Jerusalem fell to the Tartars in 1244 and in the same year the entire Christian forces were overwhelmed at Gaza. The Grand Master of the Order together with the Master of the Templars were both captured and taken into captivity in Egypt. This was the worst single disaster since the Horns of Hattin. General ruin threatened the whole Latin cause amid the smoke of burning cities and the surrender of castles and garrisons. The great Hospitaller fortress at Ascalon continued to hold out, until it too fell to the enemy in 1247. Two years later the Hospitallers were among those who took part in the Crusade led by St Louis of France which was designed to break the Moslem power in Egypt. This ended in disaster, with King Louis himself taken prisoner at Mansourah—only to be released for an immense ransom along with some twenty-five Hospitallers (among others) and the Grand Master of the Order.

The Christians with their constant quarrels had largely encompassed their own ruin during these centuries. Similarly the Moslems. It had already been proved in the days of Saladin that the latter must surely succeed in driving out these foreign interlopers if only they would unite. But like their enemies they were riven by dissensions, both religious, political, and racial. Saladin’s successor came in the person of Rukn-ad-Din Baybers, a Turk by birth, who was ultimately to become Sultan of Egypt and of Damascus. Baybers in the course of his violent life, a life marked if ever one was by ‘battle, murder and sudden death’, not only managed to drive the Latins out of Egypt but set in train the series of campaigns that were to drive the Latins out of the Levant. As Sir John Glubb writes,

 

Although essentially a soldier, Baybers was interested in the administration. In time of famine, he obliged the rich to feed the poor… Whether for religious or political reasons, he sought the role of the defender of Islam. Stringent orders were issued against the use of alcohol, against cabaret entertainments and other forms of immorality… Above all, Baybers was a soldier. He frequently rode down from the citadel of Cairo to the parade ground to watch the troops exercising. He himself often took a turn and few, if any, of the troopers could handle his lance or shoot his arrows at full gallop with more skill than the sultan himself.

 

Neither the Hospitallers nor the Templars come at all well out of this chaotic period of history. As a contemporary wrote: ‘Oh ancient treachery of the Temple! Oh long-standing sedition of the Hospitallers!’ At one moment in the years following the failure of the Seventh Crusade the Hospitallers and the Templars even fought on opposite sides. Baybers was not the man to fail to take advantage of the lunatic dissensions of his enemies. In 1265, having reinforced all the Moslem castles in Syria, he led his army into Palestine, giving as his pretext that he was anticipating a further Tartar invasion. Instead of pressing on to the north, however, he turned aside and fell upon the fortress of Caesarea. All the defenders were put to the sword and the city was levelled to the ground. A similar fate befell Arsoof, and in the following year he laid waste the coastal plain from Jaffa to Sidon, capturing the important fortress of Safad. The garrison surrendered on the condition that they might be allowed to depart unarmed and without any possessions. As soon as they had marched out they were set upon and massacred. Baybers’ aims were the same as his great predecessor’s, but he was no Saladin.

In the spring of 1268 this avenging sword of the Prophet again swept out of Egypt. The great city of Jaffa was captured and razed to the ground. Those inhabitants who were neither killed nor enslaved were expelled and a Turkish colony was planted on the site. Swirling past Tripoli (which he would have been wiser to besiege) Baybers laid waste all the area around, killing the inhabitants, destroying the churches, and leaving that rich and fruitful land looking as though a swarm of locusts had passed through. Worse was to follow.