The Accursed Tower

by Roger Crowley

  Meanwhile, Clermont’s charge at St. Anthony’s Gate, supported by the small band of Hospitaller knights, had had an electrifying effect on morale. The shame-faced rallied; behind the knights, foot soldiers advanced, stabbing the bellies of the attackers’ horses with their swords. The intruders turned and ran, pursued from street to street. Those trying to prize open the gate, which was still barred, were repulsed.

  As night fell, the sultan abandoned hope of taking Acre that day, and ordered a full retreat by trumpet call. Cries of “Victory! Victory!” echoed through the streets. In a morale-raising show, the defenders advanced out of the gates in armored force with banners unfurled to mop up. Dying Muslims were dispatched on the spot; defenders, some wounded, others lying on the ground too exhausted to move, were taken home. The dead were buried. Clermont had breathed life into the defense. There was a buzz of triumph within the town as word of the stout resistance got about and a spirit of cooperation animated the people.

  Late into the night the population worked to help repair the walls as best they could. Baulks of timber and stones were carted up to close the breaches and to make palisades. The enemy dead were thrown out. Weapons were stockpiled on the towers. These included large frame-mounted siege crossbows cranked by a windlass that had great penetrative power, two-feet versions loaded by a foot stirrup, and lighter crossbows, as well as substantial quantities of arrows. Bowmen were detailed to each position and a guard organized. Exhausted by the long, draining day of fighting and repairing, the bulk of the men were sent home for a few hours rest, then ordered to reconvene an hour before dawn at the Hospital.

  Underneath the temporary euphoria, the situation was bleak. Casualties had been high, and despite the defenders’ best efforts, they were now pinned within the inner walls for a six-hundred-yard stretch from the collapsed round tower of the King to St. Anthony’s Gate. Overnight, while they patched up their defenses as well as they could, they could hear the rhymical crash of battering rams destroying sections of the outer walls and collapsing the English Tower, which they were powerless to prevent. By the morning, the breach in the outer wall was some sixty yards wide. “When the tower had been taken,” the Templar recalled, “everyone was deeply dismayed and began to place their women and children on the ships.”20 It was doubtless the families of the wealthy who commandeered spaces on board. The poor would have to look elsewhere for salvation. “People were dazed and paralyzed, uncertain what to do.”21

  MAY 17. A Thursday. The start of a grim day, the morning overcast and the sea stormy. An hour before dawn, the leading captains, commanders, and religious authorities were gathered in the Hospital to discuss their predicament. The mood was glum. Khalil now had control of the outer wall along a wide sector, and the continuous whittling away of men left the defense threadbare. There were at best 7,000 able-bodied troops to man a perimeter of over a mile and to confront waves of attack that seemed inexhaustible.

  At the meeting at the Hospital, one man stood out. Nicolas de Hanapes rose, motioned for silence with his hands, and delivered a mighty exhortation for faith, resistance, and courage in the name of Christ. To surrender now would be to put themselves in the hands of the infidel. And he stressed the likelihood of the wholesale rape and slavery of the women and children. “For you know that whoever of you was chosen by your Lord to defend his honour fighting against one or many, there is no doubt that we are all men tied to Jesus for the faith that we have in him through which we must be saved.”22 His lengthy peroration ended with the direction to “confess your sins one to another, hoping that through the mercy of God you will be saved and obtain eternal life.”23

  His words, which were followed by a brief mass, lifted the spirits of the people. They took the sacrament, confessed and embraced each other, gave the kiss of peace, and cried. This had a bracing effect on the defense. Those who had been covertly looking for escape on the ships resolved to return to the fight, “their swords sharpened, their lances brandished, and encouraging one another.”24 Hanapes spent his day and far into the night tirelessly touring the front line, inspiring the men to do or die for their faith.

  At the walls, there was something of a lull. It was probable that Khalil had been checked by the sight of his men in full flight from St. Anthony’s Gate. Given the threats to his authority and the possibility that the enthusiasm of the vast numbers of volunteers might drain away, it was essential that there should be no repeats. On the other hand, his position was incredibly strong. He had control of a significant section of the outer wall, and he used the day to ensure the material conditions for a final breakthrough and to increase the fervor of his men. His main concern was the deep and steeply sloping ten-yard-wide ditch between the inner and outer walls that his men would have to negotiate in order to storm the inner defensive structure. Small diversionary attacks and the continuous play of the catapults were designed to prevent the defenders from relaxation and to limit their interference with his plans. Anything that was available was hauled up to the edge of the inner fosse by camels. Along with earth, stones, and timber, the cadavers of animals and fallen fighters were unceremoniously tipped into the ditch to provide a stable crossing to the foot of the inner walls. An unbearable stench wafted over the walls. At the same time, Khalil prepared the men for the battle. Religious enthusiasm would have been whipped up in the camp by the mullahs passing to and fro among the men. The prayer times were observed with particular devotion, and the sultan offered monetary rewards for acts of bravery in the final assault.

  Within the town, the Christians were making their own preparations. They set up their war machines to oppose the gaps by the King’s Tower and the English Tower. Swords were sharpened, shields and ammunition collected, guard duties assigned; the enemy dead continued to be thrown over the walls and gaps plugged with whatever materials were at hand. The Accursed Tower had to be held. The people had been inspired to prepare their own civil defense. The maze of narrow, winding thoroughfares, with their blind alleys, internal gateways, small squares, and stout towers—effectively a series of fortified nuclei within the fabric of the city—provided ample possibilities for last-ditch street fighting. Strategic crossroads were sealed with wooden barricades and guarded by detachments of armed men; stones were stockpiled on rooftops to rain down on the heads of intruders.

  The attempt to get the women and children away by ship was thwarted by the weather. Acre’s port, vulnerable to rough seas, was inhospitable, and luck was not on the city’s side. “The weather was very bad,” the Templar remembered, “and the sea so rough that the women and children who had boarded the ships could not endure it, and they disembarked and returned to their homes.”25 In the darkness, the defenders went to their positions, the civilians to their houses. Everyone knew that dawn would bring the decisive attack.

  12

  “SEE THE WOUND!”

  Dawn to Noon, May 18, 1291

  MAY 18, A Friday, the weather was gloomy and the sea still rough. Khalil’s army was readied before dawn and the sultan on horseback a visible presence there to encourage the troops. Holy men and dervishes had been through the camp whipping up spirit for the sacred cause, while Khalil’s heralds circulated, promising more earthly rewards. The Templar heard the signal for the advance. With the sound of a great drum booming in the darkness, “which had a great and horrible voice, the Saracens attacked the city of Acre on all sides.”1 If the initial strategy was to compel the defenders to spread their limited numbers along the whole front, Khalil’s real focus remained the sector from St. Anthony’s Gate to the St. Nicolas Gate, the outer walls of which were in his hands. Opposite the damaging breaches in the wall where the Tower of the English and the Tower of the King had fallen—exposing the pivotal Accursed Tower—the defenders had set up their trebuchets, resolved to mount a spirited defense of the heart of the city.

  The noise of the advance, a shock tactic of Mamluk Islamic armies to strike dread into the heart of defenders and to drive fear from those of its own men, w
as colossal—a mighty wall of sound: three hundred camel-mounted kettle drummers battering out a savage tattoo; the clashing of cymbals; the blare of trumpets; and the screaming and shouting of thousands of men.

  On the walls, the defenders waited for the enemy to come in range; trebuchets and crossbows loaded; rocks, crossbow bolts, and arrows stockpiled; townspeople manning the wooden street barricades and on the roofs of houses ready to rain down missiles. The patriarch tirelessly exhorted the defenders to be resolute in the name of Christ. “Surround us with your impregnable wall, O Lord, and protect us with your weapons!”2 Church bells rang.

  The wall of sound: drums and trumpets to terrify and inspire. (Oliver Poole, redrawn from Al-Maqamat al-Hariri, Bibliothèque Nationale de France)

  Khalil’s army advanced in well-ordered ranks, each row consisting of 150 to 200 troops specialized in specific fighting techniques. Ahead came the fanatical dervishes and fakirs, shouting out the name of God as they ran wildly forward, impelled by holy zeal and visions of paradise to die at the foot of the wall and to provide a human bridge over which the soldiers might cross. And prodded forward with them as a human shield, co-opted Christians, subject communities of the sultan’s realms, who had been compelled to the campaign with a threat and a promise: if they survived with Acre untaken, their taxation would be doubled; if it fell, they and their descendants in perpetuity would be freed from taxation.

  Behind these reluctant or zealous suicide troops came a protective phalanx, troops armed with tall, stout, wooden shields to take the first shock. Then the fire troops, men carrying oil kettles and burning torches flaring in the dark, and hurling clay bombs of Greek fire over the walls. They put up a screen of smoke and fire through which the archers in the row behind sent up shower flights of arrows, and crossbowmen stepped forward to loose quarrels. Behind them, the close combat troops, armed with short swords and leather shields to tackle the hand-to-hand fighting. Alongside, men with ladders, hoes, picks, battering rams, and grappling irons rushed forward to scale and dismantle walls. The shield-bearing troops advanced shoulder to shoulder, presenting an unbroken and menacing wall. Unarmed volunteers with simple slingshots peppered those on the walls with small stones. Further back, the trebuchets continued to hurtle rocks into the city.

  The defenders, however, had the advantage of height, and some protection from barrels and makeshift battlements, and they were evidently skilled at wall fighting. As the massed wave came on, crossbow bolts wreaked havoc among the front ranks. Aiming down almost vertically on those at the steeply sloping foot of the wall, “they fired volleys of three quarrels at a time into the front line which punctured the shields and pinned them to the shield bearers, and they shot a huge number of quarrels from ordinary crossbows and the powerful siege crossbows that passed clean through many of those who had no protection at all.”3 At the same time, they rained rocks down on the men attempting to dismantle the base of the walls, “so that they were crushed beneath their shields like toads.”4 In this havoc—in which mingled shouts in the names of Christ and Muhammad in French, Arabic, Italian, German, Turkish, English, Catalan, Greek—the defenders tore great holes in the advancing mass.

  THE INITIAL ATTACK along the whole perimeter was intended to keep the defenders thinly stretched. It was only diversionary. In the absence of any overall strategic command within the city, it ensured that the considerable fighting skills of the Templars and the Hospitallers remained tied down in the suburb of Montmusard, and as the defenders created initial carnage, Khalil resorted to the second phase of his plan. His aim was to overwhelm the overstretched defense by weight of numbers at the chosen vulnerable spots, and to do this without allowing the enemy to concentrate their men there or to allow them any respite. In what must have been a preplanned maneuver, he quietly and gradually withdrew troops from outlying sectors and “ordered them secretly to the broken wall with all their devices.”5 When they were formed up, they surged forward in a tight phalanx at the signal of the trumpets, totally oblivious to fear, with spades and picks and grappling irons to break through or climb over the walls.

  On the walls, the defenders were being worn down by the incessant repetition of dodging missiles, of firing, reloading, and firing again. The resources of the Mamluks seemed limitless. They came on in relays. If checked, “they reformed their ranks and brought up fresh troops, and with the Christians exhausted they applied immense pressure to force a way into the city. With these strategies they could in the twinkle of an eye deny the Christians a moment to breathe.”6 Noise and confusion reigned. “Those [of the enemy] who were hurling Greek fire threw it so often and so thickly,” the Templar recalled, “that the smoke was so great that one man could hardly see another.”7 It was impossible to extinguish once it caught. The fear of being burned alive by these roaring balls of fire was always terrifying, and it could be heard coming. Joinville had once vividly described the sound of Greek fire, which “made such a noise as it came that it sounded like the thunder of heaven. It seemed like a dragon flying through the air.”8 The Templar witnessed the equal pressure applied by the bowmen: “Through the smoke, archers shot feathered arrows so densely that our men and mounts were grievously wounded.”9 Exhaustion set in. The supplies of arrows and quarrels were running low. Crossbow fire slackened. They fought on with swords, maces, rocks, and whatever else was at hand.

  The breakthrough came in the fiercely contested battle for the Accursed Tower. For a long time, the defenders prevented the Mamluks entering the breaches in the walls by the ruined towers on the outer wall, against which they had positioned their trebuchets. But the supply of projectiles dwindled, and the sheer weight of numbers started to tell. The wooden cat came under intense bombardment and with it the fear of being burned alive. “They all advanced on foot, so many that they couldn’t be counted. In the front rank came men carrying great shields. Behind them men who cast Greek fire, and after them men who hurled javelins and shot feathered arrows so thickly that it seemed like rain falling from the heavens. Our men who were inside the cat abandoned it.”10 They withdrew from the Accursed Tower and fell back into the narrow lanes of the city.

  It was a decisive moment. The way into Acre lay open.

  Some of the king’s troops retreated within the inner wall toward St. Anthony’s Gate. The attackers were able to flood the space between the two walls and fan out. “They took two routes,” the Templar remembered, “since they were between the city’s two walls—that’s to say, between the first line of walls and ditches, which were called the barbican, and the great [inner] walls and ditches of the city itself. Some of them entered by a gate of the great tower called the Accursed Tower, and moved towards [the church of] San Romano, where the Pisans had positioned their great trebuchets. The others kept to the road [between the two sets of walls] and headed for St. Anthony’s Gate.”11

  The loss of the Accursed Tower was critical. One group, making their way toward the Pisan trebuchets, now posed a serious threat to the heart of the town. At the same time, both the gate of St. Anthony and that of St. Nicolas, close to the sea, were coming under increasing pressure. Trumpet calls rang across the city with desperate pleas for reinforcements. At St. Anthony’s Gate, so hotly defended two days earlier, the contest was in the balance. There was bloody hand-to-hand fighting for the wall, with the defenders resisting with all their force. For a time, the Christians seem to have driven the intruders back, but many had been drawn off for the defense of the Accursed Tower. Alarmed by the deteriorating situation, the Master of the Temple and of the Knights of St. John hurried to the gate to try to expel the intruders in a contest that was becoming increasingly chaotic. Beaujeu was in such haste that he only had time to don light armor.

  When the master of the Temple, who was at his auberge [headquarters] with the men who were defending it, heard the drum beating, he knew that the Saracens were launching an attack. The master took ten or twelve brothers and his troops and set out for St. Anthony’s Gate, between the two walls. He
passed the sector guarded by the Hospitallers and he called the master of the Hospital to go with him. The Hospitaller master in turn took some of his brothers with him, and some knights of Cyprus and some local knights, and some footmen. They came to St. Anthony’s Gate, where they found the Saracens advancing on foot, and they counter-attacked them.12

  THIS ACCOUNT, WRITTEN by the Templar of Tyre, strongly emphasized the heroic contribution of the master and his knights and probably distorts any overall assessment of contributions to the final defense. Others were more critical—“he came slowly”13—one writer maintained, and the fact that the master had not donned his armor, was unprepared, and appeared to be more concerned with defending his own auberge, which was well away from the walls, suggests the extent to which the defense of the city was hampered by factional self-interest even in its supreme crisis, but Beaujeu himself was probably in his late fifties, conventionally past fighting age, and he did at this moment hasten to the fray.

  Matthieu de Clermont, “highly skilled and uniquely physically capable at fighting,” again seemed to have distinguished himself in the contest for the Gate.14 Repeatedly, the Muslims were driven back. “We and our convent [of the Hospitallers],” recorded Jean de Villiers, “resisted them at St. Anthony’s Gate, where there were so many Saracens that one could not count them. Nevertheless, we drove them back three times as far as the place, which is commonly called Accursed.”15 Evidently, the Hospitallers were trying to plug the defenses both at this gate and further down the line.

  It was essential to push the Mamluk intruders back from the Accursed Tower and hold the inner ring, “but they could do nothing,” the Templar explained, “because the Saracens were simply too many. When the two masters of the Temple and the Hospital got there and went into combat, it seemed as if they were hurling themselves against a stone wall.” The disciplined battle tactics of the Mamluks were highly effective in small spaces. The numbers now flooding through the narrow lanes proved impossible to dislodge, and the defenders were being whittled away. Jean de Villiers recounted how “in that action [trying to retake the Accursed Tower] and others, where the brethren of our Convent fought in defence of the city and their lives and country, we lost little by little all the Convent of our Religion, which then came to an end.”16