and bringing down the Abbasids, finally taking Damascus in March 1260 with Christian help. In September of that year, though, they were decisively defeated at the battle of Ain Jalut, in Palestine itself, by the Mamluks. The event established their control of Syria and their status in the Muslim world at a stroke.
From now, the Christian states were doomed. The new sultan, the fanatical general Baybars, turned on the towns and fortresses of the crusader states and picked them off one by one. In 1265 he took Caesarea, Haifa, and Arsuf; in 1266 Safad (and with it Galilee); in 1268 Jaffa and Beirut, and in the north, brutally sacked, the town of Antioch, and with it its principality; in 1271 the Hospitaller castles of Krak des Chevaliers and Akkar. He then offered a ten-year truce, which was accepted, and renewed in 1281 by his successor Kalavun; but these were tactical truces only, and when Kalavun felt strong enough he broke it, capturing Tripoli in 1289. Two years later, with the fall of Acre and the evacuation of the remaining strongholds and towns, Christian occupation of Outremer was at an end.
The possessions of Outremer had simply fallen to superior forces. Certainly it had not helped that Frederick II had returned to Italy as soon as he had taken the crown of Jerusalem; or that the military orders, and the omnipresent Venetians and Genoese, were constantly at loggerheads with each other and often in open warfare. Nor can it really be said that the crusaders had built socially cohesive states; they remained distinct from the indigenous population throughout. But the crusader states were not particularly rotten. Without reinforcements from the west no amount of unity would have availed, and that further support, after 1270, was noticeably absent. Potential crusaders were either locked in other conflicts or rightly sceptical of their chances of success. In a sense, since it was perceived that it was moribund, Outremer was allowed to die.
The Muslim revival had been the death-knell for Outremer. But in one area Christians did make decisive and lasting inroads into Muslim territory in the thirteenth century, namely
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