Siege of Acre
Having crushed a Turkish force at Mount Tabor and advanced through Gaza and Jaffa — where he ordered the massacre of some 4,000 Turkish prisoners — Napoleon arrived before the Ottoman-held port of Acre (modern Akko) in March 1799. The city was defended by the Ottoman governor Djezzar Pasha, strengthened by British naval officers under Commodore Sidney Smith who provided naval gunfire, siege expertise, and crucially intercepted French heavy artillery being transported by sea. Without his siege guns, Napoleon was forced into costly infantry assaults against walls that could not be breached. Thirteen assaults failed over two months; plague ravaged the French camp; a Turkish relief army was destroyed at Mount Tabor in April but Acre itself held. On 20 May 1799 Napoleon ordered the retreat to Egypt. It was his first unambiguous military defeat, and it ended his ambitions for a Levantine empire that he had imagined might extend to India. He publicly disguised the failure as a voluntary withdrawal, but the check at Acre limited the Egyptian campaign to Egypt proper and accelerated his decision to return to France.
- Year: 1799 CE
- Category: Military
