18 6 THE KNIGHTS TEMPLARS. WauAM DE sumeri hostilities, with the avowed determination of crushing for Abissi, ever the christian power in the East. The fortress of Margat was besieged and taken ; the city of Tripoli shared the same fate ; and in the third year from the re-commencement of the war, the christian dominions in Palestine were reduced within the narrow confines of the strong city of Acre and the Pilgrim's Castle. In the spring of the year 1291, the sultan Khalil marched against Acre at the head of sixty thousand horse and a hundred and forty thousand foot. " An innumerable people of all nations and every tongue," says a chronicle of the times, " thirsting for christian blood, were assembled together from the deserts of the East and the South ; the earth trembled beneath their footsteps, and the air was rent with the sound of their trumpets and cymbals. The sun's rays, reflected from their shields, gleamed on the distant mountains, and the points of their spears shone like the innumerable stars of heaven. When on the march, their lances presented the appearance of a vast forest rising from the earth, and covering all the landscape." ... " They wandered round about the walls, spying out their weaknesses and defects ; some barked like dogs, some r roared like lions, some lowed and bellowed like oxen, some struck drums with twisted sticks after their fashion, some threw darts, some cast stones, some shot arrows and bolts from cross-bows." * On the 6th of April, the place was regularly invested. No rational hope of saving it could be entertained ; the eea was open ; the harbour was filled with christian vessels, and with the galleys of the Temple and the Hospital; yet the two great monastic and military orders scorned to retire to the neighbouring and friendly island of Cyprus ; they refused to desert, even in its last extremity, that cause which they had sworn to maintain with the last drop of their blood. For a hundred and seventy years " Do excidio urbis Aconis apud Mortene rot. script, tom. v. col. 76T*