10

The Landscapes of Acre

Andrew Jotischky

When Eudes of Nevers arrived at Acre in late fall of 1265, the landscape and topography of the city and its surrounding region were very different from the scene that his grandfather and father, crusaders in 1217–18 and 1239, had encountered. Power, population, and wealth in the Kingdom of Jerusalem had always been concentrated on the urban littoral. Although Jerusalem was the seat of symbolic royal and ecclesiastical power, Acre, Tyre, Sidon, and Beirut were the economic heart of the kingdom. Acre had seen dramatic expansion of both population and physical size after the loss of most of the territory of the Kingdom of Jerusalem to Saladin’s conquest in 1187. Although much of the extent of the pre-1187 kingdom was restored through a combination of military action and diplomacy from the 1190s to the 1240s, this situation began to unravel from 1250 onward with the rise of Mamluk power.

The political frontiers of the Kingdom of Jerusalem, stable until 1244, shrank with alarming speed after the rise of the Mamluks, and especially with the campaigns Sultan Baybars launched in the 1260s. Only three years before Eudes’s arrival, Baybars had attempted an assault on Acre. Although he failed to take it, his pillaging raids on Nazareth and Mount Tabor, which looked to Acre for their security, showed the reach of Mamluk power.¹ As the territories controlled by the Franks receded, the cities along the coast expanded to accommodate refugees emigrating from Mamluk-controlled regions. The area covered by the city of Acre doubled in size during the thirteenth century as the new faubourg of Montmusard developed beyond the limits of the twelfth-century city walls. The earliest description of the enclosure of this suburb, written by Wilbrand of Oldenbourg in 1211, testifies to a double wall fortified with towers. Louis IX completed the fortifications in 1250 at the start of his sojourn in Acre.² The twelfth-century extent of the city was about 1,300m (west–east) x 325m (north–south).³ Montmusard ran about 600m north–south along the sea front, but running inland its walls at their easternmost point were only about 300m north of the old city wall. The full extent of its west–east axis was probably about 500m (see map 2).

Acre was an important trading entrepot, with revenues from taxes worth fifty thousand pounds in silver annually to the king of Jerusalem.⁴ Within the city the major commercial powers—Genoa, Venice, and Pisa—controlled proprietorial zones. The origins of these quarters, not only in Acre but also in the other major ports of the kingdom, went back to the original conquests of the coastal cities, which were achieved with the naval help of the mercantile republics. Within their quarters, the republics exercised jurisdictional rights over their citizens and owned municipal and commercial buildings and churches. Representatives from the home cities ran these quarters and rented out properties to merchants and other colonists. A Venetian inventory divides the quarter into four districts. In the middle was the fondaco, a large building combining warehouse and sixteen retail spaces with lodgings on upper floors, including those for the parish priest and court clerk. The bailli had a house of two or three stories with six shops at ground level and apartments for rent on other floors. The church of St. Mark stood next door, and grouped around it outside were pitches for stalls. The Genoese inventory of 1249 shows that the republic maintained four houses and six larger buildings divided into rental apartments.⁵ The built environment of cities in the Kingdom of Jerusalem presented a dramatic contrast to what Eudes would have known in the West. In Outremer, houses were built of stone rather than wood and might comprise three or more stories. As can still be seen in the street layout of the largely medieval old city of Acre today, buildings were next to and across from each other in narrow streets, so close together that inhabitants of upper floors could reach across and hold hands. Jacques de Vitry, whose episcopal palace was to the north of the Arsenal, says that he could see the slopes of Mount Carmel from his window, so he must have occupied rooms on an upper story.⁶

The port of Acre faced south into the Bay of Haifa. Seawalls ran the length of the city from the north to the corner tower built by the Templars, and then west–east, curving to the north to follow the natural bend of the coast before running southeast. At the point where the coastline curved north, a levee mole ran into the bay from west to east, while another, longer one ran north–south from the Arsenal, on the west–east axis of the coastline. At the end of this longer mole, on the same axis as the west–east one, stood a defensive tower, known as the Tower of the Flies. A chain could be stretched across the gap between the Tower of the Flies and the shorter mole, so that access to the inner harbor by ships could be controlled.⁷ To the east of the longer mole was the outer anchorage. The Venetian quarter occupied what must have been an advantageous position with waterfront access to the inner harbor, while the Pisan quarter stood between the Templars’ corner tower and the west–east mole, and the Genoese just to the north of this with no direct access to the harbor. The Hospitallers’ palace lay north of the Genoese quarter against the old twelfth-century city wall, which in the 1260s marked the boundary between the old city and Montmusard. In the 1260s the Hospital had its headquarters in this building, whereas the Templars had moved their center of operations to Château Pèlerin, along the coast south of Haifa, in 1218.

Western visitors such as Eudes and his household often found material standards of living in the cities of the eastern Mediterranean higher than at home. Many of the luxury goods in high demand among western elites either originated in or were more readily to be found in a city such as Acre. Local products for export to the West included sugarcane, cotton, soap, glass, and the raw materials for glass making, but Acre also served as a mediator of the overland trade from Asia and as a warehouse for goods destined for Europe from Egypt and its trade in the Indian Ocean. This meant that luxury goods such as spices (pepper, cinnamon, ginger), silks, and worked metals, which had by the mid-thirteenth century become an important indicator of high status, were more plentiful in Acre. Not all visitors or new immigrants found the change of diet easy at first, as Jacques de Vitry noted in his letters, when he lamented that it was “with some difficulty [that he had] taken some food—for I have lost my appetite for eating and drinking since I entered this land beyond the sea.” His avowal of being unable to digest the rich food may owe as much to his disapproval of the general environment he found as to the food.⁸

By the time of Eudes’s residence in Acre, the years of apparently unbridled prosperity were in the past. The long-term consequences of disruption to overland trade with Asia were exacerbated by the War of St. Sabas (1258–61), a conflict between the two major commercial rivals in the eastern Mediterranean, Venice and Genoa. The other political and economic powers, notably the military orders, were drawn into the conflict. The Venetian victory over the Genoese altered the topography of the city considerably: the Genoese fortifications were destroyed, and between 1261 and 1270 Genoese citizens were expelled.⁹

The upgrading of the city’s defenses in the face of the Mongol advance in 1260 had also changed the visual appearance of the city, as trees in gardens and orchards near the defensive walls were cut down. In 1263 Baybars’s raid damaged properties in outlying suburbs, and further damage was caused a year later. Outlying defensive fortifications at Tell al-Fukhkhar were taken. In 1265, the year Eudes left France, buildings in the district of Da‘uk, including a mill tower, had been demolished by the inhabitants who feared their presence would provide raiders with a foothold from which to attack the city. Eudes’s brief period of residence in the city thus came at a time when the built environment was changing as the city experienced low-level but constant threat of attack.

Crusaders, pilgrims, and visitors to the Holy Land from northern Europe were confronted with an urban landscape that was unfamiliar and unnerving. Famously, Jacques de Vitry, appointed bishop of Acre in 1216, described his impressions of life in his cathedral seat in a letter home to friends in the West. Acre was “a horrible city … full of countless disgraceful acts,” he complained. Murder and sexual immorality were particularly widespread. Husbands and wives murdered each other, and poisons were easily obtainable. Prostitution was common, and even clergy rented out lodgings to prostitutes.¹⁰ John Phocas, visiting Acre in 1177, referred to the unhealthy miasma that hung over the city because of the constant influx of people in a crowded space.¹¹ This sense of discomfort is corroborated by the Andalusian traveler Ibn Jubayr in 1184, who spoke of refuse and excrement in streets that were “choked by the press of men, so that it is hard to put foot to the ground.”¹²

Although Frankish control over most of Jerusalem was restored by treaty between 1229 and 1244, most of the religious communities that had withdrawn to Acre or Tyre in 1187 remained there rather than returning to their original locations. This made Acre a particularly crowded ecclesiastical space—ironically, perhaps, since it was not conventionally regarded as being part of the biblical Holy Land.¹³ In addition to its own parish churches and the cathedral of the Holy Cross, the city hosted most of the major communities that had served shrines or holy spaces in and around Jerusalem before 1187. Denys Pringle’s authoritative survey of ecclesiastical buildings lists eighty-two in total, including churches, monasteries, convents and priories, chapels of ease, and hospitals.¹⁴ All but one of these (the church of St. Nicholas) lay within the area bounded by the city walls. The distribution of these buildings within the old city was fairly even, but in Montmusard most were located on or close to the sea front. The twenty-six religious institutions mentioned as recipients of bequests in Eudes’s inventory roll are similarly distributed equally across both the old city and Montmusard, but their locations are mostly restricted to the western side of both, with the only exception being St. Mary of the Germans.

The distribution according to type of institution also reveals the variety of different churches to be found in thirteenth-century Acre. Six were houses of Holy Land monasteries or convents, most of which had withdrawn their residences to Acre after 1187. The Acre house of the convent of St. Anne, in the Pisan quarter, is first mentioned in 1168, and the nuns remained in residence until the fall of Acre in 1291.¹⁵ St. Lazare of Bethany may refer to what was in the twelfth century a male cell of the convent at Bethany, near Jerusalem, but after the enforced abandonment of the convent in 1187, it housed the nuns. The property, located in the northwest corner of Montmusard, included houses rented to the Trinitarian order of friars, a tower, and vineyard.¹⁶ The sisters of St. Crux de Carpita, an order associated with the Claresses, are first attested in Antioch in 1257; after the city fell in 1268, they emigrated to Cyprus. Eudes’s inventory is our only source for their presence in Acre.¹⁷ St. Mary Magdalene was originally founded before 1222 as a Cistercian nunnery; it was a daughter house of Belmont, in the county of Tripoli, and its property in Acre was leased from the Hospital of St. John.¹⁸ The house known in the inventory roll as Notre-Dame of Tyre was the community of nuns of Great St. Mary’s, the Benedictine convent in Jerusalem, who after 1187 resettled in Tyre. They were given property by Queen Isabella I of Jerusalem in 1198/1203, after which time they seem to have abandoned Tyre.¹⁹ Finally among this group, the Premonstratensian monastery of St. Samuel, founded in the reign of Baldwin II (1118–31) at Montjoie, a few miles west of Jerusalem, owned property in Acre by 1185, to which the community withdrew after the loss of the main house in 1187.²⁰

A second group of eight recipients in the inventory roll are parish churches or small hospitals unique to the Holy Land. These include a small hospital, St. Martin of the Bretons, founded in 1254 by Giles, archbishop of Tyre, a native of Saumur who had been a crusader with Louis IX, and two leper hospitals, St. Bartholomew for men, and the Lepers of Bethlehem for women.²¹ St. Catherine “of the Battlefield” was founded as a priory near Gaza in 1177, to commemorate Baldwin IV’s victory over Saladin on the saint’s feast day. By 1232 the priory is attested as having relocated to Acre, and only two years before Eudes’s arrival there a citizen of Acre left a bequest to a hospital that the priory obviously also maintained.²²

The third group of religious institutions Eudes or his executors favored were houses of international orders in Acre. These included the priories of the major—and some minor—mendicant orders: the Jacobins (Dominicans), the Cordeliers (Franciscans), the Carmelites, and the Sack Friars. The Dominicans and Franciscans had been present in Acre since the 1230s at the earliest.²³ The Carmelites had been founded between 1205 and 1214 as a hermitage on Mount Carmel, and at the time of Eudes’s visit they followed a modified Dominican ordo. Although this house continued in existence at least until the 1260s, from 1229 onward they had also established houses elsewhere in the Holy Land, and after 1241 in the West as well. Eudes may have learned about them and their spirituality from Carmelite friars settled by Louis IX in France after 1254.²⁴ By the late 1250s or early 1260s, the Friars of the Sack, first established in the 1240s in Provence, had a house in Acre.²⁵ The Friars of the Holy Trinity, established in northern France with a ministry to ransom Christians taken captive in holy war by Muslims, had been recognized as an order by Pope Innocent III in 1198. By 1210/12, they also had a priory in Acre, with an endowment consisting of considerable urban property, and by 1219 also possessed forty-three small priories in western Europe.²⁶ As with the other mendicants, we can assume that Eudes was already familiar with them before departing for the East.

The major hospitals in Acre also benefited from Eudes’s generosity. The Hospitals of St. John and St. Lazarus were primarily associated with Jerusalem but, like most other religious institutions, had withdrawn to Acre in 1187. The Hospital of the Germans was a creation of the Third Crusade, owing its origins to a field hospital established during the crusaders’ siege of the city. Even before the capture of Acre in 1191 some property had been promised by King Guy and Queen Sibylla, and an early tradition pinpoints this as a garden near the gate of St. Nicholas on the east side of the city, where they built the hospital. Despite jurisdictional disputes with the Hospital of St. John, the Hospital of the Germans thrived in the thirteenth century.²⁷ Eudes’s familiarity with the Acre hospitals to which he also left bequests is less certain. The Hospital of St. Anthony, located in the southeast corner of Montmusard, hard by the eastern wall, can be identified as a house of the rather obscure Order of St. Anthony of Vienne, a foundation of the late eleventh century whose hospital in Acre is confirmed in a charter of 1264.²⁸ The Hospital of the Holy Spirit, in the Pisan quarter in the south of the city, had been given to the Pisans by Richard I during the Third Crusade in 1191/92. In 1227 the hospital had a staff of a master, two priests, five brothers, and three nuns. The hospital achieved notoriety in 1214 when one of the brothers assassinated Albert of Vercelli, patriarch of Jerusalem, during a procession on the feast of the Holy Cross.²⁹

Twenty out of the twenty-six institutions in the inventory roll are also mentioned in the text known as the Pelrinages et pardouns de Acre, which dates from 1258–64 and offers a devotional route around Acre’s many churches for pilgrims, with the indulgences specific to each.³⁰ In some respects, Eudes’s list of beneficiaries is as interesting for its omissions as for its inclusions. The houses of some of the most powerful institutions in the kingdom are not there—the Holy Sepulcher, Notre-Dame de Josaphat, and St. Mary Latin, to name only three. Although the Hospital of St. John is listed, the Templars are not. Whether these omissions reflect a particular direction of piety, which sought to privilege churches fulfilling particular kinds of ministries, or whether the beneficiaries testify to a devotional path through the urban landscape known to Eudes but now obscure to us is a matter for speculation.

1. “L’Estoire d’Eracles,” RHC, 2:446–47.

2. David Jacoby, “Montmusard, Suburb of Crusader Acre: The First Stage of Its Development,” in Outremer: Studies in the History of the Crusading Kingdom of Jerusalem Presented to Joshua Prawer, ed. Benjamin Z. Kedar, Hans E. Mayer, and R. C. Smail (Jerusalem: Yad Izhak Ben-Zvi Institute,1982), 213–14.

3. Denys Pringle, The Churches of the Crusader Kingdom of Jerusalem: A Corpus, (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2009), 4:4-5; hereafter all citations are to vol. 4.

4. Jonathan Riley-Smith, The Feudal Monarchy and the Kingdom of Jerusalem (London: Macmillan, 1973), 64.

5. David Jacoby, “Crusader Acre in the Thirteenth Century: Urban Layout and Topography,” Studi medievali 20 (1979): 1–45; Jacoby, “New Venetian Evidence on Crusader Acre,” in The Experience of Crusading, vol. 2, Defining the Crusader Kingdom, ed. Peter W. Edbury and Jonathan Phillips (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003), 240–56; Jacoby, “Aspects of Everyday Life in Frankish Acre,” Crusades 4 (2005): 73–105.

6. Lettres de Jacques de Vitry, ed. R. B. C. Huygens (Leiden: E. J. Brill, 1960), 79–97, no. 2.

7. By the thirteenth century, the eastern mole, which comprised masonry supported on timber rafts, was subsiding into the seabed, with the result that there were gaps through which smaller craft could find their way. Ruth Gertwagen, “The Crusader Port of Acre: Layout and Maintenance,” in Autour de la première croisade: Actes du colloque de la Society for the Study of the Crusades and the Latin East (Clermont-Ferrand, 22–25 juin 1995), ed. Michel Balard (Paris: Publications de la Sorbonne,1996), 553–82.

8. Lettres de Jacques de Vitry, 79–97, no. 2.

9. Jacoby, “New Venetian Evidence,” 240–51.

10. Lettres de Jacques de Vitry, 79–97 no. 2.

11. John Phocas, Descriptio Terrae Sanctae, IX, in Patrologiae Cursus Completus: Series Graeca, ed. J. P. Migne (Paris, 1857–80), 133:933.

12. The Travels of Ibn Jubayr, trans. R. J. C. Broadhurst (London: Jonathan Cape, 1952), 318.

13. Lettres de Jacques de Vitry, 79–97, no. 2.

14. Pringle, The Churches of the Crusader Kingdom, 15–175.

15. Pringle, The Churches of the Crusader Kingdom, 70–71, no. 395.

16. Pringle, The Churches of the Crusader Kingdom, 120–21, no. 418.

17. Pringle, The Churches of the Crusader Kingdom, 45, no. 378; for the history of the foundation, see Bernard Hamilton and Andrew Jotischky, Latin and Greek Monasticism in the Crusader States (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2020), 239–41.

18. Pringle, The Churches of the Crusader Kingdom, 147–48, no. 434.

19. Pringle, The Churches of the Crusader Kingdom, 142–44, no. 431; Hamilton and Jotischky, Latin and Greek Monasticism, 223–24.

20. Pringle, The Churches of the Crusader Kingdom, 148–60, no. 443.

21. Pringle, The Churches of the Crusader Kingdom, 129–30, no. 421.

22. Pringle, The Churches of the Crusader Kingdom, 73, no. 399.

23. Hamilton and Jotischky, Latin and Greek Monasticism, 272, 282.

24. Hamilton and Jotischky, Latin and Greek Monasticism, 263–71.

25. Pringle, The Churches of the Crusader Kingdom, 50, no. 382.

26. Pringle, The Churches of the Crusader Kingdom, 56–57, no. 387.

27. Pringle, The Churches of the Crusader Kingdom, 131–36, no. 425; Marie-Luise Favreau, Studien zur Frühgeschichte des Deutschen Ordens, Kieler Historische Studien 21 (Stuttgart: E. Klett, 1974), 35–63, 95–161.

28. Pringle, The Churches of the Crusader Kingdom, 71–72, no. 396.

29. Pringle, The Churches of the Crusader Kingdom, 54–56, no. 386.

30. “Pelrinages et pardouns de Acre,” ed. H. Michelant and G. Raynaud, Itinéraires à Jérusalem et descriptions de la Terre Sainte redigés en français aux XIe, XIIe et XIIIe siècles (Geneva: Imprimerie Jules-Guillaume Fick,1882), 227–36; for English translation, Denys Pringle, Pilgrimage to Jerusalem and the Holy Land, 1187–1291, Crusade Texts in Translation 23 (Aldershot: Routledge, 2012), 16, 229–36.