In May of the same year he suddenly moved his army northward upon the ancient city of Antioch. The former Roman capital of the East, Antioch had long been the most prosperous of the Latin possessions, being an important centre for oriental trade. Within only four days of his arrival Baybers’ men had scaled the formidable walls. Every man in the city was butchered, and the women and children were all sold off as slaves. Baybers handed over Antioch to his troops to loot, and all its riches and incomparable works of art were dispersed among the ignorant Turkish Mameluke soldiery. Determined that Antioch should never again be restored as a Christian enclave in the East the conquerer razed it to the ground. To this day the proud capital where Antony and Cleopatra had once spent the winter together has never recovered from the visitation of Sultan Baybers and his army.

The only reason it seems that Baybers did not take all the remaining Latin castles and fortified places was that he had other preoccupations, among them the Armenian kingdom of Cilicia which, in accordance with his usual policy, he laid waste, killing in the process some 60,000 Christians and enslaving thousands more. A further distraction was the arrival of a small force of crusaders led by Prince Edward of England (which Baybers may have imagined was the spearhead of a large Crusade that St Louis was said to be preparing). The latter, however, attacked distant Tunis and not Egypt. By that time Baybers had concluded a ten-year truce with Tripoli. In 1271 the great Hospitaller castle of Krak des Chevaliers, sadly undergarrisoned, had fallen to the victorious Sultan. The capture of this superb fortress sounded the death knell of the Order of St John in the Holy Land and the Levant. When Baybers died at the age of fifty-five in 1277 he had effectively set the seal upon the Moslem reconquest of Outremer. It was not only the Christians who had felt the wind of his sword, for he had also successfully thrown back the Tartars and driven them out of the whole area.

The successors of Baybers carried on his policy of total extermination of the Christian settlements. The great Hospitaller fortress of Margat fell in 1285. The knights had been relying upon the fact that a ten-year truce had been agreed upon with the Sultan, but Baybers’ successor was no more to be relied upon than Baybers himself had been. The knights and their followers were, however, permitted to leave the fortress for Tripoli, this time without any treachery on the part of their enemy. Four years later Tripoli with its great harbor—one of the chief commercial ports in the Mediterranean of that time—was besieged by an immense army numbering, if we are to believe the Latin reports, 100,000 foot soldiers and 40,000 cavalry. After a month’s siege the city was carried, and this time no mercy was shown. The city was put to the sword as Antioch had been and afterwards it too, along with its port, was utterly destroyed.

Nothing was now left but Acre. This ancient harbour town in Palestine was the last hope of the Christians in the Holy Land. Situated on the main military highway along the coast, Acre had had the unenviable fate of having been besieged time and time again ever since 1500 B.C. when its name occurs among the conquest lists of the Egyptian Pharaoh Thutmose III. It was destined to fall yet again in A.D. 1291—to yet another army coming out of Egypt. Acre was defended by 800 knights and 14,000 foot soldiers, against whom the Sultan brought an army at least five times the size—some chroniclers maintain ten times.

The city was defended by a double line of walls, the Templars holding the northern sector and the Hospitallers just to their right on the south. To the right of the Hospitallers the walls were defended by the knights of Cyprus and Syria, and next came the Teutonic Order. The southern line of the walls was held by a French detachment, then an English one, and finally Pisans and Venetians holding the area just above the port. On April 11th, 1291, the Sultan Khalil opened the bombardment. He had at his disposal, according to one Moslem historian, the heaviest siege train ever known up to that time. It included over ninety mangonels and trebuchets.