| Battle of Jaffa (1197) | |||||||
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Part of the Crusade of 1197 | |||||||
| |||||||
| Belligerents | |||||||
 Kingdom of Jerusalem |  Ayyubid Dynasty | ||||||
| Commanders and leaders | |||||||
| Renauld Barlais | Al-Adil I | ||||||
| Strength | |||||||
| Unknown | Unknown | ||||||
| Casualties and losses | |||||||
| Heavy | Unknown | ||||||
The Battle of Jaffa in 1197 was a military engagement between the Ayyubid army and the Crusaders outside the city of Jaffa. The Crusaders were defeated and lost Jaffa in the end.
In 1195, the German king, Henry VI took the cross and launched a new crusade to the holy land. This time the Germans took a route by sea, avoiding the dangerous route his father had taken during the Third Crusade. [1] Arnold of Lübeck states that the Germans had an army of 60,000, which is indeed an exaggeration; the Germans probably had a quarter of that number. A bulk of Germans arrived early in September while the main force stopped at Cyprus to crown Aimery. The German force made a raid into Galilee; however, they were surrounded by the Ayyubids led by Al-Adil, and only the intervention of King Henry saved them. [2] [3]
Soon, Al-Adil left Acre and headed towards Jaffa, as the truce of 1192 had ended. [4] The city of Jaffa was ruled by Renauld Barlais. The Crusaders, probably out of rashness, marched out of Jaffa and went to meet the Ayyubids. The Crusaders attacked the Muslims; however, the Ayyubids fought back against them and put them on the run. The Crusaders retreated from the battlefield towards Jaffa again. However, the Crusaders found the gates to be shut. The garrison closed the gates out of fear of a potential attack on the city. All the crusaders outside were subsequently massacred. The Ayyubids then laid siege to the city. [5] [6]
The Ayyubids assaulted the walls and forced the garrison to retreat. The defense was weak. The Crusaders were forced to retreat to the citadel, but the Ayyubids managed to breach it and kill all the defenders inside. King Henry heard the news of this attack and dispatched his army to relieve the city; however, on September 10, in an unexpected accident, Henry fell from a window and died. At the same time, Jaffa had already fallen to the Ayyubids, and upon hearing the death of their king, the Crusader relief army withdrew. [7] [8] [9]
The Ayyubids destroyed the city, took lots of spoils and captives, and left. [10]
The city of Jaffa remained in Muslim hands until 1204, when it was returned to the Crusaders as part of a truce agreed with Al-Adil. But despite its return, it remained deserted until 1228. [11]
Aimery of Lusignan, erroneously referred to as Amalric or Amaury in earlier scholarship, was the first King of Cyprus, reigning from 1196 to his death. He also reigned as the King of Jerusalem from his marriage to Isabella I in 1197 to his death. He was a younger son of Hugh VIII of Lusignan, a nobleman in Poitou. After participating in a rebellion against Henry II of England in 1168, he went to the Holy Land and settled in the Kingdom of Jerusalem.
The Kingdom of Jerusalem, also known as the Crusade Kingdom, was a Crusader state that was established in the Levant immediately after the First Crusade. It lasted for almost two hundred years, from the accession of Godfrey of Bouillon in 1099 until the fall of Acre in 1291. Its history is divided into two periods with a brief interruption in its existence, beginning with its collapse after the siege of Jerusalem in 1187 and its restoration after the Third Crusade in 1192.
Salah ad-Din Yusuf ibn Ayyub, commonly known as Saladin, was the founder of the Ayyubid dynasty. Hailing from a Kurdish family, he was the first sultan of both Egypt and Syria. An important figure of the Third Crusade, he spearheaded the Muslim military effort against the Crusader states in the Levant. At the height of his power, the Ayyubid realm spanned Egypt, Syria, Upper Mesopotamia, the Hejaz, Yemen, and Nubia.
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The Third Crusade (1189–1192) was an attempt led by three European monarchs of Western Christianity to reconquer the Holy Land following the capture of Jerusalem by the Ayyubid sultan Saladin in 1187. For this reason, the Third Crusade is also known as the Kings' Crusade.
The Ayyubid dynasty, also known as the Ayyubid Sultanate, was the founding dynasty of the medieval Sultanate of Egypt established by Saladin in 1171, following his abolition of the Fatimid Caliphate of Egypt. A Sunni Muslim of Kurdish origin, Saladin had originally served the Zengid ruler Nur ad-Din, leading Nur ad-Din's army in battle against the Crusaders in Fatimid Egypt, where he was made Vizier. Following Nur ad-Din's death, Saladin was proclaimed as the first Sultan of Egypt by the Abbasid Caliphate, and rapidly expanded the new sultanate beyond the frontiers of Egypt to encompass most of the Levant, in addition to Hijaz, Yemen, northern Nubia, Tarabulus, Cyrenaica, southern Anatolia, and northern Iraq, the homeland of his Kurdish family. By virtue of his sultanate including Hijaz, the location of the Islamic holy cities of Mecca and Medina, he was the first ruler to be hailed as the Custodian of the Two Holy Mosques, a title that would be held by all subsequent sultans of Egypt until the Ottoman conquest of 1517. Saladin's military campaigns in the first decade of his rule, aimed at uniting the various Arab and Muslim states in the region against the Crusaders, set the general borders and sphere of influence of the sultanate of Egypt for the almost three and a half centuries of its existence. Most of the Crusader states, including the Kingdom of Jerusalem, fell to Saladin after his victory at the Battle of Hattin in 1187. However, the Crusaders reconquered the coast of Palestine in the 1190s.
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The Fifth Crusade was a campaign in a series of Crusades by Western Europeans to reacquire Jerusalem and the rest of the Holy Land by first conquering Egypt, ruled by the powerful Ayyubid sultanate, led by al-Adil, brother of Saladin.
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Al-Adil I was the fourth Sultan of Egypt and Syria, and brother of Saladin, who founded both the Sultanate of Egypt, and the Ayyubid dynasty. He was known to the Crusaders as Saphadin, a name by which he is still known in the Western world. A gifted and effective administrator and organizer, Al-Adil provided crucial military and civilian support for the great campaigns of Saladin. He was also a capable general and strategist in his own right, and was instrumental in the transformation of the decayed Fatimid Caliphate of Cairo into the Ayyubid Sultanate of Egypt.
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