IX. The Incredible Massacre in Acre
Upon hearing the news that the Arabs had recaptured Jerusalem, Pope Gregory VIII went into a fit. Highly outraged, he immediately called for the Third Crusade (1189-1192) to capture Jerusalem and punish the Arabs. This time, the West responded with the largest Crusader army to date led by the greatest three monarchs in all of Europe: Frederick Barbarossa, king of Germany and "Holy" Roman emperor; Richard I, the so-called "Lion-Heart", king of England; and Philip II Augustus, king of France. Hence, the Third Crusade is dubbed the "Kings' Crusade."
However, before achieving anything, the Third Crusade suffered a major setback on June 10, 1190, when Frederick Barbarossa suddenly died. The Holy Roman emperor died not by Salah ad-Din's sword, but rather by drowning while swimming in a shallow stream, the Saleph River, at the foot of the Taurus Mountains in Turkey. As a result, the German Crusader army was dispersed. Nonetheless, the English and French kings proceeded with their troops and took Acre in 1191 after a very gruesome battle with the Arabs. The siege and battle of Acre, which took two years, was the most protracted and desperate bloody episode in the Arab world. Twenty-four thousand Arab fighters died in that battle and about 6,000 others were wounded. [57]
After the fall of Acre, King Richard proceeded to loot a large amount of gold and other fortunes from its Arab inhabitants. Then, contrary to his promises to spare the lives of the surviving Arabs in Acre, under the surrender terms he had accepted, the English King issued orders to the Anglo-French troops on August 20, 1191 that led to one of the most cowardly and atrocious massacres the Crusaders ever committed during their 200-year bloodbath in the Arab world. On that very hot and humid day in August, the entire surviving population of Acre, 2,700 Arabs - men, children, and women with babies clinging to them - were chained and roped to prevent their escape and restrict their movement. Totally frightened and deeply confused, the weeping and praying Arabs were then driven like animals with whips and clubs to the top of a low hill called Ayyadieh to meet their awful fate. One author describes what happened next to these 2,700 Arabs as follows:
"Richard's men began to carry out his orders to kill them all. Swords, spears, knives, axes all flashed in the sun as they rose and fell. This time the children were not saved for the slave market, but were butchered with their fathers and mothers. Even babies in their mother’s arms felt the knives of the blood-drenched Christians ... The killing completed, Richard's army started back to the city, while on the top of the hill a few loot-crazed butchers lurched from one body to another with their bloody knives, hastily disemboweling corpses to recover any gold pieces that might have been swallowed for concealment ... Nor were the prisoners and their families the only deaths he [king Richard I] was responsible for that day. As news of the slaughter spread throughout Saladin's empire, Christian prisoners everywhere were tortured and murdered in reprisal for the infamy..." [58]
After defeating a small battalion of Salah ad-Din's army at the Arab Palestinian village of Arsouf, fifteen miles from Jaffa, the English king celebrated his looting and murdering of thousands of innocent Arabs in cold blood by proudly accepting and then arrogantly bestowing upon himself the courageous nickname the "Lion-Heart". To the English, he may be the "Lion-Heart", and to the French he may be "
Le Coeur de Lion", but to all Arabs and Muslims King Richard I of England has always been viewed as a cowardly butcher, a perfidious criminal, and a murderous thug.
Nevertheless, frustrated by their inability to fulfill the Third Crusade's main goal, the capture of Jerusalem from Salah ad-Din, the two European monarchs of England and France returned as failures to their respective countries. Before leaving for Europe, however, the English king signed a peace treaty in 1192 with Salah ad-Din that limited the European invaders to Tyre and a narrow coastal strip from Jaffa to Acre. The treaty also gave unarmed European pilgrims the right to visit Jerusalem. On the other hand, Salah ad-Din was so emotionally wounded by the European perfidious massacre in Acre that he shed many painful tears and spent long sleepless nights in total agony. He died in 1193 in Damascus with a broken heart at the young age of 55, blaming himself for the whole tragedy.
X. The Last Ten Crusades and Their Atrocities
Still full of hatred towards Muslims and Arabs, especially after the Third Crusade failed to take Jerusalem from the Arabs, Pope Innocent III urgently called for the Fourth Crusade (1198-1204) to be directed this time at Egypt, the most powerful Arab region. However, the Fourth Crusade was even a bigger failure than the Third. It never even reached the Arab world as planned. The wily Doge of Venice and the rich Venetian merchants who controlled the finances of the Fourth Crusading army diverted it to its original and natural commercial ends by attacking and seizing the rival Christian Dalmatian Seaport City of Zara (now modern Zadar in Croatia). In November 1202, the unrestrained soldiers of God completely pillaged and destroyed Zara. Then in 1204, for good measures, they went and sacked Constantinople itself, the glorious Byzantine capital of the Christian Eastern Roman Empire whose emperor Alexius I, ironically, was responsible for the original idea of a Western Crusade against the Arabs and Islam. The Crusaders and Venetian merchants then established the Latin Empire of Constantinople, which lasted until 1261. While brutally conquering the capital city of their fellow European Christians in East Europe "to the honor of God, the Pope and the empire", the Crusaders were permitted to rampage and steal as they pleased for three days. They broke into the city's main Cathedral of Hagia Sophia, shattered the large silver crosses, ripped away the hangings, and stole many valuables. They even raped nuns and put a prostitute on the Patriarch's throne to sing a dirty French song. Finally, they drank the "holy" altar wine out of chalices, and threw all the Christian ikons and bibles down on the floor to be trampled under their feet. [59]
Eight years later, in 1212, saw the most bizarre and pathetic Children's Crusade in which 100,000 Western European children took part [60]. One third of these European children, composed mostly of French and German youngsters, was eventually lost or sold into slavery and prostitution by none other than their own Western fellow Christians. A 12-year old French farm boy named Stephen of Cloyes insisted that Christ had asked him to organize a children's crusade to liberate Jerusalem from the Arabs. Tens of thousands of destitute French youngsters, who endured hardships of hunger and diseases, answered Stephen's call and marched with him south to the French seaport city of Marseille where they expected God to part the waters of the Mediterranean for them so that they could walk dry-shod all the way to Palestine. Instead, their French slave-trader compatriots from Marseille lured them into ships and sold them into slavery to the Arabs. The same year another absurd and ridiculous crusade against the Arabs, composed this time of tens of thousands of helpless German children, was launched. Organized by the German youngster Nicholas of Cologne, the second Children's Crusade got no further than Italy. Many of the German youngsters suffered a great deal from want and exhaustion, and many of the young girls ended up in Roman brothels.
Nevertheless, because the Fourth Crusade attacked the Christian Byzantine Empire instead of its intended target, Egypt, Pope Innocent III called for the Fifth Crusade (1217-1221) to attack this vital Arab region of Egypt. Chiefly manned by French and German Crusaders, the Fifth Crusade failed to destroy Egypt. However, it managed to capture Damietta, near the Nile River, where the Crusaders committed various atrocities in 1218-19. One of their most notorious crimes was the drowning of almost 1,500 innocent Arabs and Muslims by sinking their ship near Damietta. [61] And, once again, the European Christian Crusaders treated the local Arab Christians with total contempt. They regarded the Egyptian Copts (Monophysite Christians) as heretic as Muslims. Fortunately for the Arabs, however, the Egyptian Sultan, al-Malik al-Kamil, Salah ad-Din's nephew, managed to beat the Fifth Crusade in 1221 and force the European soldiers of God out of Egypt.
Nonetheless, seven years after the Fifth Crusade was repelled from Egypt, the Sixth Crusade (1228-1229) was launched. Strangely this new Crusade was bloodless. It was launched as a diplomatic Crusade by the most powerful Western monarch, Frederick II, King of Germany and Sicily, who was under excommunication by Pope Gregory IX. Skeptical of all religions, including Christianity, Frederick II openly flouted papal authority. In 1229, Frederick II negotiated a very strange and special treaty with Sultan al-Kamil of Egypt by which he peacefully obtained European control of Jerusalem, Bethlehem, and Nazareth for ten years.
Although Frederick II enjoyed a positive image in the Arab world because he spoke and wrote good Arabic; had a great admiration for Arab civilization; was surrounded by an entourage of Arab and Muslim advisors; and had nothing but contempt for the barbarous West, especially for the Pope, his unusual treaty with al-Kamil to take control of Jerusalem still aroused a storm of indignation throughout the Arab world. When al-Kamil's extremely generous treaty with Frederick II expired in 1239, the Arabs recovered Jerusalem in 1244 and permanently ended the Crusaders' occupation of the city. However, al-Kamil's treaty with Frederick II has been compared by many Arab and Muslim scholars not only with the 1979 sell-out of Camp David Treaty, signed by Egypt's Anwar as-Sadat and Israel's Menachem Begin, but also with the more recent so-called "peace process" of the 1990s that Yasser Arafat signed with Israel.
Nevertheless, violent and militant Western crusading efforts against the Arabs continued. The French King Louis IX gallantly led the Seventh Crusade (1248-1254) against Egypt. However, like the Fifth Crusade thirty years earlier, the Seventh Crusade failed in its mission miserably. Soon after he captured Damietta where he offended the Egyptian Christian Copts by appointing a Catholic prelate as Patriarch of their city, the Egyptians soundly defeated King Louis IX. The French King was also deeply humiliated when he was personally captured as a prisoner. He was not released until he paid a high ransom. The Egyptians finally allowed him to rejoin his wife in the Western-occupied Arab city of Acre.
Totally exhausted by the Crusades' continuing devastating wars and destruction for over 150 years, the Arab world was not ready or able to defend itself against a new and dangerous enemy, the Mongol hordes from the East. In 1258, the Mongols, under their vicious leader Hulagu (or the George W. Bush of his day), completely destroyed Baghdad and effectively ended Arab civilization. The Mongols pillaged Baghdad; murdered one million Muslims in it [62]; destroyed its palaces and mosques; burned its libraries and schools; dumped Arab scientific and other treasure books in the Tigris River; destroyed the Iraqi irrigation canal systems; and executed the last Abbasid Caliph and all of his Arab ruling family. Although the Arab world has never completely recovered from this Mongols' crushing defeat, Muslim civilization itself continued for centuries thereafter under the powerful leadership of the Ottoman Turks.
However, in 1260, two years after the destruction of the Abbasid State, a brilliant Arabic-speaking Turkish leader from Egypt by the name of az-Zahir Baybars severely crushed the Mongol forces at Ayn Jalut, near Nazareth, in Palestine and ended their brief destructive presence in the Arab world. Baybars then dealt very harshly with the Western Crusaders, who collaborated with the ruthless Mongols, and mercilessly killed them. He recovered from the Crusaders several Arab cities: Arsouf in 1265; Atlit, Haifa and Safed in 1266; and Jaffa and Antioch (their prized-colony) in 1268.
Nevertheless, undaunted by either his earlier humiliating defeat and captivity in Egypt during the Seventh Crusade or by Baybars' stunning military victories both against the invading Mongols and Crusaders, King Louis IX of France tried once again to beat the Arabs in 1270 by launching the Eighth Crusade. This stubborn French monarch, who was full of hate for the Arabs and Islam, decided this time to "cut" the Arab world in half by invading Tunisia. Instead, he cut his own life short when he died of a virus near Tunis on August 25, 1270. His majesty's body was then taken back to Paris where he was ceremoniously buried as a "saint".
Another major military defeat for the Crusaders in the Arab world took place in 1271 when the great Baybars of Egypt captured their most formidable fortress in Syria,
Hisn al-Akrad (known in French as
Crak des Chevaliers), which not even the powerful Salah ad-Din had been able to conquer. This immense Crusaders fortress is still in existence today dominating the Syrian plains of Bukaya, reminding all Arabs of the past Western Christian terrorism, and making them draw parallels to the present Israeli and American brutal policies in Arab lands.
In 1289 the Crusaders also suffered another major military defeat when the new Egyptian ruler, Sultan al-Mansur Qalawun, thrilled the entire Muslim world by capturing Tripoli, the Crusaders' last kingdom/colony in the Arab world. After this defeat, the European invaders were left with only one Arab city under their control, the port-city of Acre, now under the brutal rule of King Henry of France.
These military defeats suffered by the Crusaders in the Arab world made Pope Nicholas IV panic and led him in the summer of 1290 to respond to King Henry's appeal for fresh reinforcements. Launched under the Pope’s order, the Ninth Crusade was composed of a large fleet full of European Christian chauvinists. It sailed from Italy directly to the Western-occupied Arab city of Acre. Once in Acre, the Western soldiers of God began to drink heavily. They then rushed drunkenly through its streets, indiscriminately attacking and killing Arab merchants, innocent bystanders, and any man wearing a beard regardless of his religion. Many Arab and non-Arab Christians were murdered in cold blood. These crimes and atrocities made the Egyptian leader Qalawun extremely angry. He swore by the holy Qur'an that he would not lay down his arms until he drove all of the European invaders out of the entire Arab world and into the Mediterranean Sea. [63] However, it was only after Qalawun's death in 1290 that his own son, Sultan al-Ashraf Khalil, who in 1291liberated Acre (the last Western hold in the Arab world), fulfilled his wish. While the French King Henry and most other European notables quickly ran away from Acre to hide in Cyprus, all other Westerners in the city were captured and mercilessly killed by Khalil's troops. The liberation of Acre took place exactly 100 years, almost to the day, after the Europeans had brutally re-captured it from the Arabs in 1191 and massacred all its inhabitants under the orders of King Richard I of England. Sultan Khalil of Egypt was to go down in history as the ruler who finally expelled the last of the West Europeans by putting an end to two centuries of their terrorism and cruel colonization in the Arab world. While all Arabs were celebrating their last victory over the Crusaders, they were also at the same time praying and asking God to grant that the barbarian terrorist Westerners never set foot again in the Arab world.
The Arab prayer was answered, but only for a few decades. Seventy-four years after their expulsion from Acre, the stubborn Westerners organized yet another Crusade in 1365 under the command of King Peter of Cyprus. Considered to be the last of the great international Crusades, this Tenth Crusade was launched against the mostly Christian Arab City of Alexandria. It was yet another totally pointless brutal invasion by the West in which thousands of Arab Christians, Muslims, and Jews were massacred in cold blood. Even the Latin traders had their stores and houses looted and destroyed by King Peter's Crusaders. [64] However, the Tenth Crusade, which was quickly repelled by the Arabs, ended with the assassination of King Peter himself.
Nevertheless, in 1395 when the Turkish Muslim army was laying siege on Constantinople, the Byzantine emperor Manuel II Palaeologus appealed to the rulers of Europe for help. Responding to his call, the "Holy" Roman Emperor/King Sigismund of Hungary organized in July 1396 the Eleventh Crusade against Islam and the Arabs. The objective of the Eleventh Crusade was not only to evict the Muslim Turks from the Balkans, but also to march into Syria and to "liberate" Jerusalem from the Arabs. Led by Sigismund in September 1396, this Crusade was also composed of Western knights from the Balkans, France, Burgundy, Germany, England, and the Netherlands. However, before it had a chance to achieve any of its objectives, the Eleventh Crusade was decisively crushed at Nicopolis, Greece, by Muslim power under the strong Turkish leadership of Sultan Bayazid I.
Again, 48 years later the terrorist Europeans organized the Twelfth Crusade against the Muslim Turks in the Balkans. In November 1444, however, the forces of Sultan Murad II quickly repelled the invading Westerners at the Bulgarian Black Sea port of Varna. In reality, the Eleventh and Twelfth Crusades were not only miserable failures that weakened the West, but they also contributed to the growing strength of Islam. The Muslim Turks became militarily stronger; captured Constantinople; destroyed the Byzantine Empire in 1453; tightened their control over the Balkans; advanced further into Eastern and central Europe where they spread Islam; and even occupied southern Italy in 1480-81. Ironically, however, these Turkish Muslim successes against the invading Westerners took place at a time when the Arabs themselves were quickly losing their final foothold in Andalusia to the Spanish Christians whose Inquisition was yet another form of Western terrorism against Muslims and Jews.
However, after the Ottoman Turks took Cyprus in 1570, they suffered their first major setback in October 1571 when the Thirteenth Crusade (composed of a combined European armada) destroyed their fleet at Lepanto (Navpaktos), near the Greek coast. The Ottomans, though, restored their fleet within a year. Nonetheless, the Western idea of launching Crusades and wars against the Arabs and the Muslim Turks continued well into the 15th, 16th, and even the 17th centuries. In fact, the violent European colonization which had started at the end of the 15th century first against the natives of the Americas, Australia, New Zealand, Asia, and Africa, eventually found its way into the weakened Ottoman Empire during the 19th and early 20th centuries. The Western powers' destruction of the Ottoman Empire, the last Muslim empire, at the beginning of the 20th century, has brought about the current subjugation of the Arabs to the brutal Western imperialism which created Jewish Israel in 1948 over the land of Palestine.
