Siege of Antioch (1268)

From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

The "Siege of Antioch" may also refer to two battles in 1097 and 1098 during the First Crusade; see Siege of Antioch.

In 1260 Baibars, the Sultan of Egypt and Syria, began to threaten the crusader state of Antioch, which (as a vassal of the Armenians) had supported the Mongols, the traditional enemies of the Turks. In 1265, Baibars took Caesarea, Haifa and Arsuf and massacred the inhabitants. A year later, Baibars conquered Galilee and devastated Cilician Armenia.

In 1268 Baibars besieged the city of Antioch, capturing it on 18 May. He razed the city and killed or enslaved the population. Antioch had been weakened by its previous struggles with Armenia and internal power struggles. With the fall of Antioch, the rest of Syria quickly fell and the influence of the Franks in Syria was at an end.

The Hospitaller fortress Krak des Chevaliers fell three years later. While Louis IX of France launched the Eighth Crusade ostensibly to reverse these setbacks, it went to Tunis instead of the Middle East due to the machinations of Charles of Anjou and Louis IX lost his life to disease.

By the time of his death in 1277, Baibars had forced the Crusaders to a few strongholds along the coast and the Crusaders were forced out of the Middle East by the beginning of the fourteenth century. The fall of Antioch was to prove as detrimental to the crusaders cause as its capture was instrumental to the initial success of the first Crusade.