The Frankish Nobility and The Fall of Acre: Diplomacy, Society, and War in the Latin Kingdom of Jerusalem, c.1240-1291

Abstract

In May of 1291, armies of the Mamluk dynasty, a Sunni Muslim regime based in Cairo, overwhelmed the defenses of the city of Acre, thereby conquering the last major stronghold in the Latin Kingdom of Jerusalem. This brought to a close nearly two hundred years of Frankish settlement in Syria and destroyed the last vestiges of the principalities the Franks had established there during and immediately after the First Crusade (1095-1099). There has long been a pervasive assumption among scholars that the kingdom was terminally weak by the early thirteenth century; that the Franks living there had little control over their own affairs; and that its eventual conquest by a neighboring Muslim power was all but inevitable. In this dissertation I challenge these assumptions through a close study of the nobility’s military and diplomatic actions and an analysis of how these actions fit into the broader context of their social and cultural attitudes during the period c.1240-1291. I conclude that the Franks remained more diplomatically and military relevant than commonly believed and that it was a pervasive attitude of political and social competition among its leading nobles and their perception of threat to their economic, social, and political dominance of the Kingdom of Jerusalem from other segments within Frankish society that proved to be its undoing.