the expression of faith and identity through social rituals and religious institutions without the necessity of individual political or military action. The relative scarcity of
crucesignati
was masked by cultural ubiquity. Independent of fighting and wars, crusading evolved as a state of mind; a means of Grace; a metaphor and mechanism for redemption; a test of human frailty, Divine Judgement and the
corruption of society. Crusading became something to be believed in rather than something to do.

Holy war also remained a prominent feature of later medieval Europe for external reasons. The eastern Mediterranean outposts remained under threat. The Mamluk empire gradually consolidated its hold on its thirteenth-century conquests, resisting Mongol attacks on Syria around 1300 and widening its aggression to the seas and coasts of the northern Levant. The Christian enclave of Cilician Armenia, sporadically paraded as a possible base for reconquering the Holy Land, was finally annexed by the Mamluks in 1375. Cyprus remained a target for Egyptian attack far into the fifteenth century. Yet despite a flood of written advice, strenuous diplomacy and occasional assaults on the Levant coast, no major western campaign was assembled to reverse the verdict of 1291. Western European presence in Palestine was reduced to well-heeled pilgrim tourists, spies, merchants and visiting clergy. By the mid-1330s, the Franciscans were established as representatives of the Roman church in Jerusalem, under Mamluk licence.
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Taking over the Latin sectors within the Holy Sepulchre, as well as the Coenaculum (Upper Room), the tomb of the Virgin Mary and the Grotto of the Nativity in Bethlehem, they devised a package of ritual site-seeing, rerouting the Via Dolorosa and inventing suitably moving ceremonies, including overnight vigils in the church of the Holy Sepulchre and, later, special knightly dubbings with a sword allegedly that of Godfrey of Bouillon. Christian military aggression against the Mamluks only interfered with this steady pilgrim trade. A treaty in 1370 between Egypt and Cyprus explicitly or implicitly secured lasting visiting rights for Latin Christian pilgrims, at a fixed price, providing the circumstances for the continued popularity of this form of religious adventure tourism, which, by 1400, had developed into a routine itinerary of chaperoned site-seeing. However, from the 1330s, a new power disrupted the thirteenth-century settlement. The land-based Ottoman sultanate of north-west Asia Minor gradually established itself as the greatest threat to the integrity of Christendom since the Mongols in the 1240s, and one that proved more durable and more immediate. By the time western Christendom began to succumb to ineradicable and violent religious schism in the sixteenth century, the Ottomans had conquered Greece, the Balkans, Asia Minor and the Mamluk empire, including Palestine, and were battering at the gates of Austria. There remained plenty of scope for anti-Muslim crusading.