The Fall of Acre in 1291

I. The Kingdom in its Last Years

By the 1280s the kingdom of Jerusalem had been reduced to a narrow strip of coastal towns: Acre, Tyre, Sidon, Beirut, Haifa and the Templar castle of Athlit, together with the county of Tripoli in the north. The great inland castles had fallen to Baybars in the 1260s and 1270s. The kingdom had no resident king. The crown was claimed by Hugh III of Cyprus and by Charles of Anjou, who bought the claim of Maria of Antioch in 1277, and the barons of Acre were divided between them.

The real powers in Acre were the military orders, the Italian communes, the papal legate and the patriarch. Each pursued its own interests, and there was no effective central authority. In 1286 Henry II of Cyprus was crowned king of Jerusalem at Tyre, and he was accepted in Acre. But he was young and suffered from epilepsy, and he spent most of his time in Cyprus, leaving his brother Amalric as his representative.

The kingdom survived because the Mamluk sultans had other priorities. After the death of Baybars in 1277, the sultan Qalawun, who seized power in 1279, was occupied with the Mongols, whom he defeated at Homs in 1281. He made a ten-year truce with Acre in 1283, while he dealt with other enemies.

II. Qalawun and the Fall of Tripoli

Qalawun was a Kipchak Turk who had been bought as a slave for a thousand dinars and rose to become one of the leading emirs of the Bahri Mamluks. He was an able ruler who built a great hospital, the Maristan of Qalawun in Cairo, with a madrasa and mausoleum, one of the finest monuments of Mamluk architecture.

In 1285 Qalawun took the Hospitaller castle of Margat, and in 1287 the port of Latakia, the last remnant of the principality of Antioch. In 1289 he took advantage of a dispute over the succession in the county of Tripoli to attack the city. Tripoli fell on 26 April 1289 after a siege of a month. The Venetians and Genoese had already left by sea. The city was sacked, and many of its inhabitants were killed or enslaved. Qalawun ordered the city to be razed and a new Tripoli built inland. The county of Tripoli, founded in 1109, came to an end.

III. The Crusaders of 1290

The fall of Tripoli caused alarm in the west. Pope Nicholas IV, the first Franciscan pope, called for a crusade, but the kings of the west were preoccupied with their own affairs. Edward I of England had taken the cross but was occupied with Scotland. Philip IV of France had no interest in a crusade. The only response was a force of about 1,600 to 3,500 men, mostly Italian peasants and townsmen from Lombardy and Tuscany, recruited by preachers and transported by a Venetian fleet of twenty galleys. They arrived in Acre in August 1290.

These crusaders were undisciplined and poorly paid. They had come to fight Muslims, and they found a city at peace with its Muslim neighbours, full of Muslim merchants and peasants who came to sell their produce. In late August 1290 a group of them rioted and attacked Muslims in the market and the surrounding area, killing many, including Christians with beards whom they mistook for Muslims. The authorities of Acre arrested some of the rioters but could not control them all.

IV. The Casus Belli

When Qalawun learned of the killings, he demanded that the murderers be handed over for punishment. The council of Acre debated the demand. The master of the Temple, William of Beaujeu, proposed handing over the Christian criminals held in the city's prisons as the guilty men, but the council refused. Instead they sent an embassy to Qalawun claiming that the murderers were foreigners over whom they had no control.

Qalawun regarded the killings as a breach of the truce and began preparations for an attack on Acre. He assembled a great army and ordered the construction of siege engines in Syria and Egypt. William of Beaujeu, who had an informant in the sultan's court, warned the city, but many did not believe him. Qalawun set out from Cairo in November 1290 but fell ill and died on 10 November. On his deathbed he made his son, al-Ashraf Khalil, swear to continue the campaign.

V. Al-Ashraf Khalil

Al-Ashraf Khalil was about twenty-seven when he became sultan. He was energetic and determined to complete his father's work. He executed emirs he suspected of disloyalty, and in March 1291 he set out from Cairo with his army. He ordered troops and siege engines from all over his empire to converge on Acre. The siege engines included great catapults from Damascus, Hama, Baalbek and Tripoli. The most famous were named Victorious and Furious. The historian Abu al-Fida, a prince of Hama, later wrote that he was with the engine called Victorious, which took a hundred carts to transport from Hama, and that it was so heavy that it took a month to bring through the mountains in the winter rain.

Al-Ashraf sent a letter to William of Beaujeu, whom he knew, warning him of his coming. The letter, preserved in the chronicle of the Templar of Tyre, addressed the master as the noble master of the Temple, the true and wise, and announced that the sultan was coming to right the wrongs done to his people.

VI. The Defences of Acre

Acre was strongly fortified. The old city was protected by a wall, and the suburb of Montmusard to the north had been enclosed by a second wall, built partly by Louis IX in the 1250s. The whole land side was protected by a double wall, with an inner and an outer line, and a ditch. The two walls met at an angle, at which stood the King's Tower in the inner wall, and before it, in the outer wall, the tower of King Hugh and the Accursed Tower, so called, according to one tradition, because Judas's thirty pieces of silver had been minted there.

The defenders numbered perhaps 15,000, including about 1,000 mounted troops and the brethren of the military orders, the Templars, Hospitallers, Teutonic Knights and Knights of St Lazarus, together with the Italian crusaders, the citizens and the troops sent from Cyprus. The city had a population of perhaps 30,000 to 40,000, though many women and children and the old were sent to Cyprus before the siege. The defenders had control of the sea, and supplies could come from Cyprus.

The Mamluk army was much larger. The chroniclers give fantastic numbers, but modern historians estimate it at perhaps 60,000 cavalry and a larger number of infantry, with more than a hundred siege engines.

VII. The Siege Begins

Al-Ashraf arrived before Acre on 5 April 1291, and the siege began on 6 April. The Mamluk army encamped in a great arc around the land walls from the sea to the sea. The siege engines were assembled and began to bombard the walls. Mamluk sappers began to mine under the towers.

The defenders made several sorties. On 15 April the Templars made a night attack on the camp of the troops of Hama, but the horses became entangled in the tent ropes and the attack failed with losses. A second sortie by the Hospitallers on a moonless night also failed. The defenders also used ships with catapults to bombard the Mamluk camp from the sea.

On 4 May King Henry II arrived from Cyprus with about 100 knights and 2,000 foot soldiers. He sent envoys to the sultan to ask for terms. Al-Ashraf asked whether they had brought him the keys of the city. When they said they had come to negotiate, he refused. During the meeting a stone from a catapult on the walls landed near the sultan's tent, and he drew his sword in anger, but his emir Shujai restrained him from killing the envoys.

VIII. The Towers Fall

By early May the Mamluk mines and bombardment had weakened the towers of the outer wall. On 8 May the defenders abandoned the tower of King Hugh, which had been undermined. On 15 May the tower called the New Tower fell, and the Mamluks occupied the outer wall at that point. The defenders retreated to the inner wall.

The defenders were exhausted, and their numbers were diminishing. Many citizens took ship for Cyprus. On the night of 15 May King Henry is said to have left for Cyprus, though the chronicles are uncertain whether he left before or after the final assault.

IX. The Final Assault

At dawn on Friday 18 May 1291, the Mamluks launched a general assault, accompanied by the sound of drums carried on three hundred camels. They attacked along the whole length of the walls, with the main thrust at the Accursed Tower. The defenders fought desperately. The Templars and Hospitallers, led by William of Beaujeu and the Hospitaller master John of Villiers, counter-attacked at the Gate of St Anthony.

William of Beaujeu was mortally wounded by a javelin that struck him under the arm, where his armour was not joined. According to the Templar of Tyre, when he turned to leave the fight, some crusaders cried out to him not to abandon them, and he replied: I am not running away, I am dead, see the blow. He was carried to the Temple, where he died. John of Villiers was also wounded and was carried to a ship.

The Mamluks broke through the Accursed Tower and poured into the city. The defenders' resistance collapsed. The marshal of the Hospital, Matthew of Clermont, was killed in the streets. The Mamluks spread through the city, killing and taking prisoners.

X. The Flight to the Ships

As the Mamluks entered the city, thousands of people fled to the harbour, trying to reach the ships. There were not enough boats for all. The sea was rough, and many boats sank under the weight of people. The Templar of Tyre describes noblewomen and their children wandering in the streets and running to the harbour, and men offering everything they had for a place on a boat.

The patriarch, Nicholas of Hanapes, an elderly Dominican, was helped into a small boat, but he allowed so many others to board that it capsized and he was drowned. A Catalan sea captain, Roger of Flor, a Templar sergeant who commanded a Templar galley called The Falcon, charged the noblewomen of Acre huge sums for passage, and he later became a notorious mercenary leader in Byzantium. Those who reached Cyprus brought news of the catastrophe.

The Mamluks killed many of those who remained, and took thousands of captives, who were sold as slaves in the markets of the Near East. Abu al-Fida recorded that the number of captives was so great that the price of a slave girl fell to a single dirham.

XI. The Last Stand of the Temple

The Templar fortress at the southwest corner of the city, on the sea, held out after the rest of the city had fallen. Thousands of people took refuge in it. The marshal of the Temple, Peter of Sevrey, commanded the defence. After several days al-Ashraf offered terms: the defenders could leave with their possessions. The Templars accepted and admitted a Mamluk emir with a hundred soldiers to supervise the evacuation. But the soldiers began to molest the women and boys, and the Templars killed them and closed the gates.

The next day the sultan offered terms again, and Peter of Sevrey went out with some companions to negotiate. They were seized and beheaded in sight of the walls. The remaining defenders fought on. The Mamluks mined under the walls of the fortress, and on 28 May 1291 the walls collapsed, killing defenders and attackers alike. A few Templars had escaped by sea with the treasure of the order to Sidon. The fall of the Temple marked the end of Christian Acre.

XII. The Evacuation of the Coast

The fall of Acre made the remaining coastal towns indefensible. Tyre was abandoned without a fight on 19 May. Sidon, to which the Templars had retreated, was besieged in June. The Templars held out in the sea castle for some weeks and then withdrew to Tortosa, and the castle was taken on 14 July. Beirut surrendered on 31 July. Haifa was taken on 30 July, and its monasteries on Mount Carmel destroyed and the monks killed. The Templars abandoned Tortosa on 3 August and Athlit, Castle Pilgrim, on 14 August.

Al-Ashraf ordered the walls and castles of the coastal towns destroyed, so that the Franks could never return. The coast of Syria and Palestine was largely depopulated, and Acre remained a ruin for centuries. The Templars held the small island of Ruad, off Tortosa, until 1302 or 1303, when it was taken and its garrison killed or captured.

XIII. The Triumph in Cairo and Damascus

Al-Ashraf returned to Damascus and then to Cairo in triumph. In Damascus, according to Abu al-Fida, the city was decorated, and the sultan entered with the captured Frankish prisoners in chains and the heads of Franks carried on lances. Muslim writers celebrated the victory as the final completion of the work of Saladin. Abu al-Fida wrote that with the conquest of the coast, the whole of Syria was in Muslim hands, a result that no one had dared to hope for.

Al-Ashraf did not enjoy his triumph long. He was murdered by his emirs in December 1293 while hunting. The Mamluk sultanate continued to rule Egypt and Syria until 1517.

XIV. The Response in the West

The news of the fall of Acre caused grief in the west but did not lead to a new crusade. Pope Nicholas IV called for one and tried to unite the kings, but he died in 1292. A flood of crusade treatises was written in the following decades, proposing plans for the recovery of the Holy Land: an economic blockade of Egypt, the union of the military orders, an alliance with the Mongols, a crusade by stages. Writers such as Fidenzio of Padua, Ramon Llull, Pierre Dubois and Marino Sanudo Torsello produced detailed proposals.

None of these plans was carried out. The kings of the west were preoccupied with their own wars, especially the conflict between England and France which led to the Hundred Years War. The military orders were weakened by the fall of the Templars. Crusading continued, but against the Turks in the Aegean and the Balkans, and the Holy Land was never again a realistic target.

XV. Why Acre Fell

The fall of Acre was the result of long-term weaknesses. The crusader states had always depended on reinforcements from the west, and by the late thirteenth century these had dwindled. The Mamluk state was organised for war and had enormous resources in men and money. The crusader states were divided among rival powers with no effective central authority. The Italian communes had their own interests, and the military orders often worked against each other.

The immediate cause was the massacre of Muslims by the Italian crusaders in 1290, which gave Qalawun a justification for war. But the Mamluks had long intended to destroy the crusader states, and the truce would have been broken sooner or later.

XVI. The Captives

The fate of the thousands of captives taken at Acre and the other coastal towns is little known. Many were sold as slaves in the markets of Damascus and Cairo, and some became soldiers or servants in Mamluk households. Some converted to Islam. Western travellers to Egypt in the following decades reported meeting Christian captives from Acre. A few were ransomed by their families or by religious orders devoted to redeeming captives, such as the Trinitarians and Mercedarians. Some Templars captured at Ruad in 1302 were found decades later still in captivity in Cairo.

XVII. The Jewish Community of Acre

The Jewish community of Acre, which had grown into an important centre of learning in the thirteenth century, was also destroyed in 1291. Acre had attracted scholars from France, Spain and Germany, including the disciples of Nahmanides and the kabbalist Isaac of Acre, who escaped the fall and went to Spain, where he wrote a number of mystical works. Rabbi Solomon Petit had led a campaign from Acre against the philosophical works of Maimonides in the 1280s, which caused a bitter controversy in the Jewish world.

Many Jews of Acre were killed or enslaved along with the Christians. The site's page on Benjamin of Tudela describes the Jewish communities of the crusader states in the twelfth century.

XVIII. The End of an Ideal

The fall of Acre marked the end of the crusading ideal as it had been conceived at Clermont in 1095. The original purpose of the crusades, to recover and hold Jerusalem and the holy places for Christendom, had failed. After two centuries of warfare and countless deaths, the Holy Land was again entirely under Muslim rule.

The crusaders had believed that they were doing God's will and that God would give them victory. Their failure raised questions about that belief. Jesus said that his kingdom was no part of this world (John 18:36), and that his followers were not to fight to protect him or his interests. The Greek Scriptures describe Christians as aliens and temporary residents in the world (1 Peter 2:11), whose citizenship is in the heavens (Philippians 3:20), not in any earthly land or city.

XIX. Memory

The fall of Acre was remembered in the west as a tragedy and an example of the punishment of sin. Western chroniclers blamed the sins of the inhabitants of Acre, their luxury, their quarrels and their worldliness, for the disaster. The Templar of Tyre, the most important eyewitness, wrote with grief of the destruction. Later historians have often accepted this moralising view.

In the Muslim world, the conquest of Acre was celebrated as the completion of the jihad against the Franks. Al-Ashraf Khalil had a Gothic doorway from a church in Acre carried to Cairo and incorporated in the madrasa of al-Nasir Muhammad, where it can still be seen, a trophy of victory over the crusaders.

XX. Assessment

The fall of Acre ended nearly two hundred years of Latin rule in the Levant, which had begun with the capture of Jerusalem in the First Crusade. It came after a long decline, and many contemporaries regarded it as inevitable. Yet it was also the result of particular decisions, the folly of the crusaders of 1290 and the refusal to hand over the guilty, which gave the sultan his pretext.

The crusader states had been founded with violence and maintained by war. They had produced remarkable achievements in architecture, law and culture, and some examples of coexistence between Christians, Muslims and Jews. But they had also caused immense suffering, and their end, in a massacre that matched the massacre of 1099, closed a cycle of violence that had brought neither side what it sought.

XXI. The Templar of Tyre

The most important account of the fall of Acre was written by an anonymous author known as the Templar of Tyre, who was secretary to William of Beaujeu and an eyewitness of the siege. His chronicle, written in French in Cyprus in the early fourteenth century, forms the third part of a compilation known as the Deeds of the Cypriots. He was not himself a Templar knight, but he served the master and had access to the order's information, including the warnings received from the sultan's court.

His account is vivid and personal. He describes the arrival of the Mamluk army, the sorties, the bombardment, the death of William of Beaujeu, the flight to the ships and the last stand of the Temple. He escaped from Acre and went to Cyprus, where he later witnessed the arrest of the Templars on the island in 1308, which he described with sympathy for the order. His chronicle is one of the finest pieces of French historical writing of the period.

XXII. Abu al-Fida

On the Muslim side the most valuable account comes from Abu al-Fida, a member of the Ayyubid family who ruled Hama under Mamluk overlordship and who later became its sultan. As a young man of eighteen he took part in the siege of Acre with the troops of Hama, and he described the transport of the great catapult and the fighting from the camp. He also took part in the siege of Tripoli in 1289.

Abu al-Fida became a distinguished scholar, writing a universal history and a geography that were later translated and studied in Europe. His account of Acre is brief but precise, and it confirms the main points of the Christian sources. He records that the conquest of Acre was achieved on the same day and at the same hour that the Franks had taken it from Saladin a century before, an observation he made to show the hand of providence in the event.

XXIII. The Military Orders at the End

The military orders bore the main burden of the defence. Their masters led the sorties and the counter-attacks, and their brethren died in large numbers. The Teutonic master, Burchard of Schwanden, had resigned in 1290, and the order's marshal led its knights. The master of St Lazarus was killed with all his knights. Of the Templars in Acre, only a handful escaped.

The orders' conduct at Acre was praised by contemporaries, even those who criticised them in other respects. Yet within a few years, the Templars would be accused of heresy and suppressed, and some of the survivors of Acre would die in the prisons of the French king. The site's page on the Crusader States and Military Orders describes their history and the trial of the Templars.

XXIV. Cyprus after Acre

Cyprus became the refuge of the survivors of Acre and the outpost of Latin Christendom in the eastern Mediterranean. The refugees, who included nobles, merchants, clergy and members of the military orders, swelled the population of Famagusta, which became a great trading port, the principal market between Europe and the Mamluk lands. Its magnificent Gothic cathedral of St Nicholas, modelled on the cathedrals of France, was largely built in the early fourteenth century, and it was there that the kings of Cyprus were crowned kings of Jerusalem.

The Hospitallers and Templars established their headquarters on Cyprus until the Hospitallers moved to Rhodes and the Templars were suppressed. The kings of Cyprus continued to claim the title of king of Jerusalem. In 1365 King Peter I of Cyprus led a crusade that sacked Alexandria, killing and enslaving many of its inhabitants and damaging Cyprus's own trade.

XXV. The Papal Trade Ban

After the fall of Acre, the papacy tried to strike at the Mamluks by forbidding all trade with Egypt. Nicholas IV and his successors excommunicated those who sold arms, iron, timber and slaves to the Mamluks, and later forbade all trade. The ban was intended to weaken the sultanate economically and to prepare for a new crusade.

The ban was widely ignored. The Venetians and Genoese depended on trade with Alexandria for spices and other eastern goods, and they obtained papal licences or simply defied the ban. The slave trade, in which Genoese merchants supplied the Mamluks with young slaves from the Black Sea who became the next generation of Mamluk soldiers, continued despite repeated condemnations. The failure of the trade ban showed the limits of papal authority over the commercial interests of the Christian cities.

XXVI. The Gothic Doorway

The doorway from Acre that al-Ashraf Khalil carried to Cairo was taken, according to the Mamluk historians, from the church of St Andrew in Acre. It was set up in the madrasa and mausoleum built by al-Ashraf's brother, al-Nasir Muhammad, in the Bayn al-Qasrayn street of Cairo, completed in 1304. The marble doorway, with its pointed arch and clustered columns, is a rare example of crusader Gothic sculpture, preserved by the very conquerors who destroyed the city.

The practice of carrying away the architectural trophies of a defeated enemy was common to both sides. The crusaders had carried relics and treasures from Constantinople in 1204, as described in the site's page on the Fourth Crusade. Such trophies were meant to display the triumph of one faith over another.

XXVII. Henry II of Cyprus

Henry II of Lusignan, king of Cyprus and Jerusalem, was about twenty when Acre fell. He has often been blamed for leaving the city before its fall, but the evidence is unclear, and his departure may have been after the final assault had begun. His reign in Cyprus was troubled. In 1306 his brother Amalric, lord of Tyre, deposed him with the support of the nobility, citing his illness and incompetence, and exiled him to Armenia. He was restored after Amalric's murder in 1310 and ruled until 1324.

Henry continued to work for the recovery of the Holy Land, sending proposals to the pope and to the Council of Vienne in 1311 for a blockade of Egypt. He was the last king of Jerusalem to have been crowned in the kingdom itself, at Tyre in 1286. His successors were crowned kings of Jerusalem at Famagusta, a title without a kingdom.

XXVIII. Nicholas IV and the Crusade Plans

Pope Nicholas IV, Jerome of Ascoli, was the first Franciscan pope, elected in 1288. He had served as a legate in Constantinople and was concerned with the east. He received envoys from the Mongol ilkhan Arghun, including the Nestorian monk Rabban Sauma, who travelled from China to Rome, Paris and Bordeaux in 1287–1288 and left an account of his journey. Nicholas hoped for a Mongol alliance and for the conversion of the Mongols.

After the fall of Acre, Nicholas called councils in the ecclesiastical provinces to discuss the recovery of the Holy Land, and proposed the union of the Templars and Hospitallers. He sent a small fleet to help Cyprus and Armenia. But his death in April 1292 ended these efforts, and the papacy was vacant for over two years.

XXIX. The Armenian Kingdom of Cilicia

The fall of Acre left the Armenian kingdom of Cilicia, in southeastern Asia Minor, as the last Christian state on the mainland of the Near East. The Armenians had been allies of the crusaders and of the Mongols, and they were frequently attacked by the Mamluks. In 1292, the year after Acre, al-Ashraf Khalil's forces took the fortress of Hromkla on the Euphrates, the seat of the Armenian catholicos. The kingdom survived until 1375, when the Mamluks captured its capital, Sis, and its last king, Leo V, was taken prisoner. Leo was ransomed and died in Paris in 1393.

XXX. Mamluk Siegecraft

The Mamluks were masters of siege warfare. Their armies included specialist engineers, miners and crews for the counterweight catapults, the trebuchets, which could hurl stones weighing over a hundred kilograms against walls. They used smaller engines to sweep the defenders from the battlements, and they protected their miners with wooden screens and with a barrage of arrows and naphtha. At Acre they built a wall of wicker and wooden screens to protect their engines and approached the walls behind it.

The speed with which the Mamluks took the great crusader castles in the thirteenth century, often within weeks, showed their superiority in siegecraft. Castles that had resisted Saladin fell to Baybars and Qalawun. The concentric defences built by the crusaders, which had once seemed impregnable, could not withstand an army that combined large numbers, skilled engineers and the willingness to accept heavy losses.

XXXI. A Note on the Figures

The size of the armies and the number of the dead and captured at Acre are uncertain. The chroniclers on both sides gave inflated figures, and the estimates given here follow the cautious judgements of modern historians. They should be taken as indications of scale rather than exact counts.

XXXII. Chronology

In 1277 Baybars died, and in 1279 Qalawun became sultan. In 1281 he defeated the Mongols at Homs. In 1283 a ten-year truce was made with Acre. In 1285 Margat fell, and in 1286 Henry II was crowned at Tyre. On 26 April 1289 Tripoli fell. In August 1290 the Italian crusaders arrived and killed Muslims in Acre. On 10 November 1290 Qalawun died. In March 1291 al-Ashraf left Cairo.

On 6 April 1291 the siege of Acre began. On 4 May Henry II arrived. On 8 and 15 May towers of the outer wall fell. On 18 May 1291 the final assault took place and William of Beaujeu was killed. On 19 May Tyre was abandoned, and on 28 May 1291 the Temple fell. On 14 July Sidon fell, on 30 July Haifa, on 31 July Beirut, on 3 August Tortosa and on 14 August Athlit. In 1302 or 1303 Ruad fell. In December 1293 al-Ashraf Khalil was murdered.

XXXIII. Bibliography

The following studies, editions and reference works underlie this account.