The treaty of 1229 by which the Emperor Frederick recovered Jerusalem was not recognised by the Hospital, partly because the Church condemned it and also because it could be seen to offer no security if the Moslems returned to the offensive. The Hospitallers resumed possession of their old home and continued to give shelter to pilgrims, but the wisdom of not moving the seat of government was shown when after a mere fifteen years the city fell finally to the Turks. Yet as the Saracen armies ranged ever more menacingly over the interior of the country the coastal strongholds remained secure, supplied by the fleets of the Italian city states. Acre, with its thirty thousand or more inhabitants, its forty magnificent churches, its castle-like palaces and its double line of walls, was far the most splendid of the cities of Outremer. It had cast off the royal authority and was a chaos of seventeenjurisdictions, the Italian communities and the local magnates - including the Master of the Hospital - each governing a separate quarter; it was a city, as Gibbon says, of many sovereigns and no government, and law-breakers of one ward found profusion of sanctuary in the others. This paradise of laissez-faire, where luxury had reached a fabulous pitch, where glass, almost unknown in Western
Europe, was in common use, and where silken awnings, it was said, stretched across the streets to shade them from the sun, was the principal mart of trade between Europe and the East, and it was supposed that the connexion was too valuable to the Moslems to be forgone by a religious war d outrance.
The crown ofjerusalem was inherited in 1267 by the kings of Cyprus, but ten years later their claim was challenged by Charles of Anjou, who succeeded in making himself master of Acre, thus further dividing the fated kingdom; when the Sicilian Vespers struck the southern flank of his empire the Lusignan kings were able to regain the city. In 1286 the fifteen-year-old King Henry came to take possession of his realm, and fittingly the feasts of his coronation were celebrated in the great hall of the Hospital, the Order which had for so long been the upholder of legitimate monarchy. Here, in the twilight of Christian Outremer, the handsome boy King held a glittering court, and there took place for two weeks an enactment of chivalric fable, the knights and noble ladies assigning themselves the roles of the heroes of the Round Table; and Lancelot, Tristan, Palamedes and the Queen of Femenie appeared in jousts and lavish feasts of gallantry.
The scene, though, was not Camelot but Lyonnesse, the last Christian battlefield between the mountains and the sea. In 1289 Tripoli fell to the Saracens and was destroyed; the next year the Sultan of Egypt moved against the opulent remnant of the Kingdom ofjerusalem. Though his death at the outset of the campaign gave the Christians a breathing-space, in April 1291 the siege of Acre began. Few reinforcements arrived from a Europe in which the crusade had been diverted to the interests of papal politics. The defence of the double walls was divided among the many authorities governing the city, the north-western sector being held by the Templars, with the Hospitallers immediately to their right. Both the orders carried out night sorties against the besiegers, but without success. After six weeks of siege the attackers broke through
* The third party to this agreement was the Teutonic Order, which had originated in Acre in 1193. In part it was a continuation of the German hospice which had existed in Jerusalem under Hospitaller jurisdiction, and at first the Teutonic Knights bore, Hke those of St John, the double character of hospitallers and soldiers. The Order of St John appealed to these facts to claim authority over the knightly foundation too, and their case was upheld by the Pope, who ordered the Teutonic Knights to recognise the supremacy of the Hospital. This claim was still being advanced in 1258, when it was formally excluded from the scope of the agreement between the three orders.
The outer wall to the right of the Hospitallers’ position, and only a counter-attack by the two orders, in which the Marshal of the Hospital, Matthieu de Clermont, distinguished himself by his bravery, prevented them from passing into the city. On i8 May the Saracens launched their grand assault, and the fate of Acre was sealed. The city was overwhelmed in scenes of desperate confusion, on the walls where the knights fought with heroic efforts to keep back the swarming enemy, in the harbour where the citizens, with King Henry at their head, struggled for places on the departing ships. The Master of the Hospital, Jean de Villiers, gravely wounded in the defence of the crumbling walls, was carried by his squires to the ships and sailed away to Cyprus. Matthieu de Clermont returned to the battle and to his death. By nightfall Acre was in the enemy’s hands; only the Templars fought
On, retreating to their great palace at the southwestern tip of the city. After ten more days of fighting the walls began to succumb to the mines of the besiegers, and as the Sultan flung two thousand Mamelukes into the breach the whole landward wall of the castle came crashing down, burying defendants and assailers together in its vast ruin.
All along the coast the Christian strongholds gave way like a fall of dominoes; by the end of July Tyre, Sidon and Berytus were lost, and in August the Templars abandoned Chateau Pelerin and Tortosa; a few miles off the last-named town they possessed the small island of Ruad, which they continued to hold against a coastline entirely controlled by the Egyptian conquerors. In 1302 that too was given up, and not a watch-tower remained of the long dominion of the crusaders in the East.
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