fourteen

The Fall of Acre

Another crusader elevated in his absence from Europe was Edward’s companion-in-arms, Theobald Visconti, the Archdeacon of Liège: while he was in Acre two emissaries arrived from Europe to tell him that he had been chosen as the new Pope. After years of wrangling, the Catholic cardinals meeting in Viterbo had been locked in the Papal Palace by the prefects of the city to oblige them to reach a decision, then exposed to the elements with the removal of its roof, and finally denied any provisions until they made a choice.

Taking the title of Gregory X, the Pope-elect returned first to Viterbo and then to Rome, which his two predecessors had avoided, and there was crowned with the papal tiara on 27 March 1272. In spirit, however, he remained in Palestine: he ‘preserved a vivid recollection of Jerusalem and worked for its recovery. His genuine devotion to the cause of the Holy Land became the basis of his policy.’305 Less than a month after his accession, he summoned a general Council of the Church to meet at Lyons. At the top of its agenda was a new crusade, and he asked for proposals to be put forward in the light of the failure of Louis IX’s expedition to Tunis two years earlier.

As a prerequisite to a successful crusade, Gregory X did what he could to reconcile the warring factions in Europe, and he also made approaches to the Greek Emperor in Constantinople, Michael VIII Palaeologus, inviting him to send delegates to Lyons with a view to reuniting the two churches. In the wake of so many setbacks, the preaching of a crusade was no longer straightforward: Humbert of Romans, the fifth Master General of Dominic Guzman’s Order of Preachers, had warned his friars in his manual De predictatione sancte crucis that they must be ready to answer blunt and hostile critics, and that their sermons would often be met ‘with mockery and derision’.306 Humbert listed the arguments used by their antagonists – for example, that it was incompatible with Christ’s teaching to kill in the name of the Church: ‘the supporters of peaceful missions to the infidels were quite numerous at the time of the Second Council of Lyons’.307 Even among those who backed a new crusade, there was widespread agreement that it should not be the kind of popular levy seen during the First Crusade – the passagium generale – but, as proposed by Gilbert of Tournai, an expeditionary force of professional soldiers – the passagium particulare.

Only one European monarch, King James I of Aragon, came to Gregory X’s Council at Lyons which convened on 7 May 1274. The absence of the Pope’s former comrade-in-arms, Edward I of England, was a particular disappointment because he would have been able to give the Council fathers the benefit of his experience. Without King Edward and King Philip III of France, Gregory fell back on the advice of the Grand Masters of the military orders – Hugh Revel of the Hospital and William of Beaujeu, elected Grand Master of the Temple after the death of Thomas Bérard the year before.

William was a career Templar with considerable experience of fighting in Palestine and administering the Order. In 1261 he had been captured in a raid and subsequently ransomed; he had been the Templar Preceptor in the County of Tripoli in 1271 and was Preceptor of the Kingdom of Sicily at the time of his election. However, his elevation almost certainly came about because of his links with the French Crown. His uncle had fought with Louis IX on the Nile, and through his paternal grandmother, Sybil of Hainault, he was related to the Capetian royal family. Not only had the French kings been the most reliable European source of help to the Holy Land, paying for a permanent force of knights and crossbowmen at Acre, but, with the triumph of Charles of Anjou over his Hohenstaufen rival at the Battle of Tagliacozzo, French power now reached throughout the Mediterranean. As a result, William of Beaujeu, at the Council of Lyons, spoke against a proposal put forward by King James I of Aragon to send a force of 500 knights and 2,000 infantry as the vanguard of a passagium generale, arguing that hordes of enthusiastic but ill-disciplined and transient crusaders would be ineffective. What was required was first a permanent garrison in the Holy Land, periodically reinforced by small contingents of professional soldiers; and second, an economic blockade of Egypt to undermine its economy.

As a prerequisite to such a blockade, William of Beaujeu argued, the Christians would have to establish a naval ascendancy in the eastern Mediterranean that did not depend upon the Italian maritime republics – Venice, Genoa and Pisa: their trade with Egypt was simply ‘too profitable to be abandoned’,308 the Venetians even using Acre for their trade with Egypt in prohibited war materials originating in Europe. Following this advice, the Council of Lyons ordered the Grand Masters of the Temple and the Hospital to build a fleet of warships.

There was a further reason for the Templars to support Charles of Anjou: he had bought the rights to the throne of Jerusalem from a credible pretender, Mary of Jerusalem, for a thousand pounds of gold and an annual pension of 4,000 livres tournois. To the Templars, and no doubt to the Pope, a single sovereign from the French royal house reigning over a joint kingdom of Sicily and Jerusalem was by far the best political basis for the preservation of a Latin presence in the Holy Land; but it brought the Order into conflict with the indigenous nobility of the Kingdom of Acre who supported the claim of King Hugh of Cyprus. When William of Beaujeu returned to Acre in September 1275, he refused to acknowledge the authority of King Hugh who in consequence returned to Cyprus in high dudgeon and wrote to the Pope complaining that the military orders made the Holy Land ungovernable.

Charles of Anjou, who also had the support of Pope Gregory X, sent a bailli to Acre to govern in his name, Roger of San Severino. The indigenous nobility saw no alternative but to accept Roger’s authority, which he exercised in tandem with William of Beaujeu. Two attempts by King Hugh to recover his position with expeditionary forces to Tyre in 1289 and Beirut in 1284 were frustrated, largely by the Templars. The price paid by the Order was the sequestration or destruction of their properties in Cyprus which in turn led to protests from the Pope.309

More arbitrarily, William of Beaujeu also involved the Temple in a protracted dispute over the hand of an heiress between Bohemond VII of Tripoli and his principal vassal, which led to a minor civil war. Such internecine conflict among the Latin Christians at a time when their kingdom was already in a perilous position scandalised European opinion and undermined the moral authority of the Templar Grand Master, creating ‘an image of him as untrustworthy and partisan, an image which in turn came to be reflected in some of the later judgements of him and of the last years of the Templars in Palestine’.310

At the end of March 1282, the whole basis of William’s policy was undermined with the revolt of the Sicilians against Charles of Anjou. This started with a fracas outside the cathedral in Palermo during the singing of Vespers that led to an attack on the French garrison. Charles, an arrogant and cold-hearted man with none of the judicious qualities of his saintly brother, Louis IX, had already antagonised the Sicilians in general with his oppressive rule, and the people of Palermo in particular by moving his capital to Naples, thereby accelerating the city’s economic decline. Incited by the rival claimant to the Sicilian throne, Peter III of Aragon, the people of Palermo followed the attack on French soldiers outside the cathedral with the massacre of the 2,000 French living in the city.

The landing of an Aragonese army at Trapani some months later started a war which ended any hope of help for the Latins in the Holy Land. A crusade was proclaimed by the Pope, Martin IV, not against the Saracens but against the Aragonese. Like a number of other crusades preached against the enemies of the Papacy in the fourteenth century, it debased the whole concept of Holy War. It was not simply that Europe was scandalised by a war against the Pope’s Christian enemies but there was also an explicit diversion of resources. On 13 December 1282, Pope Martin IV, a Frenchman, Simon of Brie, authorised King Philip III of France to withdraw 100,000 livres tournois from the Paris Temple raised by the crusading tax to finance the war against the Sicilians and the Aragonese. The ten-per-cent tax on the Church that had been collected in Hungary, Sicily, Sardinia, Corsica, Provence and Aragon, amounting to 15,000 ounces of gold, was made over to Charles of Salerno, the son and heir of Charles of Anjou. The consequences for the Holy Land were clear at the time, at any rate to the anti-papal propagandists. Bartholomew of Neocastro describes a Templar knight rebuking Pope Nicholas IV: ‘You could have relieved the Holy Land with the power of kings and the strength of the other faithful of Christ … but you preferred to attack a Christian king and the Christian Sicilians, arming kings against a king to recover the island of Sicily.’311

In the Holy Land itself, the Sicilian Vespers had made the position of Charles of Anjou’s new bailli, Odo Poilechien, untenable and the Templars shifted their support to King Henry II of Cyprus, the son and heir of King Hugh. Demonstrating a rare concord, the Grand Masters of the Templars, Hospitallers and Teutonic Knights persuaded Odo Poilechien to surrender the citadel at Acre to them, and then themselves gave it to the King. Six weeks later, after the young King’s coronation at Tyre, the court returned to Acre where his accession was celebrated with games, pageants and tournaments hosted by the Hospitallers. The young nobility of Outremer enacted scenes of chivalry from The Knights of the Round Table, and from The Queen of Femenie where knights dressed as women performed mock jousts. These celebrations continued for two weeks.

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One factor which had hitherto worked to the advantage of the Latins in Palestine had been the chaos that had followed the death of a Muslim ruler – for example, after the death of Saladin in 1193. However, when Baybars had died in 1177, his ineffectual sons were replaced within three years by Baybars’s most competent commander, Qalawun. The chief factor that had inhibited the new Sultan from moving against the Franks in force had been a residual fear of Charles of Anjou: once that had been removed by the Sicilian Vespers of 1282, nothing remained to prevent him from pursuing Baybars’s ambition to drive the Franks into the sea.

In 1287 Qalawun sent one of his emirs to attack Latakia, the last port in the principality of Antioch that remained in the hands of the Christians. No attempt was made to relieve it and Latakia fell after token resistance. In 1288, taking advantage of a dispute over the government of Tripoli after the death of Bohemond VII, Qalawun secretly prepared an assault on the city. His plan was betrayed by a spy in the pay of the Temple, the Emir al-Fakhri, and William of Beaujeu wrote to warn the citizens of Tripoli but, because of his record of self-interested duplicity, they would not believe him and so Qalawun’s army found them unprepared. When the Mameluk troops broke into the city, the Templar commander, Peter of Moncada, remained and was killed along with all the male captives: the women and children were taken as slaves. After the city was in his hands, Qalawun ordered it to be razed to the ground to prevent any return by the Franks.

Notionally, the Kingdom of Acre was still protected by a truce but Qalawun soon found a pretext for breaking it. An enthusiastic but undisciplined group of crusaders, newly arrived from northern Italy, responded to a rumour that a Christian woman had been seduced by a Saracen by attacking all the Muslims in the city of Acre. The Latin barons and the military orders did what they could to stop this pogrom but a number of Muslims were killed. When Qalawun heard of the massacre, he demanded that the miscreants be handed over to him for execution. The authorities in Acre balked at surrendering Christian crusaders to the infidel. William of Beaujeu proposed sending all the condemned prisoners held in the city’s gaols in their place but this was rejected. Instead, emissaries were sent to Qalawun by King Henry to explain that the Lombards were newcomers and so had not understood the law; and that, anyway, the riot had been started by the Muslim merchants.

This was not good enough for Qalawun. Advised by his councillors that he had just cause for breaking the truce, he ordered his army to prepare in secret for an assault on Acre. Once again, the Emir al-Fakhri sent word to William of Beaujeu but again the Templar Grand Master was disbelieved. In desperation, William of Beaujeu sent his own envoy to Cairo to treat with Qalawun, who offered peace in return for one sequin for each inhabitant of Acre. William recommended this offer to the High Court in Acre but it was contemptuously rejected. William himself was accused of treachery and abused by the crowd as he left the hall.

On 4 November 1290, Qalawun set out for Acre at the head of his army but fell ill and within a week he was dead. He was succeeded by his son al-Ashraf who, as his father lay dying, promised that he would continue the war against the Franks. New emissaries from Acre, among them a Templar knight, Bartholomew Pizan, were thrown into prison; and in March 1291, al-Ashraf’s armies from Syria and Egypt began to converge on Acre with over a hundred siege-engines, giant catapults and mangonels. On 5 April al-Ashraf himself arrived before the walls of Acre and the siege began.

Christendom had had a good six months’ notice of the Muslims’ designs on Acre but little had been done to strengthen its forces in the Holy Land. The military orders had summoned knights from Europe; King Edward I had sent some knights under Otto of Grandson; and King Henry a contingent of troops from Cyprus. At most, the combined Christian forces consisted of around a thousand knights and fourteen thousand infantry, among them the undisciplined Lombards. The population of the city was put at around forty thousand, and every able-bodied man took his place on the ramparts. To the north was the suburb of Montmusard, protected by a double wall and moat; and between Montmusard and Acre itself there was a further moat and wall linking fortified towers built by prominent crusaders such as Prince Edward of England.

Each contingent of the defending forces was assigned a section of the walls. The Templars under William of Beaujeu manned the northernmost section from where the ramparts of Montmusard met the sea. Next to them were the Hospitallers and, at the juncture with the walls of Acre, the royal knights commanded by the King’s brother Amalric reinforced by the Teutonic Knights; then the French, the English, the Venetians, the Pisans, and finally the troops of the Commune of Acre.

On 6 April the siege began with a bombardment by the Sultan’s catapults and mangonels. Covered by a hail-storm of arrows aimed at the defenders, Mameluk engineers moved forward to undermine the towers and walls. Although adequately supplied with food from the sea, the Christians were short of arms and soldiers to man the ramparts. On the night of 15 April, William of Beaujeu led a sortie to attack the Muslims’ camp but after an initial success the knights became entangled in the guy ropes of the tents and were forced back into the city, leaving eighteen dead. On 8 May the first of the towers undermined by the Muslim engineers was on the point of collapse, obliging its garrison to set in on fire and then withdraw.

During the week which followed, other towers started to crumble and on 16 May the Mameluks made a determined assault on Saint Anthony’s Gate, which was repulsed by the Templars and Hospitallers. On 15 May, while he was resting, William of Beaujeu learned that the Mameluks had captured the Accursed Tower. Without waiting to put on all his armour, he rushed out to lead a counter-attack but was repulsed and wounded. His Templar brethren carried him back to the Templar fortress on the southwestern extremity of the city. He died that night.

The Hospitaller Marshal, Matthew of Clermont, who had been with William of Beaujeu, returned to the battle and was killed. The Grand Master of the Hospital, John of Villiers, was also wounded but not fatally and was taken by his brethren to a galley in the harbour. On the quays, all was confusion as those who could tried to abandon the doomed city. King Henry and his brother Amalric sailed for Cyprus. Otto of Grandson and John of Grailly commandeered a ship. Desperate fugitives plunged into the sea to swim to the galleys lying offshore. The Patriarch, Nicholas of Hanape, welcomed so many on to the dinghy that was taking him to a galley that the small boat capsized and the Patriarch drowned.

Roger de Flor, the commander of a Templar galley, founded his subsequent career as a pirate by extorting large sums from the rich matrons of Acre for a place on his boat. But eventually the harbour was cut off by the Mameluk forces fighting their way through the streets, killing without distinction men, women and children. Those who hid in their houses until the rage of battle had subsided were made captive and enslaved: so many were taken that the price of a girl in the slave-market of Damascus dropped to a drachma, and ‘many women and children disappeared for ever into the harems of the Mameluk emirs’.312

By nightfall on 18 May, all of Acre was in the hands of the Muslims except for the Templar fortress at the seaward extremity of the city. There the remaining Templars, under the command of their marshal, Peter of Sevrey, held out with civilians who had taken refuge behind its massive walls. Galleys returned from Cyprus to keep them supplied and their residual strength was sufficient to induce the Sultan al-Ashraf to offer terms. It was agreed that the Templars would surrender the fortress in return for an unimpeded embarkation of all those within the compound, together with their possessions. But the Emir, with a hundred Mameluks who were admitted to supervise this truce, immediately seized the property of the civilians, and began to manhandle the Christian women and children. Enraged, the Templars killed the Mameluks and tore down the Sultan’s standard which they had raised over the tower.

That night, under cover of darkness, the Templar commander, Theobald Gaudin, was ordered by the Marshal, Peter of Sevrey, to take ship with the Order’s treasure and some of the civilians and sail to the Templars’ stronghold at Sidon. The next morning, the Sultan al-Ashraf asked to reopen negotiations for the Templars’ surrender. The Marshal, Peter of Sevrey, with a small group of Templar knights, left the fortress under a safe-conduct to parley. When they reached the Sultan’s camp, they were seized and beheaded. Those remaining behind the Temple’s ramparts closed the gates and awaited the Muslims’ final assault. On 28 May, part of the landward wall was undermined and the Mameluks poured through the breach. The last defenders were overwhelmed and slaughtered. Acre was finally taken.

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In Sidon, Theobald Gaudin was elected Grand Master in succession to William of Beaujeu; he was an experienced soldier who had served in the Holy Land, first as the Order’s Turcopolier, then as commander at Acre, for thirty years. He remained at Sidon for a month after the fall of Acre and, when a Mameluk army appeared before the walls of the city, withdrew with the Templar garrison to the offshore citadel. Already, Tyre had surrendered to the Mameluks; while Acre, on the orders of the Sultan, had been systematically demolished, with the portal to the Church of Saint Andrew taken to Cairo as a memorial to the glorious victory of al-Ashraf.

Still intending to resist, Theobald Gaudin sailed to Cyprus for reinforcements, taking the Order’s treasure with him. He did not return. Advised by their brethren in Cyprus to leave Sidon, and seeing that the Mameluks had started to build a causeway, the Templars abandoned the castle and sailed up the coast to Tortosa. Haifa fell on 30 July: Beirut a day later, its ramparts demolished, its cathedral made into a mosque. Tortosa was evacuated on 3 August and eleven days later the Templars withdrew from their greatest fortress, the impregnable Castle Pilgrim. All that remained was their garrison on the island of Ruad, two miles off the coast by Tortosa.

Here, the Templars maintained a garrison for the next twelve years. In that period, the Muslims demolished the cities and laid waste the land on the Mediterranean littoral. In a short time. The Frankish presence on the mainland of Asia were ruins amid the sand.