the fall of Acre and the other Christian strongholds on the coast of Syria and Palestine to the Mamluk sultan in 1291 marked the end of the western military presence in the Holy Land which had begun at the time of the First Crusade. But the widespread conviction that Jerusalem and the other places associated with Christ’s life on earth ought to be a part of Latin Christendom was by no means dead. The demise of the kingdom of Jerusalem did not signify the end of the crusading movement, though between 1291 and the end of the fourteenth century the question of whether the west should launch crusades to recapture the Holy Land came to be largely overshadowed by the more pressing question of how far the west could prevent the Muslims from occupying other Christian-held territories bordering the eastern Mediterranean. After 1291 the kingdom of Cyprus under its Lusignan dynasty remained as the sole western outpost in the Levant while to the north, in south-eastern Anatolia, the kingdom of Cilician Armenia provided the one Christian-controlled point of access to the Asiatic hinterland. Further west, in the former Byzantine lands in and around the Aegean, there were a number of European possessions, most of which had been won early in the thirteenth century as a result of the Fourth Crusade. The Hospitallers were to add significantly to these territories when between 1306 and 1310 they seized the island of Rhodes from the Byzantine Greeks. The Byzantine empire itself, though buoyed up by the reoccupation of Constantinople in 1261, lacked the resources necessary to defend its territory – now largely limited to Bithynia, Thrace and northern Greece – from the predatory designs of its neighbours, and the fourteenth century was to witness its decline into impotence (see above pp. 795–824).