The Glory of the Crusades (35 page)

You would have seen the crosses in your churches smashed, the pages of the false Testaments scattered, the patriarch’s tombs overturned. You would have seen your Muslim enemy trampling on the place where you celebrate the Mass, cutting the throats of monks, priests and deacons upon the altars . . . You would have seen fire running through your palaces, your dead burned in this world before going down to the fires of the next.
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The ancient Christian city would never be recovered. The Principality of Antioch, established after the First Crusade, 170 years previously, was no more. The scourge of Baybars the Merciless demanded a response, and once more the saintly Crusader of France took up the cross.

The Second Crusade of King St. Louis IX

News of Baybars’s raids and destruction of Christian territory in Outrémer and the unfinished business of his first Crusade prompted Louis to take the cross on the Feast of the Annunciation, March 25, 1267. The decision was somewhat of a surprise, as Louis was now in his fifties. He left Aigues Mortes on July 2, 1270 with a similar sized army as in his first Crusade: 325 knights and between 10,000 to 15,000 infantry.
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After his departure Louis announced that his initial objective was Tunis on the African coast opposite Sicily.

Through the centuries historians have tried to answer why Louis chose Tunis as the object of the Crusade. Some authors have argued that he was motivated by political reasons, since conquest of Tunis would help his brother Charles I, king of Sicily. Others have written that Louis believed Tunis was an ally of Egypt and would provide a secure base of operations for the Crusaders to attack Egypt, a long-time objective of Crusade armies.

These speculations derive from those living centuries after the king and are inadequate. The contemporary confessor of Louis, Geoffrey of Beaulieu, provides a better explanation and one in keeping with the saintly Crusader’s spiritual emphasis. He indicated that Louis desired to convert the Muslim ruler of Tunis, who had said he would embrace the gospel if a strong Christian army came to his realm.
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A Tunisian embassy who visited Louis’s court in 1269 before the king’s departure may have influenced his decision. There was also a very good logistical reason for choosing Tunis, as every Crusader fleet needed a muster port before sailing on to the Holy Land. Embarkation to Outrémer usually occurred in late summer or early fall and every Crusade army since the Second Crusade wintered over somewhere. Louis had previously used Cyprus as his staging area before sailing on to Damietta but “Tunis was within easier and safer sailing distance than Cyprus.”
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A combination of evangelization and logistics, therefore, motivated Louis’s decision to attack Tunis in the summer of 1270.

The Death of the King

Louis spent two weeks at Tunis before advancing to Carthage in order to await the army of his brother, Charles I, en route from Sicily. Unfortunately, the wait at Carthage proved fatal. The “high summer, poor diet, and water contaminated by the immobile army soon stoked the outbreak of virulent disease, probably typhus or dysentery.”
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The Crusaders began to die. Louis’s son, Jean Tristan, born at Damietta in 1250 during Louis’s first Crusade, died, followed soon thereafter by the papal legate. Then the saintly Crusader became sick and bedridden. After a month of sickness, the king finally succumbed and died on August 25, 1270 at the age of fifty-six. He died at the hour of mercy while lying on a bed of ashes mouthing the words, “Jerusalem, Jerusalem.”
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St. Louis was the last monarch of Europe to go on Crusade to the Holy Land and even with his dying breath his last thought was the liberation of the Holy City; he was truly the “perfect Crusader.”

A few hours after Louis’s death, his brother Charles of Anjou arrived at Carthage with his army. The next few months witnessed minor skirmishing between the Crusader and Muslim forces that ended when Charles negotiated a peace with the emir of Tunis in November that included an allowance for Christian evangelization and worship in lands controlled by the emir.

Charles’s return trip to France was marked by disaster and death. On November 15–16, the French fleet struck a storm that destroyed forty ships, including eighteen large transports. Thousands of souls were lost.
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The survivors reached land and began the march home but by then “it was not an army but a funeral procession which returned to France” as Crusaders continued to die, including Isabelle of Aragon, the wife of Louis’s son Philip III.
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The pregnant Isabelle fell off her horse while crossing a river, which induced premature labor and resulted in a stillbirth.
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Saint Louis’s brother, Alfonso of Poitiers and his wife, Jeanne, also died in Italy on the way home from the Crusade.

Louis’s second Crusade was a costly endeavor with little temporal gain. Pope Boniface VIII, whose relationship with Louis IX’s grandson Philip IV “the Fair” was notoriously bad, canonized the saintly Crusader on August 11, 1297, twenty-seven years after his death on his second Crusade in the desert of North Africa.

The End of the Crusader States

As the thirteenth century came to a close, Christian territory in Outrémer occupied only a very narrow coastal strip. The area was, however, extremely fertile and rich. The annual revenue of Acre, the major Christian port in the Holy Land, was more than that of the English king. The material wealth of the kingdom and its role in the Holy Land economy gave the Christians there a false sense of security, as they believed their economic importance provided a defense against Muslim attack. There was not much else the Christians could depend on, as their own military forces were woefully inadequate. Their military strategy centered on diplomacy with their Muslim neighbors and Western assistance in times of crisis. After the fall of Tripoli in 1289, King Henry II of Jerusalem entered into a ten year truce with the Mamluk sultan of Egypt, al-Mansur Qalawun. Henry hoped the truce would safeguard the remaining Christian cities and avoid the fate of Tripoli. His hope proved futile.

In the summer of 1290, Muslim merchants from Damascus arrived in Acre and were attacked by Christians. No one is exactly certain why the merchants were attacked. Some believe drunken revelers from a party lost control and set upon the Muslims. Others said a local Christian discovered his wife in bed with one of the Muslim merchants and killed him.
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Regardless of the reason, the killings gave Qalawun an excuse to break the treaty and launch an attack on the major Christian city.

In early November the Mamluk army left Egypt bent on the conquest of Acre. Six days into the march, Sultan Qalawun died. He was replaced by al-Ashraf Khalil, who also ordered Syrian forces to mobilize and join the Egyptians at Acre. The Christians were soon to be descended upon by a large, united Muslim force.

Khalil set a muster date of March of 1291 for the combined army and initiated a campaign aimed at raising enthusiasm for the
jihad
against the Christians. A week before the main army set out, the Qur’an was recited publicly in Cairo and a call went out for general volunteers, who would be used as cannon fodder, to join the army.
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Baybars al-Mansuri, the emir of Karak, best expressed the mood within the Muslim community when he wrote, “My soul had a strong desire for
jihad
, a desire for it like the earth thirsts for delivering rain.”
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In order to stem an attack on the city, Acre sent the ambassadors Philip Mainboeuf, an Arabic scholar, Bartholomew Pizan, a Templar knight, and George, a Hospitaller secretary, to Khalil. He refused to see them. Instead, he had them arrested and put in prison, where they later died.
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Nothing could convince Khalil to change his mind. He was determined to wrestle control of Acre away from the Christians. It was a holy city in the eyes of Islam and the time had come for its conquest through
jihad
.
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Amalric, the brother of King Henry II, was deeply concerned. In charge of the defenses of Acre, he knew there were not enough men to combat the massive Muslim army bearing down on the city. There was some comfort in the fact that the Templars, Hospitallers, and Teutonic Knights augmented his forces, and each order had sent summons to Europe for all available men to make haste to Acre. All three grand masters of the military religious orders were already present.

Those who could afford it began to leave the city for Cyprus. As the calendar turned to 1291, Christian forces from other towns were pulled to defend Acre. Despite this extreme measure the Christians were vastly outnumbered. The combined Muslim forces included 160,000 infantry and 60,000 cavalry; a force that quadrupled the population of Acre.
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Christian forces numbered only 15,000 with 1,000 knights, 14,000 foot soldiers and a contingent of crossbowmen first provided to the city by King Louis during his sojourn in Outrémer.

The disparity in numbers influenced Christian strategy. “Their only realistic chance of survival lay in disrupting the Muslims by inflicting unexpected or unacceptable casualties.”
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The Last Stand

Khalil’s army arrived at Acre in early April 1291. The sultan knew he had superior numbers but he also knew that fact alone would not ensure victory. Acre was a well-fortified city, with double walls that would need to be breached. Situated with its back to the sea, the city afforded a limited landward position for maneuver. Khalil had no fleet and could not command the sea, so he was forced to concentrate all his forces on a smaller area, which limited the numbers of troops he could commit to battle at any one time. Access to the sea kept the defenders supplied and provided a gateway for reinforcements as well as an escape plan for those who could get on ships. Khalil knew success demanded the destruction of the walls, or at least a part of them, so he planned a massive artillery bombardment of the city. The siege of Acre was to “be a contest of throwing machines.”
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The Muslims brought more than a hundred siege engines to the contest. This included one particularly massive engine that had been captured at Krak des Chevaliers in 1271 by Baybars. It took a hundred carts and thirty days to travel the 125 miles to Acre.
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The number of machines was astounding, and unprecedented in Muslim military history.
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The Templar of Tyre recorded that several of the siege engines were given names and he noted their dispositions during the battle:

One of these engines was called Ghadban, that is to say Furious, and it was set up in front of the Templars’ section. Another which shot at the Pisans’ section was called al-Mansuri, that is to say Victory. Yet another, very large, whose name I do not know, shot at the Hospitallers’ section, and a fourth engine shot at the great tower called the Accursed Tower.
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The first week of the siege saw limited skirmishing as each side tested the strengths of the other. The Master of the Templars, William of Beaujeu, led a surprise raid on April 15 with both regular and Templar knights. The raid began promisingly, catching the Muslims completely unawares, but then disaster struck, as described by the Templar of Tyre:

[B]oth brother and secular knights went so far in amongst the tents that their horses got their legs tangled in the tent ropes and went sprawling, whereupon the Saracens slew them. In this way we lost eighteen horsemen that night . . . though they did capture a number of Saracen shields.
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One unfortunate knight fell into the emir’s latrine, where he was killed.
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The Christians launched additional raids from April 18–20 but they did not achieve any lasting success. Eventually the raids stopped as the defenders became concerned about the number of troops available for wall defense. In early May, the Christians received a huge morale boost as King Henry II arrived in forty ships with 100 knights and 2,000 infantry from Cyprus.
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He assumed command of the defense and quickly surmised the situation was militarily hopeless.

Henry decided to seek a diplomatic solution and sent envoys to Khalil on May 7. If the envoys had hopes of striking a negotiated settlement, these were quickly dashed as Khalil greeted them with a question: “Have you brought me the keys of the city?”
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Despite the cold reception, the envoys pressed forward with the negotiation and managed to get Khalil to agree to let everyone in the city live if the king surrendered.

The envoys needed to receive the king’s consent before they finalized the deal. As they were leaving the sultan’s tent, a huge catapult stone from the city crashed near it. Khalil was furious the Christians would continue to fire on his army with their envoys present in the camp and he threatened to kill them. He relented and allowed them to go but he reneged on the deal. Acre would either hold or be destroyed.

The End of Acre

Two weeks after King Henry’s arrival, Khalil launched the final assault on the city. It began with a thunderous barrage of noise from 300 camel-mounted drummers.
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After more than a month of bombardment, the Muslims finally breached the walls and entered the city. The chronicle of the Templar of Tyre captured the scene of the Muslim army pouring in: