The truce with the Franks had allowed the Mamelukes to
Direct their energy towards renewed Mongol threats, but once that had been accomplished, and even before the truce had ended, Sultan Qalaun renewed Mameluke aggression against the Franks. Now the coastal cities and castles began to go the way of the inland defences; in 1285 Qalaun took the Hospitaller castle of Margat, perched on a salient of the Jebel al-Sariya overlooking the sea, and in 1287 he easily took the port city of Latakia after its walls were damaged in an earthquake.
fet in 1286, in the midst of these campaigns and with extraordinary insouciance, the Franks celebrated the visit of King Henry II of Cyprus, who had come to assume the crown of Jerusalem. The Templar of Tyre recorded the festivities at Acre, when the king ‘held a feast lasting fifteen days at the Auberge of the Hospital of Saint John. And it was the most splendid feast they had seen for a hundred years...They enacted the tales of the Round Table and the Queen of Femenie, which consisted of knights dressed as women jousting together. Then those who should have been dressed as monks dressed up as nuns, and they jousted together.’
Beyond the walls of Acre, however, the outlook was grim. In 1289 Qalaun overwhelmed Tripoli: ‘The population fell back to the port where some escaped on ships’, recorded the historian Abu al-Feda. ‘Qf the rest, the men were all put to death and the women and children taken as slaves, and the Muslims amassed an immense booty. Just off the headland there was a small island with a church, and when the city was taken many Franks took refuge there with their families. But the Muslim troops swam across to the island, massacring the men and carrying off the women and children. I myself went out to the island on a boat after the carnage, but I was unable to stay, so strong was the stench of corpses.’ When the killing and looting were finished, Qalaun razed the city to the ground.
Vowing not to leave a single Christian alive in the city, Qalaun set out from Cairo for Acre in November 1290, but he fell ill and died along the way. His son al-Ashraf Khalil pledged to continue the war against the Franks, and in early spring 1291 his armies from Syria and Egypt converged on Acre, together with over a hundred siege engines, including various kinds of catapults. On 5 April Sultan al-Ashraf Khalil himself arrived and the siege began. At most the Franks were able to muster about 1000 knights and 14,000 foot soldiers; the population of Acre was 40,000, and every able-bodied man took his place on the ramparts. On 15 April William of Beaujeu, the Templar Grand Master, led a night attack on a section of the Muslim lines. At first, surprise won them the advantage, but the Christians got caught up in the enemy’s tent ropes and were eventually beaten back. Under a hail of arrows and a bombardment of stones by the catapults, Mameluke engineers were able to advance close against the walls and mine the defences, bringing down tower after tower over the following weeks.
On 15 May, after six weeks of constant battering, the
Accursed Tower commanding the vital northeast salient of the city’s walls was taken by the Mamelukes. William of Beaujeu was fatally wounded trying to force the enemy back. He was placed on a shield and carried to the Temple enclave where he was buried before the high altar while the desperate fighting continued outside. By now townspeople were pressing onto the quays to board whatever ships they could to escape from the doomed city. Merchant captains made fortunes extorting money from the rich desperate to escape, as did also, it is thought, Roger of Flor, captain of a Templar galley called The Falcon, who used his profits to found his later career as a pirate. As the Mamelukes stormed through the streets they killed everyone in sight, including women and children; those who hid indoors were taken captive and sold on the slave market of Damascus, where the glut of women and girls reduced their price to a single drachma.
By the evening of 18 May all Acre was in the hands of the Mamelukes except for the Templar fortress at the seaward extremity of the city. There they held out, commanded by their marshal, together with civilians who had sought protection within their walls, and were kept supplied by sea from Cyprus. On 25 May the Templar marshal agreed to surrender provided those inside were granted safe passage out of Acre, but as the Muslims entered they began to molest the women and boys, provoking the Templars to fight back. That night the Templar commander Theobald Gaudin was sent out of the fortress with the order’s treasure and sailed up the coast to Chateau de Mer, the Templars’ sea-castle just off the coast at Sidon. The Templar fortress in Acre fell three days later and at Sultan al-Ashraf Khalil’s command all those left alive were led outside the walls where their heads were cut off, and the city was smashed to pieces until almost nothing was left standing. Forty years later a German traveller came upon the spot and found only a few peasants living amidst the desolation of what had once been the splendid capital of Outremer.
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