Why Today Is the Darkest Day in Crusader History
“If you were there, you would have seen your Muslim enemy cutting the throats of monks, priests and deacons upon the altars”—Sultan Baybars
Few dates in medieval history witnessed as much blood and civilizational trauma as today’s date, May 18.
On that day in 1268, the great Christian city of Antioch fell to the Mamluk sultan Baybars in one of the worst massacres of the Crusading era.
Twenty-three years later—again on May 18—the last major Crusader stronghold in the Holy Land, Acre, collapsed before the armies of Sultan al-Ashraf Khalil, bringing nearly two centuries of Crusader presence in the Levant to an end.
Because I recount both catastrophes in The Two Swords of Christ, what follows are excerpts illustrating how Christendom’s eastern frontier finally died—in blood, fire, enslavement, and despair.
The Fall of Antioch — May 18, 1268
Following a recounting of the brutal conquests of Mamluk sultan Baybars, the narrative continues:
Next to fall—and terrible was its fall—was the ancient Christian city of Antioch, one of the oldest and best fortified Crusader kingdoms. In May 1268, after the Muslims had breached the city, which was swollen with some one hundred and twenty thousand Christian fugitives, many of whom were women and children, Baybars entered and ordered the city’s gates shut behind him. An orgiastic bloodbath—the “single greatest massacre of the entire crusading era”—followed.
Indeed, the scale of slaughters, atrocities, and rapes visited upon the Christians of Antioch was unprecedented. Seventeen thousand Christians were massacred inside the city, and more than one hundred thousand were enslaved. In the Mamluk train was such a surplus of human booty that the price of Frankish slave women and children plummeted on the Muslim slave markets to just a few silver pieces. That said, not all would consent to rape and slavery, and “amid the usual atrocities” during the sack of Antioch, “one incident shocked even the Turks. The canonesses of St. John had cut off their noses with scissors and gashed their cheeks in order to avoid rape. The appalled Muslims slaughtered them on the spot.”
Baybars gloated over his latest handiwork in a letter to Bohemond VI, lord of Antioch, who was not present at the time of its fall:
You would have seen your knights prostrated beneath the horses’ hooves, your houses stormed by pillagers and ransacked by looters…your women sold four at a time and bought for a dinar of your own money! You would have seen the crosses in your churches smashed, the pages of the false Testaments scattered, the Patriarchs’ tombs overturned. You would have seen your Muslim enemy trampling on the place where you celebrate the mass, cutting the throats of monks, priests and deacons upon the altars, bringing sudden death to the Patriarchs and slavery to the royal princes. You would have seen fire running through your palaces, your dead burned…your palace lying unrecognizable, the church of St. Paul and that of Qusyan [Cathedral of Saint Peter] pulled down and destroyed.
The situation had reached a breaking point; in the same year that Antioch was sacked, 1268, Hugh Revel, the master of the Hospital, sent a letter to Europe describing how “the tiny number of Christians” remaining in the Holy Land “are unable to resist the indescribable power of the Saracens”; they “are so stupefied at the immense damage which they have received and which they are receiving every day, that they can provide no remedy of defense.”
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