Of course, the dream of recovering the Holy Land was not yet over, certainly not in the mind of James of Molay who in 1293 became the Templars’ new Grand Master. He had spent thirty years in the order, much of it in Outremer, and his vision for the Templars was that they should take the lead in a new crusade. The fall of Acre did not seem like the decisive end of things, more an interlude, and there were expectations that the mainland would be regained. The Templars had established their new headquarters on Cyprus, and they still held the tiny island of Ruad (Arwad) just two miles off the coast of Syria opposite Tortosa, and from these places James of Molay envisioned that the counterattack against the Mamelukes would begin.
Meanwhile on the mainland there were numerous local insurrections against Mameluke rule, which was brutal and repressive. Already in 1291, while Sultan al-Ashraf Khalil was busy fighting the Crusaders at Acre and elsewhere along the coast, Shia Muslims living in the northern part of the Bekaa valley and in the mountains northeast of Beirut had joined with Druze in an uprising against the Sunni Mamelukes which was finally crushed only in 1308.
Across Palestine, Syria and Lebanon, the Christian denominations survived but were greatly diminished. Muslims taunted the native Christians, saying that the failure of Christ to save them against the Mameluke onslaught proved that he was just a man; so demoralised were many Christians in the East that they converted to Islam. Things were particularly difficult for the Maronites. They had been condemned by the Church as heretics in the seventh century for their belief not in the single nature of Christ, Monophysitism, but in the single will of Christ, Monothelitism, but in 1182 the Crusaders helped bring them into communion with the Catholic Church at Rome. Over fifty thousand Maronites were said to have died fighting alongside the Crusaders during the twelfth and thirteenth centuries to defend Outremer against the Muslims. When the Crusaders left, some Maronites went with them to Cyprus, but those who remained never surrendered their connection with Rome, despite persecution by the Mameluke jihad. Instead they escaped into the mountains of northern Lebanon where surnames such as Franjieh, meaning Frank, and Salibi, meaning Crusader, are current to this day.
Nor had the Mongols gone away. Since their defeat at the hands of the Mamelukes in 1260 they had shown an interest in forming an alliance with the Christians in the West, and indeed the conversion of two Mongol emissaries at the Council of Lyons in 1274 had raised hopes that the Mongols might convert wholesale to Christianity. Twice, in 1281 and 1299, the Mongols advanced into northern Syria, and when news came from the West in 1300 of a new crusade, the Mongols offered the Christians the Holy Land if they would help them beat the Mamelukes.
World History
