By JAMES BARESEL
The Accursed Tower: The Fall of Acre and the End of the Crusades by Roger Crowley (Basic Books: 2019), available at amazon.com in various formats. Approximately 300 pages.
Faithful Catholic minds are naturally inclined to defend the Crusades, both because the principles behind them were quite simply the principles of Christ’s Church and because criticisms of them tend to be based in various errors of principle or of fact — pacifism, disregard for Church teaching, failure or refusal to recognize the aggressive and violent tradition of Islam, practical or theoretical religious indifferentism, the supposition that Christians were the aggressors rather than responding to Muslims’ military advances in the Mediterranean world.
It does no good, however, to get our own facts wrong, to fail to recognize that there was often a considerable difference between what Church authorities called for in theory and what Crusading too often was in practice — a distinction which we should, if anything, wish to highlight since the flawed practical reality provides no small part of the explanation for why the Crusades ultimately failed.
Roger Crowley’s The Accursed Tower: The Fall of Acre and the End of the Crusades tells the story of Palestine in the almost one hundred years between the close of the Third Crusade of King Richard I (1189-1192) and the Muslims’ capture of Acre (1291).
Coming after the dramatic liberation of the Holy Land in the First Crusade, the disastrous defeat of a crusading army by Saladin and the counterattack by one of England’s most famous warrior kings, the period which Crowley covered is too often overlooked, or remembered for the Fourth Crusade’s deviation from its purpose to sack Constantinople (and to incur excommunication as a result), Holy Roman Emperor Frederick II’s temporary capture of Jerusalem while defying a papal excommunication and the tragic failure of France’s King St. Louis IX.
It was also, however, the period which saw the developments that led to the Crusades’ ultimate end in total defeat rather than in some form of at least partial victory.
When King Richard and his allies returned to Europe they left behind a handful of small, largely coastal enclaves. Acre served as the de facto capital of the most important of these (which was officially titled the Kingdom of Jerusalem despite the enemy usually having control of its eponymous city) and as Christendom’s primary foothold in the region, though one which may ultimately have done more to undermine than to advance the Crusading cause.
Rather than unite to regain control of the Holy Land, rival claimants to the throne of the Kingdom of Jerusalem at times led armies into the field against each other. Merchants from different Italian cities set up largely self-contained and quasi-autonomous sub-cities within Acre, walled off and barricaded against each other, the desire to attain economic supremacy occasionally leading to outright warfare, complete with battles at sea and miniature sieges on land.
One of the most notable instances in which Acre’s inhabitants reached a considerable degree of unity was not in opposition to Islam but in favor of declaring their metropolis an independent city-state.
Such problems were only exacerbated by the nature of many of those who settled in the city. It was all too easy to find European Catholics willing to fight to free the Holy Land whenever the launch of a major crusade was announced — amateurs whose zeal far outstripped their knowledge of military matters and who often ran into disaster when not persuaded to remain behind.
Finding European Catholics willing to immigrate to the Holy Land in time of peace in order to expand Christendom’s (hopefully) permanent presence in the region was a different matter. Political authorities in Europe often chose to kill two birds with one stone, solving the Crusader states’ manpower shortage and ridding themselves of undesirable elements within their own populations by using the Crusader states as unofficial penal colonies.
The city which Acre became under such influences was a center of Eastern Mediterranean trade rather than of Catholicism, one which rivaled, and for a time surpassed, even Alexandria. Increasing the Catholic population of Palestine through economic expansion would, of course, have been more effective at establishing a long-term presence in the region than necessarily short-term military expeditions dependent upon supplies and financing from hundreds of miles away had the ability to do — if the merchants expanding the economy were willing to put the success of the crusading movement above their own profit.
Instead they used Acre to import into the Middle East and sell to Muslims a high proportion of the raw material which the latter used in the production of weapons, ships, and other war related artifacts. They even turned the city into a center of the slave trade, importing from Constantinople and Turkey the slaves purchased by Islamic rulers for use as soldiers known as Mamluks. Papal condemnations, and even papal sentences of excommunication, were routinely defied by merchants whose sole concern was their own profit.
Once their military training and embrace of Islam was complete, the Mamluks’ status as slaves was more technical than real. Legally owned by their masters, they were an elite, well-paid, well-maintained, and highly privileged body which provided the primarily professional force of Egypt’s Ayyubid dynasty. In time they became a political power in their own right, taking sides in dynastic politics, setting up and pulling down rulers at will.
When the implosion of the Ayyubid dynasty to which the Mamluks contributed coincided with the Mongol invasions of the Middle East, the Mamluks stepped into the power gap, fended off the attackers and then united the Sunni Islamic world under their leadership.
Decades of internal consolidation and of chipping away at the outskirts of the Crusader enclaves in Palestine were necessary before the Mamluk Empire was in a position to make an attempt on Christendom’s primary bastion in the region. But by the time Acre was attacked a century of failure to treat the Islamic threat with the necessary seriousness and of placing economic concerns and power politics above concern for the well-being of the Christian world had rendered the city unable to hold out.
(James Baresel has written for Claremont Review of Books, Catholic Herald, New Oxford Review, American History, Military History, National Catholic Register, University Bookman, Catholic World Report, The American Conservative, The Imaginative Conservative, and other publications.)
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