The Accursed Tower

by Roger Crowley

  The winter weather was biting by the time the emir Shams al-Din had been dispatched by Qalawun to Wadi al-Murabbib, a valley in the mountains of Lebanon between Acre and Baalbek, to gather long baulks of timber for the siege engines. Here, trees grew to a height of up to thirty feet. It was brutally cold, and the burden of work fell heavily on the co-opted local people, both in taxation and compulsory labor. Shams al-Din himself was “surprised by an extraordinary snowfall. He nearly died. To save his own life, he was compelled to flee precipitously, abandoning his baggage and tents. Everything was buried under snow, and remained there until summer, so that a large part of the equipment was lost.”14 Nevertheless, his suffering work corps somehow managed to transport the timber to Baalbek, where it was used to make the largest trebuchets the Mamluks had ever constructed. Disassembled, these were then transported through the mountains to Damascus by late December.

  IN THE COORDINATION of men and materials over vast distances, Mamluk military planning was formidable. Khalil had at his disposal methods of organizing warfare that had been finessed during the previous half century by Baybars and Qalawun. The collection point for the troops and war materials was to be Damascus, but the raw winter weather continued to impede the work. Early in the new year, a detachment was sent to Hisn al-Akrad (Krak des Chevaliers) to collect a giant trebuchet that had been constructed there. The mighty machine was dissembled and its constituent parts loaded onto carts.

  Among those who participated in the transport was a young Syrian prince called Abu al-Fida: “There we took delivery of a great mangonel [trebuchet] called ‘al-Mansuri’ [the Victorious], which made a hundred cart loads. They were distributed among the Hama contingent, and one cart was put in my charge, for at that time I was an emir of Ten.”15 Hauling the components the eighty miles to Damascus and then on to Acre was brutal work:

  Our journey with the carts was late in the winter season, and we had rain and snowstorms between Hisn al-Akrad and Damascus. We suffered great hardship thereby because of the drawing of the carts, the oxen being weak and dying from the cold. Because of the carts we took a month from Hisn al-Akrad to Acre—usually about an eight days’ journey for horses. The sultan al-Malik al-Ashraf similarly commanded mangonels to be brought there from all the fortresses.16

  The exhausting work of hauling the siege machines went on. In February, Khalil sent his representative, the emir Izz al-Din Aybak al-Afram, to Damascus to oversee the construction of the trebuchets and other siege equipment and their conveyance on to Acre. Aybak was the sultan’s senior military engineer, a man with twenty-five years of experience, going back to the early campaigns of Baybars, of the construction, supervision, and transportation of siege engines.

  At the same time, there was an orchestrated campaign by Khalil to whip up religious fervor, to link his campaign to the pious memory of his father, and to unify the Levant in a holy cause. On the first day of the Islamic New Year, January 4, 1291, Qalawun’s body was born in solemn procession by religious figures—sheikhs, dervishes, and qadis (judges)—first to the great al-Azhar mosque in Cairo, then to a newly constructed tomb in his magnificent mausoleum. A week before Khalil was due to depart with the main body of his army, he orchestrated a fervent ceremony and celebration at the tomb. On the night of March 2, there was a complete recitation of the Koran. The following morning, accompanied by the viceroy and vizier, a generous distribution of money and garments was made to the poor, the Koran reciters, and religious establishments. “All this was in the way of the Sultan’s farewell to the tomb, because he had decided to embark on the siege of Akka.”17

  THERE WAS A symmetry to the whole arc of the crusades in the religious fervor now gripping the Islamic world. Two hundred years earlier, similar emotions had launched Christian Europe into the Holy Land while Islam was fragmented and disunited. Now it was the pope’s pleas for a major crusade that were falling on deaf ears while the Muslim call to holy war proved incendiary. Holy men predicted the fate about to befall the impious Christians. The appeal to join the cause was spread by preaching in the mosques. Volunteers were moved both by the spirit of jihad and, inspired by the spoils from Tripoli, the material rewards.

  Khalil set out with his army, on March 6, to cross the Sinai desert. At the moment of departure, the qadi Muhyi al-Din called down curses on Acre and a warning of the catastrophe about to fall. “Oh you, sons of the blond one [Christ], soon will God’s vengeance rain down on you, of whom nothing will remain! Already al-Malik al-Ashraf is descending on your shores. Prepare to receive at his hands unbearable blows!”18 One sheikh was said to have seen in a dream an unknown man reciting verses: “Already the Muslims have taken Acre and cut off the heads of the Infidels. Our sultan has led against the enemy squadrons who have crushed beneath their feet veritable mountains. The Turks have sworn on departure not to leave an inch of soil to the Franks.”19 The air swirled with prophecy and fervor.

  Blows about to fall: launching a projectile from a trebuchet. (Oliver Poole, redrawn from The Illustrations to the World History of Rashid al-Din, Edinburgh, 1976)

  This excitement and keen anticipation were reflected in the eager response of Baybars al-Mansuri, governor of the strategic fortress of Kerak, taken from the crusaders by Saladin in 1188. Al-Mansuri had been ordered to provide men and equipment for the campaign. He was not expected to participate personally, but the fire of holy war spread throughout the whole society from top to bottom. As he recounted,

  At that time I was at Kerak, and when the order for this invasion reached me, and the decrees of the sultan to prepare the arsenals and the machines arrived, my soul longed for jihad, yearning for it like the craving of the thirsty earth for its rightful duty. I went up to the sultan with that and asked that I should go there to share the recompense for the attack and accompany it, and he allowed me to attend and generously granted permission, and I was like someone who had triumphed in gaining his hope, and whose night had become clear like the morning. I prepared protective arsenals [wooden screens and shelters], useful machinery, dedicated fighting men, and marksmen, stonemasons, raiders and carpenters. I went to meet the sultan and came to him while he had reached Gaza. I met with hospitality and joy and a smile from him, and I travelled with his horsemen to Akka.20

  THE COLLECTION OF men and matériel was gathering pace: siege catapults, stone balls, naptha, wood for defensive shelters, pit props for mines, food supplies, camels and horses, and specialist troops—miners, stone masons, incendiary experts, catapult crews, shock troops, archers, and provisioning corps. In early March, an advance guard appeared outside Acre, compelling European settlers to abandon villages, cutting and clearing orchards in readiness for the construction of the siege lines and the military encampment. Khahil’s intentions were now plainly visible to the people of the city. The troops of vassals and provincial governors were gathering not just from Cairo and Damascus but from as far away as Aleppo, 250 miles to the north; from Hama and Homs on the route from there to Damascus; from Akkar in the Lebanese mountains; from Karak and Tripoli and Hisn al-Akrad. The emir Aybak al-Afram, sent to Damascus to supervise the transport of siege machines, arrived there on March 3, and Khalil crossed the Sinai and collected the Kerak contingent at Gaza, led by its governor, Baybars al-Mansuri. They rode north up the coast with a further consignment of trebuchets prefabricated in Cairo in the baggage train. In the spring of 1291, a vast army was converging.

  Damascus was on fire with zeal for war. The city rang with the sound of hammering and sawing: carpenters constructing trebuchets, smiths forging blades and chain mail and horseshoes; the collection of all the paraphernalia for a major campaign: food and fodder, shields, tents, banners, carts and trenching tools; and the gathering of an ever-increasing number of soldiers, horses, camels, and donkeys. In the city’s great Umayyad mosque at Friday prayers on March 9, a proclamation was given out that “those who want to fight for the faithful at Acre, in the first ten days of Rabi’I [particularly auspicious as the month of the Prophet’s
birth] should put themselves to the pulling out of the mangonels and hauling them over the bridges.”21

  There was a huge popular response. In an atmosphere of heightened emotion, the great siege machines, disassembled, were dragged out of the city gates and across the bridges. The volunteers “went out at day break and only returned at midday prayer. Even the jurisprudents, the teachers, the religious scholars, and the deeply pious transported material and helped to drag the trebuchet wood.”22 By March 15, all the component parts of the trebuchets had been moved out, and the first consignment started the eighty-mile haul toward Acre in carts under the command of the emir Alam al-Muzaffar.

  Almost simultaneously, various other contingents were assembling at Damascus. On the morning of the twenty-third, the city’s governor, the emir Husam al-Din Lajin, left for Acre at the head of his troops. That evening, al-Muzaffar, lord of Hama, reached Damascus. Three days later, his troops and siege equipment arrived. On March 27, the emir al-Tabakhi, at the head of the Tripoli troops, and those from Hisn al-Akrad, Akkar, Homs, and other places in central Syria, also arrived. The region was witnessing an almost unprecedented mobilization of Islamic armies and people. So great was the popular enthusiasm, it was said that volunteers outnumbered the regular soldiers. One by one, these contingents marched on toward the coast and started to ravage the area around Acre.

  Christian sources conjured apocryphal numbers in their assessment of the size of the army and, with grudging respect for the martial display, wrote vivid imaginary accounts of the impact of the troops on the march. They pictured these columns “thirsting for Christian blood,”23 a terrifying harbinger of apocalypse—barbaric, awe-inspiring, and yet somehow magnificent:

  The sultan progressed towards Acre with the most huge multitude of infidel people, whom none could count, of all races, peoples and tongues, assembled from both east and west. And the earth trembled at the sight of them, with the sound of a vast number of trumpets, cymbals and drums proceeding before them. The sun glittered on their shields like gold as they passed and reflected off the mountains, and the points of their polished spears gleamed against the sun like stars shining in the heavens in a serene night sky. When the army marched, a forest could be seen moving over the earth because of the multitude of spears. They numbered 400,000 soldiers and it was impossible not to admire the sight of so many infidels, because they covered the whole earth, the plains and the hills.24

  Whatever the truth about its size and appearance, the approaching army represented an extraordinary demonstration of Mamluk military power.

  Toward the end of 1290, a sense of urgency finally stirred within the walls of Acre. The call for troops became insistent. Some reinforcements were sent by King Henry from Cyprus. Soldiers were recalled from outlying positions within the kingdom of Jerusalem: from Chateau Pèlerin, Tyre, Sidon, and Beirut. The grand master of the Teutonic Knights, Burchard von Schwanden, arrived with forty Knights and four hundred other crusaders—and then undercut any positive effect on morale by promptly resigning his office and sailing back to Europe. The funds that the pope had entrusted to Nicolas de Hanapes were put to use for repairing and strengthening walls and outworks, gathering munitions and armaments, and the construction of powerful trebuchets. The patriarch played a central role in maintaining morale with his powerful orations in the city’s cathedral, the Church of the Holy Cross, but Acre was still scrambling to complete its preparations as the Mamluk columns closed on the city.

  8

  THE RED TENT

  April 1–9, 1291

  SULTAN KHALIL REACHED Acre at the start of April. In one Christian account, “He rested three days with his commanders and with the wise men of his army, organizing the army. On the fourth day, the camps moved, nearing the city up to a mile, where they were set out, with a terrible blast of trumpets, cymbals, drums and the horrible shouting of many different voices.”1 On Thursday April 5, he staged a formal announcement of the siege.

  He had chosen a small hill rising 100 feet above the level plain and some 300 yards east of the city as the site for his personal encampment. It was, by all accounts, a pleasant spot, which once possessed “a lovely tower and gardens and vineyards of the Templars,” and had a commanding view.2 The Muslims called it the Tall al-Fukhar, the Christians, Le Touron, and it had historical significance for both. A century earlier, in the summer of 1189, Guy de Lusignan, king of Jerusalem, had commanded the siege of Saladin’s Acre from the same hill. Now the wheel of fortune had turned full circle. From here, Khalil could look down over fields and orchards to a long sandy bay directly below him, into which the river Naaman flowed through patches of marshland, and beyond, the ruined citadel of Haifa, desolated by Baybars, on the headland ten miles to the south. To the north lay the double walls and intersecting towers of Acre, laid out like “the shape of an axe” in one description, with its harbor and tightly packed center, its churches and the prominent palaces and fortifications of the kings of Jerusalem, the military orders and the Italian communes rising above the flat-roofed houses.3 And he could watch his army assembling in front of the city.

  The siting and pitching of the sultan’s tent was a ceremonial act. Following Mamluk practice, Khalil orientated his ornate pavilion, the dihliz, in line with his objective. It was “entirely red, and had its door opened facing towards the city of Acre.”4 The aspect was an indicator of his intentions. “It was the ceremonial practice of the [Mamluk] sultans that the direction in which the door of the dihliz faced let everyone know the direction in which the sultan would take the road.”5 Probably the same day, delegates approached the city and offered aman, a guarantee of safe conduct and protection for the inhabitants in the event of voluntary surrender. After the steady collapse of crusader strongholds, and the massacre at Tripoli, this was just a formal nod to Islamic law. With their backs to the sea and no other significant footholds left on the shores of Palestine, the defenders knew that this must be a fight to the finish—or they would be departing with the universal condemnation of Christendom clinging to their names. Refusal, if the Franks deigned to respond with more than a shower of arrows, meant that the siege could formally open the following day. It was a Friday, the most holy day of the Muslim week, chosen to underline the sacredness of the cause.

  The anonymous Templar of Tyre was among those witnessing the Mamluk deployment. He believed that the sultan’s army contained 70,000 horsemen. The corps of royal Mamluks in Khalil’s time was perhaps somewhere between 7,000 and 12,000, to which were added the emirs’ own Mamluks and a body of free cavalry. Later figures, drawn up in 1315, claimed that the army of Egypt alone numbered 24,000 horsemen (though many of these would travel with two horses, in addition to one or two baggage camels, and so there was considerable scope for miscalculation in surveying a throng of men and animals). Throughout the siege, it is clear that large bodies of cavalry patrolled the Mamluk camp day and night. Alongside the cavalry, the Templar of Tyre put the number on foot at 150,000, both trained and untrained infantry swelled by a vast number of civilian volunteers and the support corps. In all the encounters between the Mamluks and the crusaders, the sheer mismatch of numbers had been a decisive factor. However exaggerated the Templar’s estimate of Khalil’s army, it is clear that the popularity of the campaign had assembled an enormous force, probably one of unprecedented size.

  Despite the discrepancy of numbers, the outcome was not a foregone conclusion. Acre was more populous than any other fortified position the Mamluks had ever tackled. The castles that Baybars had invested rarely held more than a thousand men; Acre was defended by more than ten times that number. The Templar of Tyre estimated that Acre had a population of between 30,000 and 40,000, including women and children; 700 to 800 mounted knights; and 13,000 infantry. It was a mixed force, the heavily armed and armored knights of the military orders and their sergeants comprised elite cavalry units. Each order was recognizable by its distinctive dress: the Templars in their white surcoats with a red cross, the Hospitallers a white c
ross on red, the Teutonic Knights black on white. Acre’s infantry comprised troops from Cyprus, mercenaries, and detachments from Europe. These included experienced crossbowmen (invaluable in siege defense) and a small contingent of technical experts—engineers, miners, and carpenters—essential for constructing defensive shelters, building and repairing catapults, and countermining, should the Mamluks get close enough to tunnel under the walls. The Pisans present in the city were practical mariners, particularly skilled in the construction and operation of catapults. In addition, there were the recently arrived civilian pilgrims and adventurers whose actions had been the cause of the war.

  From the ramparts, the Templar could see the pavilions and tents “very close together, stretching from Touron all the way up to as-Sumairiya [just north of the city], so that the whole plain was covered with tents.”6 The army surrounded Acre from sea to sea with its contingents, drawn widely from across the Middle East, arranged in orderly sectors confronting the walls: at the northern tip, flanking a rocky shore, the forces of the Ayyubid vassal al-Malik al-Muzaffar, ruler of Hama in central Syria; in the central section against the city’s main gate of St. Anthony, set within a tower, the troops from Damascus under its governor, Husam al-Din Lajin; to their left, those from Kerak under Baybars al-Mansuri; and directly below the sultan’s hilltop, his own Egyptian Mamluks, menacing the walls down to the harbor.