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Abu I Fida
Abu I Fida (b.1273-d.1331) was an Arab historian and geographer born in Damascus. The value of his works to students of the crusades comes from his having been an eyewitness to  the end of the crusading movement in the East. He was a member of the Ayyubid's after they had been supplanted in Syria and Egypt by the Mamluks. His two main historical works were his Historical Compendium of the Human Race and his Determination of the Longitude of the Lands. In 1310 he became the governor of Hamah in Syria where he ruled with almost absolute power and engaged in scholarly pursuits including the authorship of his two books. In 1320 he was given the title of Sultan with the right to transmit his authority to his descendants. Abu I Fida fought against the crusader states as a young man and his works detail events of the period including the fall of Tripoli in 1289 and Acre in 1291. He wrote powerfully in his descriptions of combat between the Muslims and crusaders. For example, concerning the fall of Tripoli, he described in his Historical Compendium the Arab conquest of the city as follows:              The Sultan beleagered the city with a narrow number of catapults, big and small. He enforced              a stringent blockade and after a violent struggle took the city by storm on Tuesday 4 rabi II              688/27 April. The Muslim troops forced their way in and the citizens fled to the harbour. A few              got to safety on ships, but most of the men were killed and the children taken captive. The Muslims              took quantities of booty from the place. When the killing and looting were over, the city, on the              Sultan's orders, was demolished and razed to the ground.* *Taken from Francesco Gabrieli's Arab Historians of the Crusades. Trans. E.J. Costello (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1969), 342. See this work for additional selections of Abu I Fida's account of the end of the crusading era. Damascus- Crusades-Encyclopedia Tripoli- Crusades-Encyclopedia Acre-Crusades-Encyclopedia Crusades Chroniclers and Authors of Primary Source Texts- Crusades-Encyclopedia (c) Andrew Holt, June 2005- Permission is granted for electronic copying and distribution in print form for educational and personal use. No permission is granted for commercial use.