ABSTRACT
In 1882 Count Riant published a Hospitaller document in a collection entitled Itinéraires à Jérusalem et descriptions de la Terre Sainte, rédigés en Français aux xie, xiie & xiiie siècles. This document, La Devise des Chemins de Babiloine, detailed the strengths of Mamluk armies in Egypt and Syria and gave mileages of the various routes between Cairo and the Delta ports. 1 Evidently it had been prepared as an intelligence report in preparation for some future and hypothetical crusade to be launched against Mamluk Cairo. Riant, who found the memorandum in the Vatican archives, dated it fairly precisely to between 1289 and 1291. Riant had noticed that Tripoli was listed in the Devise as a centre of Mamluk government, whereas Acre was not, and he deduced that the document therefore must have been drafted after Qalawun's army had taken Tripoli but before Acre had yet fallen to Qalawun's son, al-Ashraf Khalil.
