In this first wave of attack, Baybars struck with speed and efficiency. His methods and achievements revealed the Mamluks’ grasp of siegecraft and their overwhelming numerical and technological supremacy. The sultan had also indicated an ability to employ stealth so as to prevent his Latin quarry from preparing for an attack. In future campaigns Baybars took extreme steps to maintain this element of surprise. Always suspicious of enemy spies and scouts, he used messengers to deliver sealed orders to his generals, containing details of the next target that were only to be read once on the march. Most crucially of all, the sultan had shown that, in the case of Caesarea and Arsuf, his intention was destruction, not occupation. All along the Mediterranean coast his policy would be to wipe the Latin ports from the face of the Holy Land, closing, one by one, the doorways that linked Outremer with the West.

Breaking the Franks

Baybars renewed his attacks in spring 1266. One army of around 15,000 troops was sent north under Qalawun to ravage the county of Tripoli, where it swept up a number of minor fortresses, all of which were razed. Later that summer, a second Mamluk force was dispatched, this time to punish the Armenian Christians of Cilicia for their alliance with the Mongols. The Muslim host invaded in August 1266 and proceeded to lay waste to a succession of Armenian settlements. This unrelenting campaign left Hethum’s Cilician kingdom in a severely weakened state.

Meanwhile, the sultan led the bulk of his forces on a series of scouring raids up the coast, enacting a devastating scorched-earth strategy around the likes of Acre, Tyre and Sidon. The Mamluk host then turned inland to attack the major Templar fortress of Safad in Galilee, the last Latin bulwark in the Palestinian interior. According to Baybars’ chancellor, this castle was targeted because ‘it was a lump in Syria’s throat, and an obstacle to breathing in Islam’s chest’. The siege began on 13 June 1266 with a mixture of bombardment and sapping, and though the Templars put up strong resistance, they were eventually forced to sue for terms on 23 July. Conditions of surrender were agreed that supposedly allowed the Franks safe conduct to the coast, but these were never realised. Whether through blunt deceit or, as most Muslim sources suggest, because the Templars were found still to be armed as they marched from Safad, Baybars ordered the garrison’s execution. Some 1,500 Christians were duly led to a nearby hill–the site upon which the Templars traditionally themselves had executed Muslim captives–and the entire party was beheaded. One sole surviving Frank was spared and sent to Acre to relate the news of these events, and thus inspire fear.12

In the aftermath of this massacre, Baybars refortified Safad with great care and at considerable expense, and garrisoned the fortress with Muslim troops. In addition to the strengthening of battlements, two mosques were also built within its confines. This established the second arm of the sultan’s strategy: the retention of major inland strongholds to act as centres of Mamluk administration and military domination. In the months that followed, he overran a series of other castles and settlements in Palestine, including Ramla. By the end of the summer, Galilee and the Palestinian interior were under Mamluk control.

Having suffered two years of unmitigated defeat, the Latins of Outremer were left in total disarray, unsure of how to react to this seemingly unstoppable enemy. In October 1266 Hugh of Lusignan bravely tried to lead a raiding party of about 1,200 men into Galilee, but around half of this force was butchered by the Muslim force now stationed at Safad. From this point onwards the Franks began clamouring to secure terms of peace with the Mamluks, no matter how punitive. In some cases, Baybars was happy to neutralise and isolate potential opponents while the work of conquest and destruction progressed elsewhere. In 1267, for example, the master of the Hospitallers agreed a humiliating ten-year treaty covering the castles of Krak des Chevaliers and Marqab, agreeing to forsake the tribute monies traditionally extracted from local Muslims and acknowledging Baybars’ right to annul the treaty whenever he wished. However, when the Franks of Acre desperately tried to negotiate a truce in March that same year, Baybars flatly refused and, in May, made another destructive incursion into the city’s environs, terrorising the population and burning the harvest. According to one Latin chronicler, the Mamluks ‘killed more than 500 of the common people’ taken prisoner in the fields, and then ‘sliced all the hair off their heads, to below their ears’. These scalps were then supposedly hung from a ‘cord around the great tower at Safad’. This story is not confirmed in any Muslim source, but it indicates clearly the level of horror either experienced or imagined by the Christians during Baybars’ dreadful assaults.13

The fate of Antioch

Baybars’ assiduous preparations in the early 1260s had borne considerable fruit. The outposts of the Latin kingdom of Jerusalem were being picked off virtually at will and the power of Cilician Armenia had been all but broken. Even so, the Mamluks had yet to conquer one of Outremer’s great cities–to crush a crusader state and drive home the message that the days of Latin dominion in the Levant were ending. In 1268, with the Ilkhanid Mongols still showing no sign of launching a new invasion, the sultan decided that the time for such a statement was ripe. As his target, he chose the territory of Bohemond VI, lord of Tripoli and Antioch–the Frankish prince who had collaborated with the Mongols in 1260.

With his sights firmly set on the north, Baybars marched out of Egypt that spring. He briefly paused at Jaffa. The truce agreed with John of Ibelin had elapsed (and John himself had died in 1266) and the sultan brusquely refused to renew terms of peace. The port promptly fell to his attack in half a day, and was demolished. After this short interruption, Baybars led his armies into the county of Tripoli, marching up the coast in early May, leaving a trail of desolation behind them. Contemporary Muslim testimony described how ‘the churches [were] razed from the face of the earth…the dead were piled up on the shore like islands of corpses’.

Bohemond VI was ensconced in Tripoli, readying himself to resist a siege, but the Mamluks bypassed the city. Baybars’ target was Antioch. Advancing north via Apamea, he arrived outside the ancient city on 15 May 1268. Antioch’s power as a crusader state had long since waned, but its great walls still stood, holding a population numbered in the tens of thousands. The sultan appears at first to have encouraged the Antiochenes to negotiate terms of capitulation, but they brazenly refused, choosing to rely upon the same walls that had held back the First Crusaders for eight months and had later repelled numerous Muslim warlords, from Il-ghazi to Saladin. This was to prove a foolish and fatal error. The Mamluk host surrounded the city on 18 May and, within a day, Baybars’ troops broke in near the citadel on Mount Silpius. A bloody and savage massacre followed, echoing that enacted by the Franks at the moment of their own conquest, almost exactly 170 years earlier. In retribution for their stubborn refusal to submit, the sultan locked the city gates so that none could escape.

Glorying in the triumphant horror of this moment, Baybars wrote to Bohemond VI to describe Antioch’s sack. In mocking terms he congratulated the Frankish ruler for not having been in the city, ‘for otherwise you would be dead or a prisoner’, and described how, if present, ‘you would have seen your knights prostrate beneath the horses’ hooves…flames running through your palaces, your dead burned in this world, before going down to the fires of the next’. The city’s fall brought the Mamluks a huge amount of plunder–it was said to have taken two days simply to divide the loot–but, once they had picked it clean, Baybars’ men left Antioch in a state of utter ruination; one from which it would not recover for centuries. The few remaining Templar outposts to the north were immediately abandoned, while the Antiochene patriarch was permitted to linger in his castle at Cursat (just to the south) for a few more years, but only as a Mamluk subject. The principality of Antioch–once Outremer’s great northern bastion–had been overwhelmed, reduced to a tiny, isolated enclave at the port of Latakia. Only the imperilled husks of two crusader states now remained: the county of Tripoli and the kingdom of Jerusalem.14