The Siege of Acre: The Last Battle of the Crusades

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or, in the channel, from the name of the world, all the years. And it's our interactive exhibition by the elite tour, Artur guide and a classic, and the next Parvillon, the whole world of road-keption, the road-keption-eleptness world, only a set of experiences. [MUSIC] It is the ultimate medieval siege, catapults, bata, battlements,

“flames of knapfer and gulf screaming defenders, walls are brought crashing down by miners”

who fight savage hand-to-hand battles and underground tunnels. There is no quarter-given here. This is total war. This is G-hat. It is May 1291.

And these are the besieged walls of Acre, the last great crusader stronghold in the Holy Land. The forces of Al-Ashraf Kellyel, the Mamluk army commander Titan, like a nuke. The defenders, Knights Templar, Knights Hospitaler, alongside Chutonic Knights, they'll fight 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, 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. [MUSIC] Steve, great to have you on the podcast. Our love needs to be hidden.

We have reached a grand finale of the crusade. This is a big moment. Not only is it the final moment of the crusade of states, hundreds of history, but it's also one of the great seizures of all time.

“Yeah, 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." And also lots of seizures are sort of quite good and they break it off and go somewhere else, or something where everyone gets disentering and goes, "Oh, this is a proper siege, isn't it?" 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 die-hards of the inferdels that are sort of like a little

pimple on the, on the backside of your empire. And you see all the techniques of that sort of classic medieval siege war for the few brief familiar with for movies, but this is where you really see them in the historical record. 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

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. Very much like if we're talking about it, let's do very quickly deal with the fact that had been these crusader states that have been multiple crusades, Christians heading out to the so-called holy land, roughly speaking, bits of Syria, Lebanon, Israel, Palestine,

teeny bits of Jordan, bits of Egypt. That's, they've all, it's all been conquered by Muslims, recon, could conquered by Muslims at this point? Yes indeed. The only one thing is left.

Yeah, there's basically there's a few, a few little seaside towns now. There's a couple of

big cities, tyre and acre, and a few carcels, like, side and athlete are still there. So right, right on the coast of the Mediterranean? Absolutely, this is not, this is supposedly 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 coastline of what is now, Israel, Palestine.

So everything is to play for here. All the settlers of the crusades who haven't gone back to Europe are there. These are people who perhaps, we think of them as being crusaders and foreigners,

and there will be a lot less foreign than say many of the manloks who are slaves from

Turkic lands or the Caucasus. Yeah, well, let's talk about the manloks, because they're the new superpower of the start they, where have they come from? Who are they? Yeah, so the manloks were effectively slave soldiers. As you can imagine, 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 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 amirs who all, you know,

“they all have friends and family, your cousins are in place. 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 manloks, slave soldiers were taken from the, you know, the Turkic steps 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 that is the theory of it. And the wonderful thing about the manloks was that they were so professional, so good. So there was a lot of truth behind the logic, you know, that if you get people who had devoted to that art and dislocated from their families, they devoted themselves to that. You know, in the same way as say a Templar, night, you know, taken from his family and given just one job to do, which is, you know,

learn how to challenge properly, you know, is elite. So the manloks 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. And they could be from as far as we mentioned, they could be from the

step, the Asian step, they could be from Turkey. They could be from parts of Europe or somewhere. Yeah, certainly. Yeah. Some eastern eastern parts of the eastern lands of Byzantium.

“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 locals, it's actually hard to tell what ethnicity people are because it's so unimportant. You know, most of the kings of Jerusalem were mixed race. Most of the guys on the ground were not really crusaders in the sense of somebody who just got off the boat from Donnie Gaul. It's like these are people who have been in the area for

200 years with seven or eight generations of Arab mothers and grandmothers. So although it might seem odd that these Mamelooks 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. And the Mamelooks, they begin as a slave army, but they take over

“and they establish their own empire. And so this is the Mamelooks now as independent players.”

Yeah, absolutely. That shows the fundamental floor in the argument that these guys are not going to be interested in politics. Well, you know, of course they are because they're human beings. So you're absolutely right. Having defeated King Louis on crusade, the reward for the soul town who beat him was to be killed by his own Mamelooks. And then the Mamelooks took over. I mean, the Madruchless, ruthless way. I mean, it was very for us. Egypt and then took over

much of what we've now called the Middle East. Absolutely. And we've got to give it to Mamelooks. I mean, they absolutely smoke the Mongols in battle, which is a pretty short list of people who do that. Oh, my word. Yes, absolutely. I mean, yeah, the Mongols are your worst nightmare. You find in the run-up to the Mongols meeting their defeat at 1260 in Angeload. You know, you find Muslim chronicles who are almost too scared to write about them. It is like

Game of Thrones when the Mongols approach, people are paralyzed. And these guys who are so remorseless, they they're almost unthinkable. So the idea that the Mamelooks could face them and beat them was extraordinary, but it's a real testament to the Mamelooks. You're listed down to those history. We'll be back after this break. And so a decade or two later, having beaten the Mongols. Yeah. They turned their attention on these little tiny pinpricks

in our Mediterranean coast. So this is a big mismatch. Yeah, it is. And actually, you know,

still there is because everybody had something bested to do. You know, the Mamelooks had to worry

about the Mongols. The Mamelooks always had their own internal politics. 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 13th 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 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 infertals sticking out in a place that's of increasing irrelevance in terms of trade. You've got the Mongols. You've cleared your agenda. You know, you're 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. Right. And what if those crusaders

defences look like? Let's take, let we're talking about a particular, I mean, it is, but it's been in Crusader hands since Richard the Lionheart presumably. Yes indeed. Yes, it was in Muslim hands for a very short period after the Battle of Hathain in 1187. But for most of the last 200 years, it's been in Christian hands. And what are those qualifications like? Oh my god, they're enormous. I mean, this is dated the art. This is like two aircraft carriers put together. I mean, it's a

fabulous set of 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 that imposes huge costs on the, 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

got two layers of walls, you push your way through at huge costs, huge risk, and at the end of it, your face, you find yourself in a club. You actually, that was only the start of the turn. Yeah, absolutely. And then you've got a set of delby on that. And in 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. The 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 acro now, wonderful. And it's still a beautiful place. Right, so,

“and to defend this, I think I'll have to defend this manning those walls. That is the perennial”

problem with the crusades. Basically, everybody, it's always the worst kind of an away match.

You know, 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 a good day, they're huge downnumbered. And by this point, at 1291, 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 700 nights. Wow. And many thousands of infantry. So maybe 10 to 13,000 infantry. 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 big are the procedures and what kind of equipment they've got. Well, that was about to ask. The news isn't good, Dan. It's pretty rough out there. So yeah,

the manligs are a wonderful force. They're super focused and they are professional in a way that the crusade is armed. The crusade is a good individual fighters, and some of them, like the hot Templars and the hospitalers, are highly trained. So you've got these, these groups of nights, 10, people have heard of, nights hospital. These are sort of monastic orders of worry amongst. Yeah, absolutely. So they would train together, they'd live together, they got funds and recruit

center of Europe, but they're not, they're not, they're certainly used to working with each other. Not at all. No, and actually, you know, they are elite, but they're tiny, even even in that group,

“they're tiny in number. And the, the big problem, I think, part from like a 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 peasants, there were januals, there were fanatians, they all hated each other. The januaries, just before the siege started, decided that they didn't want to join in, and they declared themselves to be

commercial perspective, it made sense for a historical perspective, or from, you know, from

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

Did they get, sorry, just quickly, did they get away with that? Or did the other Christians just, sort of what they just sat in their houses, put a big G on the door and just, yeah, yeah. So it's like, you know, we're all right, don't, don't come in here. Yeah, no, I don't know how worked in practice, or, you know, I mean, if you're in the midst of, you know, an assault, whether people stop and think, oh, it's a G there, oh, yeah. But, but in, yeah, but that's exactly what they're trying to do.

So you had, you had all of that, then you have also the fact that the, the King who's actually

based in Cyprus, which again is quite telling us. Yes, the King of Jerusalem, yes exactly, first.

You know, that's a real, you know, photos of confidence when the, when the King lives off of the coast, because he knows how risky it all is. You know, so he's not very highly, he doesn't

“wield very much power, there are 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 wicked. Yes, sticky wicked, not super attractive. And on the, so on the other side, though, thousands, plenty of soldiers, yeah, highly trained, absolutely. And talk to me throughout their siege equipment. Yeah, they were, well, they were a very, very accomplished bunch.

So they were, so we're talking about huge numbers. I mean, the estimates are up to half a million,

which is a gross exaggeration. But we do know that the, the man looks had tens of thousands of top quality cavalry, and then when you get that number of cavalry, you also get, you know, 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 had just come and fight for free for the prospect of plunder and piracy, really, the two, you know, can't live quite

quite happily together. They were also fabulous logistics. So, 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, on 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

superweapon they had was artillery. You know, they had siege engines, counterparts that were to die for, and they were super about it. They had, for instance, they had, at the siege of Tripoli,

“which had taken place just a few years earlier. I think only two years earlier, they'd used”

17 of these big counterparts, and they'd taken the city quite easily. When it came to the siege of Acre, they had up to 70. Whoa, yeah, 70 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

in a fleet. You know, these are big, big items. And they would basically be two kinds. There's a

kind of a slightly smaller one called attraction catapult. This is very complicated areas. I'm simplifying over here. But for our purposes, there's something called attraction catapult, which is the one, you know, you see in manuscripts where you get the guys hanging off the edge of the catapult, usually quite precariously. And this is a dangerous job. 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 the rock or whatever goes the long way. But then obviously you're limited by, you know, human muscle and how many men you can actually attach to it. 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 tons worth of weights, you know, rocks, layered or whatever

in this, in this counterweight. And that allows you to throw even bigger stones, bigger rocks further. They take longer to assemble, they're more difficult to maneuver, they'll 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 arch. I mean, the crusaders have had their own artillery, and there's a couple in particular that did some damage. But, you know, there's really like one or two pieces of artillery

on the crusader side that you hear off, whereas on the Muslim side, you're talking up to 70, sourced from all over the Middle East. Wow. And it's the, this is the period where, over the first king of England was off at the same time smashing the scots with these big artillery

I think. And the, the, the, the, the Mamnik's had names, they like the victorious, yeah. Furious.

Furious. Yeah. It sounds like an Napoleonic English Navy, doesn't it, but yeah.

“No, there was, they were really important pieces. I always grew up thinking that catapult smashed walls.”

You know, you watch a Hollywood film and you see the catapult's 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. When I was a PhD student, I was wondering around Israel. And I found myself at the huge castle of Al-Suf, which bybar said had besieged in the 1260s. The Mamnik, the Mamnik. Indeed. Sorry, the salt and yes, absolutely. And because it was the

1980s and the archaeologists hadn't got there 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 hope they're all in museums now. But in the, the mid-80s, 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 sea legends with huge, huge ammunition. And what, a lot of recent research is showing 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. 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 man who looks had was they had these tens of thousands of superb archers. And it meant that for every crusader, crossbowmen, 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 everyone of him, there were going to be 20 guys shooting arrows at him, who was superb in their own right. So it was almost like a, you know, suicide missions, 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. And mining,

“I think, is the very unglamorous kind of boring part of the 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 like the greatest gap where they're sort of, you know, going through 150 yards. You actually want to get your miners right to the base of the wall. It saves them having to do too much. Absolutely. And the, and the, and the Mamlic arm is were superb. They had really in the same way as had specialist artillery units. They had specialist mining units. No particular parts of the world,

where these guys were came from. And they, they had a real heritage, though Aleppo produced fabulous miners. And there were thousands of Aleppo miners at the siege. Kurosan was also 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, which means that your miners can then go to work without,

those irritating crusaders firing out them with crossbows, you know, you're almost unstoppable of that point. You are consuming dance-nose history hits, more after the break. What hope, did it? What hope if any did these crusaders have, they try and sort of keep the siege going to the winter and hope that they would have the attacks, I have to go home or perhaps reinforcements right from Europe or what, and what was the plan? Yeah, yeah. The plan is

difficult to find a good plan. You know, basically Europe is very divided, everybody's got something

better to do. Edward the first is beating up the scots as we said. Yeah, he's, he's actually the Edward the first. I don't mean that's 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 crusader at that point. He's, you know, he's not on his agenda. Everybody else is fighting everybody else. It's a lot of, of infighting and, you know, Sicilian versers and, you know, all of that, that there's

“always a diversion. I think the other aspect that people were probably too shy to talk about was”

throwing good money off to bad. You know, it did kind of feel like the end of days. The crusades were grinding to an end. If they couldn't fall in then 1291, well, probably would have fallen

his son Edward the second, that would have, that would have really worried. By the way, by the way,

“the rid of the use. Yeah. But I think to your other point, so reinforcements weren't really”

coming. 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 past they were, however committed, they've, you know, girls still got to eat. And the Mamluk themselves, you know, they, they're great soldiers. They don't want to hang around. You know, the latrines get full, all sorts of ghastiness happens, you know, as usual, disease kills more people than crossbow bolts. So holding out

for time would be helpful. I think trying to get to what you find is the crusaders do two or three

sortes at the beginning of the siege and every time they aim at the artillery. So they aim at

the catch bolts. They know exactly what the priority is. You know, the catch bolts are protecting the miners, the miners are destroying the city. So if they can get to the catch bolts, they have a chance and they keep trying to get to the catch bolts. But the trouble is every time they come out, you know, there are a couple hundred guys fighting a camp that's got 40, 50, 60,000 people on it. You know, they are pushing against them, you know, a lead wall and they fail. They keep bouncing

off. So they did their best. They did try to get to the catch bolts. They did try to get reinforcement,

“some occasionally ships would come through the king sent, I think it was 40 ships, but they had”

700 men. You know, in the scheme of things, you know, whenever reinforcement came through, either 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 into be killed. And there is a point where people who you're asking of help are saying, you know, I'm going to need my soldiers like they're all going to die if I send them to you.

So the crisis is reaching mid-May. Indeed, indeed, the siege starts in April, at the beginning of April, that's and the point is, you know, the up to that point, mid April, the sort is 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, 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 a particular problems because every castle has a weakness. And in the case of Acre,

“there were two key weaknesses. Really, one is there was a salient, which is where there was a tower”

called the Acursid Tower, with a couple of barbecans on the outer wall. And, you know, medieval guys are so blunt, you know, is a great name because the tower, you know, if you know, it's not going to end well. So that's one very, very weak point. That's very exposed. It's, yeah, Ben's out. I can be attacked on all sides. Absolutely, there's kind of battle at the bulge for siege warfare there. And you find there's the opposite of a bulge, but another vulnerable point,

because Acre used to be a much smaller city, and they built a fortified suburb around it. And 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 where the three walls meet. And there's a gate there, gates, obviously, also a weakness. And there's called the gate of sometimes, me. So you had these two, two weak points. And the Muslim, Muslim army under

Khalil had enough men 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've focused the best machines, best artillery on those two weak points, and it really showed. So we can imagine that the curse of tower in 70s gates, a lot of the maidsmen who's been smashed, very difficult to defend, does it, doesn't assault go into the trying to take the by storm? Yeah. So so by mid-May,

everything is, is really rough. There are big motes, but they've been gradually filled outside these places. So the Muslim troops have filled in these motes, they can walk across them. 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 curse of tower is in the inner layer of walls, but on the outer layer of walls protecting it, there's an outwork, which the barbeacon,

and there's another tower called the Kings Tower, and over in that, during that fortnight, they've been pounded to pieces. And you just get to a point where the curse of tower has to be abandoned,

put a kind of wooden structure behind it to try and shore it up. But you know things are

“approaching an end game at that point, if you're relying on bits of wood to kind of man things. And”

eventually you just get to the point, similarly on the St. Anthony's Gate, where the walls in front of it were being knocked down, the towers were falling down around all of the outer, outer walls, the towers were crunchyly collapsing. And because they're being undermined, they're being undermined, and the battlements are being swept by these 70 catapults, and because the Manlicks have so many men. They're able to do continual artillery bombardments. You know, because you can imagine

particularly with the traction engines, it's very wearing. You know, guys can not do this 24 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 they're hugely outnumbered. And at that point, you know, you've got mining going on.

“Counter mining, as well, which we know happened, which is where your own miners,”

the Crusader miners, tried to bury themselves underneath and fight off the the Manlick miners.

And actually, even that is not helpful, ultimately, because then you're undermining your own

wall. Yes, exactly. And that causes problems. But there would have been fierce little battles underground when there were two. Yeah, a roof. Yeah, it is, you know, sort of bird song, but we're even, even more ghastlyness, because it's also hand to hand. Yeah. And so mid-May, the, you're, they have to fall back basically from those outhibitions they really like the gate. Yeah. So you, you find it, it's, you only need one, one point of entry, really. And, and the

Manlick assault troops are just fabulous. They're armed with effectively hand grenades that are of liquid fire, anapther. So they can throw those and they can be thrown on counterparts as well.

“So you've got this horrific thing where you get the combination of mining, artillery,”

archery, crossbows, and then is freak fire. It is like something out of game of thrones. And the, and the guys eventually break through on the occassid 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 all, you know, it's all over, and people start running to the, to the port to try and get them 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 from morale, but it's equally, it's entirely rational. But once those through that inner wall, then it's, it's just, it's sort of game over. Yeah. The Templars and the Hospitlers both do good work at this point. So the, the master of the Templars William of Boju, hastily puts on his armor and charges out with his guys towards an antennas gate to try and stop the flow of assault troops coming in. But because he's been rushing

into doing it, he hasn't got his, his armor on properly. He gets killed by a javlin blow under his left armpit, and he's, he's carried off dying. Even then, just to give you a sense of the numbers, he had somewhere between about 12 and 14 nights with him, and they're, you know, they count to challenging almost an infinite number of guys coming through. It is, it's just a matter of buying time at this point. The Hospitlers did great work as well. Their, their martial was 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 they were within, within acre. You know, the Hospitlers had one of those, there was

a royal castle, there was a very powerful temple of castle as well. And, I'm possibly, there was a

genuys bit where there was a g on the, on the doors and everybody was just given a nice couple of cupcakes instead. But by that stage, you're just isolated. It's a better time. I mean, you can't hold out. Absolutely. And you find for a couple of days the Hospitler compounds in the royal castle held out, and then they surrendered under terms. But it looks like the people are surrendered were, were then killed, the men were killed, and the women were enslaved. So the,

the treaty wasn't honoured. The Templars had, had a, had a big compound, very crowded, and they held that for quite a while a few days, and there were peace negotiations going on. But then, 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, some of the Mamluk troops

and at that point, they were butchered. So then the Mamluk's obviously react very badly to

“their own guys being killed and talks right 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 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, the siege of

aaker is really head. That's effectively it. Yeah. And so, if you lose aaker, you can't really

mount on the Crusades. 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. Yep, you're absolutely right. And in fact, the Mamluk was

“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. 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, the thing, oh, I know, lads, you know, we can, we can go back to aaker or we have to do as

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 all the way up and down. So there wasn't anything to come back to,”

which made the planning, you know, that people like the Templars were planning to launch huge amphibious landings and recapture the Holy Land. It's like there was just so unrealistic. You know, they hadn't been able to save the Holy Land even with huge castles. So what chance did they have coming from, you know, from nowhere with no real bases? I mean, they're realistic, they're none. So effectively the memory is very cleverly undermined the idea of any future crusade at the same

time as snuffing out all the old crusade assatement. So yeah, full marks to them is a very definitive ending. Well, that is also the end of this podcast. In that case, got nothing more to talk about, the end of the crusade. Steve, thank you very much coming on. Thank you, Dan. Been a pleasure. Nah, no plans for the end. Besuch the road-cappuccino-leadness world in Freiburg with Euron Mellets, Deuron, or than the channel-type of nebence, which is all about the past. And take our interactive

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