Overview

Akka (Acre): a town on the coast of al-Sham, in the district of Jordan. Ibn al-Athir describes it as the mother of the coastal frontier and the impregnable fortress of Islam in the age of the Crusades. ²

The conquest and the siege

Salah al-Din Yusuf ibn Ayyub conquered it on a Wednesday after the battle of Hattin, in the year 583 AH. ²

The Franks then besieged it for two years and seized it on Friday, the seventeenth of Jumada al-Akhira in the year 587 AH. Ibn al-Athir reports that they killed the Muslim prisoners there on Tuesday, the twenty-seventh of Rajab. ³

صلاح الدين يوسف بن أيوب الملك الناصر

Shirkuh's nephew, who held Alexandria four months in 562, took Egypt's vizierate as al-Malik al-Nasir in 564, ended the Ubaydid khutba in Muharram 567 after the Ajami al-Amir al-Alim led it, sold the palace treasures over ten years, crucified the restoration plotters of 569, and ordered Cairo's great wall, the Muqattam citadel and al-Shafi'i's turba. He died in the 'Year of Kings', 589, not yet sixty, leaving sixteen sons and one daughter; his conquests were reckoned at sixty fortresses. Ibn al-Imad preserves his clemency: when a man falsely claimed the dead Sanqar's estate, the sultan quietly gave him robe, stipend and mule — and when Sanqar's foot landed on the sultan's hand laid upon the ground he said only 'write with my hand or under my foot'

Acre

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Overview

The conquest and the siege

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صلاح الدين يوسف بن أيوب الملك الناصر