Battle Castles by Dan Snow

Author:Dan Snow
Language: eng
Format: epub, mobi
ISBN: 9780007457489
Publisher: HarperCollins Publishers

This photograph of Krak des Chevaliers was taken by T. E. Lawrence (Lawrence of Arabia) who described it as ‘perhaps the best preserved and most wholly admirable castle in the world’

Photograph of Kalaat-el-Hosn/Krak des Chevaliers (image ref. #149, unnumbered, preceding leaf 44). Reproduced by kind permission of the Principal, Fellows and Scholars of Jesus College, Oxford

After the Crusades came to an end, Krak des Chevaliers lost its main military function, but remained the capital of a district in the large province of Tripoli. From then on the fourteenth-century governors who ruled the castle were little mentioned in the Arabic chronicles but were locally influential, like the Emir Batkamar Ibn ‘Abd Allah al-Khazindar, who sponsored the construction of a church, a school and a hospital in the neighbouring city of al-Hisn in 1319. Nevertheless, Krak continued to play a military role until the mid-fourteenth century (as indicated by an epigraph dated 1345 carved on the façade of an eastern gate-tower, which gives details of the pay of the garrison then stationed in the castle).

After its capture by Sultan Baybars, Krak remained wholly in Muslim hands for nearly 650 years. Efforts to secure Christian rule in the Holy Land had proved a failure and for much of this intervening period the might of the Ottoman Empire dominated the Levant. Only with the collapse of this power during the First World War did European armies once again find themselves campaigning in the region. T. E. Lawrence had visited, Krak before the war, while researching a dissertation on Crusader castles, pronouncing it ‘the best preserved and most wholly admirable castle in the world’.

By the time Lawrence and other pioneering students of the Crusader castles, like Paul Deschamps, visited, the villagers who had long lived in small settlements beneath the castle had moved up the hill to occupy the castle itself. Deschamps found some 500 of the local Kurdish population living as a functioning community within the walls. They had taken stone from the crenellations in building makeshift houses which obscured, and damaged, the castle fabric, while the great vaults had become packed with rubbish. As Syria was at the time a French mandate, Krak was taken into direct French care as a historic monument. The accumulated waste was cleared out – a job which took two hundred men years to complete – and the villagers themselves were likewise evicted (with some compensation). Only then did Krak become the tourist attraction it has since remained, particularly for French visitors who have most identified with the Frankish Crusaders whose fervent mission in the Holy Land left Krak des Chevaliers and other castles as a lasting memorial.

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