Holy Warriors (48 page)

Louis had been determined to live as a true Christian monarch and crusading lay at the very heart of his thinking. The seven years he spent overseas between 1248 and 1254 represent an unmatched level of devotion to the Holy Land. Yet for all his prayers, suffering, and financial outlay, he had, as he knew all too well, failed to turn around Christian fortunes in the Levant. His personal devotion in both France and Outremer was recognized in 1292 when he was canonized—the first crusader king to become a saint.

After Louis’s death the French army soon broke up and returned home, although an important latecomer was to land in the Levant rather than
North Africa. Louis had induced Lord Edward (soon to be King Edward I of England), eldest son of King Henry III, to join the crusade, and after wintering in Sicily the prince set sail for the Holy Land in the spring of 1271.
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The arrival of a powerful westerner was a cause for excitement and King Hugh I of Jerusalem and Cyprus (the two crowns were united at this time) came over to Acre. Edward, Hugh, and the Military Orders executed several large raids into Muslim territory but their forces were nowhere near big enough to engage Baibars. At Acre, Edward survived an assassination attempt. His entourage contained a convert from Islam whom the crusaders were using as a spy; he had given good information to the Christians and seemed to prove his loyalty during an earlier foray. One night he came to the royal chambers where Edward and his wife were sleeping and claimed to have urgent news for him. Dressed only in his undershirt and drawers, Edward opened the door and the traitor stabbed him deep in the hip; the prince was not felled, however; in one mighty punch, he knocked out his assailant, then grabbed a dagger and killed him. The prince’s wound was sutured and luckily for him it remained free of infection; he recovered to leave the Levant in October 1272.

Baibars continued to squeeze the Christians closer to extinction—while at the same time he was also at war with the Seljuk Turks of Asia Minor and the Mongols of Persia. On occasion he made truces with the Franks to enable him to pursue these other opponents individually, although he tended to break these agreements when it suited him.
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In 1277 he embarked upon a major campaign in Asia Minor and seemed poised to take control of the region only to return to Damascus to face a threatened Mongol invasion. There, on June 20, 1277, he fell ill while watching a polo match. He had consumed some qumiz, a highly alcoholic brew made from fermented mare’s milk (not the wine so frowned upon by the sultan himself), a drink that can be lethal if it goes bad; given Baibars’s atrocious record of murder and deceit, rumors of poisoning abounded but no one was identified as responsible for his death. He was buried in Damascus, where his modified tomb remains in its original setting, the Zahiriyya madrasa, a couple of hundred meters from the resting place of Saladin. Few grieved the death of such a harsh ruler, yet he had maintained power for seventeen years and proved the most gifted and imaginative commander of the age. A carefully developed administration meant that by the time of his death his lands were immeasurably better organized for war than before. He had been a remorseless
foe of the Franks and did much to break their hold on the Levantine coast. As his biographer wrote: “The sultan stood among his comrades like a sun among the bright stars and like a lion amongst the cubs it protects. He trained to fight the unbelievers and continued to fight the holy war day and night.”
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Baibars’s death did not mean the end of the Mamluk threat. In contrast to many previous successions in the Muslim world there was no civil war. After a brief reign by Baibars’s son, the former sultan’s chief emir, Qalawun, emerged in power. He was another former slave, nicknamed “al-Alfi,” the thousander, on account of the high price that he had fetched at auction. He served his master well and his daughter had married into the sultan’s family; he was also a highly experienced soldier. Soon he had to confront the Mongols because in 1280 they plundered Aleppo. A year later, at the Battle of Homs, two huge armies met and practically obliterated each other; the carnage was immense but Qalawun held the field and so the victory went to him.

By the late 1280s the pattern familiar from Baibars’s reign was repeating itself. Major Christian castles and cities fell with alarming regularity: Marqab in 1285, Latakia in 1287, and Tripoli in 1289. The Mamluks genuinely intended to erase the Frankish presence. Qalawun began to focus on Acre, the settlers’ capital city; it would be a huge challenge to breach its massive defenses, but if the sultan succeeded it would definitively break Christian power in the Holy Land. A truce was in operation but when a group of newly arrived crusaders killed Muslim farmers in Acre, the sultan had a casus belli. Since his success at Tripoli he had employed military inspectors to ensure that the castles near Acre were ready for war and he ordered the construction of special siege engines from Lebanese cedar wood. Before he could act, however, Qalawun was fatally poisoned. On his deathbed he was said to have urged his son, al-Ashraf, to take Acre and to avenge the blood of the Saracens slain by the crusaders.
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In March 1291 al-Ashraf gathered a huge army, assembled from Egypt, Palestine, and Syria; meanwhile any Franks who lived in the countryside
fled behind the walls of Acre. The city was crammed with refugees; perhaps thirty to forty thousand men, women, and children defended by around eight hundred knights and thirteen thousand footmen. Al-Ashraf sent a letter to the master of the Templars that conveyed unyielding menace:

On April 5, 1291, the siege began when al-Ashraf pitched his red tent with its entrance facing the city of Acre. Soon the Muslims brought forward enormous siege engines, mighty machines that could fire stones weighing about fifty kilograms each. One was called “Furious;” another, “the Victorious,” took one hundred wagons to transport it (in kit form) from its home at Krak des Chevaliers; two other huge machines are also known to have been used.

Boldly, the Franks took the initiative and charged out of the city gates to harass the Muslim camp. They also sent out ships from the harbor and landed troops near the enemy lines to fire bows and portable ballistas. One particularly heavy raid penetrated the Muslim camp and caused panic—an emir fell into the latrine pit and drowned—but a swift counterattack drove back the Christians with heavy casualties. Over the weeks, however, the pressure on the Franks increased; the Muslims hid behind huge padded wicker screens that deflected artillery fire and, protected by these devices, they moved up to the ditch outside the city. Such was their numerical superiority that they could work four shifts a day and still remain fresh.

The Christians gained some relief from the arrival of King Henry II of Cyprus and a cease-fire was declared. The king tried to negotiate but al-Ashraf was not prepared to leave without taking the city and would only offer free passage to the defenders and its inhabitants. Henry could never agree to this “because the people overseas would hold us to be traitors;” he did not want to be the man who had surrendered the capital of the Christian
presence in the Holy Land.
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Under the cover of a heavy bombardment the Muslims mined the outer wall and the Tower of the King and created a breach of such dimensions that the defenders panicked. More and more women and children were evacuated to Cyprus—the dismal Mamluk navy meant that Christian shipping was fairly safe.

The beating of a huge drum “which had a horrible and mighty voice,” as one eyewitness characterized it, signaled a general onslaught. The Muslims advanced on foot; first came shield-bearers, behind them men hurled Greek fire, and next came javelin-throwers and archers. They spread out between Acre’s inner and outer walls and concentrated on two gates that barred the city. William of Beaujeu, the master of the Templars, left his own tower and rushed toward the Gate of Saint Anthony. The Muslims continued their terrible bombardment of Greek fire, arrows, and spears; when the knights charged at them “it seemed as if they hurled themselves against a stone wall.”
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In the middle of the engagement William was grievously wounded when a javelin hit him under the armpit. When the standard-bearer saw him turn his horse away he followed, assuming that William was leading a retreat, but others called out for the master not to leave or else the city would fall. William revealed his wound and collapsed forward, almost falling from his mount. Men rushed to hold him in the saddle and then eased him onto a shield and carried him to the Templar headquarters inside the citadel. He lived one day longer, asking only to be left to die in peace.

The Muslims poured into the city and took tower after tower. The French regiment founded by Louis IX fought bravely but nothing could withstand the onslaught. King Henry and the master of the hospital saw that all was lost, boarded boats, and fled to Cyprus; May 18, 1291, was an inauspicious day for the Latin hierarchy. Not everyone was so fortunate; women and children remained and many were soon slaughtered. The Templar compound was the last place of refuge, the strongest location of all. At last an agreement of safe conduct was made. A group of Muslim horsemen came in and, according to Muslim and Christian sources, started to molest the female prisoners. Furious, the Franks attacked and killed them. Al-Ashraf claimed to accept responsibility for this incident and he asked to talk to the senior Templars. Once they were in his possession, however, he beheaded them all; in response, five Muslim prisoners were precipitated from the walls. For the surviving knights and citizens in the Templar tower there was no hope of escape. After ten days a corner in the complex was mined, and as
the defenders surrendered it collapsed, killing Muslims and Christians alike. More carnage ensued—Franciscan and Dominican friars, female mendicants (the Poor Clares) were slain, while long lines of women and children were led off into slavery. Thus the city of Acre fell. The Christian capture of Jerusalem in 1099 and the Muslim victory at Acre in 1291 bookended the crusader presence in the Holy Land with massacres of exceptional savagery. Within a short time Sidon, Beirut, Athlit, Jubail, and Tyre capitulated as well. On August 3, 1291, when the last group of knights left Tortosa for the tiny isle of Ruad, just over a mile off the Syrian shore, it marked the end of Christian rule on the mainland. Almost two hundred years after the First Crusaders had achieved an improbable victory at Jerusalem, their successors fled for their lives, or died. The Franks had fought hard but their penchant for ruinous political infighting, the failure of Louis’s crusades, and the lack of further meaningful help from the West, coupled with the focus and strength of their Mamluk opponents, meant the end of an era. Al-Ashraf had fulfilled Saladin’s ambition at last. As the Muslim writer Ibn al-Furat wrote in a panegyric to his successful sultan:

FROM THE TRIAL OF THE TEMPLARS TO FERDINAND AND ISABELLA, COLUMBUS, AND THE CONQUEST OF THE NEW WORLD

A
s dawn broke on Friday, October 13, 1307, royal officials smashed their way into Templar priories and commanderies across France and arrested hundreds of knights.
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The men were accused of a series of profane reception rituals that included: the denial of Christ’s divinity, saying that he was a false prophet; spitting on the cross; kissing the officiating knight on the mouth, navel, and genitals; worshipping false idols; and engaging in further homosexual acts.
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This was a very contentious move on the part of the French crown because the Templars were the most feared and formidable warriors in Christendom; in modern terms it would be comparable to a claim that the U.S. Marines were disloyal to the American government and then, within years, disbanding them.

The crackdown was sudden and largely unexpected. The decision to persecute the Templars can, in part, be explained by the personality of their chief adversary, King Philip IV “the Fair” (a reference to his good looks, rather than his character) of France (1285–1316). Philip was an austere man of high moral tone and it is possible that he saw some truth in the allegations and felt justified in moving to end the pollution of a religious order. Yet other, less lofty, ideals were in evidence too: expensive wars against England and Flanders meant that Philip owed the Templars massive sums of money and the need to repair his ailing finances was strongly rumored to underlie his actions. Recent events had rendered the order
strangely susceptible to these accusations and to leap from the Templars’ arrest to their complete destruction in only five years demonstrates peculiar vulnerability in a group hailed by many as the bravest of the brave. One trivial indication of the Templars’ customary standing was their central role in
Parzival
, the popular story of the Holy Grail, composed in the first decade of the thirteenth century: who, other than the Templars, were fit to be the guardians of this most sacred object? Yet there had been complaints about the Templars’ wealth, and sometimes their greed, for decades. Churchmen, in particular, grumbled about their substantial landholdings in western Europe (over nine thousand properties) and resented their exemptions from ecclesiastical taxes. Such corporate riches were a long, long way from the simple and rigorous path of founding father Hugh of Payns and his eight companions back in 1120, but this stupendous accumulation of property reflected their long-lasting popularity among lay donors, grateful for the Templars’ protection during pilgrimages and their efforts in fighting the Muslims. In any case, these vast resources were vital because of the phenomenal cost of developing and holding spectacular castles such as Krak des Chevaliers. By 1307, however, the Templars’ prime problem was one of perception. With the expulsion of the Christians from Acre in 1291 many felt that the order had failed in its primary task, the defense of the Holy Land, and for this reason it became far more open to criticism than before. The Templar master, James of Molay, had a rather different perspective: to him, the Holy Land fell because of the indifference of western Europe and it was in an attempt to gather new crusading armies that he happened—fatefully for him—to be in France during late 1307.