al-Ashraf Khalil

al-Ashraf Khalil took Acre in 1291 and ended the crusader states on the mainland of the Levant after 192 years. He was the son of Qalawun, the Mamluk sultan who had prepared the campaign and died as it was being assembled, telling him to finish it. He arrived before Acre in April 1291 with a siege train that contemporaries described in terms nobody quite believed, including a catapult called the Victorious that took a month to transport. The pretext was a massacre of Muslim merchants and peasants by newly arrived Italian crusaders the previous year, for which the city had refused to surrender the culprits. The siege lasted six weeks. The Accursed Tower fell on 18 May, the Templar Grand Master Guillaume de Beaujeu was killed defending the breach, and the city was stormed; those who could not reach a ship were killed or enslaved. Tyre, Sidon, Beirut and Tortosa were abandoned within months without a fight. He then had the coastal fortresses systematically demolished so that no future crusade could use them, which is why so little of crusader Palestine survives. He took Qal'at al-Rum from the Armenians the following year. In 1293 he was murdered while hunting by a conspiracy of his own senior emirs, led by the man who held his stirrup. That was the ordinary end of a Mamluk sultan, and he was thirty-one. His head was reportedly kept by his killers and his body left where it fell. The demolition of the coast he ordered was strategically sound and economically ruinous, since the ports he levelled were the ones the Italian trade had used, and it took Beirut and Tripoli centuries to recover.

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