Templar of Tyre

Also known as Templier de Tyr, the Anonymous of Tyre

Anonymous Frankish secretary in Acre and Cyprus whose chronicle of the years 1243–1314 forms the third part of the Gestes des Chiprois — the eyewitness Frankish source for the fall of Acre in 1291 and the dissolution of the Templars.

The unnamed author known to scholarship as the 'Templar of Tyre' was born about 1255 to a Frankish family of Tyre, and spent his career as a secretary in the service first of Guillaume de Beaujeu, the last grand master of the Temple to die in the East, and afterwards of the kings of Cyprus. He was not himself a Templar — the title is a misnomer fastened on him by his nineteenth-century editor — but he was Beaujeu's confidant, present at the master's death on the walls of Acre on 18 May 1291, and one of the very few literate Franks who escaped the city alive.

His chronicle, written in Old French in Cyprus between about 1315 and 1320, was later attached as the third part of the composite Gestes des Chiprois ('Deeds of the Cypriots'). It covers the years 1243 to 1314 and is the eyewitness Frankish source for the slow contraction of the kingdom under Mamluk pressure — the loss of Tripoli in 1289, the collapse of Acre two years later, the refugee resettlement on Cyprus — and concludes with the trial and burning of the Templar leadership in Paris in 1314, news of which reached him in Famagusta from the West.

Brusque, factual, and written from the inside of a defeated administration, his account is the irreplaceable Frankish witness to the end of the kingdom of Jerusalem.

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