High Middle Ages · Middle East · Culture

1288

Acre's last tournaments held

1288

The surviving crusader nobility of Acre held a last flowering of chivalric tournaments, with troubadours competing and knights running at the ring. Contemporary letters describe a bright, doomed sociability a few years before Mamluk siege engines ended the city forever. The tournaments were deliberately extravagant, a defiant celebration of a way of life that everyone present must have known was about to end.