The Dream and the Tomb (64 page)

On the night of March 30, 1282, Charles of Anjou received the greatest shock of his life. The Sicilians, exasperated by the behavior of the French army of occupation, rose up and massacred every Frenchman they could lay their hands on. The Sicilian Vespers came as an inevitable result of Charles's depradations, arrogance, and incompetence. With this uprising, his dreams of a Mediterranean empire, with himself as emperor of Byzantium and king of Jerusalem, crumbled. Charles would no longer play any role in Crusader affairs.

Meanwhile, Qalawun continued to ravage the Christian outposts in the Holy Land, capturing the great Hospitaller castle at Marqab, but was not yet ready for the final assault on Acre. He watched from a distance while the kings of Jerusalem succeeded one another. King Hugh III died. His eldest son, John, a graceful and delicate boy of seventeen, followed him. John died a year later, and his younger brother Henry was crowned at Tyre on August 15, 1286. His coronation was attended by elaborate festivities. Henry was fourteen, handsome, gracious, very brave, and an epileptic. In less than five years he would see the downfall of his kingdom in the ruins of Acre.

*
The Orontes, called
al-'Asi
, “the rebel,” by the Arabs, because it flows from south to north.

*
He is referring to the long-drawn and bitterly fought Welsh wars of King Henry III.

THERE were men who said Acre was one of the oldest cities of the earth, or at least as old as any city on the Palestinian coast. It appears on the conquest list of Thutmose III, which was drawn up about 1500
B.C
. It is mentioned in the Amarna tablets of the heretical Pharaoh Akhenaton. In the third century
B.C
. Ptolemy II Philadelphus founded it afresh and gave it his name—Acre or Akka became Ptolomeis. In the ninth century
A.D
. Ahmed ibn-Tulun, the Governor of Egypt, conquered Syria and decided to fortify the city with a great seawall. The Franks conquered it and changed its name to Saint-Jean d'Acre. It grew and flourished under the Franks until toward the end of the thirteenth century it was, after Constantinople, the richest city in the region, with huge towers and walls dominating the landward approaches, an inner and outer harbor, a large customs house where the customs officers sat on carpets and dipped their pens in inkwells of ebony and gold. There were squares and open spaces in the city, shaded from the sun by huge painted cloths stretching from wall to wall. Workmen and artisans lived in the center of the city, and here, too, were the shops and the marketplaces. There were thirty-eight churches, and when, on Sunday, all the church bells rang, they could be heard for more than a mile out to sea.

Acre was a mercantile town, trading with all the countries of Europe and with Egypt and the East. Lombards, Pisans, Genoese, Venetians, and Germans had their own warehouses and what corresponded to chambers of commerce. They were continually quarreling with one another, so that it became the custom to erect barricades in the narrow streets at the first sign of fighting. It was said that there were 14,000 prostitutes to serve a population of perhaps 120,000, of whom half were Muslims. Since the Muslims lived in the city, there was very little about the government and the military which was not quickly known in Damascus and Cairo. Acre lived off its traders; it had few factories, but more warehouses than anyone could count. Furs from Russia, turquoises from Persia, silks from China, rubies
from India could be bought in the enormous marketplaces. The popes thundered against the vice and luxury of the great seaport but could do nothing to change it. Acre lived according to its own momentum.

In theory, the city was ruled by Henry II of Lusignan, King of Cyprus and Jerusalem. In fact it was ruled by a multitude of rulers, most of them exiles from the lost Kingdom of Jerusalem. The papal legate, the grand master of the Temple, the grand master of the Hospitallers, the grand master of the Teutonic Knights, and various princes who had taken refuge in Acre when their lands and estates passed into the hands of the Saracens—all had something to do with the government of the city, which was divided into twenty-seven districts, each one largely self-governing. In such a city, government works awkwardly. There were too many rulers and too many things that could go wrong.

In a situation so complex and so difficult, it was disastrous when foreigners came into the city. They upset the balance of forces, and massacred Muslims, thus giving the sultan a ready-made pretext to attack the city and destroy it stone by stone.

Pope Nicholas IV received an urgent appeal for more soldiers. He was able to enroll a few hundred peasants and unemployed laborers under the banner of the Cross. They came from Lombardy and Tuscany, and were shipped off to Acre in Venetian vessels under the command of Nicholas Tiepolo, the son of the reigning doge. The papal treasury provided three thousand gold pieces to pay for the expedition. Five galleys owned and outfitted by King James of Aragon accompanied the new Crusaders, who arrived in Acre toward the end of August, 1290.

It was the season of festivities; there had been a superb harvest in the Galilee; Damascus merchants were once more sending their produce to the marketplaces of Acre. The prince of Tyre, the brother of the king of Cyprus, was in residence in the royal palace, and he received Nicholas Tiepolo with all the honor due his rank. There was always the fear that Sultan Qalawun would attack, but the relations between the Franks and Egypt seemed to be improving. Suddenly, in that peaceful summer, there were signs that there might not be any more summers.

A few days after they arrived at Acre, the Tuscans and Lombards went on a rampage. Apparently they had not been paid, they were unruly after the long sea voyage, and they had no understanding of the habits and customs of a Levantine city. Acre flaunted its wealth; they had none, or so little that it scarcely counted. They thought they had come to fight the Saracens, and there were Saracens all around them. Bernard, Bishop of Tripoli, had been placed in charge of them by the pope, but had no control over them. Debauched, drunken, without roots in the country, seeing themselves as foreigners in a strange land, despised by the people of Acre, and without any resources of their own, they raced through the streets in murderous
fury, killing every Muslim they encountered. They killed men, women, and children indiscriminately, but they had a special hatred for bearded Muslim merchants. They swept through the marketplace in the center of the city and out into the suburbs. Since many Christians wore beards, they too were killed. The riot started so quickly that the police, the soldiers, and the knights were taken by surprise. Some Muslims were dragged to safety in the castle, others found refuge in private houses. The Lombards and Tuscans were rounded up, but many escaped. It was as though a hurricane had appeared out of a cloudless sky and killed about a thousand people in the city.

The government, knowing that the news of the massacre would soon reach Egypt, immediately offered its apologies to Qalawun. But Qalawun was in no mood to listen to apologies. He sent his representatives to Acre to demand that all the men responsible for the outrage should be handed over to him for punishment, which meant execution. The city councillors met and debated the sultan's demand at some length. The grand master of the Temple suggested that the matter could be settled very easily by sending all the prisoners in the city jails to Egypt. This was a characteristic Templar solution. The idea of a general scouring of the prisons was abandoned; no better ideas were advanced; and the councillors announced that the massacre was at least partly the fault of the Muslims and they hoped the sultan would accept their apologies and forget the matter.

The sultan did not forget. Incensed by the massacre, and also by the high-handed attitude of the councillors, he resolved to destroy Acre. He summoned his jurists and asked them for advice. He had signed a treaty with the king of Cyprus. Could he break it, and on what grounds? One jurist advised him that he had the power to break or maintain the treaty at his pleasure, but he was more impressed by the argument that the treaty had been broken by the Christians, who had failed to obey the clause by which all Muslims within Acre were under the protection of the civil government and every offense against them must be punished by the Christian magistrates. This had not been done, and accordingly a state of war existed between Egypt and the Latin Kingdom.

Qalawun was so delighted with the latter argument that he issued an immediate order for a vast number of trees at Baalbek and in the region between Caesarea and Athlit to be cut down for making siege engines. The Christians quickly learned that the trees were being cut down and began to raid the places where the woodcutters were at work. When winter came, the work of the woodcutters was made difficult by both the intense cold and the raids of the knights.

The master of the Temple had for some time traditionally enjoyed a secret correspondence with Qalawun. This correspondence was now coming to an end. Qalawun wrote to the master saying that he had come to an
irrevocable decision: Acre must be destroyed, it was useless to hope he would receive envoys, his mind was made up. The Master, William of Beaujeu tried one last, desperate appeal.

Qalawun relented. He offered to spare Acre for a ransom of one Venetian sequin from each inhabitant of Acre. Sequins were gold coins, worth about ten dollars, and the ransom therefore amounted to about $600,000. This was a huge sum for the time, but not beyond the ability of the citizens to raise. William of Beaujeu summoned a meeting of the citizens at the Church of St. Cross to listen to the demand for ransom. Instead of agreeing to pay the ransom, they laughed in his face, hurled abuse at him, accused him of being a traitor for having secret correspondence with the enemy, and would have killed him if he had not escaped in time.

The councillors of Acre decided to send one more embassy to Cairo. When they reached Qalawun's court, he refused to see them. They were either murdered on the spot or thrown into prison. Nothing more was ever heard of them.

At the end of the year, Qalawun sent messages to all the Arab states, proclaiming that, as a result of innumerable violations of the treaty by the Christians, he was resolved to destroy Acre. In a letter to King Hethum of Armenia, he wrote that he had sworn on the Koran that not one single Christian would be left alive in that accursed city.

The Christians, too, were sending out proclamations and appeals. Letters were sent to the pope, to friendly kings, to the Templars and Hospitallers in the West, and to the king of Cyprus, urgently demanding aid. In Acre the Patriarch Nicholas, John of Grailly, and an extraordinary knight called Otto of Grandson formed a military command, and at once gave orders to repair all the towers and battlements, which had recently been strengthened by King Henry of Cyprus. The city was in a good state of defense. It could hold off a large army almost indefinitely, if there was good leadership, because it could be provisioned and supplied by sea. Able men were in command of some sectors of the wall, but there were others commanded by men who were cowardly and without resolution.

Suddenly, the city councillors heard that Qalawun had died soon after marching out of Cairo, and they exulted. They thought the danger was past. But with his dying breath, the seventy-year-old sultan had commanded his son al-Ashraf Khalil to continue the expedition against Acre, and not to rest until the city was in ruins. He also commanded his son to leave his body unburied until the day Acre fell.

About 40,000 cavalry and 160,000 foot soldiers converged on Acre. Huge mangonels, called “black oxen,” were dragged through the mud and sleet of a particularly hard winter. There were two hundred of them, more than had ever been gathered together against a single city. Two towering siege engines called “the Victorious” and “the Furious,” which took the form of giant catapults, were also brought to Acre on carts drawn by a hundred
pairs of oxen. By sheer force of numbers, and by the weight of his military machinery, Khalil expected to overwhelm the last fortress of the Crusaders.

The siege of Acre began on April 5, 1291, when Khalil arrived before the city with great pomp. The defenders were vastly outnumbered by Khalil's army, yet during the first weeks of the siege they fought brilliantly. Sometimes they opened the great gates, thus taunting the enemy to enter. They refused to play the defensive role the enemy assigned to them, and they often made small sorties outside the city walls. On the night of April 15, under a full moon, a small army of Franks attacked the camp of the prince of Hama, who was taken by surprise. Most of the Franks were Templars, who fought with their accustomed fury. Many lost their lives, but the Muslims also suffered. With the first light, the prince of Hama had the pleasure of stringing together the heads of some of the Crusaders and placing them like a wreath around the neck of a captured horse and sending it as a present to Khalil. The Crusaders could have done the very same thing with Muslim heads.

A few days later, the Hospitallers made a sortie through the Gate of St. Anthony. It was a very dark night, the Hospitallers moved stealthily, and they were about to spring on the camp when suddenly the night was made bright by thousands of torches held in the hands of white-robed Muslims. Khalil's men had got wind of the affair, and they sprang a surprise on those who had hoped to surprise them. There followed a fierce battle by the light of torches, with two thousand slain on each side. Such sorties proved to be too costly and were discontinued.

On May 4, a new commander arrived in Acre. He was King Henry II of Lusignan and Cyprus, brother of the prince of Tyre, who came with forty ships from Cyprus. He had about a hundred horsemen, two thousand foot soldiers, and plentiful supplies. He was greeted with processions and hymns, as though he were the destined savior of Acre.

Khalil heard of his coming and deliberately increased his fire, pounding the walls with rocks and launching a vast quantity of Greek fire. His sappers were at work attempting to undermine the tower named for the king. Other towers were also being mined. The noise inside the city was deafening. The walls trembled, and the booming of the sultan's kettledrums could be heard throughout the city. Against the enemy mines, the Franks built countermines; sometimes the mines met, and there would be fierce hand-to-hand fighting deep beneath the city walls.