1291: The Destruction of Acre
As soon as Acre was in his power, the
Sultan set about its systematic destruction. He was determined that it should
never again be a spearhead for Christian aggression in Syria. The houses and
bazaars were pillaged, then burned; the buildings of the Orders and the
fortified towers and castles were dismantled; the city walls were left to
disintegrate. When the German pilgrim, Ludolf of Suchem, passed by some forty
years later, only a few wretched peasants lived amongst the ruins of the once
splendid capital of Outremer. One or two churches still stood, not wholly
destroyed. But the fine doorway of the Church of Saint Andrew had been taken to
ornament the mosque built in Cairo to honour the victorious Sultan; and amidst
the crumbling walls of the Church of Saint Dominic the tomb of the Dominican
Jordan of Saxony was untouched, as the Moslems had peered in and found his body
uncorrupted.
The remaining Frankish cities soon shared
the fate of Acre. On 19 May, when most of Acre was in his hands, al-Ashraf sent
a large contingent of troops to Tyre. It was the strongest city of the coast,
impregnable against an enemy that lacked command of the sea. In the past its
walls had twice thwarted Saladin himself. A few months earlier the Princess
Margaret, to whom it belonged, had handed it over to her nephew, the King’s
brother Amalric. But its garrison was small; and, as soon as the enemy
approached Amalric’s
bailli,
Adam of Caftan, lost his nerve and sailed
away to Cyprus, abandoning the city without a struggle. At Sidon the Templars
determined to make a stand. Tibald Gaudin was there, with the treasure of the
Order; and the surviving knights had elected him Grand Master, to succeed
William of Beaujeu. They were left in quiet for a month. Then a huge Mameluk
army came up under the emir Shujai. The knights were too few to hold the town;
so they retired, with many of the leading citizens, to the Castle of the Sea,
built on an island rock a hundred yards from the shore, and recently
refortified. Tibald at once set sail for Cyprus, to raise troops for the castle’s
assistance. But once that he was there he did nothing, either from cowardice or
despair. The Templars in the castle fought bravely, but when the Mameluk
engineers began to build a causeway across the sea, they gave up hope and
sailed away up the coast to Tortosa. On 14 July Shujai entered the castle and
ordered its destruction.
A week later Shujai appeared before
Beirut. Its citizens had hoped that the treaty made between the Lady Eschiva
and the Sultan would preserve them from attack. When the emir bade the leaders
of the garrison to come and pay their respects to him, they therefore anxiously
complied, only to find themselves made prisoner. Without its leaders the
garrison could not contemplate defence. Its members took to their ships and
fled, carrying with them the relics from the Cathedral. The Mameluks entered
the city on 31 July. Its walls and the castle of the Ibelins were pulled down,
and the Cathedral turned into a mosque.
1291: The Death of Outremer
Soon afterwards the Sultan occupied Haifa
without opposition on 30 July, and his men burned the monasteries on Mount
Carmel and slew their monks. There still remained the two Templar castles at
Tortosa and Athlit, but in neither was the garrison strong enough to face a
siege. Tortosa was evacuated on 3 August and Athlit on the 14th. All that now
was left to the Templars was the island fortress of Ruad, some two miles off
the coast opposite Tortosa. There they maintained their hold for twelve more
years, only quitting the island in 1303, when the whole future of the Order
began to be in doubt.
For some months the Sultan’s troops
marched up and down the coast-lands, carefully destroying anything that might
be of value to the Franks should they ever attempt another landing. Orchards
were cut down, irrigation-systems put out of order. The only castles that were
left standing were those that were back from the coast, like Mount Pilgrim at Tripoli,
and Marqab on its high mountain. Along the sea there was desolation. The
peasants of those once rich farms saw their steads destroyed and sought refuge
in the mountains. Those of Frankish origin hastened to merge themselves with
the natives; and the native Christians were treated little better than slaves.
The old easy tolerance of Islam was gone. Embittered by the long religious
wars, the victors had no mercy for the infidel.
The lot of the Christians that escaped to
Cyprus was not much better. For a generation they lived the miserable lives of
unwanted refugees, for whom as the years passed sympathy wore thin. They only
served to remind the Cypriots of the terrible disaster. And the Cypriots needed
no reminder. For a century to come the great ladies of the island, when they
went out of doors, wore cloaks of black that stretched from their heads to
their feet. It was a token of mourning for the death of Outremer.
BOOK V
EPILOGUE
CHAPTER
I
THE
LAST CRUSADES
And they that understand among the people shall instruct many: yet
they shall fall by the sword, and by flame, by captivity, and by spoil.’
DANIEL XI, 33
With the fall of Acre and the expulsion of
the Franks from Syria the Crusading movement began to slip out of the sphere of
practical politics. After Saladin’s reconquests, a century before, the
Christians still retained great fortresses on the mainland, Tyre, Tripoli and
Antioch. An army of rescue had bases from which it could operate. Now the bases
were gone. The little waterless island of Ruad was useless. Expeditions must be
organized and provisioned from across the sea, from Cyprus. The only Christian
dominion that remained was the kingdom of Armenia, in Cilicia. But the journey
from Cilicia into Syria was difficult, and the Armenians could not all be
trusted. Again, the loss of Jerusalem in 1187 had come as a terrible shock to
Christendom, so sadden was the collapse of the kingdom. But everyone knew in
1291 that Outremer was crumbling. Its disappearance caused grief and
indignation, but no surprise. Western Europe now had overriding problems and
quarrels at home. There would be no glow of fervour that would drive its
potentates eastward, as in the days of the Third Crusade. Still less could a
great popular expedition like the First Crusade be launched. The peoples of the
West were enjoying new comforts and prosperity. They would never respond now to
the apocalyptic preaching of a Peter the Hermit with the simple, ignorant piety
of their ancestors two centuries before. They were unconvinced by the promise
of indulgences and shocked by the use of the Holy War for political aims. Nor
was a great military expedition possible, with the great Empire of Byzantium
reduced to a shadow. The end of Outremer was grievous news, but it provoked no
violent reaction.
Lack of Allies
Only the Pope, Nicholas IV, sought to
implement his sorrow by deeds; but there was no one to whom he could turn. The
prestige of the Papacy had been crippled by the ill-success of the Sicilian
war. Kings no longer troubled to carry out the Papal bidding. The Western
Emperor, whose oecumenical power the Popes had broken, was fully occupied in
Germany. If he emerged, it was only to take a wistful expedition into Italy.
King Philip IV of France was able and active, but, having extricated his
kingdom from the Sicilian war, he spent his energy in building up the royal
authority. Edward of England had his hands full in Scotland. Moreover, England
and France were moving into the state of intense rivalry that was soon to
produce the Hundred Years War. The monarch with the strongest sea-power in the
Mediterranean, James II of Aragon, along with his brother Frederick, claimant
of Sicily, was at war with the Pope’s client, Charles II of Naples; who was
willing enough in theory to help in a Crusade, but had first to eject the
Aragonese from Sicily. Further East the Byzantine Emperor was busy enough
warding off the Turks on the one hand and the new Balkan monarchies of Bulgaria
and Serbia on the other. Besides, the Angevins of Naples were now taking over
the claims of the dispossessed Latin Emperors. Their patron, the Pope, could
not therefore hope for much sympathy from the Greeks. The merchant-cities of
Italy were too busy adjusting their policy to the changed circumstances to make
any promises that might embarrass them. The Kings of Cyprus and Armenia were
most intimately concerned with the problem; for their kingdoms were in the
front line now, and one or other must serve as the base for any new Crusade.
But they were desperately anxious not to provoke the Sultan. The King of
Armenia had to contend with the Turks as well as with the Egyptians, and the
King of Cyprus had to solve the problem of the refugees. Moreover, both royal
houses, which were now closely interconnected by marriage, were soon troubled
by family quarrels and civil war. The Ilkhan of Persia remained a potential
ally; but the Ilkhan Arghun had been cruelly disappointed by his failure to
rouse the West to action before the fall of Acre. He would do no more. In 1295,
soon after Arghun’s death, the Ilkhan Ghazzan adopted Islam as the state
religion of the Ilkhanate, and threw off his allegiance to the Great Khan in
the East. Ghazzan was a good friend of the Christians, for he had been brought
up by the Despina Khatun, the Ilkhan Abaga’s gracious wife, whom all the East
revered; and his conversion in no way lessened his hatred of the Egyptians and
the Turks. But there were no more Mongol embassies to Rome and no more hope
that Persia would become a Christian power. There was, it is true, a Papal
envoy in Pekin, Brother John of Monte Corvino; but, though Brother John enjoyed
the friendship of Kubilai, the Great Khan had no interest now in the affairs of
the Near East.
There remained the Military Orders. They
had been founded to fight for Christendom in the Holy Land, and that was still
their chief duty. After the fall of Acre the Teutonic Order abandoned the East
for its Baltic possessions; but the Templars and the Hospitallers set up their
headquarters in Cyprus. There, unable to perform their proper task, they took
to meddling in local politics. The Pope could probably count on them to provide
help for any actual expedition; for their vast endowments all over Europe
aroused jealousy that might have dangerous results unless they were proved to
be justified. But the Temple and Hospital unaided could not undertake a Crusade.
Pope Nicholas had failed to rouse the West
after the fall of Tripoli. He was equally impotent after the greater disaster
at Acre. His advisers gave him no help. Charles II of Naples supported the
suggestion, first made some years previously, that to end their rivalry the
Military Orders should be amalgamated; but he thought that military action in
the East was impossible for the moment. He advocated an economic blockade of
Egypt and Syria. It would be easy to maintain and very damaging to the Sultan. But
that too was in fact impracticable. Neither the Italian nor the Provencal and
Aragonese merchant-cities would ever co-operate. Their welfare depended on the
Eastern trade, much of which passed through the Sultan’s dominions. Indeed,
were it to cease, they would no longer be able to maintain their fleets, and
the Moslems might well dominate the Mediterranean Sea. It was unfortunate that
the chief export with which the Christians paid for Eastern goods consisted of
armaments; but would it have been worth while to deprive Europe of the benefits
of all this commercial activity? The Church might protest against this
nefarious exchange of goods. But business interests were now stronger than the
Church. Nicholas IV died in 1291 disappointed in his endeavours.
Raymond Lull
None of his successors achieved a better
result. But, though the soldiers for a Crusade were lacking, the feeling that
Christendom had been shamed produced a new wave of propaganda. The
propagandists were no longer itinerant preachers, as in the past, but men of
letters who wrote books and pamphlets to show the need of a holy expedition,
for whose conduct each author had his own special scheme. In 1291 a Franciscan
friar, Fidenzio of Padua, whom the Pope had often used in the past for
diplomatic missions and who had travelled widely in the East, published a
treatise, called the
Liber de Recuperatione Terre Sancte,
which he
dedicated to Nicholas IV. It contains a learned history of the Holy Land,
together with a discussion of the type of army needed for its recovery and of
the alternative routes that this army might follow. It was informative and well
reasoned; but Fidenzio assumed that an army would be available and considered
that the commander should make the ultimate choice of the route. Next year, in
1292, a certain Thaddeus of Naples published an account of the fall of Acre. It
is a vivid narrative, embroidered by lavish accusations of cowardice against
practically everyone who was there. Thaddeus’s violent language was
intentional. His object was to shame the West into launching a Crusade; and he
ended his book with a great appeal to the Pope, to the Princes and to the
Faithful to rescue the Holy Land which is the Christians’ heritage.
Thaddeus’s work certainly influenced the
next propagandist, a Genoese called Galvano of Levanti, a physician at the
Papal Court. His book, which he published about 1294 and dedicated to King
Philip IV of France, was a mixture of analogies taken from the game of chess
and mystical exhortations, and was devoid of practical sense. A far more
important figure was the great Spanish preacher, Raymond Lull, who was born in
Majorca in 1232, and was stoned to death at Bougie in North Africa in 1315. His
fame is highest as a mystic, but he was at the same time a practical
politician. He knew Arabic well and he had travelled widely in Moslem
countries. In about 1295 he presented the Pope with a memorandum on the action
needed to combat Islam, and in 1305 he published his
Liber de Fine
which
elaborated his ideas and offered a workable programme. Both the Moslems and the
schismatic and heretical Christian Churches must be won over as far as possible
by well-educated preachers, but at the same time an armed expedition is
necessary. Its leader should be a King, the Rex Bellator, and all the Military
Orders should be united under his command into a new Order which should be the
backbone of the army. He suggests that the Crusade should expel the Moslems
from Spain, then cross into Africa and move along the coast to Tunis, and so to
Egypt. But later he also advocates a naval expedition, suggesting that Malta
and Rhodes, with their excellent harbours should be captured and used as bases.
Later still, he seems to prefer that the land expedition should take
Constantinople from the Greeks and journey across Anatolia. He is full of
concrete advice about the organization of the army and the fleet, and about the
supply of food and war materials, as well as about the instruction of the
preachers who must accompany the army. The book is prolix and at times contradicts
itself, but it is the work of a man of remarkable intelligence and wide
experience, though his attitude towards the Eastern Christians is unpleasantly
intolerant.