Tyre

Also known as Sur, Sour, Ṣūr, Tyr, Tyrus, Seigneury of Tyre

One of the four great ports of the Kingdom of Jerusalem, usually held as part of the royal domain. Besieged for five and a half months by a combined Crusader–Venetian force in 1124 — the Venetian fleet blockading the harbour — and taken on 7 July that year. After the catastrophe at the Horns of Hattin in 1187, Tyre was the only major port of the kingdom to hold out against Saladin, defended heroically by Conrad of Montferrat, whose two defensive victories gave the Third Crusade its base of operations. Tyre became the de facto Frankish capital until Acre was recovered in 1191, and remained Crusader until its surrender to the Mamluks on 19 May 1291, the day after Acre. The city was also the seat of the single most important Crusader chronicler: William of Tyre, born in Jerusalem around 1130 and educated at the schools of Paris, Orléans and Bologna, who became Archbishop of Tyre in 1175 and composed most of his Historia rerum in partibus transmarinis gestarum from his cathedra there before dying around 1186 — his history breaking off unfinished mid-sentence in book XXIII, in a passage of dark foreboding about the kingdom's prospects. Fragments of the Crusader city walls, the cathedral of the Holy Cross (where tradition says Frederick Barbarossa's bones were buried), and the Venetian quarter survive in the modern town of Sour.

Coordinates: 33.2704°, 35.2038°

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