“A Dragon With Nine Heads”

Following the Muslim capture of Jerusalem in 1187, the multi-ethnic Levantine port city of Acre (Akko) had become the new capital of the ‘Frankish’ Kingdom of Jerusalem. Upon his arrival in 1216, the newly appointed Bishop of Acre, Jacques de Vitry, described the religious and ethnic situation in the city as “a monstrous dragon with nine heads engaged in mutual conflict.” Although Jacques’s words have often been used in modern scholarship, his account is but part of a changing perception of the multicultural and multi-religious society of Acre in contemporary testimonies. In this chapter, the author tracks the changing reputation of the city of Acre in the long thirteenth century and shows how the events of the last decade of the twelfth century represented a turning point. Aside from contextualising Jacques de Vitry’s notorious testimony, light is shed on the diverging descriptions of the multicultural situation in Acre. While the “beast with nine heads” analogy prevails in the popular memory of crusader Acre, the author argues that the reputation of the city in the thirteenth century was locked in between overly negative as well as overly positive testimonies.