On the evening of May 20th 1799, General Napoleon Bonaparte reluctantly raised the siege of Acre. It was his first defeat.

The French army had traveled five hundred miles to reach Acre, but they could go no further. The Syrian city was surrounded on three sides by the Mediterranean Sea, and a squadron of British Royal Navy ships, commanded by Admiral Sir Sidney Smith, was stationed in these waters. Headed by the warships Tigre and Theseus, the British had provided support and provisions to the city in the interest of thwarting the French. Within its impenetrable walls, Acre’s ruler, Ahmad Pasha elDjezzar, and his tenacious Turkish soldiers refused to surrender. After two long months of sorties, skirmishes, and unsuccessful bombardments, the French had no choice but to turn around and go back to Egypt.  Continue >>

We had always known the man in that mansion was richer than God. He even had the same ethereal ambiguity as Him; nobody knew his name, nobody could picture his face. He had lived shut up in that great big mansion for as long as anybody could remember, and the closest we ever got to him were the rumors we spread. He would’ve fossilized like that, embedded in the city’s lore as nothing more than a fictive construct of our collective speculation, except that one day, he invited us all to come play a game. Continue >>