![]() ![]() The compression of so many people in such a narrow space meant Acre’s harbor was slick with grime. ![]() ![]() Refugees fleeing from the Mongols also sought shelter within the city’s ramparts. Great ships arrived from across the Mediterranean Sea daily, bringing religious pilgrims, merchants and Crusaders to this bustling hive of humanity. In its markets, buyers could purchase goods as varied as linen from Egypt, ceramics and silk from China, and locally produced crystallized sugar. The city attracted merchants from across Africa and Eurasia, and many languages were spoken in its narrow streets. This drawing from a 13th-century Matthew Paris manuscript shows Saladin fighting Guy de Lusignan at the Battle of Hattin.Īcre itself was a vast, diverse metropolis in the mid-13th century, the Muslim author Abu Shama dubbed it the “Constantinople of the Franks,” or people from Western Christendom. The Crusader states had once been major powers in the region, but after Saladin’s victory over their armies at the Battle of Hattin in 1187, they were confined to a narrow strip of territory along the Levantine coast. At the time, Jerusalem was one of the Crusader states, four Christian territories established in the Middle East around the turn of the 12th century, during the First Crusade. The Englishman ended up in the great port city of Acre, then capital of the Kingdom of Jerusalem, shortly after his exile. He provided the Crusaders with valuable information on their Muslim opponents’ strategies and traditions. In 1099, when the Christian armies of the First Crusade were besieging Jerusalem, they encountered Bonel, who had spent many years in the Middle East. Whatever his motives, he wasn’t the first exile to embark on the long voyage across the Mediterranean.Ĭonsider, for instance, the Norman knight Hugh Bonel (also spelled Bunel), who fled his home in the late 11th century after hacking “off the head of the Countess Mabel, because she had taken away his paternal inheritance by force,” according to the English chronicler Orderic Vitalis. It’s also possible he sensed opportunities for the ambitious and the adventurous amid the chaos engulfing the region. Perhaps he attached himself to a band of Crusaders or set out in search of spiritual renewal in a pilgrimage to the Holy Land. Most significantly, the Mongol Empire was expanding aggressively into the area, just as it was across Eurasia.īeyond the fact that the Englishman was banished “for certain crimes,” according to an 1852 translation of Ivo’s letter, as quoted in an abridged version of the Chronica Majora titled Historia Anglorum, historians don’t know exactly why or when he chose to head east. Crusading armies from Western Europe sought to conquer Jerusalem, then under Muslim control, and rival claimants vied for authority over the vast Ayyubid Empire, established by the Muslim leader Saladin in 1171. In the 1210s and 1220s, when the Englishman likely arrived in the region, the Middle East was riven by war and upheaval, with many powers locked in a struggle for supremacy. ![]() At first glance, this was perhaps a surprising choice. When the Englishman was cast into exile, he set out to make a new life for himself in the Middle East. But his life speaks to the interconnected nature of the medieval world, demonstrating how the rise of the Mongol Empire set travelers in motion, compelling them to cover great distances and explore lands and cultures beyond Europe’s borders.Īs Antony Eastmond, author of Tamta’s World: The Life and Encounters of a Medieval Noblewoman From the Middle East to Mongolia, says, “People undertook enormous journeys across the Mongol Empire-as ambassadors, as warriors and as slaves-and returned to their homes with remarkable stories that mixed fact and fiction to create a semi-legendary account of the empire and its peoples.” Whether Paris or Ivo took any liberties in retelling the Englishman’s story is difficult to say, as no other surviving contemporary sources mention him. Albans, just north of London, later read and reproduced the letter in his Chronica Majora, a wide-ranging history that ends in 1259, the year of his death. News of the Englishman’s exploits eventually reached the land of his birth, apparently via a letter written by a cleric called Ivo of Narbonne around 1243. How the Mongol invasions of the Middle East reshaped the balance of world power in the Middle Ages Buy The Mongol Storm: Making and Breaking Empires in the Medieval Near East ![]()
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