Another man closely scrutinizing the Mamluk siege arrangements was the grand master of the Hospitallers, Jean de Villiers, who dated the approach of the sultan a few days earlier. In a letter written afterwards, he described, with grandiose exaggeration, Khalil’s dramatic arrival on April 1. He “invested the city of Acre on all sides from one sea as far as the other, between sunrise and tierce [about nine in the morning], and on the other side eastwards as far as the river Euphrates [as far as the eye could see], with all his battering-engines. And so, with numerous engines and a great host he sat down before the city.”7
If the size of the Mamluk army was routinely overestimated, for those watching on the walls it was still an awe-inspiring sight. They could survey a scene of extraordinary animation: thousands of animals—camels carrying tents, oxen dragging siege machines, Mamluk war horses—and all the resources of the army—cavalry and infantry, carpenters, stonemasons, cooks, holy men, and supply teams bringing fodder, water, and food, as well as an array of outfits and weapons such as helmets, turbans, body armor, shields, and swords. The people of Acre could hear the sounds of an army settling in: the braying of animals, the impact of hammers, the shouting of orders, the calls to prayer, the digging of trenches, the laborious erection of tents and siege machinery, the fluttering of yellow banners, the trumpet calls and thud of drums. “When we settled down there,” recorded Baybars al-Mansuri, “they were surrounded from all sides.”8
Khalil’s army could look up at “a town protected by walls, outer walls, towers, moats and strong barbicans… triangular in shape like a shield,” as one visitor put it a few years earlier.9 The double line of walls stretched unbroken from shore to shore—a distance of over a mile—pierced at various points by gates and posterns and interspersed at regular intervals by massive square towers. In front was a fosse, a steep-sided, stone-lined ditch forty feet wide. The names of the towers reflected the somewhat piecemeal manner in which they had been constructed and paid for by individual donation or initiative: the tower of the Venetians, of the English, that of King Henry, of the Countess of Blois. Other toponyms were more sinister, reflecting Acre’s turbulent past and the legends that clung to it. The Accursed Tower was flanked by the Tower of Blood. Further west, the outer wall’s defenses included the Gate of Evil Step.
Well before the late addition of extra defensive measures, however, visitors such as Wilbrand van Oldenburg had praised the “good, large, deep moats, lined with stonework from the bottom, crowned by a double turreted wall, finely arranged in such a way, that the first wall with towers, not higher than the main wall, is overlooked and protected by the second and inner wall, whose towers are high and most powerful.”10 Between the two walls, there was a broad killing field of some forty yards, which also contained a ditch. The sloping ditches were constructed of cut stone, providing a steep escarpment up which an attacker would have to climb to the foot of the walls. The lower, outer wall had towers that were also probably square, spaced at fifty-yard intervals “not a stone’s throw distant from one another all around the walls,” with additional smaller projecting salients to provide covering fire. The city gates were also set within towers.11 The intervals between the towers on the inner wall were protected by semicircular bastions. The walls were extremely stout, in Ludolf von Suchem’s description, “wide enough that two carts driving along the top of them could easily pass one another,” and beyond the outer ditch there were other “divers outer works and defences,” terraces probably lined with wooden stockades and fronted by ditches to further slow down an advancing enemy. Acre’s defenses were formidable.
According to received Islamic wisdom on the conduct of sieges, collected in the military manual of Ibrahim al-Ansari a century later, a commander should take time to “know the conditions of the fortress, the inaccessible places and those with ease of access; the impossible and the possible places for action… [and further]… the positions for mining [the walls] and for scaling ropes, siege ladders and grappling irons.”12 From his vantage point and tours of inspection, Khalil had ample opportunity to survey Acre’s defenses and run through his strategic options. There were two points of particular interest. Acre was effectively divided into two portions: the old city encircling the port and the newer suburb of Montmusard, both now enclosed in a continuous double wall. The two parts were separated by an internal wall, once the outer wall of the original city. Where the two met, the outer walls took an inward dent to a strategic city gate: that of St. Anthony. About 650 yards further east, the wall took another, sharper right-angle turn down toward the sea. This was Acre’s most vulnerable point. It was here that the crusaders had battered the Accursed Tower a century earlier.
The rebuilt Accursed Tower was now shielded not only by an outer wall but also by other fortifications. These included the construction of the barbican of Hugh III—an external defensive structure jutting from the outer wall and linked to it by a walkway—and at the very apex, the nearby tower built by King Henry (the King’s Tower), which provided further protection for the Accursed Tower, the entrance into the heart of the city. It was important for Khalil to maintain pressure along the whole wall to spread the defenders thinly, but it was the barbican of Hugh III and the gate of St. Anthony on which his attention would initially focus.
DESPITE THE VAST army that he had assembled and the almost unbroken success of the Mamluks against crusader castles over the past thirty years, there was risk for Khalil in this venture—and his legitimacy as sultan depended on success. The dispatch of an unpopular ruler who lost authority could be sudden and bloody. He had no ships and no ability to seal Acre off against resupply or reinforcement by sea, though he was probably well informed by Muslims who knew the city well as traders and spies about the likely defensive strategy and the response to Acre’s appeals for help. Spring seas could be unpredictable, and there was every chance that the weather might disrupt the arrival of any relief from Cyprus.
It was important for the sultan to show a close personal interest in the work in progress. The Mamluk military manual of Ibrahim al-Ansari prescribed that “the commander of the army or one of his army whom he deputized should circumambulate the fortress every day or two” and should “supervise the raising of the mangonels and their firing.”13 Both Saladin and Baybars had understood that personal involvement in the fighting was essential. Baybars had been up close to the walls of Caesarea in 1265 to inspect mining operations from under a wheeled shelter and was nearly killed in the trenches at Arsuf shortly afterwards. The sultan should be visible to his army and rewards given out. Morale was all important if men were to fight and die.
Time was a key factor. The strategy of the Mamluks was to bring overwhelming force against a town to deliver a quick knockout blow. If none of the Christian strongholds that had collapsed like dominoes since the time of Sultan Baybars had survived more than six weeks, this was also probably the maximum length of time that less-committed detachments and volunteers could be reliably retained. Saladin’s attempt to take Antioch in 1188 had failed because “the determination of his troops, especially those from far away, had weakened and their zeal for holy war had flagged and they only wanted to return to their countries and rest from fighting.”14 Disease was another factor. In matters of hygiene and camp management—the organization of water supplies and washing facilities, the burial of corpses, the supply of food—Islamic armies were considerably superior to their Christian counterparts, but the vast size of Khalil’s force, the growing heat as spring progressed, and the low-lying terrain could provide challenges. The marshes that surrounded Acre were miasmic, as a later traveler, Domenico Laffi, testified. He called Acre “an unhealthy place… because of the swamps that surround it… our (ships) are unable to stay there throughout the year on account of the bad air and bad conditions during the rainy season.”15 Both armies at Acre in the long siege of 1189–1191 had been ravaged by disease.
THE LOGISTICAL SKILLS of Mamluk armies were considerable but the malign numbers involv
ed in sustaining a lengthy siege gradually stacked up as time dragged on. It has been estimated that a medieval army of 25,000 men required 9,000 gallons of water and 30 tons of animal fodder a day to provision itself. A sixty-day siege would need the removal of a million gallons of human and animal waste and 4,000 tons of solid biological waste. Khalil’s army would have multiplied these numbers by at least three. If nothing else, the motivation of the men to wait and die outside castle walls was finite. The vast numbers of volunteers were inspired not only by religious fervor but also by the prospect of booty. They would not be held on the plains of Acre indefinitely.
Seen from his camp, the city’s preparations certainly looked thorough: Khalil “found it fortified with all kinds of equipment and siege machines.”16 The defenders had done everything they could within the time available. Jean de Villiers later wrote that “we and all the good Christian people of the city made preparations against them, and we armed ourselves completely, and we put in readiness all the instruments and engines which are intended to protect and defend the city and the bodies of men.”17 Men prepared their equipment: greasing hauberks; cleaning helmets; sharpening swords, knives, and the points of spears; shoeing horses; adjusting shields and crossbows; stockpiling ammunition. The Templar of Tyre also described the defenders preparing their siege engines. They “manned their defences well, and began to raise the alarm, as one must do when one has an enemy.”18
The city had no seaward defenses, as the rocks and sand banks offshore made an amphibious attack impossible. Instead, the northern end of Montmusard, where the defenses came down to a rocky shore, was protected by an enormous round tower; at the eastern end, where the wall gave way to sandy beach, there was a small tower, then a large spiked iron trellis ran out into the water to prevent any outflanking attack by cavalry riding through the shallows. In the harbor, the Pisans had ships capable of bombarding the shoreline with deck-mounted catapults. Ashore, they had fifteen of these devices, positioned to be fired from just within the inner walls, probably with range finders directing operations from the battlements.
Abutting these inner walls were large, vaulted chambers that served as munitions stores to which the ordinary citizens of the town played an active part in the gathering of weapons, “carrying quantities of rocks, crossbows, crossbow bolts, lances, falchions [single-bladed swords], helmets and mail hauberks, scaled and padded armour, shields with metal bosses and all other type of armour of different sorts.”19 Banners fluttered from the walls, and in all probability, when the gates were finally sealed shut, the defenders employed the conventional ploy of suspending heavy curtains from the outer walls—bales of wool or sheets of leather attached to wooden beams—to muffle the impact of bombardment from stone balls hurled by catapults.
Defensive responsibilities were parceled out in segments. The northernmost section of Montmusard was manned by the Templars, under their grand master Guillaume de Beaujeu and the marshal Pierre de Sevrey, with the support of the leper knights of St. Lazarus; to their right, the Hospitallers commanded a crucial section to the gate of St. Anthony with their master and marshal, Jean de Villiers and Matthieu de Clermont. The Hospitallers alternated shifts with the English Knights of the Order of St. Thomas; from there, it was the responsibility of the Teutonic Knights under Hugo von Boland. The critical King’s Tower, the Accursed Tower, and the projecting barbican, where the wall took its sharp turn, were the responsibility of the King of Cyprus’s troops under his young brother Amalric, Lord of Tyre and Regent of Acre. The final section, running down to the harbor, was entrusted to the French regiment of Jean de Grailly and the English contingent under Othon de Grandson, with the help of the recently arrived pilgrims and the townspeople.
The seafaring Italians played a sporadic part in the defense. The Venetians and the Pisans provided support at various points. The Genoese hesitated, then declared themselves neutral; in May 1290, they had signed a commercial treaty with Qalawun, which they had no desire to jeopardize. As the Venetians had one too, the commitment of the Italian merchant communes was treated with continuous suspicion, despite a wholehearted Pisan contribution.
The guarding of the walls was to follow a strict rotation in shifts—eight hours on, eight hours off—alternating the responsibilities between two detachments in each sector, which was administered by two rectors. Sources suggest that overall responsibility was shared by a council of war of eight leading figures, including Amalric; the grand masters of the three largest military orders—Villiers, Beaujeu, and Boland; Jean de Grailly, “commander of the men of France and seneschal of the Kingdom of Jerusalem”; Othon de Grandson of the English; and the patriarch, Nicolas de Hanapes.20
Despite these apparently logical arrangements, there was no satisfactory, unified defensive plan. The organization of the siege reflected the sectarian history and geography of the city itself, with separate communities each barricaded within their own guarded enclaves, the defense of which they tended to regard as their first priority. The crusading orders were powerful and competing autonomous bodies, answerable to no one but themselves and the pope, in whose name Hanapes, as papal legate, had a nominal jurisdiction. The Italian maritime republics were commercial rivals who had engaged in bitter fighting in the city within living memory and whose priorities excluded a commitment to holy war and frequently included selling war materials to the Mamluks in Egypt.
Over and beyond this there was a deeply established resident civilian population of townspeople and religious orders for whom Acre was their home; vulnerable refugees from Tripoli and other fallen towns; and the rabble of recently arrived crusaders and pilgrims, with little military experience and whose actions had provided the cause of war. The nominal ruler of the kingdom of Jerusalem, the twenty-year-old Henry of Cyprus, delegated his authority over this contentious mass of people to his younger brother Amalric, now aged eighteen or nineteen years old, but his authority was also limited. Throughout the siege, there were scarcely suppressed notes of discord: unequally allocated tasks, arguments about privileges and rank, and unclear command structures. Acre’s reputation as a Levantine den of impious sin continued to cling to it during the siege, so that it was said that many closed their eyes to the growing crisis in preference to the delights of port life—the taverns and the brothels.
ISLAMIC ARMIES HAD long and deep experience of siege warfare. As early as the ninth century they were producing military manuals that set out generally agreed procedures for the capture of castles, and by the high Middle Ages their technical and operational management of the investiture of fortified places was highly sophisticated. Despite stunning open-field victories, such as Saladin’s at Hattin, the Holy Land under the Mamluk sultans was being wrested back from the Franks, piece by piece, by dynamic, high-intensity sieges. The thirteenth century had witnessed a litany of impregnable places going down one after another: Ascalon, Caesarea, Saphet, Antioch, Chastel Blanc, Krak des Chevaliers, Margat, Tripoli. All fell within a six-week period.
The conventional procedure was first to secure the Mamluk camp against sorties with defensive palisades and ditches. “It must be stressed,” al-Ansari wrote,
that the besieger of the enemy is also the besieged in the sense that he is not secure from their going out against him and their hastening to do so when the opportunity, during the day or night, presents itself to them; for they require victory as much as the besieger desires it over them. Hence it is incumbent upon the commander to be cautious with respect to himself and those of the army with him as much as possible. He should use trenches if there is need of them, and their construction is possible; for this is among the strongest [factors] of resolution and conquest.21
To protect the camp against artillery bombardment and counterattacks, they fronted it with an earth rampart. It was necessary to be on the alert and to keep cavalry posted a bow shot from castle walls against the possibility of sorties. Once securely established, the next step was to find ways of advancing under cover as close to the walls as p
ossible to maximize the effect of their own catapults and projectiles and to start mining operations. Psychological softening up was another key component. The effect of shattering noise—the repeated creak and crash of catapults, the orchestrated thunder of camel-mounted drummers, the cries, shouts, and rhythmic chanting from across the whole battlefield—these could be deeply disheartening to defenders.
Degrading the walls with catapults and sweeping resistance off the parapets with volleys of projectiles was the preparatory stage. Protected by this hale of fire, miners could then work their way under the walls and bring down towers. Once a reasonable breach had been effected, defenders often conceded that further resistance was futile and sued for surrender. Many of the crusader fortresses attacked by Baybars and Qalawun simply gave in with the collapse of a strategic bastion or curtain wall. If not, the day would come for a bloody final assault undertaken before dawn to a barrage of noise. This required any ditch to be filled in sufficiently for men to pass across and the sacrifice of a front line of volunteers or prisoners driven forward from behind. Then a final massacre.
THE ORGANIZATION OF Khalil’s army camp evidently took time. Villiers watched the preparations unfold over nine days: “And from the day they came until the Monday after [April 9] they ceased not to take up the ground, some for their engines, some for their defences, some for trenches, some for stockades and to make their other works, and they brought up all their engines and defences round about the walls and set them up against ours.”22
The Accursed Tower Page 13