The Fall of Acre and the End of the Crusades

When the churchman Jacques de Vitry stepped ashore at the city of Acre in November 1216, he was appalled. Vitry had come to Palestine to take up his position as the city’s bishop with a mission to rejuvenate the spiritual fervour of its people in advance of a new crusade, but instead of a pious Christian stronghold he found a brawling, dynamic and cosmopolitan Mediterranean port. Vitry painted a lurid picture of a disputatious city of sin, ‘like a monster or a beast, having nine heads each fighting the other’, where prostitution was everywhere, black magic rife and murder common. He was confused by Acre’s cultural complexity and variant Christian sects. He had to use an Arabic interpreter to address some of his flock: heavily bearded men who looked like Muslims and veiled their women, Eastern Syrians, Georgians, Armenians and orientalised Europeans. Meanwhile, the Italian merchant communities of Genoese, Pisans and Venetians simply ignored his attempts to excommunicate them, rarely if ever listened to the word of God and ‘even refused to come to my sermon’. Vitry was experiencing all the disorientation of arriving in the Middle East – yet in a city whose houses, towers, palaces and Gothic churches looked puzzlingly European.

Ancient Acre

With one short interruption, the crusaders had held Acre for over a century. When Pope Urban II delivered his rallying call to save Jerusalem in 1095, a crusader army slogged the 2,000 miles from Europe into the Middle East and, against all reasonable expectations, captured the holy city. The venture was massively attritional. Of the 35,000 who set out, only about 12,000 saw Jerusalem. It was clear that the land route was unsustainable. Military planners learnt of the need to transport armies by ships, the services of Italian maritime republics to provide them and the necessity of ports to receive them.

The city that the crusaders called Acre – Akka in Arabic, Akko in Hebrew – was initially taken by Baldwin of Boulogne, the first crusader King of Jerusalem, in 1104. Acre was so valuable that, when a leading crusader, Gervais de Bazoches, Prince of Galilee, was captured in a raid four years later, the ruler of Damascus tried to exchange his prisoner for the city. Baldwin weighed up the offer and sacrificed the man: the Prince of Galilee’s scalp with flowing white locks was attached to a pole and led Muslim armies into battle.

By the time of the Crusades, Acre was already ancient. The city is recorded in Egyptian hieroglyphs, the chronicles of Assyrian kings and the Bible. Bronze Age people occupied the nearby hill that would later be the base for Acre’s besiegers. It was captured by the pharaohs and used by the Persians to plan attacks on Greece. Alexander the Great took it without a fight and Julius Caesar made it the landing place for Roman legions. Cleopatra owned it. It fell to Islam in 636, just four years after the death of the Prophet Muhammad.

Acre was so valuable because of its strategic location. The city backs onto the Mediterranean on a hooked and rocky triangular promontory that ensured it could only be attacked from one side. It provided a small but sheltered harbour and possessed a fertile hinterland. Acre’s position midway along the shores of the Levant has rendered it a natural halting place – an axis for maritime trade, south to north from Egypt to Constantinople and the Black Sea and east to west across the Mediterranean. From Acre, land routes led to Damascus and into the heart of the Middle East. Amid ongoing war, it has been a door through which crop species, goods, industrial processes, languages, religions and peoples have passed and enriched the development of civilisation.

Following its capture, Acre became the main port of the Frankish Levant and the principal landing place for pilgrims and armies. Crusader ventures set out through its gates; royal brides landed at its port; kings were married in its church and died in its mansions. It saw an extraordinary movement of travellers: churchmen, pilgrims, merchants, adventurers and industrialists passed through its customs post. In one day alone during Easter Week in 1169, 80 pilgrim ships docked in its harbour.

Trading places

Merchant communities were a significant presence. Both the Venetians and the Genoese acquired their own quarters with attendant commercial privileges in return for maritime assistance in the capture of Acre and other ports. Acre became the epicentre of the great game between Genoa and Venice with Pisa in third place, all jostling for access to the port and preferential tax breaks. It frequently led to violence. At stake was not just the carrying and supply trade for the crusaders, but direct access to the superior goods and industries of the Islamic world from a secure European base.

Regardless of war, Acre traded continuously with its Islamic neighbours – a state of affairs that shocked rookie crusaders arriving on the shores to fight the infidel. The Kingdom of Jerusalem was effectively part of a Middle Eastern trading system, with Acre as its primary western outlet, linked by road to Damascus 80 miles away. Damascus was a nexus for trade with Persia, Asia Minor and Egypt. It received goods from further east via the Persian Gulf and Egypt. Syrian merchants came to Acre’s trade fairs, while European merchants travelled back to Damascus to buy Indian ivory, rhubarb from China, musk from Tibet and a wide range of spices and other highly valued merchandise: pepper, cinnamon, incense, cloves, indigo, pearls from the Persian Gulf. Damascus was itself a manufacturing centre of highly prized goods – particularly silk weaving and other luxury fabrics. It was also a centre of weapons production. In Damascus it was possible to acquire high-quality sword blades and other weapons from Muslim artisans. Louis IX, in Acre in the 1250s, was able to send his armourer there to buy horn and glue for the making of crossbows.

Even in times of armed conflict, when Saladin was closing in, trading continued. The complexity of these dealings amazed the Arab traveller Ibn Jubayr in 1184:

One of the astonishing things that is talked of is that though the fires of discord burn between the two parties, Muslim and Christian, two armies of them may meet and dispose themselves in battle array, and yet Muslim and Christian travellers will come and go between them without interference. In this connection we saw at this time … the departure of Saladin with all the Muslims troops to lay siege to the fortress of Kerak … but still the caravans passed successively from Egypt to Damascus, going through the lands of the Franks without impediment from them … The soldiers engage themselves in their war, while the people are at peace and the world goes to him who conquers.

With its comings and goings, Ibn Jubayr saw Acre as:

the capital of the Frankish cities in Syria, the unloading place … port of call for all ships. In its greatness it resembles Constantinople. It is the focus of ships and caravans, and the meeting-place of Muslim and Christian merchants from all regions.

He even found that a corner of the Church of the Holy Cross, once a mosque, had been reserved for Muslim prayer and at the customs house his bags were scrupulously searched by Christian clerks who spoke and wrote Arabic. ‘All this was done with civility and respect’, he wrote, though this did not deter him from cursing the place: ‘May God destroy it.’

Saladin and siege

Three years later, Ibn Jubayr had his wish fulfilled. In July 1187, Guy de Lusignan set out from the gates with a crusader army to confront Saladin. The annihilation of the Christian force at the Horns of Hattin shattered the crusader states. Saladin retook 52 towns, including Jerusalem. When he reached Acre the people of the city voluntarily submitted and were allowed to depart with their possessions.

An attritional counter siege by the forces of the Third Crusade followed, led by Richard I of England and Philip Augustus of France. For 683 days between 1189 to 1191, the crusaders struggled to regain the vital port in a titanic struggle that involved naval battles, open field warfare, repeated attacks on the city walls, sorties and skirmishes. The walls were pummelled by catapults and battering rams, assaulted from siege towers, undermined by tunnels and defended by counter bombardment with stones, arrows and incendiary devices. When the crusaders brought down a critical section of wall in July 1191, the Muslim defenders bowed to the inevitable and surrendered.

In the aftermath of the Third Crusade, Acre again became the most dynamic city in the Eastern Mediterranean. It was now the only destination in the Holy Land for pilgrim ships and crusader armies. Trade with the Islamic world continued to boom. Other players, Catalans and merchants from Marseille, Amalfi and Ancona, gained small footholds within the city. With Jerusalem lost, the city became the administrative centre of the so-called Second Kingdom of Jerusalem. Its kings, the Lusignans of Cyprus, had their royal castle in Acre; the bishop doubled as Jerusalem’s patriarch, the military orders of the Hospitallers and Templars moved their headquarters to Acre and constructed magnificent buildings. Acre saw the creation of a new military order: the Teutonic Knights.

At the same time many of the religious orders, driven out by Saladin, or fearing for the future, relocated their churches, monasteries and nunneries in Acre. When the crusaders retook the city in 1191, the landward side of the city was enclosed by a single wall, much of which had been severely damaged. Soon this was substantially rebuilt; two lines of walls dotted with towers and fronted by deep ditches provided a formidable defensive structure.

The layout of the city reflected the many different factions and religious communities within. Acre’s plan consisted of a tightly packed urban centre, in which the merchant groups occupied their own densely inhabited quarters, with warehouses, shops and residences that came to resemble tiny fortified Italian towns, barricaded against their neighbours and protected by gates and watchtowers. Networks of narrow winding streets led to small market squares, the nuclei of each community with their own church, religious houses and institutions.

This network of walled compounds reflected the lack of social cohesion and disunified political rule. Fragmentation of political power paralysed decision making. The endless contests for the title of King of Jerusalem, splitting both military orders and Italian merchant communities, ensured that for 60 years there would be no resident king in Acre’s royal citadel. Direct access to the port was a source of fierce competition. In the late 1250s the rivalry between Genoese and Venetian merchants exploded into a small war. For a year the two adjoining enclaves bombarded each other at close range with catapults, hurling rocks over the walls of fortified enclosures into their neighbour’s quarters in a contest that sucked in the Templars and Hospitallers on different sides and wrecked a large part of the city.

City of merchants

Yet the trading went on. The extent to which the Kingdom of Jerusalem was intricately bound to the Levantine commercial world extended to Acre’s coinage. To the displeasure of the papacy, Acre employed the monetary system of its Muslim neighbours. It minted gold and silver imitations of Fatamid and Ayyubid coins, with inscriptions in Arabic. When the pope banned the use of Islamic inscriptions and style of date in 1250, the city’s mint simply replaced the words on its coinage with Christian ones – but still in Arabic and with added crosses. The interdependence of Christian and Muslim merchants ensured that neither had a strong interest in disturbing a status quo.

Acre was an emporium for the exchange of goods over a vast area and the most cosmopolitan city in the medieval world – a multinational hubbub of peoples and cultures. The main language of communication was French, but German, Catalan, Provençale, Italian and English could all be heard in the streets, mingling with the languages of the Levant. Travelling merchants from Constantinople, Antioch and Egypt came regularly to do business and in spring and autumn, with the arrival of merchant ships from the west, the harbour was crammed with vessels and the population of the city could be further increased by the arrival of up to 10,000 pilgrims intent on travelling to see the holy sites. Touts, tour guides and lodging houses benefited from these throngs of visitors. When the instability of the Palestinian hinterland made journeys to Jerusalem impossible, Acre, despite having no connection with the life of Jesus, became a pilgrimage site in its own right. Under the guidance of local clerics, Acre had a circuit of 40 churches to visit, each with its own relics, holy souvenirs and remission of sins granted by the papacy.

In the 13th century Acre came to rival and even overtake Alexandria in the volume and variety of goods that passed through its port. In the early 1240s it was estimated that the city brought in £50,000, a sum equal to the royal income of a monarch in western Europe. European merchants came with wool, iron, salt, wheat and dried fish to trade with its Islamic neighbours, as well as other essential supplies for the crusading effort. The Templars and the Hospitallers manufactured glass and refined sugar at their own mills and furnaces outside the city. Sugar became a high-value export from the city. Almost all the sugar consumed in Europe in the 12th and 13th centuries came from the Levant.

The rush of merchant groups to Acre in the 13th century stimulated the prosperity of the city states of southern Europe. A network of ports along the northern shores of the Mediterranean and its islands facilitated the growth of long-distance trades. Developments in sailing technology – maritime charts, the introduction of the stern rudder, larger ships and attendant business techniques, such as maritime insurance and sophisticated financial partnerships, accelerated the trade in Acre and other crusader ports in the Levant. These cities were engines in the growth of global trade and the development of Europe at the expense of the Islamic Middle East.

The industries that had made the Levant wealthy – the manufacture of soap, glass, silk and paper and the production of sugar – would in time be usurped by European producers and undermined by their transport systems. Venetian merchants moved from buying Syrian glass to importing the key raw material – soda ash from the Syrian desert – until the superior glass of Murano was being re-exported to Islamic palaces. Soap and paper-making followed the same trend. Sugar production moved from Syria to Cyprus, where Venetian entrepreneurs employed more efficient production processes to supply western markets. Every shipload that sailed to and from Acre gradually shifted the balance of power.

The city was also a window that enlarged Europe’s knowledge of the world. As the Mongols advanced west and the fortunes of the crusader states declined in the face of stiffening Muslim opposition, a succession of missions were despatched from the city into the heart of Asia in an attempt to seek alliances with the ‘Tartars’. In the 1250s the Flemish Franciscan missionary William of Rubruck spent two years journeying to the court of the great Mongol khan at Karakoram and came back to Acre with a detailed written account of central Asia. Others travelled east on commercial ventures. The city’s merchants were buying alum in Asia Minor and bartering in Kiev. Niccolo and Maffeo Polo, respectively Marco’s father and uncle, who traded in Acre, followed in Rubruck’s footsteps. They returned in 1269 after their nine-year journey to China. In 1271, they set out from Acre again, this time taking Marco with them.

If successive popes had been scandalised by Acre’s coinage, they were more deeply troubled by another highly profitable trade: war materials, sold to the Ayyubid sultans in Cairo – much of which also passed through the hands of Italian merchants via Acre. These comprised wood and iron for shipbuilding, weapons and war machines and naphtha for incendiary devices. Even more significant was the trade in human beings. Acre was a stopover and slave market and Turkic military slaves – known as Mamluks to the Arabs – from the steppes north of the Black Sea came via Constantinople on Byzantine or Italian ships. Papal bans were regularly flouted. In 1246 Pope Innocent IV blamed all three Italian trading communities in the city for transporting slaves from Constantinople, who were then shipped on to Alexandria to swell the sultan’s armies.

Decline and fall

The acceleration of this trade had unintended consequences for Acre. Its citizens were complacent in the belief that their city was simply too valuable to be destroyed. As one sultan put it: ‘Acre is a caravanserai to which our merchants resort, a place from which comes a wider range of choice for us.’ By the 1260s, however, the tectonic plates of power in the Middle East were shifting. After the destruction of Baghdad in 1258, trade routes moved north, damaging Acre’s economy, while the Mongol advance threatened Islam’s very existence. The Mamluks, slave soldiers of the Ayyubid sultans of Egypt, staged a coup and established a dynasty that brought a harder ideology to the contest with its enemies. Under the autocratic rule of Sultan Baibars, the Mamluks started to wage concerted warfare against both Mongols and crusaders. Between 1265 and 1271 Baibars systematically dismantled the chain of fortresses that enabled the crusaders to control their territory. The campaign continued under his successors. By 1289 Acre, with a population of up to 40,000, was all that was left and, in the spring of 1291, the Mamluk sultan, al-Ashraf al-Malik Khalil, came to the city walls with an enormous army intent on delivering a knockout blow to Christendom’s last stronghold.

Khalil’s army probably numbered at least 100,000 trained soldiers and volunteers. His siege train included 90 catapults, some of which were capable of hurling enormous stones, and a thousand skilled miners from Aleppo to undermine the walls. The defence could muster about 14,000 fighting men. Over five weeks the giant catapults mercilessly bombarded the ramparts, while the miners dug numerous tunnels under the strategic towers and walls. One by one the defensive line collapsed. Despite night sorties led by the Templars and Hospitallers in an attempt to destroy the catapults, the outcome was never in doubt. Before dawn on 18 May 1291, to a wall of noise from drums and trumpets, the Mamluks began their final assault. There was chaotic and savage fighting in the narrow streets as the defenders were forced back, the towers taken one after another, the Christian siege engines set on fire and the civilian population trampled underfoot and slaughtered.

The military orders and the Italian militias staged desperate defences of their fortified positions. The Grand Master of the Hospitallers was seriously wounded; that of the Templars killed. In the carnage, there was a rush to the port. In scenes of uncontrolled panic and confusion, people drowned climbing into overcrowded boats; wealthy women held out their jewels in return for passage on the few ships. One man, Roger de Flor, became rich in a day and gained lasting notoriety for taking control of a Templar galley and holding the rich to ransom. By nightfall, almost all the city was in the hands of the Mamluks.

‘Thus was all of Syria lost’, wrote a surviving Christian eyewitness, acknowledging that the Holy Land crusades were effectively over. In the aftermath, much of the city was demolished and rocks dumped in the harbour. The aim was to deny future crusader armies any foothold. Slowly much of Acre’s shattered outline was covered by wind-blown sand, but for hundreds of years the ghostly ruins of its churches and great palaces were still visible as a landmark for passing ships. Like an image of Ozymandias, its remnants fascinated and haunted passing travellers.

Only in the 18th century was the city reclaimed by the Ottomans, its walls rebuilt in time to resist Napoleon in another great power struggle. ‘Had I been able to take Acre’, he insisted, ‘I would have made myself emperor of the East.’ Acre mattered.

Roger Crowley is the author of Accursed Tower: The Crusaders’ Last Battle for the Holy Land (Yale University Press, 2019).