Siege of Acre (1291)

Siege of Acre

Part of: Crusades

The Marshal of St. John, Mathieu de Clermont, defends the walls of Acre.
Painting by Dominique Papety, 1845

date	April 6, 1291 to May 28, 1291
place	Acre ; Kingdom of Jerusalem
output	Victory of the Mamluks

Parties to the conflict
Kingdom of Jerusalem Kingdom Cyprus Knights Templar Order of St. John German Order of Saint Lazarus	Mamluks
Commander
Amalrich of Tire Heinrich II. Guillaume de Beaujeu † Jean de Villiers	Al-Ashraf Chalil
Troop strength
up to 15,000 and 2,000 by Heinrich II.	60,000 horsemen 160,000 foot soldiers
losses
unknown	unknown

In the course of the siege of Acre by the Mamluks , the last significant bastion of the Kingdom of Jerusalem was lost on May 28, 1291 . Jerusalem itself had been in the hands of the Muslims again since 1244; Tire , Sidon and Beirut were to fall between May and July 1291.

Events in advance

In August 1290 there was a massacre of Muslim traders in Acre. Some Jewish and Christian residents also fell victim to the riots. This massacre was carried out by drunk, demoralized Lombard and Tuscan crusaders, mostly of peasant origin, who had been condemned to idleness for weeks ; the only ones who, after the fall of the county of Tripoli (see Tripoli (Lebanon) ) in 1289, followed the Pope's call for a new crusade to save the Christians in the Holy Land. For the gentlemen of Acre, who found themselves in a rather precarious situation and had actually hoped for professional support in the form of professional soldiers or mercenaries , this undisciplined bunch from Italy was extremely inconvenient. The city, overflowing with refugees, now had to accommodate and pay these "crusaders" from Italy, who were not familiar with the local customs, and ultimately did not succeed. In addition, an armistice had been concluded with the Mamluks with great difficulty, which is why on the one hand the Italians could not move against the enemy and on the other hand Muslim traders came to Acre again. The “Crusaders” who came to the Holy Land to fight the infidels found it difficult to understand why the Muslims in the city should be left unmolested. This is also the background to the outbreak of the unrest and the massacre that followed.

The Mameluk Sultan Qalawun demanded from Acre the extradition of the crusaders involved and compensation in the amount of thirty thousand Venetian zecchins , an extremely high sum for the time. But the city councils of Akon were unwilling to pay or extradite the perpetrators. Under the pretext of wanting to march into Africa, the Sultan provided an army in Cairo in the summer of 1290 . When he set this on the march in November 1290 for his real project, the expulsion of Christians from the Holy Land, he fell ill and died six days later. Surprisingly, Qalawun's son al-Ashraf Chalil was able to assert himself as Sultan within a few weeks without the usual turmoil and resolutely carried on with his father's plan. Because of the late season he postponed the attack until the following spring.

Deployment and troop strengths

Al-Ashraf Chalil marched from Cairo in March 1291 and gathered his Egyptian and Syrian troops in Damascus . He carried numerous siege devices with him. An enormous number of volunteers had joined his army, who were deployed in particular for excavation work. He was additionally strengthened by armies of his vassals Lajin from Damascus, al-Muzaffar Taqai ad-Din from Hama , Bilban from Tripoli and Baibars al-Dewadar from Kerak , who joined in front of Acre. The latter contingent also included the Arab historian Abu l-Fida , who reports on the siege in his work Mukhtassar tarikh al-Bashar . The huge numbers in the Mamluk army seem greatly exaggerated, but are not impossible and represent well how great the superiority of the Mamluk army was. The Mamluk army camped outside Acre on April 5 and enclosed the city from the land side.

The defenders then concentrated their troops. Every able-bodied resident of Akkon was drafted. Their King Henry II of Jerusalem and Cyprus was sick at the time, but had his fleet commute between Cyprus and Acre to bring reinforcements and provisions to the city and to evacuate at least some of the women and children. The king transferred the supreme command to his brother Amalrich . This was supported by the contingents of the four orders of knights, the Templars under Grand Master Guillaume de Beaujeu , the Johannitern under Grand Master Jean de Villiers and the Knights of Germany under Grand Master Burchard von Schwanden , who surprisingly resigned and handed over his command to Heinrich von Bouland, and a troop of the Order of Lazarus . There was also a small contingent of English knights under Otton de Grandson , as well as a French contingent under Jean I. de Grailly , as well as other smaller European contingents. Altogether there were about 1,000 mounted and 12,000 to 14,000 foot soldiers on the side of the crusaders, the population of Acon is estimated at about 40,000. On May 2nd, King Henry II, who had since recovered, arrived with another 100 mounted and 2,000 foot soldiers. Acre was strongly fortified and had a double wall ring on the land side, which was reinforced with several large towers.

Course of the siege

Acre at the time of the siege in 1291.

On April 6, 1291, the Mamluk catapults began hurling stones and fire over the city walls. On the evening of the eighth day, the attackers began to erect barricades and to work their way to the foot of the city walls under the protection of large partitions made of wicker, which were supposed to protect them against the arrow fire from the defenders. More throwing machines were brought into position and parts of the walls were undermined. Again and again, especially under cover of night, the defenders made attacks, but they were all repulsed.

During the entire siege, the crusaders had access to the city by sea. However, in view of the overwhelming strength of the enemy, they were unable to bring in sufficient reinforcements. They received their only significant reinforcement from King Henry II on May 2nd. From May 8, individual towers of the outer ring of the city wall began to collapse gradually. With a major attack by the Mamluks on May 15, the defenders were pushed back into the inner wall, which they were able to hold for the time being. At dawn on May 18, the Muslims launched another major attack on the city. After fierce fighting, in which Guillaume de Beaujeu, the Grand Master of the Templar Order, was fatally wounded, the attackers succeeded in storming a section of the inner wall ring near the Tower of Damnation (also Damned Tower), with which they managed to break through into the city. Now bloody street fights began, in which the Muslims showed no mercy towards either the defenders or the civilian population. After breaking into the city, Akkos Johanniterkommende , the Teutonic Order House and the Knights Templar fortress in Eisenburg could hold out for some time. The Marshal of St. John, Mathieu de Clermont , as well as all twenty-five Knights of Lazarus were killed in battle. Some defenders and civilians were able to save themselves on the few ships in the port, including King Henry II and the seriously injured Johanniter Grand Master Jean de Villiers.

At nightfall, Acre was in the hands of al-Ashraf Chalil, with the exception of the iron castle , the fortified headquarters of the Knights Templar. There the Templars, under the command of their Marshal Pierre de Sevry, holed up with a few surviving citizens. Negotiations on the surrender against free withdrawal failed on May 27th, whereupon the later Templar Grand Master Thibaud Gaudin escaped under cover of the night with a ship to Sidon , where he evacuated the treasure of the Templars. The Mameluks had meanwhile undermined the iron castle, which finally collapsed on May 28th and buried the defenders under them. In the end, seven Knights of St. John and ten Knights Templar escaped across the sea, and orders of German and Lazarus had no survivors.

consequences

With the loss of Acon, the resistance of the Crusader states on the Levant was broken. The last remaining cities and fortresses of the crusaders then fell without any major fighting. Tire had already been lost on May 19, 1291, Sidon was occupied at the end of June, the Templars in the sea fortress in front of Sidon held out until July 14, Beirut surrendered on July 31, the Templars evacuated their Château Pèlerin castles on May 3. August and Tartus on August 14th. Only the fortified, waterless island of Aruad off the coast of Tartus lasted until 1302 . The whole country was now under the rule of Sultan al-Ashraf Chalil, who ordered that all fortifications on the Mediterranean coast be systematically destroyed so that the crusaders would never be able to anchor themselves on the coast again.

swell

There are three eyewitness accounts of the siege of Acre. The oldest is a letter from the Grand Master of St. John, Jean de Villiers , to the Master of the Order of Provence, Guillaume de Villaret, dating back to 1291 (June?) . A second report was written about ten years later by the anonymous Templar of Tire in his chronicle, who had taken part in the fighting in Acre. On the Muslim side, the chronicler Abu l-Fida was in the sultan's squad and later described the last fight against the Christians in the holy land in his universal history ( Mukhtasar ta'rikh al-bashar ).

literature

• Erwin Stickel: The Fall of Akkon - Investigations into the subsiding of the idea of ​​the crusade at the end of the 13th century . Herbert Lang, Bern 1975.
• Steven Runciman : History of the Crusades . Dtv, Munich 2003. ( ISBN 3-423-30175-9 )
• Reinhard Barth / Uwe Birnstein / Ralph Ludwig / Michael Solka: The Chronicle of the Crusades . Chronik Verlag, Gütersloh / Munich 2003. ( ISBN 3-577-14609-5 )
• Robert Lee Wolff / Harry W. Hazard (eds.): The later Crusades, 1189-1311 (A History of the Crusades 2) . University of Wisconsin Press, Madison 1969, pp. 593 ff.
• Desmond Seward: The Monks of War. The Military Religious Orders. Archon Books, London 1972.

Notes and individual references

1. ↑ Adam Wienand, "Die Johanniter und die Kreuzzüge", in: Der Johanniter-Orden - Der Malteser-Orden: The knightly order of St. John from the hospital in Jerusalem - His tasks, his history , Adam Wienand (ed.) With Carl Wolfgang Graf von Ballestrem and Christoph Freiherr von Imhoff, Cologne: Wienand, 1977, pp. 32–108, here p. 105.
2. ↑ Adam Wienand, "Die Johanniter und die Kreuzzüge", in: Der Johanniter-Orden - Der Malteser-Orden: The knightly order of St. John from the hospital in Jerusalem - His tasks, his history , Adam Wienand (ed.) With Carl Wolfgang Graf von Ballestrem and Christoph Freiherr von Imhoff, Cologne: Wienand, 1977, pp. 32–108, here p. 106.
3. ↑ See Albrecht Fuess: Burned Shore. Effects of Mamluk Maritime Policy on Beirut and the Syro-Palestinian Coast (1250–1517). Islamic history and civilization, Vol. 39. Brill Academic Pub, Cologne 2001, p. 107 ff.
4. ↑ On the Grand Master's letter, see V. Le Clerc: Relation anonyme de le prize d'Acre en 1291 , In: Histoire littéraire de la France , 20 (1842)

Coordinates: 32 ° 55 ′ 10 ″  N , 35 ° 4 ′ 1 ″  E