The goal of the Crusade was, of course, Jerusalem. Ninety years before, when Islam was split up into a number of separate and rival states, all weakened and well-nigh exhausted by constant strife with each other, the First Crusaders had attained that goal by a victorious land march all the way from Antioch; but now all was changed, and it would have been sheer madness for their successors to dream of following in their steps. Now that the resources of Aleppo, Damascus, Bagdad, and Cairo were all at the command of one ruler, the acquisition of a base on the sea-coast in such a position that troops and supplies could be poured through it from the West direct into the Holy Land in safety and on a large scale (or what in the twelfth century was accounted such) was an almost indispensable preliminary to any practical attempt at the re-conquest of Jerusalem. Tyre, with its peninsular citadel facing the valley which leads round the foot of Lebanon into Coele-Syria, was somewhat too isolated as well as too far north for this purpose. But some twenty-five miles south of Tyre there was a fortified sea-port whose character and importance were summed up by an Arab writer, a few years before it fell into Saladin’s power, in one significant sentence: “Acre is the column on which the Frankish towns of Syria rest.”[643] Acre stood on the site of the ancient Ptolemaïs, at the northern extremity of the wide semicircular bay whose southern extremity is the point of Carmel, and which forms the only real break in the long straight coast-line of the Holy Land. Its harbour was the best—indeed, the only good one except Tyre and, perhaps, Ascalon—in the whole length of that coast-line. Under the Franks it was the chief landing-place for both pilgrims and traders from Europe; for it was the converging-point of all the main lines of communication between the West and Jerusalem, Mecca, Egypt, and Damascus. For the trade of Damascus it was practically the only available sea-port, being the only one to and from which access on the land side was not blocked by Mount Lebanon. “There,” says the Arab visitor quoted above, “put in the tall ships which float like mountains over the sea; it is the meeting-place of crafts and caravans, the place whither Mussulman and Christian merchants congregate from all quarters.”[644] To the natural advantages of the site were added fortifications which ranked among the mightiest of the many mighty productions of military architecture reared by the Frank settlers in Syria. The mouth of the harbour was guarded by a chain; a great tower rose on a tongue of land which ran out into the sea and sheltered the harbour to westward; the city lay partly on this peninsula and partly on the mainland, and was protected on the land side, to north and east, by strong walls and towers, and beyond these by a wide and deep fosse.[645] Saladin had taken the place in July 1187; he was fully alive to its importance,