As the Mamluks pounded Acre, the Christians made some vain attempts to launch counter-attacks. Stationed on the northern shore, Abu’l Fida described how ‘a [Latin] ship came up with a catapult mounted on it that battered us and our tents from the sea’. William, master of the Templars, and Otho of Grandson also tried to prosecute a bold night-time sortie, hoping to wreak havoc within the enemy camp and torch one of the massive Mamluk trebuchets. The raid went awry when some of the Christians tripped over the guy ropes of the Muslim tents, raising a commotion. Thus alerted, scores of Mamluks rushed into the fray, routing the Franks and slaying eighteen knights. One unfortunate Latin ‘fell into the latrine trench of one of the emir’s detachments and was killed’. The next morning, the Muslims proudly presented the heads of their vanquished foes to the sultan.24

By 8 May, Khalil’s inexorable advance had brought the Mamluk lines close enough to the city for sappers to be deployed on the outer walls. They quickly turned Acre’s advanced sewerage system to their advantage, using outflows to start their tunnels. Just as in the Third Crusaders’ siege of Acre in 1191, the work of undermining was focused particularly upon the city’s north-eastern corner, but with Acre now protected by double walls there were two lines of defence to breach. The first collapsed at the Tower of the King on Tuesday 15 May and, by the following morning, Khalil’s troops had taken control of this section of the outer battlements. With panic rising in the city, women and children began to evacuate by ship.

The sultan now prepared the Mamluks for a full-strength frontal assault through the breached Tower of the King, towards the inner walls and the Accursed Tower. At dawn on Friday 18 May 1291, the signal for the attack began–the thunderous booming of war drums that created ‘a terrible, terrifying noise’–and thousands of Muslims began racing forward. Some threw flasks of Greek fire, while archers loosed arrows ‘in a thick cloud [that] seemed to fall like rain from the heavens’. Driven forward by the overwhelming force of this onslaught, the Mamluks broke through two gates near the Accursed Tower and began rushing into the city proper. With Acre’s defences punctured, the Franks tried to make a last desperate stand to contain the incursion, but one eyewitness admitted that attacking the Muslim horde was like trying to hurl oneself ‘against a stone wall’. In the thick of the fighting, the Templar Master William of Beaujeu was mortally wounded when a spear pierced his side. Elsewhere, John of Villiers, master of the Hospital, took a lance thrust between his shoulders. Grievously injured, he was dragged back from the walls.

Before long, the Christian defenders were overrun and the sack of Acre began. One Latin, then in the city, wrote that the ‘day was terrible to behold. The [ordinary people of the city] came fleeing through the streets, their children in their arms, weeping and despairing, and fleeing to sailors to save them from death’, but hunted down, hundreds were slaughtered and abandoned infants were said to have been trampled under foot. Abu’l Fida confirmed that ‘the Muslims killed vast numbers of people and gathered immense [amounts of] plunder’ once Acre fell. As the Mamluks surged through the city, masses of desperate Latins tried to escape in any remaining boats, and there was utter chaos at the docks. Some got away, including King Henry and Otho of Grandson. Half dead, John of Villiers was carried to a boat and sailed to safety. But the Latin patriarch fell into the water and drowned when his overburdened craft became unstable. Elsewhere, some Latins chose to remain and face their fate. Khalil’s troops found a band of Dominican Friars singing ‘Veni, Creator Spiritus’–the same crusader hymn intoned by Joinville in 1248–in their convent, and butchered them to a man.25

Many Christians sought to take refuge in the fortified compounds of the three main Military Orders, and some managed to hold out for days. The robust Templar citadel was eventually undermined by sappers and collapsed on 28 May, killing the Templars within. Those sheltering in the Hospitallers’ quarter surrendered on promise of safe conduct from Khalil, but Muslim chronicles testify to the fact that the sultan deliberately broke this promise, leading his Christian prisoners out of the city and on to the surrounding plains. Almost exactly one hundred years earlier, Richard the Lionheart had violated his own pledge of clemency to Acre’s Ayyubid garrison, executing some 2,700 captives. Now, in 1291, Khalil herded the Latins into groups and ‘had them slaughtered as the Franks had done to the Muslims. Thus Almighty God was revenged on their descendants.’

Acre’s fall was a final and fatal disaster for the Latin Christians of Outremer. Recalling the city’s sack, one Frankish eyewitness who fled by boat declared that ‘no one could adequately recount the tears and grief of that day’. The Hospitaller Master John of Villiers survived to pen a letter to Europe describing his experiences, although he admitted that his wound made it difficult to write:

I and some of our brothers escaped, as it pleased God, most of whom were wounded and battered without hope of cure, and we were taken to the island of Cyprus. On the day that this letter was written we were still there, in great sadness of heart, prisoners of overwhelming sorrow.

For the Muslims, by contrast, the glorious victory at Acre affirmed the efficacy of their faith, sealing their triumph in the war for the Holy Land. One witness described in amazement how, ‘after the capture of Acre, God put despair into the hearts of the other Franks left in Palestine’. Christian resistance crumbled. Within a month, the last outposts at Tyre, Beirut and Sidon had been evacuated or abandoned by the Franks. That August, the Templars withdrew from their strongholds at Tortosa and Pilgrims’ Castle. With this, the days of Outremer–the crusader settlements on the mainland Levant–were brought to an end. Reflecting upon the wonder of this event, Abu’l Fida wrote:

These conquests [meant that] the whole of Palestine was now in Muslim hands, a result that no one would have dared to hope for or to desire. Thus the [Holy Land was] purified of the Franks, who had once been on the point of conquering Egypt and subduing Damascus and other cities. Praise be to God!26

CONCLUSION

THE LEGACY OF THE CRUSADES

With Acre’s fall and the loss of Outremer’s last remaining strongholds, Latin Christendom’s political and military presence on the mainland Levant came to a definitive end. The final conquest of the crusader states helped further to validate Mamluk authority, and the sultanate’s power in the Near East held for more than two centuries. In the West, however, the kingdom of Jerusalem’s collapse caused widespread shock and anxiety. Not surprisingly, explanations were sought and recriminations levelled. The Levantine Franks were derided for their sinfulness and propensity to factionalism, the Military Orders criticised for pursuing international interests rather than focusing upon the Holy Land’s defence.

Commercial contact between Europe and the Muslim Near East continued long after 1291 and Cyprus remained under Frankish rule until the late sixteenth century. But the mainland Levant remained a target of holy war. From the 1290s onwards, many detailed treatises were composed in Europe, advancing various plans and methods to secure Jerusalem’s reconquest. New expeditions to the Near East were discussed, some were even launched–one culminating in the brief capture of the Egyptian port of Alexandria in 1365. Through the fourteenth century and beyond, many more crusades were preached and wars fought against the likes of heretics, Ottoman Turks and the papacy’s political enemies. The Templars were dissolved as an order in 1312, after accusations of abuses and neglect spearheaded by an acquisitive French monarchy, but other Military Orders survived through the Middle Ages. The Hospitallers established new headquarters, first on Cyprus and then on Rhodes and later Malta, while the Teutonic Order carved out their own independent state in the Baltic. Yet, despite all of this, no crusade ever reclaimed the Holy City, and Islam’s hold over the Levant did not weaken until the early twentieth century.1