Siege of Acre (1291)

Also known as Fall of Acre, Mamluk siege of Acre

The Mamluk sultan al-Ashraf Khalil arrived before Acre on 5 April 1291 with the largest siege army the medieval Levant had ever seen — contemporary chronicles claim a hundred and twenty thousand men and dozens of trebuchets, including two enormous machines named 'The Furious' and 'The Victorious'. Inside the walls, perhaps fifteen thousand defenders — Templars, Hospitallers, Teutonic Knights, the militias of the Italian quarters, and the household knights of King Henry II of Cyprus — held a nearly impossible perimeter for six weeks. On 18 May the outer walls were breached at the Accursed Tower; in the days that followed the inner city, the harbour, and finally the Templar quarter at the southern point of the peninsula all fell. The grand master William of Beaujeu was killed at the breach; the last Templars were buried beneath their own collapsing tower on 28 May. With Acre lost, the surviving ports of Tyre, Sidon, Beirut, and Atlit were evacuated within weeks, ending the Crusader states on the Levantine mainland after almost two centuries.

Coordinates: 32.9210°, 35.0494°

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