The Landscapes of Acre

This chapter addresses the landscapes of Acre. When Eudes of Nevers arrived at Acre in late fall of 1265, the landscape and topography of the city and its surrounding region were very different from the scene that his grandfather and father, crusaders in 1217–18 and 1239, had encountered. Power, population, and wealth in the Kingdom of Jerusalem had always been concentrated on the urban littoral. Although Jerusalem was the seat of symbolic royal and ecclesiastical power, Acre, Tyre, Sidon, and Beirut were the economic heart of the kingdom. Acre had seen dramatic expansion of both population and physical size after the loss of most of the territory of the Kingdom of Jerusalem to Saladin’s conquest in 1187. Although much of the extent of the pre-1187 kingdom was restored through a combination of military action and diplomacy from the 1190s to the 1240s, this situation began to unravel from 1250 onward with the rise of Mamluk power. The chapter then looks at the religious institutions mentioned as recipients of bequests in Eudes’s Account-Inventory, considering how the distribution according to type of institution reveals the variety of churches to be found in thirteenth-century Acre.