The Accursed Tower Read online

  IN JULY 1269, he made the pilgrimage to Mecca in strictest secrecy to ensure no insurrection among dissident emirs. Elaborate arrangements concealed his departure. It was given out that he had gone hunting. His confidential messengers continued to bring him the mail; replies were dispatched as if he had never gone. When he returned from Mecca at the end of August, he arrived without warning in Damascus, and then in Aleppo. His aim was to keep his provincial governors in uneasy obedience, aware that he was always watching and could unexpectedly call them to account at any moment.

  5

  A PUPPY YELPING AT A MASTIFF

  1270–1288

  BY THE TIME Baybars had departed for the hajj in 1269, he had inflicted serious damage on the crusader states, prizing away their castles one by one, depriving them of revenues and tribute, and destroying their agricultural hinterland. They were increasingly dependent on resources from the west. The quarrels between factions of the noble families of Outremer and among the Italian merchants continued unabated. All seemed blind to the possibility of a final collapse, but to those alive to the political and military realities, there was a sense of impending doom. An increasing burden was falling on the wealthy military orders for the defense of the Christian footholds, and they were realistic about the prospects. As early as 1261, “If the kingdom is lost” had begun to appear as an ominous qualifier to their contracts on property and land.1

  The Genoese departure from Acre after the war of St. Sabras further weakened the city’s position as an emporium for trade, and the irruptions of the Mongols had diverted caravan routes further north. Its great days as the richest city in the Mediterranean world seemed to be coming to an end. The disintegration of authority in Acre and the disputes between factions in the kingdom of Jerusalem hampered any coordinated effort. By the mid-1260s, the only real leadership in Acre was the patriarch of Jerusalem, who was also the bishop of Acre. He was not just the spiritual leader, but effectively the city’s temporal lord. The patriarch was given unlimited powers by the papacy to manage the kingdom’s affairs—in so far as the citizens and factions would obey the pope. As de facto head of state, he was authorized to act against disputatious military orders, and at times given money for troops and funds to repair fortifications, build war machines, and redeem prisoners. It was the patriarch who was destined to be the commanding figure in Acre’s final crisis.

  An awareness of Baybars’s devastations was seeping back into Europe too. Despite the continuing struggles between the papacy and the Hohenstaufens, the growing crisis in the Holy Land was unavoidable, but the only states stable enough to respond to a fresh crusading call were England and France. Papal initiatives were stop-start, but the possibility of complete loss stirred Clement IV to raise funds and issue a call for a new crusade. The intertwined rivalry between the kings of France and their French-speaking neighbors, the kings of England (who also held land in France), formed a running backstory to crusader ventures. Both were deeply steeped in a crusading tradition whose origin was French, but the mutual suspicion between Richard the Lionheart and Philippe Augustus of France had soured the siege of Acre in 1191. When Louis IX had launched his ill-fated crusade to the Nile in 1249, the English king Henry III had sworn to go—and failed to do so, with considerable loss of face and, more seriously, breach of a sacred vow. Now Louis, himself haunted by Mansurah and obsessed with the golden dream of Jerusalem, again responded. The embarrassment of the English crown if it failed to commit a second time would be doubled.

  It was Henry’s oldest son, Edward, who answered the call. The English prince was in his late twenties, blond and dashing. He was nicknamed “Longshanks”: at six foot two, he cut an imposing figure at a time when most men were barely five foot six. And he was a fighter well-versed in the knight’s code of chivalry, with combat skills honed in tournaments and mock battles. The desire to do heroic deeds in the Holy Land ran in his bloodline. He had been fed crusader stories since his childhood. Richard the Lionheart was his great uncle; another crusader, Richard of Cornwall, his uncle, and he had in his entourage older French knights who had fought with Louis at Mansurah.

  Edward also had early firsthand experience of war. He had led his father’s armies against the rebel Simon de Montfort at the battle of Evesham in 1265, at which both sides had worn crosses on their surcoats. Edward won, but rather than ransom the rebel nobles who attempted to surrender, they were slaughtered on the battlefield. Men seeking sanctuary in the abbey church were cut down at the altar. It was dubbed “the murder of Evesham”—an unprecedented breach of chivalric protocol.2 Edward and his knights may have felt they had blood on their hands. Crusading was not only an opportunity to perform heroic deeds. It was also an expiation of sins.

  In a carefully choreographed ceremony in June 1268, the pope’s cardinal preached the call to crusade in the church of the Holy Sepulchre in Northampton, England. The venue had special resonance. It had been built by a knight from the First Crusade in imitation of the church of the Holy Sepulchre in Jerusalem. That day, Edward and his younger brother Edmund both took crusading vows, along with hundreds of other nobles and their followers. Among this band were two knights destined to play a leading part in Acre’s fate. Othon de Grandson was thirty, just a year older than Edward and his closest friend. Grandson came from an old noble family from Swiss Savoy, and he, too, came from crusading stock: his grandfather had died in the Holy Land. He was reliable, brave, and versatile, both a fighter and a skilled diplomat destined to give years of service to the English crown. He had fought in Edward’s civil war battles and been rewarded with a knighthood and land. Another knight from Savoy, Jean de Grailly, somewhat older, was one of Edward’s counselors; he had also been rewarded by the prince for reliable service.

  Louis’s financing and organization of his second crusade was as efficient as the first—he again demonstrated the bureaucratic, emotional, and financial skills necessary for a well-organized crusade. Crusading was expensive. When Edward found it difficult to raise the funds for an English contingent, Louis lent him £17,000. Tellingly, the loyal Joinville had declined the invitation to a second brush with death.

  If the preparations were again impeccable, the results were no better. For political and misconceived strategic reasons, Louis set out not to the Holy Land, or even back to the graveyards of the Nile, but to Tunis, which he believed, once captured, would be the gateway to Egypt. Instead, the king and his army were struck down by dysentery and the crusade petered out in stalemate and a peace treaty.

  Louis died near Carthage in August 1270; his whispered last words were reported to be “Jerusalem! Jerusalem!”3 While many returned to France, part of his expedition followed this injunction and sailed on to the east, but most of the fleet was wrecked in a storm at Sicily. Only the detachment of Prince Edward of England made it to the Holy Land.

  Longshanks arrived in Acre in May 1271 with a small force, probably a thousand in total, of whom 250 were knights. His party included the churchman Teobaldo Visconti, who received word while in Acre that he had been elected to the papacy. If any pope understood the critical situation of the Frankish states, it was Visconti; his final sermon before he sailed was on the text “If I forget you, O Jerusalem, let my right hand forget its skill! Let my tongue stick to the roof of my mouth if I do not remember you.”4 No pope could have had a deeper commitment to the plight of Outremer.

  Edward was appalled by the political and commercial realities of the crusader states. He could see with his own eyes ships of the Italian merchant republics in Acre harbor en route to Alexandria with weapons, food supplies, and enslaved manpower for the Mamluk army. Successive popes repeatedly outlawed these trades with dire threats of excommunication; in 1202, so suspicious was Innocent III that he was issuing categoric threats to the Venetians on this subject even as they were preparing to participate in the Fourth Crusade: “[We] prohibit you, under strict threat of anathema to supply the Saracens by selling, giving or bartering, iron, hemp, sharp implements, inflam
mable materials, arms, galleys, sailing ships, or timbers.”5 Versions of these carefully framed interdictions were repeated regularly during the thirteenth century—to little purpose. Even when the republics’ state authorities were forced to repeat the ban, illegal trades—smuggling or consignments on foreign ships—continued.

  Acre’s role as a great trans-Mediterranean trade hub may have been diminishing, but it remained an important regional hub for transshipment and transit, a link in the chain that connected the slaves of the Black Sea, the iron and wood of Turkey, and the wheat and weapons of Europe to Alexandria and the state arsenal in Cairo. Acre had its own slave market. The timber went to make war machines, crossbows, ships, and spear shafts; the pitch for Greek fire; the wheat to offset shortages in Egypt and pacify dissent in Cairo; the metal for blades, and sometimes as finished weapons; the slaves to wield or operate these weapons against Acre’s own walls.

  Seen from Edward’s perspective, Acre was complicit in eating itself, yet within the city these trades induced a degree of complacency. It was believed that it was simply too valuable to be destroyed. The feuding barons of the crusader states, so intent on their own privileges and prerogatives, were unable to see the route to disaster.

  Nor had Edward come in time or been in any position to prevent what was to prove Baybars’s most spectacular siege campaign. Released from the Mongol threat, Baybars could turn his attention back to picking off crusader forts. In March 1271, he moved against the Hospitallers’ spectacular castle of Krak des Chevaliers. Situated in northern Syria, the castle was of considerable strategic value. It overlooked the Homs Gap, an important thoroughfare through the mountains, and from here it dominated territory and extracted tribute from the surrounding area. King Andrew II of Hungary, who came in 1218, called it the key to the Christian lands. At its peak, it housed a garrison of 2,000 men and provided a base for offensive operations; but by the second half of the thirteenth century, the Hospitallers’ finances and manpower were both in decline. The English-born grand master Hugh Revel complained in 1268 that there were only three hundred Hospitaller knights in all Outremer. Baybars’s campaigns of economic attrition had stripped away valuable revenue and devastated the hinterland. By 1271, the castle was isolated and poorly garrisoned.

  The Mountain: a reconstruction of Krak des Chevaliers. (Étude sur la topographie de la ville d’Acre au XIII siècle, Paris, 1879)

  Nevertheless, Krak des Chevaliers was exceptional—the most formidable fortification the crusaders ever built. Positioned on a steep-sided bluff, 2000 feet above sea level, that could only be accessed along a level approach from the south side, it was a work of extraordinary skill. Erected on a bedrock of hard basalt out of high-quality limestone blocks so perfectly fitted that there was barely need for mortar, the inner keep rose 160 feet, its outer walls 30 feet. It was nicknamed “the mountain.” As well as a moat, fed from a spring between the two walls on the southern side, it comprised sophisticated defensive features: overhanging box machicolations of stone allowed well-protected defenders to drop projectiles onto the heads of attackers at the base of sheer walls, arrow slits were staggered to limit the area of dead ground, and a twisting 150-yard passage with blind turns would force any attackers to launch their final assault under fire from above. Its capture by storm was almost an impossibility against a determined defense.

  Baybars, at the head of an army of 12,000 men, hauled the siege equipment up the rocky outcrop in the spring rain. The wooden components of the trebuchets swelled in the wet and could not be set up. The archers’ bow strings were unusable. The army waited eighteen days for the weather to ease. When it did, Baybars brought into play all the skills he had honed over the past decade. On the south side, his troops quickly overcame the outer works, probably wooden stockades. He then erected his catapults and set the miners to work. While the catapults hurled stones weighing up to 220 pounds against the parapets, keeping the defenders’ archers at bay, it was the miners who eventually brought down a tower on the southwest corner of the outer wall. At this point Baybars was still confronted with the moat, which could not be mined, and the mountain itself, rearing up above. And, against his usual practice of demolishing castles, he wanted to take this one intact, without a fight.

  Deception always formed a key ingredient of Baybars’s armory. In 1268, he had succeeded in intercepting a letter to the besieged garrison at Beaufort and replacing it with a forgery designed to undermine the defenders’ morale. Now at Krak des Chevaliers, it’s probable that he again fabricated a letter from the Hospitallers’ grand master in Tripoli to state that no relief was on the way and giving them permission to surrender. The castellan of the fort sought terms, and on April 7, the garrison capitulated. Baybars was handed the great fortress largely undamaged. Whether the forgery actually occurred or just provided the castellan with a convenient explanation, it is clear that the isolation of crusader forts and their lack of manpower rendered even the most impregnable stronghold obsolete against the Mamluk tactics of total war.

  Baybars honored the safe conduct and addressed a taunt to the Master of the Hospitallers in his now familiar style:

  To frère Hugues—may God make him one of those who do not oppose destiny or rebel against Him who has reserved victory and triumph for His army… to inform him of the conquest, by God’s grace of [Krak de Chevaliers], which you fortified and built out and furbished… and whose defence you entrusted to your Brethren. They have failed you; by making them live there you destroyed them, for they have lost both the fort and you. These troops of mine are incapable of besieging any fort and leaving it able to resist them.6

  It was a boast, but no more than the truth. Krak des Chevaliers had been the ultimate test for Baybars, and the castle’s capture called into question the ability of any fortress to resist Mamluk siege craft. On a column of its elegant gallery, the Hospitallers had once carved a short poem in Latin that served perhaps as a warning: “Have richness, have wisdom, have beauty but beware of pride which spoils all it comes into contact with.”7 Baybars was remorselessly puncturing any remaining crusader pride. He moved on to the castle at Akkar, at the northern end of the Homs Gap, transporting his siege engines on carts, on which he was said to have ridden. A breach in the outer wall led its garrison quickly to seek terms.

  From there, Baybars resolved to wipe Tripoli off the map. Bohemond VI had escaped the fires of hell that had engulfed Antioch, but Baybars still had a score to settle with the counts of Tripoli for allying with the Mongols. Bohemond received another letter warning him of what was coming and advising him to flee by sea: the prison fetters awaited. Yet news of Prince Edward’s arrival at Acre caused the sultan to pause. Wary of new crusader armies led by royal commanders and unable to ascertain the level of the threat posed by the English prince, he agreed a ten-year truce with Tripoli.

  Edward’s presence raised morale, but he had far too few men to make any substantial difference to Acre’s strategic situation. Baybars moved immediately to threaten the English prince, appearing in the vicinity of Acre, then turning north to tackle the redoubtable fort of the Teutonic Knights, Montfort, perched on the edge of a ravine twelve miles to the east. Despite the operational difficulties of the terrain both for his trebuchets and his miners, within a month he had compelled the garrison’s surrender with a guarantee of safe conduct. Edward was treated to the dispiriting sight of these men being released in front of the city walls and the sheer size of a Mamluk army. It was a rude awakening to the realities of the Holy Land.

  But Edward had seen other possibilities. Upon arrival, he immediately dispatched ambassadors to Abaqa, the Mongol ruler in Iran, to propose a combined operation against the Mamluks. While awaiting a reply, he embarked enthusiastically on raiding the hinterland and carried out an attack with the Hospitallers and Templars on a nearby Mamluk stronghold. It inflicted damage but also provided the English knights with a sobering lesson in the risks of military operations in the height of summer; in their heavy chain mail, numbe
rs of his men died of thirst and heat stroke. This kind of military tourism had become a repeated and, at times, aggravating problem for the kingdom of Jerusalem. Newly arrived crusaders, hungry for action but often never staying long enough to make a substantial difference, stirred up trouble without any comprehension of the delicate compromises that now allowed Outremer to survive. It was a tendency that would precipitate Acre’s final crisis.

  The Mongols’ reply to Edward, which took months to arrive, was encouraging. They undertook a new campaign, drove the Mamluks out of Aleppo, and compelled Baybars to move north. In the interim, Edward launched a second front, attempting to capture the Mamluk castle of Qaqun, forty miles to the south, which guarded the road to Jerusalem. His small force again ravaged the land around, but the castle held out, being “very strong, surrounded by ditches full of water.”8 Any hopes of real progress were further dented by the news that the Mongols had withdrawn from Aleppo in the face of Baybars’s advance. As to Qaqun, the sultan scornfully remarked that “if so many men cannot take a house, it seems unlikely that they will conquer the kingdom of Jerusalem.”9 A further perplexity for new arrivals in the Holy Land who came with preconceptions of the implacable confrontation with Islam was that the people of Qaqun were routinely accustomed to selling their agricultural surpluses in the markets of Acre.

  OVER THE WINTER of 1271–1272, Edward borrowed money to strengthen Acre’s defenses by constructing a new tower on the critical section of the outer wall, fronting it with a further low wall to protect its base. He additionally founded a small military order, the Confraternity of St. Edward the Confessor, expressly dedicated to the defense of this English Tower. Meanwhile, Baybars pondered the continued threat represented by Edward’s presence. In December 1271, he feinted a further attack on the city, a calculated attempt to unsettle and undermine.