The end of the crusader states (1193-1291)

Part oneAfter Salahuddin

Salahuddin died in Damascus on 4 March 1193 (27 Safar 589 AH), only months after the treaty. He had given away so much that he left almost no money, and friends had to cover the cost of his funeral. He had never made the pilgrimage to Makkah. He was buried beside the Umayyad Mosque in Damascus.

He had ruled by personal respect and left no machinery to hold his lands together. His sons and brothers each took a share, and within a year they were quarrelling. By 1200 his brother al-Adil had taken Egypt and become sultan, and the family became known as the Ayyubids, after Salahuddin's father Ayyub. Al-Adil was a patient ruler who preferred truces to campaigns.

The crusades went on. The Fourth Crusade, meant for Egypt, turned aside in 1204 and attacked the Christian city of Constantinople. In 1218 the Fifth Crusade landed at Damietta on the Nile. It held the port for over a year, and al-Adil's son al-Kamil, now sultan, offered to give up Jerusalem in return for peace. The crusaders refused. They advanced up the river, and in 1221 they were forced to surrender when the Nile rose around them.

In 1229 al-Kamil did give Jerusalem up. The Holy Roman Emperor Frederick II came east with a small force, and al-Kamil, who was busy with a feud among his relatives in Syria, signed a treaty. Jerusalem, Bethlehem and a road to the coast went to the Franks for ten years, while the Muslims kept the Haram al-Sharif, with al-Aqsa and the Dome of the Rock. Many Muslims were angry at the agreement. In 1244 troops from Central Asia, the Khwarazmians, who had been driven west by the Mongols, took Jerusalem, and it returned to Muslim rule.

Part twoThe Mamluks finish the work

The Ayyubids' own soldiers were Mamluks, slave soldiers bought as boys, raised as Muslims and trained to fight. In 1249 King Louis IX of France landed at Damietta in the Seventh Crusade. The Ayyubid sultan died during the campaign, and his widow, Shajar al-Durr, held the state together. In 1250 the Mamluks defeated Louis's army near Mansura and took him prisoner, and he was released after he gave back Damietta and paid a large ransom. That same year the Mamluks took power in Egypt, and an officer named Aybak became the first Mamluk sultan. After the Mongols destroyed Baghdad in 1258 and the Mamluks beat them at Ain Jalut in 1260, the Mamluk sultan Baibars turned to the Frankish coast.

Baibars had been bought as a slave boy, had fought at Ain Jalut, and ruled from 1260 to 1277. He gave a home in Cairo to a member of the Abbasid family who had escaped the fall of Baghdad, and the line of Abbasid caliphs there lasted for centuries. He rebuilt the army, repaired roads and castles and improved the postal system. He took the fortress of Safad in 1266, the great castle of Crac des Chevaliers in 1271, and in 1268 he took Antioch, the city the crusaders had won in 1098. The Franks still held several ports, but they were cut off from each other. Louis IX led one more crusade in 1270 and died of illness at Tunis, and it hardly touched the Levant. The English prince Edward arrived at Acre in 1271 with a small force, and in 1272 he agreed a ten-year truce with Baibars before he went home.

Qalawun, who became sultan in 1279, also built a great hospital and school complex in Cairo, which still stands. In 1289 he took Tripoli.

Acre was now the main city of the Frankish coast. The Italian trading cities of Genoa, Venice and Pisa competed there so fiercely that it could hardly act as one. In 1290 a group of newly arrived crusaders attacked Muslim merchants in Acre, breaking a truce. Qalawun prepared an army and died that autumn, and his son al-Ashraf Khalil led it north. He laid siege to the city, and after about six weeks it fell, on 18 May 1291. Many of its people left by sea.

Tyre, Sidon and Beirut were given up over the following weeks, and the last small strongholds fell in August. The Mamluks pulled down the harbours and walls of many coastal towns so that no new crusade could land. After 192 years, the Frankish states on the Levantine coast were over. The sultans who ended them had taken up the work of Nur ad-Din and Salahuddin, and the Mamluk state they ruled would make Cairo the centre of the Muslim world.

The crusades left a long memory on all sides. Muslims remembered Nur ad-Din, Salahuddin and Baibars as the men who answered, and Jerusalem stayed under Muslim rule through most of the centuries that followed, open to Christian pilgrims.

Ninety-eight years after Salahuddin's death, the last crusader city on the coast fell.

WatchThe lecture for this chapter

Lecture

[[LECTURE]]slot for the chapter lecture embed, to be supplied by the owner.

The mapWhere it happened

• Damascus
• Damietta
• Mansura
• Antioch
• Tripoli
• Acre

This map is a simple sketch to help you picture where events took place. Positions, distances and borders are approximate, so please use it for reference only, not as an accurate map.

SourcesSources for this chapter