The Siege of Acre: The Last Battle of the Crusades

The desperate, violent last stand that ended two centuries of crusading in the Holy Land. We hear how, outnumbered, divided and desperate, the Christian defenders decided to fight to the bitter end against the Mamluk forces of Al-Ashraf Khalil at the Siege of Acre For this series, we're joined by Steve Tibble, author of many books on the Crusades, including 'The Crusader Strategy: Defending the Holy Land'. Produced by James Hickmann and McKenna Fernandez, and edited by Jhenelle White. We need your help! Let us know what you want from Dan Snow's History Hit by filling in our anonymous survey here: https://forms.gle/PvgayWLkWGjYT4St6 Dan Snow's History Hit is now available on YouTube! Check it out at: https://www.youtube.com/@DSHHPodcast Sign up to History Hit for hundreds of hours of original documentaries, with a new release every week and ad-free podcasts. Sign up at https://www.historyhit.com/subscribe. You can also email the podcast directly at [email protected] mailto:[email protected]. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy https://acast.com/privacy for more information.

Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

• 0:00Dan Snow?

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• 1:15Speaker 01

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• 1:23Dan Snow?

  It is the ultimate medieval siege. Catapults, batter, battlements, flames of naphtha engulf screaming defenders. Walls are brought crashing down by miners who fight savage, hand-to-hand battles in underground tunnels. There is no quarter given here. This is total war. This is jihad. It is May 1291, and these are the besieged walls of Acha, the last great crusader stronghold in the Holy Land. The forces of Al Ashraf Khalil, the Mamluk army commander, tighten like a noose. The defenders, knights templar, knights hospitaller, alongside Teutonic knights, they all fight

• 2:06Dan Snow?

  with a desperation of men who know there can be no surrender, no retreat. Men whose fate is martyrdom. This is not just a massive, closely contested siege. It is the end game of two centuries of conflict. It is the last battle for the Holy Land, the last crusade. Before we dive into this story, make sure you check out the first two episodes in our series on the complete history of the Crusades and come back here when you're done. Now, let's get into it.

• 2:44Dan Snow?

  Steve, great to have you on the podcast.

• 2:45Speaker 02

  Lovely to be here, Dan.

• 2:46Dan Snow?

  We have reached the grand finale of the Crusade. This is a big moment.

• 2:50Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 2:51Dan Snow?

  Not only is it the final, the final moment of the Crusade estates, 100 years history, but it's also one of the great sieges of all time.

• 2:57Speaker 02

  Yeah, it's, this is a real culmination. And I think there are many occasions when you could say, well, this siege was important or that one was, but this one, you can't argue about it. This is the end of the Crusades.

• 3:09Dan Snow?

  And also lots of sieges are sort of quite good and they break it off and go somewhere else or something where they, everyone gets disentree and goes home. This is a proper siege, isn't it?

• 3:18Speaker 02

  Very much so. This is no holds barred. It's the last big outing for the Crusaders. These are guys who haven't got anywhere else to go. These are people with their backs to the wall. On the one hand, from the Crusader side, from the Mamluk side, these are the, this is the last kind of diehards of the infidels that are sort of like a little pimple on the, on the, on the backside of your empire.

• 3:43Dan Snow?

  And you see all the techniques of that sort of classic medieval siege warfare that people are familiar with from movies, but this is, this is where you really see them in the historical record.

• 3:52Speaker 02

  Absolutely. And the wonderful thing about this is that it really does act as a great case study for explaining how real siege warfare worked, not the Hollywood one. And it explains how.

• 4:07Speaker 02

  Things like catapults, you can really see catapults working in the way that they really did, rather than, you know, as you might think of them.

• 4:15Dan Snow?

  Very much looking forward to hearing about it. Let's very quickly deal with the fact there had been these crusader states, there'd been multiple crusades, Christians heading out to the so-called Holy Land, roughly speaking, bits of Syria, Lebanon, Israel, Palestine, little teeny bits of Jordan, bits of Egypt, that's, they've all, it's all been reconquered by Muslims, reconquered, conquered by Muslims at this point.

• 4:40Speaker 02

  Yes, indeed.

• 4:40Dan Snow?

  The only one thing is left.

• 4:42Speaker 02

  Yeah, basically, there's a few, a few little seaside towns now. There's a couple of big cities, Tyre and Acre, and a few castles like Sidon, Athlet are still there.

• 4:55Dan Snow?

  So right, right on the coast of the Mediterranean?

• 4:57Speaker 02

  Absolutely. This is not, this is supposedly what, what people would call the Latin Kingdom of Jerusalem, but that's way too grand. Basically, these are, you can't even ride down the road from one of these places to the other. These are just tiny little enclaves on the, on the, on the coastline of what is now Israel, Palestine. So, everything is to play for here. You know, all the settlers of the crusades who haven't gone back to Europe are there. You know, these are people who perhaps, we think of them as being crusaders and foreigners, but in reality, you know, they, they will, many of them will have been there and their families for 200 years. They'll be a lot less foreign than, say, many of the Mamluks who are slaves from Turkic lands or the Caucasus.

• 5:42Dan Snow?

  Yeah, well, let's talk about the Mamluks, because they're the new superpower of the East, aren't they? Where have they, where have they come from? Who are they?

• 5:49Speaker 02

  Yeah, so the Mamluks were effectively slave soldiers. As you can imagine, when, when you're in a very political situation, and you're effectively running a family firm, like many of these political entities were, what you want is people you can rely on, because they've been slightly dislocated and they don't have family alliances. You know, these are people who you pay to do what you tell them to do. And if you, if you think you're, if you're a normal kind of warlord, and particularly, say, a Muslim warlord in this part of the world at this time. You're surrounded by your emirs who all, you know, they all have friends and family, your cousins.

• 6:32Dan Snow?

  They've got their own interests as well.

• 6:34Speaker 02

  Exactly. Who can you trust? So what you do is you end up with slaves who you train up as soldiers. They're far, you know, they could be a thousand miles away from their home. A lot of the Mamluks slave soldiers were taken from the, you know, the Turkic steppes or the Caucasus. So these are people who, in theory at least, have no other ties. So they can be tied to the people who pay them cash. In reality, of course, it's always more complicated and it doesn't take that much time before people develop their own political alliances. But but that is the theory of it. And the wonderful thing about the Mamluks was that they were so professional, so good. So there there was a lot of truth behind the logic.

• 7:16Speaker 02

  You know, that if you get people who are devoted to that art and dislocated from their families, they devote themselves to that. You know, in the same way as, say, a Templar knight, you know, taken from his family and and given just one job to do, which is, you know, learn how to charge properly. You know, is is elite. So the Mamluks became this elite force in the Middle East of primarily cavalry. But the big difference between them and the Crusaders was there were lots of them. There were tens of thousands of these guys and they were superb and they were trained.

• 7:48Dan Snow?

  And they could be from as far, well, you mentioned they could be from the steppe, the Asian steppe, they could be from Turkey, they could be from parts of Europe or?

• 7:55Speaker 02

  Somewhere, yeah, certainly, yes, some eastern, eastern parts of the the eastern lands of Byzantium. It really, I think one of the deep mythologies of the Crusades is that there's somehow a big kind of racist dimension to it. And it really couldn't be further from the truth. When you look at the documents of the Crusades, whether it's Europeans or or locals. It's actually hard to tell what ethnicity people are because it's so unimportant. You know, most of the kings of Jerusalem are mixed race. Most of the guys on the ground were not really Crusaders in the sense of somebody who's just got off the boat from Donegal. It's like these are people who, uh, you know, have been in the area for two hundred years with seven or eight generations of Arab mothers and grandmothers. So.

• 8:39Speaker 02

  Although it might seem odd that these Mamluks are from different parts of the world, that is actually normative. People were much more obsessed with religion than they were with ethnicity, even though that's important to many people nowadays.

• 8:52Dan Snow?

  And the Mamluks, they begin as a slave army, but they they take over and they establish their own empire. And so this is this is the Mamluks now as independent players.

• 9:01Speaker 02

  Yeah, absolutely. That that shows the fundamental flaw in the argument that these guys are not going to be interested in politics. Well, you know, duh, of course they are because they're human beings. So you're absolutely right. Having defeated King Louis on crusade, the the the reward for the Sultan who beat him was to be killed by his own Mamluks.

• 9:21Dan Snow?

  Really?

• 9:22Speaker 02

  And then the Mamluks took over, I mean, in the most ruthless ruthless way. I mean, it was very ferocious.

• 9:27Dan Snow?

  Egypt and then took over much of what we now call the Middle East.

• 9:30Speaker 02

  Absolutely.

• 9:31Dan Snow?

  And we got to give it to Mamluks. I mean, they absolutely smoked the Mongols in battle, which is there's a pretty short list of people that do that.

• 9:39Speaker 02

  Oh, my word. Yes, absolutely. I mean, yeah, the the Mongols are your your worst nightmare. You find in the run up to the Mongols, meeting their defeat at 1260 in Angealud, you know, you you find Muslim chroniclers who are almost too scared to write about them. It is like Game of Thrones when the Mongols approach, they people are paralyzed. Now, these guys who are so remorseless, they they're almost unthinkable. So the idea that the Mamluks could face them and beat them was extraordinary, but it's a real testament to the Mamluks.

• 10:15Dan Snow?

  You're listening to Dan Snow's History. We'll be back after this break.

• 10:20Dan Snow?

  And so a decade or two later, having beaten the Mongols,

• 10:25Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 10:26Dan Snow?

  they turn their attention on these little tiny pinpricks along the Mediterranean coast. So this is a this is a big mismatch.

• 10:32Speaker 02

  Yeah, it is. And actually, you know, just between us girls, I mean, I think the reason that there's tiny little seaside states are still there is because everybody had something better to do.

• 10:44Dan Snow?

  Yeah.

• 10:44Speaker 02

  You know, the the Mamluks had to worry about the Mongols. The Mamluks always had their own internal politics. There was there was an economic benefit from having these ports, you know, and having a kind of an entrepreneurial route back to Europe. It facilitated trade up to a point. But I think by the mid thirteenth century, the trade routes were heading a bit north. As you know, we're talking about the end of the Silk Road. So you have to have a path for those goods to to go on either to Egypt or to Europe. And those paths were changing. So the kind of literal of Palestine was becoming less important. So what are you left with? You've got some kind of irritating infidels sticking out in a place that's of increasing irrelevance in terms of trade.

• 11:29Speaker 02

  You've got the Mongols, you've cleared your agenda, you know, your to do list has got shorter and you've scrolled up. And what now is top of the to do list for the first time is get rid of those irritating crusaders.

• 11:41Dan Snow?

  Right. And what do those crusader defences look like? Let's take me, we're talking about Acre in particular. I mean, it is, but it's been in crusader hands since Richard the Lionheart, presumably.

• 11:51Speaker 02

  Yes, indeed. Yeah, it was in Muslim hands for a very short period after the Battle of Hatton in eleven eighty seven. But for most of the last two hundred years, it's been in Christian hands.

• 12:01Dan Snow?

  And what are those fortifications like?

• 12:03Speaker 02

  Oh, my God, they're enormous. I mean, this is state of the art. This is like

• 12:09Speaker 02

  two aircraft carriers put together. I mean, it's a fabulous set of

• 12:15Speaker 02

  concentric walls. So I don't know if you've ever heard the term concentric castle. Basically, it means two layers of walls or a series of layers of walls. And the wonderful thing about that is it imposes huge costs on the attacker. And it allows the defender to fire from over from one wall to the other. It also means that people who want quick plunder, which is like most people really, are almost certainly going to be disappointed, you know, because if you've got two layers of walls, you push your way through at huge cost, huge risk. And at the end of it, you're faced with

• 12:50Dan Snow?

  You find yourself in a killing zone. You've actually, that was only the start of a town.

• 12:53Speaker 02

  Yeah, absolutely. And then you've got a citadel beyond that. In an acre, you have a series of castles within these layers of walls. I mean, it's absolutely stonkingly wonderful. I've been there many times. What you see now is not what was there at the time, but you can, you really can get a sense of it. It's called Aco now, and it's still a beautiful place.

• 13:14Dan Snow?

  Right. So and defenders, have they got enough defenders manning those walls?

• 13:19Speaker 02

  That is the perennial problem with the Crusades. Basically, everybody, it's always the worst kind of an away match. You know, they're, they're far from home, they're literally thousands of miles from home. They're at the end of a very long supply line. They've got almost no land, so people can't support themselves, you can't get lots of settlers out there. So you find that on, on a good day, they're hugely outnumbered. And by this point at twelve ninety one, the guys are just embarrassingly outnumbered. So we don't know any of the exact numbers for what we're talking about, but we think all in, there may have been about seven hundred knights. And, and many thousands of infantry, so maybe ten to thirteen thousand infantry.

• 14:04Speaker 02

  But it's not, it's not anywhere near enough. You know, this is the big city, many walls. It's very difficult to defend with that number of guys. And of course, what the other part of the equation is, how, how big are the besiegers? And what kind of equipment they've got?

• 14:21Dan Snow?

  Well, I was about to ask.

• 14:23Speaker 02

  It's, uh, the news isn't good, Dan. It's, it's pretty rough out there. So, yeah, the, the Mamluks are a wonderful force. They're, they're super focused. And they are professional in a way that the Crusaders aren't. Um, the Crusaders are good individual fighters. And some of them, like the Templars and Hospitallers are, you know, highly trained.

• 14:43Dan Snow?

  Yes, so you've got these, um, these, these groups of knights, Knights Templar, people have heard of, Knights Hospitaller. These are sort of monastic orders of warrior, warrior monks.

• 14:53Speaker 02

  Yeah, absolutely.

• 14:54Dan Snow?

  So they would train together, they'd live together, they were, they got funds and recruits sent over from Europe. But, right, but they're, but they're used, they're not necessarily used to working all with each other.

• 15:02Speaker 02

  Not at all, no. And, and actually, you know, they, they are elite, but they're tiny, even, even in, in that group, they're tiny in number. And they. The big problem, I think, apart from lack of manpower, is that the Christian defenders were so fragmented. If you think there, there were several, part of the community were Italians, and there were, you know, there were Pisan's, there were Genoese, there were Venetians, they all hated each other's guts. Um, the Genoese, just before the siege started, decided that they didn't want to join in, and they, they declared themselves to be neutral, because they were planning on doing more trade with the Sultan. Uh, so, you know, from a commercial perspective, it made sense. From a historical perspective, uh, or from,

• 15:46Speaker 02

  you know, from, from the Vatican's point of view, it looks, you know, this is a real stab in the back.

• 15:50Dan Snow?

  Did they get, sorry, just quickly, did they get away with that? Or did the other Christians just, so what, they just sat in their houses, put a big G on the door and just?

• 15:56Speaker 02

  Yeah, yeah, yeah. So it's like, you know, we're, we're all right, don't, just don't come in here. Yeah, no, I don't know how it worked in practice. Or, you know, I mean, if you're in the, the midst of a, you know, an assault, where the people stop and think, oh, it's a G there, or something, yeah. But, but in, yeah, but that's certainly what they tried to do. So you had, you had all of that, then you have also the fact that the, the king is actually based in Cyprus, which again is quite telling.

• 16:19Dan Snow?

  Yes, the king of Jerusalem.

• 16:20Speaker 02

  Yes, exactly. You know, that's a real, um, you know, photo of confidence when, when the king lives, um, off, off the coast, um, because he knows how risky it all is, you know, so he's not very highly, he, he doesn't wield very much power, they're different communities, people barely on speaking terms with each other, plus you've got tiny numbers of guys relatively, and very limited prospect of relief. So, you know, grim, sticky, sticky wicket.

• 16:48Dan Snow?

  Yeah, sticky wicket, uh, not, not super attractive. And on the, so on the other side though, thousand, plenty of soldiers.

• 16:55Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 16:55Dan Snow?

  Highly trained.

• 16:56Speaker 02

  Absolutely.

• 16:57Dan Snow?

  And talk to me about their siege equipment.

• 16:58Speaker 02

  Yeah, they were, well, they were a, a very, very accomplished bunch. So they're, they're, so we're talking about huge numbers. I mean, the, the estimates are up to half a million, which is a gross exaggeration. But we do know that the, the Mamluks had tens of thousands of top quality cavalry. And then when you get. That number of cavalry, you also get, you know, a much larger number of infantry and there were huge numbers of volunteers because this was seen as the last big push for jihad. You know, there were a lot of guys who would just come and fight for free for for the prospect of plunder and piety, really, the two, you know, can live quite quite happily together. They were also fabulous at logistics.

• 17:40Speaker 02

  So when, you know, for instance, when part of the army set off from Egypt, they'd had months of setting up, you know, base camps and ammunition dumps and supply dumps all the way up the Palestinian coast. You know, and the Crusaders wouldn't have had that luxury at all. You know, this was a really professional army fighting against a tiny number of squabbling, squabbling largely commercial interests at this point. The other super weapon they had uh was artillery. You know, they had uh siege engines, catapults that were to die for. Um, and they were superb at it. They they had, for instance, they had the siege of Tripoli, which had taken place just a few years earlier, I think.

• 18:24Speaker 02

  Um, just only two years earlier. They'd they'd used seventeen of these big catapults and they'd taken the city quite easily. Um, when it came to the siege of Acre, they had up to seventy. Whoa. Yeah, seventy of these these huge engines and each one was, I don't know what the equivalent would be. I mean, it would be like, you know, an aircraft carrier and a fleet, you know, these are big, big items. And they would basically be of two kinds, there's a there's a kind of um a slightly smaller one called a traction catapult. This is a very complicated area, so I'm simplifying overly here. But for our purposes, there's something called a traction catapult, which is the one, you know, you see in manuscripts where you get the guys

• 19:08Speaker 02

  hanging off the edge of the the catapult, usually quite precariously, and this is a dangerous job. Um, and that would be an engine where the force behind it would be propelled by a team of men, you know, quite a lot of men, pulling it down and then letting go at the right point and they the rock or whatever goes a long way. But then obviously you're limited by, you know, human muscle and how many men you can actually attach to it.

• 19:37Speaker 02

  The other kind is a counterweight catapult, which is where you get a kind of a box, like a triangular box at one end of it, where you would have had men. And in that box, you have super heavy things. So you have several tonnes worth of weights, you know, rocks, lead or whatever in this, in this counterweight. And that allows you to, to throw even bigger stones, bigger rocks further. They take longer to assemble, they're more difficult to manoeuvre, they're longer to reload. But if you're on the receiving end of that, you really do know it. So these are guys, they're really state of the art. I mean, the Crusaders have, have their own artillery and there's a couple in particular that did some damage.

• 20:19Speaker 02

  But, you know, there's really like one or two pieces of artillery on the Crusader side that you hear of. Whereas on the Muslim side, you're talking up to seventy, sourced from all over the Middle East.

• 20:29Dan Snow?

  Wow. And this, this is a period where Edward the First, King of England, was off at the same time smashing the Scots with these big artillery, with these big trebuchets as well, wasn't he?

• 20:37Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 20:38Dan Snow?

  He was called the Wall Wolf, I think. And, and the, the Mamluks had names, they like the Victorious.

• 20:43Speaker 02

  Yeah, furious.

• 20:45Dan Snow?

  The furious.

• 20:45Speaker 02

  Yeah, it's, it sounds like Napoleonic English Navy, doesn't it? But, uh, yeah.

• 20:50Dan Snow?

  Brilliant.

• 20:50Speaker 02

  No, they was, they were really important pieces. I always grew up thinking that catapults smashed walls. You know, you watch a Hollywood film and you see the catapults working and the walls shatter. In reality, that's not how they work and they, they're not capable of doing that by and large. And they're not meant to do that. Um, when I was a PhD student, I was wandering around, um, Israel. Um, and I, I found myself at the huge castle of Al-Suf, where, which Bae bars had, had, um, besieged, uh, in the twelve sixties.

• 21:24Dan Snow?

  The Mamluk, the Mamluk Sultan.

• 21:25Speaker 02

  Indeed, sorry, the Sultan, yes, absolutely. And because it was the nineteen eighties and the archaeologists hadn't got there in in huge numbers, there were still the the catapult stones were still there. And the rocks, you could see where they bounced off the wall. So these were huge, huge rocks. I I hope they're all in museums now, but in the the mid eighties, they were all just lying on the ground. But you could see that these walls had not been jet, you know, touched in any serious way. Even though these were great siege engines with with huge, huge ammunition. Um. And what a lot of recent research is showing um what what they were really about. And what they were really about was clearing the top of the walls rather than knocking them down. So it was about dominating the battlements.

• 22:09Speaker 02

  You took away the protection at the top. You made it very difficult for people to stand on the top. And the other thing that the the Mamluks had was they had these tens of thousands of superb archers. And it it meant that for every crusader, crossbowman, who was brave enough to try and, you know, just crouch below whatever little cover was left after the catapults, you know, was then for every one of him, there were going to be twenty guys shooting arrows at him who was superb in their own right. So it was almost like a, you know, a suicide mission, standing up there firing down. And that way you could clear the battlements. And the other real reason for having catapults is that by doing that, you allow mining to take place.

• 22:53Speaker 02

  And mining, I think, is the very unglamorous uh kind of boring part of siege warfare, but it's the mining that actually does it. The thing that knocks the wall down is a team of miners operating underneath. And it's not it's not like the Great Escape where they're sort of, you know, going through a hundred and fifty yards. You actually want to get your miners right to the base of the wall.

• 23:13Dan Snow?

  Saves them having to dig too much.

• 23:14Speaker 02

  Absolutely. And the and the and the Mamluk armies were superb. They had really, in the same way as had specialist artillery units. They had specialist mining units. No particular um parts of the world where these guys were came from. And they they they had a real heritage. So Aleppo produced fabulous miners and there were a thousand Aleppo miners at the siege. Um. Khorasan was also a great, great source of miners and they could, these these lads could really just literally undermine a wall very quickly. So the combination of of those kind of colossal catapults destroying battlements.

• 23:51Speaker 02

  Which means that your miners can then go to work without those irritating crusaders firing at them with crossbows. You're almost unstoppable at that point.

• 24:00Dan Snow?

  You are consuming Dan Snow's history hits. More after the break. This episode is brought to you by Decagon. If you've ever been trapped in phone tree hell, pushing zero fifty times while a voice robot pretends not to hear you, you know true psychological warfare. It's brutal, folks. Thankfully, that kind of horror is now confined to the history books. Customer service has evolved. Decagon helps companies create personalized concierge-style customer experiences with AI agents across chat, email, voice, and SMS. They're available 24/7, feel natural to talk to, and can resolve customer requests on their own, so businesses can keep up with requests without losing their personal touch. Plus,

• 24:43Dan Snow?

  because workflows can be updated using natural language, teams can make changes themselves. Decagon gives your team full visibility into why agents make decisions and what's happening across every conversation, helping to power millions of conversations every day. Ready to transform your customer support? Go to decagon.ai/dansnow to see what Decagon can do for your team. That's decagon.ai/dansnow. Check Decagon out at decagon.ai/dansnow. This episode is brought to you by TikTok. I never thought about the history of coffee. You make it, you drink it, nothing more to it. Then I've had a TikTok video about how

• 25:26Dan Snow?

  people in the 1700s would pour their coffee into saucers to let it cool before drinking it. I love that sort of discovery. A detail, but suddenly you're imagining how people lived and drank and socialized. Now I wonder what all baffled historians about us: mugs. It's a ceramic vessel, but crucially, it has a handle. Well, that's the joy of TikTok, folks. You look for one thing and find yourself somewhere completely different. Your next discovery is waiting on TikTok. Learn more at tiktok.com/discovermore.

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• 26:50Speaker 03

  In a world where swords were sharp.

• 26:52Speaker 04

  And hygiene was actually probably better than you think it is. Two fearless historians.

• 26:58Speaker 03

  Me, Matt Lewis.

• 26:59Speaker 04

  And me, Dr. Eleanor Yanaga. Dive headfirst into the mud, blood, and very strange customs of the Middle Ages.

• 27:06Speaker 03

  So for plagues, crusades, and Viking raids, and plenty of other things that don't rhyme, subscribe to Gone Medieval from History Hit wherever you get your podcasts.

• 27:23Dan Snow?

  What hope did it, what hope, if any, did these crusaders have? They try and sort of keep the siege going till the winter and hope that they would have, the attackers have to go home, or perhaps reinforcements arrive from Europe? Or what was the plan?

• 27:36Speaker 02

  Yeah, yeah. The plan, it's difficult to find a good plan. You know, basically, Europe is very divided. Everybody's got something better to do.

• 27:46Dan Snow?

  Edward I is beating up the Scots, as we said.

• 27:48Speaker 02

  Yeah, he's, he's actually Edward I. Now, I don't mean this from a partisan point of view. He's probably the most prominent crusader at the time. He's the only European monarch who's actually been on crusade at that point. He's, you know, it's not on his agenda. Everybody else is fighting everybody else. There's a lot of infighting and, you know, Sicilian vespers and, you know, all of that. There's, there's always. A diversion. I think the other aspect that people were probably too shy to talk about was throwing good money after bad, you know, it did kind of feel like the end of days. The Crusades were, you know, grinding to an end. If Acre hadn't fallen in twelve ninety one, well, probably would have fallen in twelve ninety two. You know, there's that that whole inevitability of it.

• 28:32Dan Snow?

  Edward the first should have sent his son Edward the second, that would have.

• 28:36Speaker 02

  That would have really worried.

• 28:37Dan Snow?

  Got rid of the youths.

• 28:38Speaker 02

  Yeah, Calio. But I but I think to your other point, so reinforcements weren't really coming. The the main opportunity they had was time. You know, there were a lot of volunteers in the Mamluk army who couldn't stay there forever because however pious they were, however committed, you know, girls still got to eat. And the Mamluks themselves, you know, they they're great soldiers. They don't want to hang around. You know, the latrines get full, all sorts of gaslighting has happens, you know, as usual, disease kills more people than crossbow bolts. So holding up for time would be helpful. I think trying to get to what you find is the Crusaders do two or three sorties at the beginning of the siege.

• 29:22Speaker 02

  And every time they aim at the artillery. So they aim at the catapults. They know exactly what the priority is. You know, the catapults are protecting the miners, the miners are destroying the city. So if they can get to the catapults, they have a chance. And they keep trying to get to the catapults. But the trouble is every time they come out, you know, there there are a couple hundred guys fighting a camp that's got forty, fifty, sixty thousand people in it. You know, they are pushing against a, you know, a lead wall and they fail. They keep bouncing off. So they did their best. They did try to get to the catapults. They did try to get reinforcements and occasionally

• 30:02Speaker 02

  ships would come through. The king sent, I think it was forty ships, but they had seven hundred men. You know, in the scheme of things, you know, whenever reinforcements came through, A, there weren't many, you know, reinforcement attempts, but when they did come through, you're talking hundreds rather than tens of thousands. It's almost just putting more men in to be killed. And there is a point where people who you're asking for help are saying, you know, I'm going to need my soldiers. They're all going to die if I send them to you.

• 30:30Dan Snow?

  So the crisis is reached in mid-May?

• 30:33Speaker 02

  Indeed, indeed. The siege starts in April, at the beginning of April. That's and the point is, you know, that up to that point, mid-April, the sorties that we've just been talking about take place, the catapults are doing their damage, the crusaders have proved they can't get to the catapults. So there is just, you know, then there's a couple of weeks of just unremitting remorseless pain being delivered on the walls. So first of all, the outer walls. And then, you know, obviously, once you've done that, you can get through to the inner walls. There are there are particular problems. Um, because every castle has a weakness. And in the case of Acre, there were there were two key weaknesses, really. One is, there's a, there was a salient.

• 31:14Speaker 02

  Um, which which is um, where where there was a tower called the accursed tower. Um, with a couple of barbicans on the outer wall. Uh, and, you know, medieval guys are so blunt, you know, it's a great name, accursed tower, you could, you know, you know, it's not going to end well. So that's one very, very weak point.

• 31:33Dan Snow?

  So it's very exposed, it's

• 31:34Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 31:35Dan Snow?

  bends out and it can be attacked on all sides.

• 31:37Speaker 02

  Absolutely. It's kind of Battle of the Bulge for for siege warfare there. And you find there's a the opposite of a bulge, but another vulnerable point. Um, because Acre used to be a much smaller city, and they built a fortified suburb around it. And they say there's a wall, an internal wall going around the line of the old city walls. And when that meets, there's a kind of the opposite of a salient. But it's a weakness between uh, where the three walls meet. Uh, and there's a gate there, gate's obviously also a weakness. And it was called the Gate of Saint Anthony. So you had these two, two weak points. And the Muslim Muslim army under under, yeah, um, Khalil had enough men

• 32:20Speaker 02

  to totally, totally, you know, man, man the siege walls. So they could make sure that every part of the wall had to be manned. But they focused the best machines, best artillery on those two weak points, and it and it really showed.

• 32:34Dan Snow?

  So we can imagine that the accursed tower and Saint Anthony's Gate, a lot of the masonry has been smashed, very difficult to defend. Uh, it does, does an assault go in? Do they try and take them by storm?

• 32:44Speaker 02

  Yeah, so so by mid May, everything is is really rough. The the there are big moats. Um. But they've been gradually filled outside these places.

• 32:55Dan Snow?

  So so the Muslim troops have filled in these moats, they can walk across them.

• 32:58Speaker 02

  Yeah, yeah. So at that point, then, you know, the miners can get straight to it. You're ready and you've got your assault troops ready to go in. So the um the accursed tower is is in the inner layer of walls, but on the outer layer of walls protecting it. There's there's an outwork which the Barbican and there's another tower called the King's Tower. And over that during that fortnight, they've been pounded to pieces. And you just get to a point where where um the accursed tower has to be abandoned. Just because, you know, there's it's so vulnerable, it's just about to fall down and the the crusaders have put a kind of wooden structure behind it uh to try and shore it up. But you know, things are approaching an endgame at that point.

• 33:41Speaker 02

  If you're relying on bits of wood to kind of man things. And and eventually you just get to the point, similarly on Saint Antonius Gate, where where the walls in front of it were being knocked down, the towers were were falling down around all of the outer outer walls, the towers were gradually collapsing.

• 33:58Dan Snow?

  And because they're being undermined.

• 34:00Speaker 02

  They're being undermined and the the battlements are being swept by these seventy catapults. And because uh the Mamluks have so many men, they're able to do continual artillery bombardments, you know, because you you can imagine, particularly with the the traction engines, it's very wearing, you know, guys cannot do this twenty four hours a day. But if you've got teams of guys and they're all waiting to do it, you can just keep a continual bombardment. And it just exhausts everybody, you know, the masonry is coming down, the defenders are exhausted. And and they're hugely outnumbered. And at that point, you know, you've got mining going on. Counter-mining as well, which we know happened, uh, whi- which is where your own miners, the crusader miners, tried to

• 34:45Speaker 02

  bury themselves underneath and and fight off the uh, the mammoth miners. And actually, even that is not helpful ultimately, because then you're undermining your own walls to get to them, and that and that causes problems.

• 34:57Dan Snow?

  But there would have been fierce little battles underground when they're in the tooth.

• 35:01Speaker 02

  Yeah, horrific. Yeah, it is, you know, sort of birdsong. Uh, but with even even more ghastliness, because it's also hand to hand. Yeah.

• 35:09Dan Snow?

  Yeah. And so mid-May, uh, the you're they have to fall back basically from those outer positions, do they, like the gate?

• 35:16Speaker 02

  Yeah. So you you find it it's you only need one, one point of entry, really. And and the the mammoth assault troops are just fabulous. They've they're armed with effectively um, hand grenades uh, that are of liquid fire, napther.

• 35:31Dan Snow?

  Okay.

• 35:31Speaker 02

  Uh, so they can throw those and they can be thrown on catapults as well. So you've got this horrific thing where you get this combination of mining artillery, archery, crossbows, and then it's freak fire. It is like something out of Game of Thrones. And the and the guys eventually break through on the accursed tower. And once you've broken in through there and you've got guys through the inner walls, then you kind of know it's it's all, you know, it's all over and people start running to the to the port to try and get on the last few ships. People have actually been leaving, the rich, rich people have been leaving for the last couple of weeks, which is not great for morale. But it's equally, it's entirely rational, but.

• 36:11Dan Snow?

  But but once they're through that inner wall, then it's it's just.

• 36:14Speaker 02

  It's sort of game over. Yeah. The templars and the hospitalers both do good work at this point. So the the master of the templars, uh, William of Beaufort, um,

• 36:27Speaker 02

  hastily puts on his armor and charges out with his guys towards St. Antonius Gate to try and stop the flow of assault troops coming in. Um, but because he's been rushing into doing it, he hasn't got his his his armor on properly. He gets killed by a a javelin blow under his um, left armpit and he's he's carried off dying. Um, even then, just to give you a sense of the numbers, he had somewhere between about twelve and fourteen knights with him.

• 36:54Dan Snow?

  Right.

• 36:54Speaker 02

  And that, you know, they're countercharging almost an infinite number of guys coming through. It is it's just a matter of buying time at this point. The hospitalers did great work as well. Their their their marshal was, uh. Very famous in The Chronicles for work he was doing, and they were doing almost suicidal charges. But it's, you know, it's, it's good to go out in a blaze of glory, but it doesn't actually win the battle. You know, once, once a huge army is broken in through the walls, it is game over. And at that point, people either fled, or down to the port, or they went into the separate compounds and castles that there were within, within Acre. You know, and the Hospitallers had one of those. There was a royal castle. There was a very powerful

• 37:37Speaker 02

  Templar castle as well. And, and possibly there was a Genoese bit where there was a G on the, on the doors, and everybody was just given a nice couple of cupcakes instead.

• 37:47Dan Snow?

  But at that stage, you're just isolated. It's a matter of time. I mean, you can't hold out.

• 37:50Speaker 02

  Absolutely. And you find for a couple of days, the Hospitaller compounds and the royal castle held out, and then they surrendered under terms. But it looks like the people who surrendered were, were then killed, the men were killed, and the women were enslaved. So the, the treaty wasn't honoured. The Templars held, had, had a big compound, very crowded, and they held out for quite a while, a few days. And there were peace negotiations going on. But then, and there, and there were some Mamluk troops inserted inside the castle to try and organise the, the refugees leaving the castle. But then things got out of hand.

• 38:32Speaker 02

  Some of the Mamluk troops sort of raped and murdered some of the younger, younger guys in there, and, you know, raping boys and girls. And, and at that point, they were butchered. So then the Mamluks obviously react very badly to their own guys being killed, and talks break down. And the, the Templar compound is, is eventually rushed, and the tower collapses and kills even more people. It's a very, very grim ending to a, a very grim siege. But it is so apocalyptic. It is, you know, a very definitive end to the Crusades. I know people still talk about the Crusades afterwards, but if you need a line in the sand, Siege of Acre is really it.

• 39:14Dan Snow?

  That's effectively it.

• 39:15Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 39:17Dan Snow?

  And so if you lose Acre, you can't really mount another crusade because you haven't got a beachhead, you haven't got a port that you can, so that there would, there would be no tenth crusade.

• 39:27Speaker 02

  Yeah, you're absolutely right. And in, and in fact, the Mamluks were very clever. You know, the temptation must have been to capture the city, nice buildings, nice port, and then reuse it. And they didn't take that opportunity. What they did was just trashed it. They made sure that the port was destroyed, the walls were taken down, the buildings were taken down. What, even the villages, even the villages around, you know, the trees were cut down. They deliberately created a wasteland because what they didn't want was some, some bright spark in Europe to think, oh, I know, lads, you know, we can, we can go back to Acre. All we have to do is capture that city or this city and we can start again. So what they did is by and large, they just destroyed the coastal ports

• 40:09Speaker 02

  all the way up and down. So there wasn't anything to come back to, which, which made the planning, you know, the people like the Templars were planning to launch huge amphibious landings and recapture the Holy Land. And it was like, it was just so unrealistic. You know, they hadn't been able to save the Holy Land even with huge castles. Um, so what chance did they have coming from a, you know, from nowhere with no real basis? I mean, realistically, none. So effectively, the Mamluks very cleverly undermined the idea of any future crusade at the same time as snuffing out all the old crusader settlements. So yeah, full marks to them is a very definitive ending.

• 40:45Dan Snow?

  Well, that is also the end of this podcast. In that case, got nothing more to talk about. The end of Crusade. Steve, thank you very much for coming on.

• 40:52Speaker 02

  Thank you, Dan. It's been a pleasure.

• 41:16Speaker 01

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• 42:07Dan Snow?

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