ABSTRACT
The end of Christian rule in the Holy Land did not go unnoticed in Constantinople, which from 1261 was the capital of a restored Byzantine empire. In the early fourteenth century, George Pachymeres, a deacon and teacher at the patriarchal academy, noted the fall of Tripoli to the Mamluks in 1289, then that of Acre in 1291. His account is not as informative as it might be. Writing in deliberately archaic Greek, he referred to Acre by its classical name of Ptolemaïs and called the Mamluk ruler ‘the sultan of Babylon’. He imparted few details apart from the massacre of the adult population and the destruction of the towns. Much more space was devoted to the omens observed in the Byzantine capital that had foretold the final disaster of 1291, such as weeping statues and bleeding icons. Like most Byzantines, Pachymeres was more interested in events at home than the fate of the ‘Latins’ in the Holy Land.1
