The Frankish Nobility and The Fall of Acre: Diplomacy, Society, and War in the Latin Kingdom of Jerusalem, c.1240-1291 A DISSERTATION SUBMITTED TO THE FACULTY OF THE GRADUATE SCHOOL OF THE UNIVERSITY OF MINNESOTA BY Jesse W. Izzo IN PARTIAL FULFILLMENT OF THE REQUIREMENTS FOR THE DEGREE OF DOCTOR OF PHILOSOPHY Michael Lower October 2016 © Jesse W. Izzo, May 2016 i Acknowledgements It is a welcome task indeed to thank some of the many individuals and institutions that have helped me bring this project to fruition. I have enjoyed a good deal of financial support from various institutions without which this project would not have been possible. I extend my heartfelt thanks to the UMN Graduate School and College of Liberal Arts; to the History Department; to the Centers for Medieval Studies and Early Modern History at Minnesota; to the U.S. Department of Education for providing me with a Foreign Language and Area Studies award to study Arabic; and to the U.S.-Israel Education Foundation and Fulbright program, for making possible nine months of research in Jerusalem I cannot name all the marvelous educators I had in secondary school, so O.J. Burns and Ian Campbell of Greens Farms Academy in Westport, CT, two of the very best there have ever been, will need to stand for everyone. Again, I had too many wonderful professors as an undergraduate to thank them all by name, but I do wish to single out Paul Freedman of Yale University for advising my senior essay. My M.Phil. supervisor, Jonathan Riley-Smith, emeritus of Emmanuel College, Cambridge, helped set me on my way in researching the Crusades and the Latin Kingdom of Jerusalem, as he has done for so many students before me. As I am sure they do, I deeply regret his recent passing. I am also grateful to Reuven Amitai of the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, an outstanding mentor while I was in Israel. Whatever I know about Mamluks and Mongols I certainly have learned from him. At the University of Minnesota, my academic home for most of the last seven years, Bernard Bachrach, Giancarlo Casale, Oliver Nicholson, J.B. Shank, George Sheets ii and others have been a fundamental part of my training. I owe a very special debt to the members of my committee—Lianna Farber, Mary Franklin-Brown, Ruth Mazo Karras, and Kathryn L. Reyerson—not only for their service in that connection, but also for their constant professional advice and support throughout my graduate career. Finally, my advisor, Michael Lower, has my enduring gratitude. His guidance since I arrived in Minneapolis in 2009 has been all I could have hoped for and more. So much good that has happened for me during my graduate years I owe to his sage and sober advice—and to the insights that come from chatting over the occasional burrito lunch. I have had the privilege and delight of meeting a group of friends and colleagues during my time at Minnesota who have contributed enormously to the completion of this dissertation. Much more importantly, they have been a constant source of amusement and edification in both happy and trying times. For this, I gladly thank: Adam Blackler, Cameron Bradley, Chris Flynn, Brian Hill, Matt King, John Manke, Basit Qureshi, Brian Toye, Tiffany Vann Sprecher, Liz Venditto, Alex Wisnoski, and Ann Zimo. There could not be a finer group for me to have rubbed elbows with during my time at the U. I would also like to thank Jessica Andruss, Brian Campbell, and Noah Kaye, all of whom made my research stay in Israel in 2012-13 indescribably better than it ever could have been without them. A special thanks goes to my wife, Barbara, whose love and unflagging interest in my studies are sacred mysteries to me. Everything became so much better and easier when she appeared on the scene. Finally, pride of place in these acknowledgements must go to my parents, Cheryl and Frank. They have nurtured my interests going back long iii before my memory can reach; and each and every day they still think up some new way to show their love and support. This is for them, and because of them. iv Abstract In May of 1291, armies of the Mamluk dynasty, a Sunni Muslim regime based in Cairo, overwhelmed the defenses of the city of Acre, thereby conquering the last major stronghold in the Latin Kingdom of Jerusalem. This brought to a close nearly two hundred years of Frankish settlement in Syria and destroyed the last vestiges of the principalities the Franks had established there during and immediately after the First Crusade (1095-1099). There has long been a pervasive assumption among scholars that the kingdom was terminally weak by the early thirteenth century; that the Franks living there had little control over their own affairs; and that its eventual conquest by a neighboring Muslim power was all but inevitable. In this dissertation I challenge these assumptions through a close study of the nobility’s military and diplomatic actions and an analysis of how these actions fit into the broader context of their social and cultural attitudes during the period c.1240-1291. I conclude that the Franks remained more diplomatically and military relevant than commonly believed and that it was a pervasive attitude of political and social competition among its leading nobles and their perception of threat to their economic, social, and political dominance of the Kingdom of Jerusalem from other segments within Frankish society that proved to be its undoing. v Table of Contents Introduction 1 Project Overview The Kingdom of Jerusalem in the Thirteenth Century Historiography Sources Chapters Part I Chapter 1: The Permanent Fracturing of the Kingdom 24 Governance Fiefs, Fortifications, and Military Forces Civil War Conclusion Chapter 2: Franks, Mamluks, and Mongols 56 The New Near-Eastern Context Sultan Baybars Frankish Resistance Conclusion Chapter 3: The Crown of Jerusalem and the Nobility 85 Hugh of Antioch-Lusigan (Hugh III of Cyprus and Jerusalem) The Angevin Regime in Syria Revolts of the Embriaco Lords of Jubail Conclusion vi Chapter 4: The Fall of Acre 109 Last Diplomatic Hopes The Fall of Tripoli The Fall of Acre Conclusion Part II Chapter 5: A Chivalrous Community 136 Making War and Maintaining Peace Appearance and Reputation Churchmen and Women in Power Merchants and Money Conclusion Chapter 6: A Vanishing World 163 Symbolic Communication and Images of Consensus Intertexts Once and Future Conclusion 185 Bibliography 188 Appendix A – Timeline 208 Appendix B – Key Players 212 1 Introduction On May 16, 1291, sappers in the army of the Mamluk sultan al-Ashraf Khalil mined the King’s Tower on the easternmost salient of the encircling wall of Frankish Acre and collapsed its outer façade. The tower’s defenders did not fall back immediately, resisting from amidst the ruins for much of the next day. Eventually recognizing their cause was futile, they retreated to St. Anthony’s Gate and the Accursed Tower, located on the inner wall of the city just behind the King’s Tower. On May 18th the attackers forced their way into the Accursed Tower, thereby gaining entrance to Acre roughly six weeks after having initiated the siege.1 The ominous beat of the sultan’s war drums could be heard everywhere as his men rushed through the tower gate into the city. Panic reigned in the streets and on the quays of the harbor where too many people tried to push their way onto too few boats. Vessels sank, men and women drowned, unscrupulous ship captains gouged the rich and ignored the poor while they pleaded to be delivered from the city before it was given over to the sack. The military orders and the chivalry of Acre fought stoically but to no avail: they were completely overwhelmed. The inhabitants of the city who had not escaped by sea, or drowned, or been slain, barred themselves inside the Templar compound on the shore in the southwest corner of the city. After ten days of defiance, these holdouts surrendered to al-Ashraf Khalil on the promise that their lives would be spared, but once the Templar gates were opened they were executed.2 So fell Acre, ending nearly two hundred years of 1 The siege began on April 6. 2 For the most detailed Frankish account, see Templare di Tiro. Cronaca del templare di Tiro: 1243-1314: la caduta degli stati crociati nel racconto di un testimone ocular, trans. Laura Minervini (Naples: Liguori, 2000), 206-29. For a study based on the several extant Muslim 2 Frankish settlement in Syria. After four decades of intermittent warfare against the Kingdom of Jerusalem, the Mamluks had finally burned out its heart; the last Frankish strongholds in the area were abandoned soon after without resistance. Never again in the medieval period would the Franks settle in the Holy Land.3 Project Overview For generations scholarship on the Crusades and the Latin Kingdom of Jerusalem has been weighted heavily toward the twelfth century. This has been in part a consequence of the pervasive belief among scholars that the truncated kingdom that survived in the thirteenth century following the conquests of Saladin in 1187 was not an independently viable entity and could last only if propped up by support from the Latin West.4 A related assumption has been that the Franks living in the thirteenth-century kingdom had little control over their own affairs, and that its eventual destruction was a virtual fait accompli after the Franks suffered a terrible defeat at the Battle of la Forbie in 1244 and King Louis IX of France’s crusades of 1249-50 and 1270 ended in abject failure.5 Christopher Tyerman has written that the Kingdom of Jerusalem was at the mercy of “forces over which the Franks held no influence.”6 Similarly, Thomas Madden has claimed that “[f]ew could shake the foreboding feeling…that the armies of Islam accounts, see Donald Little, “The Fall of ‘Akka in 690/1291: The Muslim Version,” Studies in Islamic History and Civilization: in Honour of Professor David Ayalon, ed.