The Fall of Crusader Acre

By the late thirteenth century the once-great Crusader states had shrunk to a strip of fortified ports along the coast of Syria and Palestine, of which Acre (Akka), strongly walled, rich and populous, was the chief city and effective capital. In 690 AH, 1291 CE, the Mamluk sultan al-Ashraf Khalil (rahimahu Allah), son of Qalawun and heir to the long Mamluk campaign to drive the Franks from the coast that Baybars and Qalawun had pressed stronghold by stronghold, brought a great army against Acre with a formidable train of mangonels and miners. The Egyptian historian al-Maqrizi, in his Kitab al-Suluk, records the muster of the army and the engines; Baybars al-Mansuri, a Mamluk amir of the reign, in his Zubdat al-Fikra and the chronicle of Ibn al-Furat give the course of the siege; and the prince Abu al-Fida, who was present as a young Ayyubid lord of Hama, describes in his Mukhtasar fi Akhbar al-Bashar the labour at the walls and the storm. The siege opened in the spring and ran for some six weeks while the Mamluks battered and undermined the double land-walls with their great stone-throwing engines and miners' galleries, and the defenders, the garrison, the citizens and the knights of the Templars, Hospitallers and Teutonic Knights, resisted; at length the towers were brought down, the walls were breached, and the city was stormed and taken amid hard fighting, while a part of the population fled by sea from the harbour and many others were killed or enslaved. The fall of Acre broke the back of the Frankish presence in the East: within months the remaining holdings on the coast, Tyre, Sidon, Beirut, Haifa, Tortosa and Atlit, were abandoned or surrendered one after another, and the long enterprise of the Crusader kingdoms in the Holy Land, begun with the capture of Jerusalem in 1099, came to its end. For the Muslims it was the final liberation of the Syrian coast and is remembered as the close of the Crusader wars in the land. This scene depicts the storm itself: a great mangonel at work in the foreground under the yellow banners of the besiegers, the double land-wall breached and ladders raised against it as the assault goes in amid flying stones and rising dust, and out at the harbour the ships crowded with people taking flight by sea. In keeping with the project's ethics any figure is anonymous and at a distance, no gunpowder cannon appears (correct for 1291), and the violence of the storm is conveyed without graphic gore.