The Accursed Tower

by Roger Crowley

  But Baybars had in his repertoire a second strategy for dealing with the heir to the English throne. It required cunning and patience. Versions differ as to the exact details, but most probably his plan involved the dispatch of a loyal emir with an entourage to the gates of Acre. He came bearing gifts and with a tale to tell: that he had come to betray the sultan. They were cautiously welcomed, and Edward, not above deception himself but probably encouraged by the possibilities, was taken in. Some time passed. Suspicions were lulled. On June 17, one of the party secured a private audience with the prince and his interpreter with the promise of important news. Coming near, he drew a dagger and struck. Edward fought back and killed the assassin, but not before he had been badly wounded with a weapon believed to be poisoned. In legend, either his wife, Eleanor of Castile, sucked the venom from the wound and saved his life or his friend Othon de Grandson did, but the following day the spread of infection caused Edward to write his will and prepare for the worst. He was saved by radical and painful surgery, the doctor cutting away the infected flesh.

  With this act, Edward’s crusade was over. He departed shortly after, thwarted but resolved to return. He never did, but his two close companions, Othon de Grandson and Jean de Grailly, would. Twenty years later, these men, along with the Templar commander at nearby Tripoli in the early 1270s, Guillaume de Beaujeu, would be forming a council of war to defend Acre for the last time.

  Edward’s brief intervention had at least bought the city some time. By the early 1270s, Baybars must have felt himself poised for a final attempt on Tripoli and Acre, but the fear of Mongol attacks, encouraged by Edward’s initiative, had led the sultan to seek other means to defuse crusader pressure and free his hands to deal with the larger problem. In April 1272, shortly before the assassination attempt, he had signed a truce with the city of Acre of ten years, ten months, ten days, and ten hours, in the Islamic formulation. Edward had again been dismayed by the realpolitik of the Levant and had refused to participate in signing, but it had cut the ground from under his feet. When Guillaume de Beaujeu returned to Acre in 1275 as grand master of the Templars, he wrote to Edward, now king of England, to describe the state of affairs in Outremer. His account was gloomy. He feared further attacks from Baybars, who had stripped the land of its resources. Revenues from the land that they had once held were no longer coming in; the kingdom of Jerusalem was impoverished, and the Templars were faced with the increasing costs of maintaining their castles.

  It seemed that only the counterpressure of the Mongols was keeping the crusader states alive. The specter of encircling alliances haunted Baybars. If it increased his desire to eradicate the Franks, it was always a secondary consideration. In the years after 1272, the sultan moved to confront the Mongols on their own territory. In 1277, he took an army through Syria into Anatolia—southern Turkey—where he inflicted a shattering defeat on a Mongol army; but with a second Mongol force on its way, he deemed it wise to retreat.

  WITHIN EUROPE, THE enthusiasm for crusading ventures was dying. Teobaldo Visconti, the former patriarch in Acre, now Pope Gregory X, set about energetically trying to rally support. In 1274, he called a council to discuss the organization of a new crusade. Only a single crowned monarch came, and the lack of enthusiasm was resounding. One veteran of both of Louis IX’s crusades, Érard de Valéry, who did attend and was wise to the realities of confronting the Mamluks, commented that the puny resources that could now be mustered against the infidel were like a small puppy yelping at a mastiff.

  It was a blunt assessment of the difficulties facing any crusading venture. The initiative collapsed with Gregory’s death in 1276. Baybars himself died in Damascus the following year after drinking fermented mare’s milk while watching a polo game. Poison was suggested, but rumors of foul play routinely circulated around a sultan’s death.

  Although the Mamluk succession was traditionally a tribal election process among the leading emirs with no hereditary prerogatives, Baybars attempted to make his son sultan. He failed. The sultanate required the building of a confederacy of support and was frequently a bloody process. After some years of confusion, it was one of Baybars’s most trusted and successful generals, al-Mansur Qalawun, who emerged as sultan in 1280. Qalawun was about sixty, and he had been a leading commander in several of Baybars’s campaigns. He belonged to the same Kipchak tribe as Baybars and had been enslaved quite late so never became fluent in Arabic. Like Baybars, he was not initially popular in Cairo. For several months he feared to go about the streets, and when he did, the people provided the traditional show of contempt by pelting him with offal. But he wisely followed Baybars’s example, carrying out public works and showing piety toward orthodox Sunni Islam, even if he never quite shook off his Turkish roots. He was said to have retained some of the shamanistic practices of his steppe origins, such as predicting the future from the shoulder bones of sheep.

  Qalawun, however, was an astute and successful general, fully aware of the greater threat of the Mongols and equally wary of possible alliances with the Christians. Between 1276 and 1291 the Mongols sent six embassies to the courts of the west. They achieved nothing. The distances and the communication times, and growing disenchantment with large crusading ventures, ensured that such coordinated plans remained in the realms of fantasy. The death of Baybars had (however temporarily) eased the pressure on Acre.

  Within the enclaves on the coast of the Levant, feuding continued unabated. Bohemond VII, count of Tripoli, was at war with the Templars; a contest between Charles of Anjou and the kings of Cyprus for the title of king of Jerusalem rumbled on between 1277 and 1285, while the friction between Genoa and its rivals ensured continuous disruption. These schisms were reflected on the streets of Acre. Hugh III, king of Cyprus and nominally of Jerusalem, left the city in 1276 and returned to Cyprus, regarding the place as ungovernable. In 1286, the French contingent at Acre refused to accept the claim of his son Henry II to be king in Acre and temporarily barricaded themselves in the royal castle, denying him access. The following year, as the storm clouds were gathering once more, the Genoese were blockading the port and fighting with the Pisans in the city streets.

  Qalawun’s preoccupation with the menace of the Mongols made him keen to neutralize the Franks at his rear. He signed truces with the Hospitallers’ stronghold at Margat in the Lebanon and with Bohemond VII as Count of Tripoli in 1281 in order to have his hands free to confront the Mongol threat. That year, he put the Mongols to flight at the battle of Homs in Syria—a nominal victory that cost him as many men as his opponents. Securing his position against internal revolts from the Bedouins and dissident factions prevented any sense of threat to Outremer.

  In 1283, Qalawun signed another ten-year truce with Acre by the terms of which he specifically also bound the Hospitallers and the Templars. As independent entities not answerable to the commune of Acre and as the most effective military forces, they had a history of wriggling free of agreements that they had not personally signed. One signatory to this agreement was Guillaume de Beaujeu, now grand master of the Templars, who would have cause to reexamine the document’s exact wording just a few years later.

  Critical to Qalawun’s bid to counter multiple threats was the desire to build up the core group of Mamluks, a reliable military cadre loyal to the sultan and his group of emirs. The slave trade gathered pace in the second half of the thirteenth century, consisting of kidnapped or displaced tribal peoples from the shores of the Black Sea, traded through Constantinople on Genoese ships, or from ports in southern Turkey. He had agents in the Black Sea to facilitate this trade, critical to his mission. He obtained many more Mamluks than Baybars ever had, a figure of somewhere between 6,000 and 12,000, from further-flung places. Some of the captured who entered his service were even of Greek or Prussian origin.

  The victory over the Mongols may have been pyrrhic, but it quieted the frontiers of Syria and, in time, Qalawun turned his attention back to the Franks. Despite the spirit of jihad, the desire to ri
d the Islamic world of the Europeans was in large measure defensive. The prospect of fresh incursions from the west never died, nor did the fear of a pincer movement—that the Islamic world could be caught in an alliance between Christians and Mongols. In 1285, Qalawun besieged and took the powerful Hospitaller fort of Margat, a loss that further shook Christian morale. In 1287, he occupied the coastal port of Latakia. Now all that was left in Christian hands was Tripoli, Acre, and a few other fortified coastal enclaves, such as Tyre and Sidon.

  THE MAMLUK THREAT was drawing ever closer, but Acre was living out its last few years with an attenuated splendor. With the death of Charles of Anjou in January 1285, the long-running contest for the crown of the shrinking kingdom of Jerusalem was over. In August 1286, the coronation of his rival, the sixteen-year-old Henry II of Cyprus, took place in Tyre. Henry then came to Acre for festivities that lasted a fortnight in the grand hall of the Hospitallers’ compound. “It was,” according to the chronicles, “the loveliest festival anyone had seen for a hundred years, with amusements and jousts with blunted lances. They re-enacted stories of the round table… with knights dressed up like women jousting together. Then they had nuns who were dressed as monks and who jousted together, and they role-played Lancelot and Tristan and Pilamedes and many other fair and delightful and pleasant scenes.”10 It was a decadent fantasy in the face of known facts, but beneath the brawling, the fighting, the feuds, and the bombardments, Acre sustained a late flowering of medieval culture.

  The time that Louis IX spent here after his disastrous crusade had stimulated Acre. Although never a major center of learning—it was more an administrative hub, a launch pad for crusader armies and a warehouse for merchants—the city was energetic and vibrant. With its come-and-go of peoples, it attracted cultured visitors, leading churchmen, and kings. Francis of Assisi had preached here, and its last half century saw the development of a school of book production, painting, and manuscript illumination, ranging from copies of the Bible to editions of the classics and histories of the crusades. In the margins of these volumes, the illustrators portrayed the world they knew: mailed crusaders, weapons, ships and castles, silk pavilions, coronations and kings. An element of oriental sophistication softened this crusader world. The common use of glass in the windows of houses, fine carpets and textiles, new tastes and cuisines—olive oil, citrus fruits, sugar and spices—all contributed to a sense of the exotic.

  Nearly half a century after its fall, the German traveler Ludolf von Suchem conjured a wistful and romantic portrait of Acre’s splendor, though there was perhaps some measure of truth. He described the city, of which he could see only the ruins standing, as

  on the sea-shore, built of square hewn stones of more than usual size, with lofty and exceeding strong towers, not a stone’s throw distant from one another all round the walls. Each gate of the city stood between two towers and the walls were so great that two carts driving along the top of them could easily pass one another, even as they are at the present day. On the other side also, toward the land, the city was fenced with notable walls and exceeding deep ditches, and variously equipped with divers outer works and defences, and conveniences for watchmen.11

  He imagined the palaces “adorned with glass windows and paintings” and houses “not built merely to meet the needs of those who dwelt therein, but to minister to human luxury and pleasure… the streets of the city were covered with silken cloths, or other fair awnings, to keep off the sun’s rays. At every street corner there stood an exceeding strong tower, fenced with an iron door and chains.” He painted a world of court ceremonial in which “princes, dukes, counts, nobles, and barons walked about the streets in royal state, with golden coronets on their heads, each of them like a king, with his knights, his followers, his mercenaries, and his retainers, his clothing and his war horse wondrously bedecked with gold and silver,” the military orders with their headquarters and their garrisons, the many churches, and also “the richest merchants under heaven, who were gathered together therein out of all nations” and where “everything that can be found in the world that is wondrous or strange used to be bought thither.”12 Evidently, there were such shows of extravagant splendor. When the sultan of Homs came to Acre in 1252, the city “greeted him with such honour in Acre that cloth of gold and silk was laid on the ground everywhere he went.”13

  Generations of stone masons, many of them Muslim slaves, had constructed this city of splendor and filth, with its Romanesque and Gothic churches, its monasteries and chapels, its double walls and its foul-smelling harbor and spice bazaars. Beauty there certainly was. A Muslim writer described the portal of one of these churches as “one of the most marvellous things made by man, for it is of white marble and of wonderful shape and of the highest quality of workmanship… the bases, capitals and shafts being all of one piece.”14 The impressive castle of the Templars stood perched on the edge of the sea, a landmark for arriving ships. Out toward the city walls was the equally imposing compound of the Knights Hospitallers, with its extensive series of pillared halls, undercrofts, courtyards, and towers that combined the functions of palace, fortress, infirmary, and church. Acre in its heyday rivalled Alexandria and Constantinople as a great emporium. To live here was to sense the possibility of larger worlds. After André de Longjumeau’s journey to central Asia, King Louis dispatched another ambassador. The Flemish Franciscan missionary Willem van Ruysbroeck (William of Rubruck), a Marco Polo before Marco Polo, spent two years from 1253 to 1255 traveling to the court of the great Mongol khan at Karakorum and came back to Acre with his written account. Niccolo and Maffeo Polo, Marco’s father and uncle, who traded in the city, followed in his footsteps. They returned here in 1269 after their first expedition east, a nine-year journey to China. In 1271, they set out from Acre again, this time taking Marco with them.

  WHILE THE NOBILITY were play-fighting with blunted lances, they were also doing what they could to shore up the city’s defenses. The last half of the thirteenth century saw concerted reinforcement of the walls and the addition of new towers at individual initiative and expense. The work intensified as the Mamluks drew closer. Louis IX, after the debacle on the Nile, had completed the fortification of the new suburb of Montmusard in 1250; Edward’s English Tower of 1271–1272 was accompanied by the construction nearby of a barbican—an external defensive structure connected to the main wall by a walkway—by King Hugh III of Cyprus. In 1286, his son Henry II built a stout, round tower at the very northeastern tip of the outer walls. This, known informally as the King’s Tower, was designed to buttress defense of the critical Accursed Tower. It was fronted with a further defensive curtain wall. The following year, Alice, Countess of Blois, also funded an adjacent tower that bore her name and gave money for strengthening the wall that protected Montmusard. One year after that, the pope advanced a loan to the patriarch and papal legate Nicolas de Hanapes to carry out repairs to the moat and walls and to rebuild a further tower gate, that of the Patriarch, to watch over the seaward end of the east wall. One witness to this late spurt of defensive building was the Venetian statesman and geographer Marino Sanudo Torsello. Sanudo was a widely traveled observer of the Mediterranean world and the front lines between Islam and Christendom. Toward the end of 1286, he spent several months in Acre and produced an invaluable contemporary plan of its walls, towers, and the internal layout of the city.

  Barring two years when Saladin had occupied it and turned the cathedral church of the Holy Cross into a mosque, Acre had been a Christian city for nearly two hundred years. The city held a population of about 40,000, many of whose families were deeply settled in the Holy Land and had lived there for generations. Baybars, for all his raids and devastations of Acre’s hinterland, had never brought siege engines and mining teams to seriously threaten its defenses. Its resolve and its walls awaited a final test.

  6

  WAR TO THE ENEMY

  Winter 1288–Autumn 1290

  DURING THE WINTER of 1288, two men arrived in Alexandr
ia to speak to Qalawun. They had come from the County of Tripoli. By now this crusader kingdom had been reduced to a tiny enclave on the coast of Lebanon, consisting of nothing more than the city itself, but still a valuable port used by the Venetians and the Genoese. It was hamstrung by factional disputes over its governance after the death of the ruler Bohemond VI and had almost descended into anarchy. In this situation, it seemed likely that the Genoese would get the upper hand. This would potentially give Genoa control of both the lucrative Black Sea slave trade and commerce with northern Syria.

  The visitors had a tale to tell: a Genoese coup in Tripoli would allow them to dominate regional trade, and this would be detrimental to the sultan’s interests. Without the Genoese, Tripoli could arm ten to fifteen galleys:

  But now that the Genoese have it within their grasp, they will be able to arm thirty of them, for they will flock to Tripoli from everywhere; and if they have Tripoli, they will be lords of the seas, and it will turn out that those who will come to Alexandria will be at their mercy, both going and coming and within the port itself, and this thing bodes very ill for merchants who do business in your kingdom.1

  These words were reported by an exceedingly well-informed resident of Acre whose identity has never been satisfactorily established. He may or may not have been a knight called Gérard de Montréal, but he is generally known to history more anonymously as the Templar of Tyre. He seems to have been a minor noble of the leading families of the kingdom of Jerusalem, and while in the service of the Order, was not himself a Templar. As an Arabic speaker, he acted as translator, adviser, and probably intelligence officer to Guillaume de Beaujeu, grand master of the Templars. The Templar chronicler was about thirty-five years old, continuously close to events in the kingdom of Jerusalem—and he would leave the most vivid Christian eyewitness account of the siege of Acre in the spring of 1291, even if his judgments were probably slanted in favor of the order that he served.