Siege of Tyre launched

1116

Baldwin I began the first serious Crusader attempt to take the Phoenician port of Tyre. The siege was unsuccessful, hampered by Egyptian naval intervention and lack of Latin ships. The city would only fall eight years later, after Venetian galleys blockaded its harbor. Tyre's formidable double-harbor defenses, built on a causeway Alexander the Great had constructed fifteen centuries earlier, made it the hardest coastal target on the Levantine shore.