Among the tens of thousands of combatants of the Muslim army was Abu’l-Fidā’, a young emir of sixteen. A scion of the Ayyubid dynasty, now a vassal of the Mamluks, he would several years later become the ruler of the small city of Hama, where he would devote most of his time to reading and writing. The work of this historian, who was also a geographer and a poet, is of interest primarily for the account it affords us of the last years of the Frankish presence in the Middle East. Abu’l-Fidā’ was present, sword in hand and with an attentive eye, on all the main fields of battle.
The city of Tripoli, he observes, is surrounded by the sea and can be attacked by land only along the eastern side, through a narrow passage. After laying the siege, the sultan lined up a great number of catapults of all sizes opposite the city, and imposed a strict blockade.
After more than a month of fighting, the city fell to Qalāwūn on 27 April.
The Muslim troops penetrated the city by force, adds Abu’l-Fidā’, who does not seek to mask the truth. The population fell back to the port. There, some of them escaped onto ships, but the majority of the men were massacred, the women and children captured; the Muslims amassed immense booty.
When the invaders finished their killing and rampaging, the sultan ordered the city demolished; it was razed.
A short distance from Tripoli, in the Mediterranean Sea, there was a small island, with a church. When the city was taken, many Franj took refuge there with their families. But the Muslim troops took to the sea, swam across to the island, massacred all the men who had taken refuge there, and carried off the women and children with the booty. I myself rode out to the island on a boat after the carnage, but was unable to stay, so strong was the stench of the corpses.
The young Ayyubid, imbued with the grandeur and magnanimity of his ancestors, could not but be shocked by these futile massacres. But as he well knew, times had changed.
Curiously, the expulsion of the Franj occurred in an atmosphere reminiscent of that which had prevailed at the time of their arrival nearly two centuries earlier. The massacres in Antioch in 1268 seemed to mirror those of 1098, and in centuries to come, Arab historians would present the merciless destruction of Tripoli as a belated riposte to the destruction of the city of the Banu ‘Ammār in 1109. But it was only during the battle of Acre, the last great confrontation of the Frankish wars, that revenge became the central theme of Mamluk propaganda.
Just after his victory, Qalāwūn was harassed by his officers. It was now clear, they argued, that no Frankish city could hold out against the Mamluk army; it was therefore necessary to go on the offensive immediately, without allowing the West, alarmed as it was by the fall of Tripoli, the time to organize any new expedition to Syria. Had the time not come to put an end, once and for all, to what remained of the Frankish kingdom? But Qalāwūn refused. He had signed a truce, and he would never betray his oath. In that case, his entourage insisted, could he not ask the doctors of law to declare the treaty with Acre null and void? That procedure had been adopted by the Franj often enough in the past. The sultan refused. He reminded his emirs that under the terms of the accord signed in 1283 he had sworn not to resort to juridical consultation to break the truce. No, Qalāwūn decided, he would seize all the Frankish territories not protected by the treaty, but nothing more. He sent emissaries to Acre to reassure the last of the Frankish kings—Henry, ‘sovereign of Cyprus and Jerusalem’—that he would respect his commitments. Indeed, he even decided to renew the truce for another ten years from July 1289, and he encouraged the Muslims to make use of Acre in their commercial exchanges with the West. In the coming months, the Palestinian port became the scene of intense activity. Damascene merchants flocked there by the hundreds, renting rooms in the inns near the souks and engaging in profitable transactions with the Venetian traders or the rich Templars, who had now become the principal bankers of Syria. Moreover, thousands of Arab peasants, especially from Galilee, converged on the Frankish metropolis to market their harvests. The consequent prosperity benefited all the states of the region, the Mamluks most of all. Since the channels of trade with the East had been interrupted for many years by the Mongol presence, the shortfall could be made up only through an expansion of Mediterranean trade.
The most realistic of the Frankish leaders believed that the new role of their capital as the great exchange-counter linking two worlds held out an unexpected chance of survival in a region in which they could no longer hope to play a leading role. This view, however, was not unanimous. There were those who still sought to mobilize a religious fervour in the West powerful enough to organize fresh military expeditions against the Muslims. Just after the fall of Tripoli, King Henry sent messengers to Rome asking for reinforcements. So effective were his appeals that in mid-summer 1290 an impressive fleet sailed into the port of Acre, discharging thousands of fanatical Frankish fighters into the city. The inhabitants deeply mistrusted these new Occidentals, who staggered about drunkenly, looked like plunderers, and seemed to obey no commander.
Incidents began within the first few hours. Merchants from Damascus were assaulted in the street, robbed, and left for dead. The authorities made some attempts to restore order, but the situation deteriorated towards the end of August. After a banquet with alcohol galore, the new arrivals fanned out through the streets. They hunted down and mercilessly slaughtered every bearded man they could find. Many Arabs perished: peaceable merchants and peasants, Christians and Muslims alike. The others fled, to spread the word about what had happened.
Qalāwūn was enraged. Was it for this that he had renewed the truce with the Franj? His emirs pressed him to take immediate action. But as a responsible statesman he could not allow himself to be carried away by anger. He dispatched an embassy to Acre to ask for an explanation and above all to demand that the murderers be handed over for punishment. The Franj were divided. A minority recommended acceptance of the sultan’s conditions in order to avert a new war. The others refused, going so far as to tell Qalāwūn’s emissaries that the Muslim merchants were themselves responsible for the killing, one of them having tried to seduce a Frankish woman.
Qalāwūn hesitated no longer. He assembled his emirs and announced his decision to put an end once and for all to the Frankish occupation that had dragged on for so long. Preparations began immediately. Vassals were convoked from the four corners of the sultanate to take part in this final battle of the holy war.
Before the army left Cairo, Qalāwūn swore on the Koran that he would not lay down his arms until the last Franj had been expelled. The oath was especially impressive since by that time Qalāwūn was a somewhat feeble old man. Although his exact age was unknown, he seemed to be well past seventy. The impressive Mamluk army set out on 4 November 1290. The sultan fell ill the very next day. He summoned his emirs to his bedside, had them swear obedience to his son Khalīl, and asked the latter to pledge himself, just as Qalāwūn had done, to carry the campaign against the Franj through to the very end. Qalāwūn died less than a week later, venerated by his subjects as a great sovereign.
The death of the sultan postponed the final offensive against the Franj by just a few months. In March 1291 Khalīl led his army into Palestine. At the beginning of May large numbers of Syrian contingents joined him in the plain ringing Acre. Abu’l-Fidā’, who was then just eighteen, took part in the battle along with his father and was even entrusted with some responsibility: he was placed in command of a formidable catapult, nicknamed ‘the Victorious’, so large that it had to be dismantled and transported in pieces from Ḥiṣn al-Akrād to the environs of the Frankish city.
The carts were so heavy that the trip took us more than a month, although in normal times eight days would have sufficed. By the time we arrived, nearly all the oxen drawing the carts had died from exhaustion and exposure.
The battle was joined immediately. We men of Hama were stationed, as usual, on the far right flank of the army. We were alongside the sea, and from our positions we attacked Frankish boats toppe
d by wooden-covered turrets lined with buffalo hide, from which the enemy fired at us with bows and crossbows. We thus had to fight on two fronts, against the army of Acre opposite us and against their fleet. We suffered heavy losses when a Frankish vessel transporting a catapult began to hurl chunks of rock at our tents. But one night, there were violent winds. The vessel began to pitch back and forth, rocked so violently by the waves that the catapult broke into pieces. Another night, a group of Franj made an unexpected sortie and advanced as far as our camp. But in the darkness some of them tripped on the tent cords; one knight fell into the latrine ditches and was killed. Our troops recovered and attacked the Franj from all sides, forcing them to withdraw to the city after leaving a number of dead on the field. The next morning my cousin al-Malik al-Muẓaffar, lord of Hama, had the heads of some dead Franj attached to the necks of the horses we had captured and presented them to the sultan.
On Friday 17 June 1291 the Muslim army, now enjoying overwhelming military superiority, finally penetrated the besieged city. King Henry and most of the notables hastily sailed off to take refuge in Cyprus. The other Franj were all captured and killed. The city was razed.
The city of Acre had been reconquered, Abu’l-Fidā’ explains, at noon on the seventeenth day of the second month of Jumādā in the year of the Hegira 690. It was on precisely this day, and at this hour, that the Franj had taken Acre from Saladin in the year of the Hegira 587, capturing and then massacring all the Muslims in the city. A curious coincidence, is it not?
The coincidence is no less astonishing by the Christian calendar, for the victory of the Franj at Acre had occurred in 1191, a hundred years, almost to the day, before their ultimate defeat.
After the conquest of Acre, Abu’l-Fidā’ continues, God struck fear into the hearts of those Franj still remaining on the Syrian coast. Thus did they precipitately evacuate Saida, Beirut, Tyre, and all the other towns. The sultan therefore had the good fortune, shared by none other, of easily conquering all those strongholds, which he immediately had dismantled.
Indeed, in the heat of his triumph, Khalīl decided to destroy any fortress, along the entire length of the coast, that might be used by the Franj if they ever sought to return to the Orient.
With these conquests, Abu’l-Fidā’ concludes, all the lands of the coast were fully returned to the Muslims, a result undreamed of. Thus were the Franj, who had once nearly conquered Damascus, Egypt, and many other lands, expelled from all of Syria and the coastal zones. God grant that they never set foot there again!
Epilogue
The Arab world had seemingly won a stunning victory. If the West had sought, through its successive invasions, to contain the thrust of Islam, the result was exactly the opposite. Not only were the Frankish states of the Middle East uprooted after two centuries of colonization, but the Muslims had so completely gained the upper hand that before long, under the banner of the Ottoman Turks, they would seek to conquer Europe itself. In 1453 they took Constantinople. By 1529 their cavalry was encamped at the walls of Vienna.
Appearances are deceptive. With historical hindsight, a more contradictory observation must be made. At the time of the Crusades, the Arab world, from Spain to Iraq, was still the intellectual and material repository of the planet’s most advanced civilization. Afterwards, the centre of world history shifted decisively to the West. Is there a cause-and-effect relationship here? Can we go so far as to claim that the Crusades marked the beginning of the rise of Western Europe—which would gradually come to dominate the world—and sounded the death knell of Arab civilization?
Although not completely false, such an assessment requires some modification. During the years prior to the Crusades, the Arabs suffered from certain ‘weaknesses’ that the Frankish presence exposed, perhaps aggravated, but by no means created.
The people of the Prophet had lost control of their own destiny as early as the ninth century. Their leaders were practically all foreigners. Of the multitude of personalities who parade before us during the two centuries of Frankish occupation, which ones were Arabs? The chroniclers, the qāḍīs, a few local petty kings (such as Ibn ‘Ammār’ and Ibn Munqidh) and the impotent caliphs. But the real holders of power, and even the major heroes of the struggle against the Franj—Zang, Nūr al-Dīn, Quṭuz, Baybars, Qalāwūn—were Turks; al-Afḍal was Armenian; Shīrkūh, Saladin, and al-Kāmil were Kurds. Granted, most of these men of state were ‘Arabized’, both culturally and emotionally. But let us not forget that in 1134 the sultan Mas‘ūd had to use an interpreter in his discussions with the caliph al-Mustarshid; eighty years after his clan’s capture of Baghdad, the Seljuk still could not speak a word of Arabic. Even more serious, considerable numbers of warriors of the steppes, lacking any connection with Arab or Mediterranean civilizations, were regularly incorporated into the ruling military caste. Dominated, oppressed, and derided, aliens in their own land, the Arabs were unable to continue to cultivate the cultural blossoms that had begun to flower in the seventh century. By the epoch of the arrival of the Franj, they were already marking time, content to live on their past glories. Although in most domains they were clearly more advanced than these new invaders, their decline had already begun.
The second ‘weakness’ of the Arabs, not unrelated to the first, was their inability to build stable institutions. The Franj succeeded in creating genuine state structures as soon as they arrived in the Middle East. In Jerusalem rulers generally succeeded one another without serious clashes; a council of the kingdom exercised effective control over the policy of the monarch, and the clergy had a recognized role in the workings of power. Nothing of the sort existed in the Muslim states. Every monarchy was threatened by the death of its monarch, and every transmission of power provoked civil war. Does full responsibility for this lie with the successive invasions, which constantly imperilled the very existence of these states? Perhaps the nomadic origins of the peoples who ruled this region are to blame, be they the Arabs themselves, the Turks, or the Mongols? Such a complex question cannot be dealt with in this brief epilogue. But let us at least note that in the Arab world the question is still on the agenda, in scarcely altered terms, in the latter part of the twentieth century.
The absence of stable and recognized institutions had inevitable consequences for the rights of the people. At the time of the Crusades, the power of Western monarchs was governed by principles that were not easily transgressed. During one of his visits to the Kingdom of Jerusalem, Usāmah remarked that ‘when the knights render a judgement, it cannot be modified or annulled by the king.’ Even more significant is the following testimony from Ibn Jubayr about the last days of his journey in the Middle East.
Upon leaving Tibnīn (near Tyre), we passed through an unbroken skein of farms and villages whose lands were efficiently cultivated. The inhabitants were all Muslims, but they live in comfort with the Franj—may God preserve us from temptation! Their dwellings belong to them and all their property is unmolested. All the regions controlled by the Franj in Syria are subject to this same system: the landed domains, villages, and farms have remained in the hands of the Muslims. Now, doubt invests the heart of a great number of these men when they compare their lot to that of their brothers living in Muslim territory. Indeed, the latter suffer from the injustice of their coreligionists, whereas the Franj act with equity.
Ibn Jubayr had every reason to be concerned, for along the roads of what is now southern Lebanon he had just made a discovery of vital import: although there were certain features of Franj justice that could well be called ‘barbaric’, as Usāmah had emphasized, their society had the advantage of being a ‘distributor of rights’. The notion of the ‘citizen’ did not yet exist, of course, but the feudal landowners, the knights, the clergy, the university, the bourgeoisie, and even the ‘infidel’ peasants all had well-established rights. In the Arab East, the judicial procedures were more rational, but the arbitrary power of the prince was unbounded. The development of merchant towns, like the evolution of
ideas, could only be retarded as a result.
In fact, Ibn Jubayr’s reaction merits even more attentive examination. Although he had the honesty to recognize positive qualities among the ‘accursed enemy’, he went on to indulge in pure imprecations, for he believed that the equity and sound administration of the Franj constituted a mortal danger to the Muslims. Indeed, might not the latter turn their backs on their own coreligionists—and on their religion—if they discovered well-being in Frankish society? However understandable it may be, the attitude of the renowned traveller is none the less symptomatic of a malady from which his congeners suffered: throughout the Crusades, the Arabs refused to open their own society to ideas from the West. And this, in all likelihood, was the most disastrous effect of the aggression of which they were the victims. For an invader, it makes sense to learn the language of the conquered people; for the latter, to learn the language of the conqueror seems a surrender of principle, even a betrayal. And in fact, many Franj learned Arabic, whereas the inhabitants of the country, with the exception of some Christians, remained impervious to the languages of the Occidentals.
Many such instances could be cited, for in all domains the Franj learned much in the Arab school, in Syria as in Spain and Sicily. What they learned from the Arabs was indispensable in their subsequent expansion. The heritage of Greek civilization was transmitted to Western Europe through Arab intermediaries, both translators and continuators. In medicine, astronomy, chemistry, geography, mathematics, and architecture, the Franj drew their knowledge from Arabic books, which they assimilated, imitated, and then surpassed. Many words bear testimony to this even today: zenith, nadir, azimuth, algebra, algorithm, or more simply, cipher. In the realm of industry, the Europeans first learned and then later improved upon the processes used by the Arabs in paper-making, leather-working, textiles, and the distillation of alcohol and sugar—two more words borrowed from the Arabic language. Nor should we forget the extent to which European agriculture was enriched by contact with the Orient: apricots, aubergines, scallions, oranges, pastèque (the French name for watermelon): the list of words derived from Arabic is endless.