The muslim conquest of Acre and the other cities on the coast of Syria in 1291 transformed the political situation in the East. Whilst the loss of his mainland territories meant that King Henry no longer had to commit resources in their defence, Cyprus itself was now vulnerable as the sole outpost of western Christendom in the eastern Mediterranean. The only other Christian state in the region was the Cilician kingdom of Lesser Armenia. At Jubail the Muslims allowed the Genoese Embriaco family to retain possession under their suzerainty for a few years, but otherwise, with this one minor exception, the whole of the Levantine coastlands from the Gulf of Iskenderun to Egypt and beyond had come into the control of the Mamlūk sultanate. The immediate danger was that the Mamlūks might try to follow up their successes by invading Cyprus. On the other hand, there were plenty of people in the West prepared to pay at least lip-service to the idea that a new crusade should be organized to win back the Holy Land. But in the event there was no Mamlūk invasion; nor was there a crusade to recover Jerusalem.

Cyprus had been noted as a haven for refugees from Muslim advance from as early as the 1240s, and in 1291 large numbers of survivors from Syria escaped thither. Many of them, both Franks and Christian Syrians, were reduced to poverty, and their condition must have been made worse by a series of harvest failures in the mid-1290s.