Dan Snow's History Hit - The Crusades: The Last Battle for the Holy Land

Episode Date: April 16, 2026

For the third episode in our mini-series on the Crusades, we dive into the 1291 Siege of Acre - the desperate, violent last stand that ended two centuries of crusading in the Holy Land. We hear how, outnumbered, divided and desperate, the Christian defenders decided to fight to the bitter end against the Mamluk forces of Al-Ashraf Khalil.For this series, we're joined by Steve Tibble, author of many books on the Crusades, including 'The Crusader Strategy: Defending the Holy Land'.Produced by James Hickmann and McKenna Fernandez, and edited by Jhenelle White.We need your help! Let us know what you want from Dan Snow's History Hit by filling in our anonymous survey here: https://forms.gle/PvgayWLkWGjYT4St6Dan Snow's History Hit is now available on YouTube! Check it out at: https://www.youtube.com/@DSHHPodcastSign up to History Hit for hundreds of hours of original documentaries, with a new release every week and ad-free podcasts. Sign up at https://www.historyhit.com/subscribe.You can also email the podcast directly at [e-mail]. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

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Sign up to join us in historic locations around the world and explore the past. Just visit history hit.com slash subscribe. It is the ultimate medieval siege. Catapults, batter, battlements, flames of Naphtha engulfed screaming defenders, walls are brought crashing down by miners who fight savage hand-to-hand battles in underground tunnels. There is no quarter given here. This is total war.

This is jihad. It is May 1291. And these are the besieged walls of Acre, the last great crusader stronghold in the Holy Land. The forces of Al-Ashraf Khalil, the Mamluk Garmie commander, Titan like a noose. The defenders, Knights Templar, Knights Hospitaller, alongside Teutonic Knights, they all fight with a desperation of men who know there can be no surrender, no retreat, men whose fate is martyrdom. This is not just a massive, closely contested siege.

It is the endgame of two centuries of confessions. It is the last battle for the Holy Land, the last crusade. Before we dive into this story, make sure you check out the first two episodes in our series on the complete history of the Crusades and come back here when you're done. Now, let's get into it. Steve, great to have you on the podcast. Oh, lovely to be here, Dan. We have reached the grand finale of the Crusade.

This is a big moment. Yeah, I know. Not only is it the final moment of the Crusader States, 100 years of history, but it's also one of the great sieges of all. time. Yeah, this is a real culmination and I think there are many occasions when you could say, well, this siege was important or that one was, but this one, you can't argue about it. This is the end of the Crusades. And also lots of sieges are sort of quite good and they break it off and go somewhere else or something that everyone gets dysentery and goes home. This is a proper siege,

isn't it? Very much so. This is no holds barred. It's the last big outing for the Crusaders. these are guys who haven't got anywhere else to go. These are people with their backs to the wall. On the one hand, from the Crusader side, from the Mamluk side, these are the, this is the last kind of diehards of the infidels that are sort of like a little pimple on the backside of your empire. And you see all the techniques of that sort of classic medieval siege warfare that people be familiar with from movies,

but this is where you really see them in the historical record. Absolutely. And the wonderful thing about this, is that it really does act as a great case study for explaining how real siege warfare worked, not the Hollywood one. And it explains how things like catapults, you can really see catapults working in the way that they really did, rather than, you know, as you might think of them. Very much looking forward to hearing about it.

Let's very quickly deal with the fact there had been these crusader states, there had been multiple crusades, Christians heading out to the so-called Holy Land, roughly speaking, bits of Syria, Lebanon, Israel, Palestine, teeny bits of Jordan, bits of Egypt. That's, they've all, it's all been reconquered, conquered by Muslims, reconquered, conquered by Muslims at this point. Yes, indeed. The only one thing is left. Yeah. Basically, there's a few little seaside towns now.

There's a couple of big cities, Tyre and Acre, and a few castles like Saiden, Athens. are still there. So right on the coast of the Mediterranean? Absolutely. This is not, this is supposedly what people would call the Latin Kingdom of Jerusalem, but that's way too grand. Basically, these are, you can't even ride down the road from one of these places to the other. These are just tiny little enclaves on the, on the coastline of what is now Israel, Palestine.

So everything is to play for here. You know, all the settlers of the Crusades who haven't got, back to Europe are there. You know, these are people who perhaps we think of them as being crusaders and foreigners, but in reality, you know, they will, many of them will have been there and their families for 200 years and there would be a lot less foreign than, say, many of the Mamlux who are slaves from Turkic lands or the Caucasus. Yeah, well, let's talk about the Mamluks, because they're the new superpower of the East,

aren't they? Where have they come from? Who are they? Yeah, so the Mamlux were effectively slave soldiers. As you can imagine, when you're in a very political situation and you're effectively running a family firm like many of these political entities were, what you want is people you can rely on

because they've been slightly dislocated and they don't have family alliances. These are people who you pay to do what you tell them to do. And if you think you're a normal kind of warlord, particularly, say, a Muslim warlord in this part of the world at this time, you're surrounded by your emirs who all, you know, they all have friends and family, your cousins are all related. Exactly.

Who can you trust? So what you do is you end up with slaves who you train up as soldiers. They're far, you know, they could be a thousand miles away from their home. A lot of the Mamluk's slave soldiers were taken from the, you know, the Turkic steppes or the Caucasus. So these are people who, in theory at least, have. no other ties so they can be tied to the people who pay them cash. In reality, of course, it's always more complicated and it doesn't take that much time before people develop their own political alliances. But that is the theory of it. And the wonderful thing about the Mamluks

was that they were so professional, so good. So there was a lot of truth behind the logic, you know, that if you get people who are devoted to that art and dislocated from their families, they devote themselves to that. You know, in the same way as, say, a Templar knight, you know, taken from his family and given just one job to do, which is, you know, learn how to charge properly, you know, is elite. So the Mamluks became this elite force in the Middle East of primarily cavalry. But the big difference between them and the Crusaders was there were lots of them. There were tens of thousands of these guys and they were superb and they were trained.

And they could be from as far out, well, you mentioned they could be from the, step, the Asian step, they could be from Turkey, they could be from parts of Europe or? Somewhere, yeah, certainly, yeah, some eastern parts of the eastern lands of Byzantium. Really, I think one of the deep mythologies of the Crusades is that there's somehow a big kind of racist dimension to it. And it really couldn't be further from the truth. When you look at the documents of the Crusades, whether it's Europeans or locals, it's actually hard to tell what ethnicity people are, because it's so unimportant. You know, most of the, of the kings of Jerusalem were mixed race. Most of the guys on the ground were not really crusaders

in the sense of somebody who's just got off the boat from Donny Gaul. It's like these are people who have been in the area for 200 years with seven or eight generations of Arab mothers and grandmothers. So although it might seem odd that these Mamluks are from different parts of the world, that is actually normative. People were much more obsessed with religion than they were with ethnicity, even though that's important to many people nowadays. And the Mamluks, so they begin as a slave army, but they take over and they establish their own empire. And so this is the Mamluks now as independent players. Yeah, absolutely. That shows the fundamental flaw in the argument that these guys are not

going to be interested in politics. Well, of course they are because they're human beings. So you're absolutely right. Having defeated King Louis on Crusade, the, the, the, the, the, the award for the Sultan who beat him was to be killed by his own Mamluks. And then the Mamluks took over. I mean, they're both ruthless, ruthless way. I mean, it was very ferocious. Egypt and then took over much of what we now call the Middle East. Absolutely.

And we've got to give it to Mamluks. I mean, they absolutely smoke the Mongols in battle, which is, there's a pretty short list of people that do that in the 13th century. Yes, absolutely. I mean, yeah, the Mongols are your worst nightmare. You find in the run-up to the Mongols' meetings, their defeat at 1260 in Ainshalute. You know, you find Muslim chroniclers

who are almost too scared to write about them. It is like Game of Thrones when the Mongols approach. People are paralyzed. You know, these guys who are so remorseless, they're almost unthinkable. So the idea that the Mamluks could face them and beat them was extraordinary.

But it's a real testament to the Mamluks. You're listening to Dan Snow's history. We're going to be back after this. break. And so a decade or two later, having beaten the Mongols, they turn their attention on these little tiny pinpricks along the Mediterranean coast. So this is a big mismatch. Yeah, it is. And actually, you know, just between us girls, I mean, I think the reason that those tiny little seaside states are still there is because everybody had something better to do. You know, the Mamlux had to worry about the Mongols. The Mamlukes always had their own internal politics.

politics, there was an economic benefit from having these ports, you know, and having a kind of an entrepreneurial route back to Europe. It facilitated trade up to a point. But I think by the mid-13th century, the trade routes were heading a bit north. As you know, we're talking about the end of the Silk Road. So you have to have a path for those goods to go on either to Egypt or to Europe. And those paths were changing. So the kind of literal of Palestine was becoming less important. So what are you left with? You've got some kind of irritating infidels sticking out in a place that's of increasing irrelevance in terms of trade. You've got the Mongols. You've cleared your agenda. Your to-do list has got shorter and you've scrolled up. And what now is top of the

to-do list for the first time is get rid of those irritating crusaders. Right. And what does crusader defenses look like? Let's take me, look at least, we're talking about Aker in particular. I mean, It is, but it's been in Crusader hands since Richard the Lionheart, presumably. Yes, indeed, yeah. It was in Muslim hands for a very short period after the Battle of Hattin in 1187. But for most of the last 200 years, it's been in Christian hands. And what are those fortifications like? Oh my God, they're enormous.

I mean, this is state of the art. This is like two aircraft carriers put together. I mean, it's a fabulous set of concentric walls. So I don't know if you've ever heard the term concentric castle. Basically it means two layers of walls or a series of layers of walls. And the wonderful thing about that is it imposes huge costs on the attacker, and it allows the defender to fire over from one wall to the other. It also means that people who want quick plunder,

which is like most people really, are almost certainly going to be disappointed. You know, because if you've got two layers of walls, you push your way through at huge costs, huge risk, and at the end of it, you're faced with another wall. You find yourself in the killing zone. Actually, that was only the start of a 10. Yeah, absolutely. And then you've got a citadel beyond that.

In an acre, you have a series of castles within these layers of walls. I mean, it's absolutely stonkingly wonderful. I've been there many times. What you see now is not what was there at the time, but you really can get a sense of it. It's called Aco now. Wonderful place.

And it's still a beautiful place. Right. So, and defenders, have they got enough defenders manning those waltz? That is the perennial problem with the Crusades. Basically, everybody, it's always the worst kind of an away match. You know, they're far from home, they're literally thousands of miles from home. They're at the end of a very long supply line. They've got almost no land, so people can't support themselves.

You can't get lots of settlers out there. So you find that on a good day, they're hugely outnumbered. And by this point at 1291, The guys are just embarrassingly outnumbered. So we don't know any of the exact numbers for what we're talking about, but we think all in there may have been about 700 nights. Wow. And many thousands of infantry, so maybe 10,000 to 13,000 infantry. But it's not anywhere near enough.

You know, this is the big city, many walls. It's very difficult to defend with that number of guys. And of course, what the other part of the equation is, how big are the procedures and what kind of equipment they've got. Well, I was about to ask. The news isn't good, Dan. It's pretty rough out there. So, yeah, the Mamlux are a wonderful force. They're super focused.

And they are professional in a way that the Crusaders aren't. The Crusaders are good individual fighters. And some of them, like the Templars and the hospitlers, are highly trained. So you've got these groups of knights, Knights Templar people have heard of, Knights Hospitlar, these are sort of monastic orders of warrior monks. Yeah, absolutely. So they would train together, they'd live together, they got funds and recruits sent over from Europe. But right, but they're not necessarily used to working all with each other, I presume.

Not at all. No, and actually, you know, they are elite, but they're tiny, even in that group. They're tiny in number. And the big problem, I think, apart from lack of manpower, is that the Christian defenders were so fragmented. If you think there were several, part of the community were Italians. And there were, you know, there were peasans, there were Genoese, there were Phoenicians. There were Genoese.

They all hated each other's guards. The Genoese, just before the siege started, decided that they didn't want to join in. And they declared themselves to be neutral because they were planning on doing more. trade with the Sultan. So, you know, from a commercial perspective, it made sense, from a historical perspective, or from, you know, from the Vatican's point of view, it looks, you know, this is a real stab in the back. Did they get, sorry, just quickly, do they get away with that? Or don't the other Christians just, so what, they just sat in their houses, put a big G on the door and just yeah, yeah. So it's like, you know, we're all right. Don't, just don't come in here. Yeah, no, I don't

know how it worked in practice. Or, you know, I mean, if you're in the midst of a, you know, an assault, whether people stop and think, oh, it's a G there. But yeah, but that's certainly what they tried to do. So you had all of that, then you have also the fact that the king who's actually based in Cyprus, which again is quite telling. Yes, the King of Jerusalem. Yes, exactly. You know, that's a real, you know, vote of confidence when the King lives off the coast

because he knows how risky it all is. So he's not very highly, he doesn't wield very much power. There are different communities. is people barely on speaking terms with each other. Plus, you've got tiny numbers of guys relatively and very limited prospect of relief. So, you know, grim, sticky wicket. Yeah, sticky wicket, not super attractive.

And so on the other side, though, plenty of soldiers, highly trained. Absolutely. And talks to me about their siege equipment. Yeah, they were, well, they were a very, very accomplished bunch. So we're talking about huge numbers. I mean, the estimates are up to half a million, which is a gross exaggeration. But we do know that the Mamluks had tens of thousands of top quality cavalry.

And then when you get that number of cavalry, you also get, you know, a much larger number of infantry. And there were huge numbers of volunteers because this was seen as the last big push for jihad. You know, there were a lot of guys who would just come and fight for free for the prospect of plunder and piety, really. the two, you know, can live quite happily together. They were also fabulous at logistics. So, you know, for instance, when part of the army set off from Egypt, they'd had months of setting up, you know, base camps and ammunition dumps and supply dumps

all the way up the Palestinian coast. You know, and the Crusaders wouldn't have had that luxury at all. You know, this was a really professional army fighting against a tiny number of squabbling, squabbling largely commercial interests at this point. The other super weapon they had was artillery. They had siege engines, catapults that were to die for, and they were superb at it.

For instance, they had at the Siege of Tripoli, which had taken place just a few years earlier, I think only two years earlier, they'd used 17 of these big catapults and they'd taken the city quite easily. When it came to the siege of acre, they had up to 70. Whoa. Yeah, 70 of these huge engines.

And each one was, I don't know what the equivalent would be. I mean, it would be like, you know, an aircraft carrier and a fleet. You know, these are big, big items. And they would basically be of two kinds. There's a kind of a slightly smaller one called a traction catapult. This is a very complicated area, so I'm simplifying. overly here. But for our purposes there's something called a traction

catapult which is the one, you know you see in manuscripts where you get the guys hanging off the edge of the catapult usually quite precariously and this is a dangerous job and that would be an engine where the force behind it would be

propelled by a team of men quite a lot of men pulling it down and then letting go at the right point and the rock or whatever goes a long way. But then obviously you're limited by human muscle and how many men you can actually attach to it. The other kind is a counterweight catapult, which is where you get a kind of a box, like a triangular box at one end of it, where you would have had men.

And in that box you have super heavy things. So you have several tons worth of weights, you know, rocks, lead or whatever, in this counterweight. And that allows you to throw even bigger stones, bigger rocks further. they take longer to assemble they're more difficult to maneuver they're longer to reload but if you're on the receiving end of that you really do know it

so these are guys they're really state of the art I mean the Crusaders have their own artillery and there's a couple in particular that did some damage but you know there's really like one or two pieces of artillery on the Crusader side that you hear of whereas on the Muslim side you're talking up to

70 sourced from all over the Middle East Wow. And this is a period where Edward the first King of England was off at the same time smashing the Scots with these big artillery, with these big trebishop as well, wasn't he? Yeah. He was called the War Wolf, I think. And did the Mamluks had names, and they like the victorious. Yeah, furious.

Yeah, it sounds like Napoleonic English Navy, doesn't it? But, yeah. Brilliant. No, they were really important pieces. I always grew up thinking that Caterpult smashed walls. You know, you watch a Hollywood film and you see, catapults working and the walls shatter. In reality, that's not how they work.

And they're not capable of doing that by and large. And they're not meant to do that. When I was a PhD student, I was wandering around Israel. And I found myself at the huge castle of Alsuf, which Bybars had besieged in the 1260s. The Mamluk. The Mammuk, Southwark. Indeed.

Sorry, the Sultan. Yes, absolutely. And because it was the 1980s and the archaeologists hadn't got there in huge numbers, there were still the catapult stones were still there. And the rocks, you could see where they bounced off the wall. So these were huge, huge rocks. I hope they're all in museums now, but in the mid-80s, they were all just lying on the ground. But you could see that these walls had not been touched in any serious way,

even though these were great sea engines with huge, huge ammunition. and what a lot of recent research is showing what they were really about and what they were really about was clearing the top of the walls rather than knocking them down so it was about dominating the battlements you took away the protection at the top

you made it very difficult for people to stand on the top and the other thing that the Mamelukes had was they had these tens of thousands of superb archers and it meant that for every crusader crossbowmen who was brave enough to try and just crouch below whatever little cover was left after the catapults was then for every one of him there were going to be 20 guys shooting arrows at him who was superb in their own right so it was almost like a you know a suicide mission standing up there firing down and that way you could

clear the battlements and the other real reason for having catapults is that by doing that you allow mining to take place and mining i think is the very un-glamorous, kind of boring part of siege warfare, but it's the mining that actually does it. The thing that knocks the wall down is a team of miners operating underneath. And it's not like the great escape where they're sort of, you know,

going through 150 yards. You actually want to get your miners right to the base of the wall. It saves them having to dig too much. Absolutely. And the Mamelic armies were superb. They had really, in the same ways, had specialist artillery units. They had specialist mining units.

and there were particular parts of the world where these guys came from and they had a real heritage. Aleppo produced fabulous miners and there were a thousand Aleppo miners at the siege. Curasan was also a great, great source of miners. And these lads could really just literally undermine a wall very quickly. So the combination of those kind of colossal catapults

destroying battlements, which means that your miners can then go to a wall, work without those irritating crusaders firing out them with crossbows, you know, you're almost unstoppable at that point. You are consuming Dan Snow's history hits more after the break. What hope did it, what hope, if any, did these crusaders have? They try and sort of keep the siege going until the winter and hope that they would have the attacks have to go home or perhaps reinforcements arrived from Europe or what was the plan?

Yeah, yeah. The plan is difficult to find a good plan. You know, basically, Europe is very divided. Everybody's got something better to do. Edward I was beating up the Scots, as we said. Yeah, he's actually Edward I don't mean this from a partisan point. He's probably the most prominent crusader at the time. He's the only European monarch who's actually been on Crusade at that point.

He's, you know, it's not on his agenda. Everybody else is fighting everybody else. There's a lot of infighting and, you know, Sicilian Vespers and, you know, all of that. There's always a diversion. I think the other aspect that people were probably too shy to talk about was throwing good money after bad. You know, it did kind of feel like the end of days. The Crusades were, you know, grinding to an end. If Aker hadn't fallen then 1291, well, probably would have fallen then 1292.

You know, there's that whole inevitability of it. Ever the first should have sent his son, Edward the second. That would have really worried. Might have got rid of the uses. Yeah, Calhiel. But I think to your other point, so reinforcements weren't really coming. The main opportunity they had was time. You know, there were a lot of volunteers in the Mamluk army

who couldn't stay there forever because however pious they were, however committed, you know, girls still got to eat. And the Mamlux themselves, you know, they're great soldiers. They don't want to hang around. You know, the latrines get full. All sorts of ghastliness happens, you know, as usual. disease kills more people than crossboat bolts. So holding up for time would be helpful.

I think trying to get to what you find is the crusaders do two or three sorties at the beginning of the siege. And every time they aim at the artillery. So they aim at the catapults. They know exactly what the priority is. You know, the catapults are protecting the miners. The miners are destroying the city. So if they can get to the catapults, they have a chance.

And they keep trying to get to the catapults. But the trouble is every time they come out, you know, there are a couple hundred guys fighting a camp that's got 40, 50, 60,000 people in it. You know, they are pushing against a lead wall and they fail. They keep bouncing off. So they did their best. They did try to get to the catapults. They did try to get reinforcements. And occasionally ships would come through.

The king sent, I think it was 40 ships. But they had 700 men. You know, in the scheme of things. you know, whenever reinforcements came through, A, there weren't many, you know, reinforcement attempts, but when they did come through, you're talking hundreds rather than tens of thousands. It's almost just putting more men in to be killed.

And there is a point where people who you're asking for help are saying, you know, I'm going to need my soldiers. They're all going to die if I send them to you. So the crisis has reached in mid-May? Indeed, indeed. The siege starts in April, at the beginning of April. And the point is, you know, up to that point, mid-April, the sorties that we've just been talking about take place,

the catapults are doing their damage, the Crusaders have proved they can't get to the catapults. So there is just, you know, there's a couple of weeks of just unremitting, remorseless pain being delivered on the walls. So first of all, the outer walls, and then, you know, obviously once you've done that, you can get through to the inner walls. There are particular problems because every castle has a wall. weakness and in the case of acre there were two key weaknesses really one is there's a there was a salient which which is where where there was a tower called the accursed tower with a couple of barbicans on the outer wall and you know medieval guys are so blunt you know it's a great name a cursed tower you know it's not going to end well so that's one very very weak point so it's very exposed

it's yeah bends out it can be attacked on all sides absolutely it's kind of Battle of the Bulge for siege warfare there. And you find there's the opposite of a bulge, but another vulnerable point, because Acre used to be a much smaller city, and they built a fortified suburb around it. And so there's a wall, an internal wall, going around the line of the old city walls. And when that meets, there's kind of the opposite of a salient, but it's a weakness between where the three walls meet. and there's a gate there. Gates obviously also a weakness,

and it was called the gate of St Anthony. So you had these two weak points. And the Muslim army under Kahlil had enough men to totally, totally, you know, man the siege walls. So they could make sure that every part of the wall had to be manned, but they focused the best machines, best artillery on those two weak points,

and it really showed. So we can imagine, that the accurseded tower and Sanati's Gate lot of the masonry has been smashed very difficult to offend does an assault go in do they try and take them by storm? Yeah so by mid-May everything

is really rough there are big moats but they've been gradually filled outside these places so the Muslim troops have filled in these moats they can walk across them yeah yeah so at that point then you know the miners can get straight to it you're ready and you've got your

assault troops ready to go in So the accurseder tower is in the inner layer of walls But on the outer layer of walls protecting it There's an outwork which the Barbican And there's another tower called the King's Tower And over that during that fortnight They've been pounded to pieces And you just get to a point where

The accurseder has to be abandoned Just because it's so vulnerable It's just about to fall down And the Crusaders have put a kind of wooden structure behind it to try and shore it up but you know things are approaching an end game at that point if you're relying on bits of wood

to kind of man things and eventually you just get to the point similarly on St Antonin's Gate where the walls in front of it were being knocked down the towers were falling down around all of the outer walls the towers are gradually collapsing and because they're being undermined

they're being undermined and the battlements are being swept by these 70 catapults and because the Mamluks have so many men they're able to do continual artillery bombardments you know because you can imagine particularly with the

traction engines it's very wearing you know guys can not do this 24 hours a day but if you've got teams of guys and they're all waiting to do it you can just keep a continual bombardment and it just exhausts everybody you know the masonry is coming down the defenders are exhausted and and they're hugely

outnumbered and at that point you know you've got mining going on counter mining as well which we know happened which is where your own miners the crusader miners tried to bury themselves underneath and fight off the the mamluk miners and actually even that is not helpful ultimately because then you're undermining your own wars to get to them and that and that causes problems but there would have been faced little battles underground when they're in the two that's terrific yeah it is you know sort of bird song but with even more ghastliness because it's also hand to hand yeah

and so mid-May they have to fall back basically from those outer positions do they like the gate? Yeah so you find it's you only need one one point of entry really and the the Mammelic assault troops are just fabulous they're armed with effectively

hand grenades that are of liquid fire naphther so they can throw those and they can be thrown on catapults as well. So you've got this horrific thing where you get this combination of mining, artillery, archery, crossbows, and then it's freak fire.

It is like something out of Game of Thrones. And the guys eventually break through on the accursed tower. And once you've broken in through there and you've got guys through the inner walls, then you kind of know it's all over. And people start running to the port to try and get on the last few ships.

People have actually been leaving. rich people have been leaving for the last couple of weeks, which is not great for morale, but it's equally, it's entirely rational. But once they're through that inner wall, then it's just... It's sort of game over, yeah. The Templars and the hospitalers both do good work at this point. So the master of the Templars, William of Bourgeois,

hastily puts on his armour and charges out with his guys towards St. Anton's Gate to try and stop the flusers. of assault troops coming in. But because he's been rushing into doing it, he hasn't got his armor on properly. He gets killed by a javelin blow under his left armpit, and he's carried off dying.

Even then, just to give you a sense of the numbers, he had somewhere between about 12 and 14 nights with him, and they're countercharging almost an infinite number of guys coming through. It is just a matter of buying time at this point. The hospitalers did great. work as well. Their, their Marshal was very famous in the Chronicles for work he was doing, and they were doing almost suicidal charges. But it's, you know, it's good to go out in a blaze of

glory, but it doesn't actually win the battle. You know, once a huge army has broken in through the walls, it is game over. And at that point, people either fled or down to the port, or they went into the separate compounds and castles that there were within acre. You know, and the Hospitlers had one of those. There was a royal castle. There was a very powerful Templar castle as well. And possibly there was a Genoese bit where there was a G on the doors and everybody was just given a nice couple of cupcakes instead.

But that takes you're just isolated. It's a matter of time. I mean, you can't hold out. Absolutely. And you find for a couple of days the Hospitler compounds in the Royal Castle held out. and then they surrendered under terms but it looks like the people who surrendered were then killed the men were killed and the women were enslaved

so the treaty wasn't honoured the Templars held had a big compound very crowded and they held out for quite a while a few days and there were peace negotiations going on but then and there were some Mamluk troops inserted inside the castle to try and organise the refugees leaving the castle. But then things got out of hand.

Some of the Mamelik troops sort of raped and murdered some of the younger, younger guys in there, and, you know, raping boys and girls. And at that point, they were butchered. So then the Mammeliks obviously react very badly to their own guys being killed and talks breakdown. And the Templar compound is eventually rushed and the tower collapses and kills even more people.

It's a very, very grim ending to a very grim siege. But it is so apocalyptic. It is, you know, a very definitive end to the Crusades. I know people still talk about the Crusades afterwards, but if you need a line in the sand, Siege of Acre is really it. That's effectively it. Yeah.

And so if you lose Acre, you can't really mount another crusade because you haven't got a beachhead, you haven't got a port. So there would be no... 10th crusade. You're absolutely right. And in fact, the memories were very clever. You know, the temptation must have been to capture the city, nice buildings, nice port, and then reuse it.

And they didn't take that opportunity. What they did was just trashed it. They made sure that the port was destroyed, the walls were taken down, the buildings were taken down. Even the villages, even the villages around, you know, the trees were cut down, they deliberately created a wasteland because what they didn't want was some bright spark in Europe to think, oh, I know, lads, you know, we can go back to Ager. All we have to do is capture that city or this city and we can start again.

So what they did is by and large, they just destroyed the coastal ports all the way up and down. So there wasn't anything to come back to, which made the planning, you know, the people like the Templars were planning to launch huge amphibious landings and recapture the Holy Land. It was just so unrealistic. You know, they hadn't been able to save the Holy Land, even with huge. huge castles. So what chance did they have coming from a, you know, from nowhere with no real basis? I mean, realistically none.

So effectively, the Mamlux very cleverly undermined the idea of any future crusade at the same time as snuffing out all the old Crusader settlement. So, yeah, full marks to them is a very definitive ending. Well, that is also the ending this podcast. In that case, got nothing more to talk about at the end of crusade. Steve, thank you very much for coming on. Thank you, Dan. It's been a pleasure.

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