The Count of Sidon, who had taken refuge there, and the castellan of Tyre were negotiating with Saladin for its surrender, and had already prepared to hoist his colours on the walls, as soon as he made his appearance before the gates. The people of Tyre, however, received Conrad with acclamations; the Count of Sidon fled to Tripolis, and preparations were made for the defence of the city. Saladin collected some ships to blockade Tyre by sea, and in the end of the month of December invested the city. Conrad had very few ships, but having possessed himself of some of Saladin’s fleet, which he had enticed to enter the harbour by the hope of a surrender, he manned them with his own troops, and attacking the remainder, drove them on shore. The enemy had taken advantage of his temporary absence to attempt to scale the walls; but he promptly returned and compelled them to retire with the loss of a thousand men. Saladin on this raised the siege, and did not resume it in the following spring. The archbishop, William of Tyre, had been engaged in soliciting aid from the Christian powers of the West, and had prevailed on the king of Sicily to send a fleet to Tyre with three hundred knights; other reinforcements arrived; the release of the captive king, Guy of Lusignan, gave unity to the Crusaders, and they became the assailants. In August of this year (A.D. 1189) the siege of Acre began, which ended, after a succession of extraordinary vicissitudes, in its capture by the united arms of Philip Augustus and Richard Cœur-de-Lion. By the pacification of August, 1192, Joppa is fixed as the southern, and Tyre as the northern boundary of the Christian territories in Palestine.
Tyre continued to flourish as a commercial city during the succeeding century, chiefly through the activity of the Venetians. In return for the assistance which they had rendered to Baldwin II, they had obtained for themselves the concession of a third part of the city and its dependent territory, the right of being governed by their own magistrates and tried by their own tribunals, and various commercial privileges throughout the extent of the kingdom of Jerusalem; and they succeeded in maintaining these rights, though often infringed.
The rise of the Mameluke power in Egypt was soon felt in the capture of Antioch (A.D. 1268), and the subsequent reduction of the principal towns of the seacoast. A temporary respite was obtained by the second expedition of Louis IX, in 1270, and of the son of Henry III, afterwards Edward I of England, in the following year. The dissensions which followed the death of the sultan Bibars (or Beybars) by whom Antioch had been taken, delayed the catastrophe which the nations of the West took no means to avert. The sultan Kalavun (Kalaoon) resumed the attack on the remains of the Christian kingdom. Margaret, the widow of John de Montfort, who held the principality of Tyre, entered into an agreement with him, by which she bound herself to withdraw from all alliance with the Christian princes who harboured evil designs against the sultan, to raise no new fortifications nor repair the old, and to divide with him the revenues of all territory which they might hold in common. Acre was again the scene on which the Christians and Saracens tried their strength. Kalavun died on the march from Egypt, but Ashraf, his son and successor, adopted his policy, and the siege was begun in the first week of April, 1291. Since its reconquest by Philip and Richard, it had taken the place of Tyre as the great mart of the Syrian coast; every language of the East or West found an interpreter within its walls. It was far more strongly fortified than when it defied for two years the attacks of Saladin, and forces were assembled in it amply sufficient for its defence, had they been wielded with vigour and unanimity. But dissension reigned among them. On the 18th of May, 1291, the whole city with the exception of the fort of the Templars, was occupied by Ashraf, and this was delivered up to him by capitulation on the next day. The few places which the Christians still held in Syria attempted no defence. The Frank inhabitants of Tyre abandoned it on the evening of the day on which Acre surrendered, and the Saracens entered it the following morning.
[1479-1516 A.D.]
Othman, the founder of the present Turkish empire, began his reign in A.D. 1288, three years before the reduction of Syria by the sultan of Egypt. From the conquest of Asia Minor and the Danubian provinces of the Greek empire, the Turks advanced in the middle of the fifteenth century to the capture of Constantinople (A.D. 1453), and spread a panic through Europe by the sack of Otranto in A.D. 1479. The progress of conquest was checked during the reign of Bajazet II; but his successor, Selim I, in A.D. 1516, conquered Syria in a single campaign, and since that time it has been subject to the Ottomans, the most barbarous of all the conquerors by whom it has successively been subdued. The consequent decline of its prosperity has been rapid and complete. The insecurity of life and property has been fatal alike to manufacturing industry, to agriculture, and to commerce; the traveller, if without arms or escort, has pursued his researches in perpetual danger of being plundered or killed, and with the certainty of vexatious delays and interruptions; the means of communication have been suffered to fall into decay, and no effort has been made to check the process by which nature is destroying the harbours of the coast. Neither sieges nor earthquakes have done so much as Turkish oppression and misrule to make Tyre what the traveller now sees, “a rock for fishermen to spread their nets upon.”[b]
Phœnician Sarcophagus