Krak des Chevaliers: The Great Crusader Castle in Syria

Krak des Chevaliers is a medieval castle in western Syria and the best-preserved fortress built by the crusaders. Granted to the Knights Hospitaller in 1142, it guarded the Homs Gap and became the centre of the order’s power in the County of Tripoli until the Mamluk sultan Baybars captured it in April 1271. Its concentric walls, massive sloping bases and great towers make it a textbook example of medieval military architecture.

The site and its early history

The castle stands on a spur of the Jabal Ansariyya hills at a height of about 650 metres. From its walls a garrison could watch the Homs Gap, the broad valley that links inland Syria with the coastal plain around Tripoli and Tartus. Whoever held it could threaten caravans, raid the fertile lands around Homs and Hama, and block armies moving to the coast.

A fortress existed here before the crusades. In 1031 the Mirdasid emir of Aleppo placed a Kurdish garrison on the hill, which gave the place its Arabic name, Hisn al-Akrad, “Castle of the Kurds”. Crusaders of the First Crusade under Raymond of Saint-Gilles seized it briefly in early 1099 but abandoned it as they marched on Jerusalem. In 1110 Tancred, regent of Antioch, captured it, and it became part of the crusader County of Tripoli.

The Hospitallers take charge

In 1142 Count Raymond II of Tripoli granted the castle, with other strongholds and rights in the area, to the Knights Hospitaller. The order had begun as a hospital community in Jerusalem but by then was becoming a military order with professed brother-knights. The secular lords of the crusader states lacked the money and manpower to hold frontier castles, while the military orders could draw on estates and donations across Western Europe.

The Hospitallers transformed the site. Earthquakes struck the region in 1157 and especially in 1170, and each disaster was followed by rebuilding on a larger scale. Most of the inner castle visible today dates from the late twelfth and early thirteenth centuries, and the outer circuit of walls was added in the thirteenth century, probably after a further earthquake in 1202.

Architecture

Krak des Chevaliers is a concentric castle: an inner ward stands within an outer wall, so that attackers who broke through the first line faced a second, higher one. The outer wall is studded with round towers projecting from the curtain, allowing defenders to shoot along its face. Between the two lines on the south side lies a broad water-filled reservoir, fed partly by an aqueduct.

The most striking feature of the inner ward is its talus or glacis, a steep stone slope at the base of the walls on the south and west. It made mining and scaling difficult, strengthened the walls against earthquakes and caused stones dropped from above to bounce outward. Three great towers dominate the southern front, the side most open to attack.

Inside are vaulted storerooms, stables, an oven, a chapel that the Mamluks later converted into a mosque, and a great hall fronted by an elegant Gothic loggia. The castle could hold large stocks of food and water, and contemporary estimates suggest it could house a garrison of up to around 2,000 men, of whom only a small minority were Hospitaller knights; the rest were sergeants, mercenaries and servants.

A base for power and tribute

Krak des Chevaliers withstood several Muslim attacks in the twelfth century. After his victory at the Battle of Hattin in 1187, Saladin overran most of the Kingdom of Jerusalem, but in 1188 he inspected the castle and decided not to lay siege to it. It survived as one of the few major strongholds left to the Franks in the north.

In the first half of the thirteenth century the Hospitallers used the castle as an offensive base. Raids from Krak and the order’s coastal castle of Margat pressured the Muslim rulers of Hama and Homs, and at times these cities paid tribute to the order. The castle thus functioned as an administrative and economic centre as well as a military one.

The Mamluk siege of 1271

The balance shifted after 1250, when the Mamluks seized power in Egypt. Sultan Baybars set about dismantling the crusader states, taking Caesarea and Arsuf in 1265, Safed in 1266 and Antioch in 1268. The Hospitallers were short of men and money, and Krak was increasingly isolated.

Baybars arrived before the castle in early March 1271, with troops from Hama and other allied contingents. His engineers and miners attacked the outer defences, and the outer ward fell by the end of March. The defenders retreated into the inner castle, and Baybars’ miners worked at the south-west tower.

According to Arabic accounts, Baybars then had a letter delivered that appeared to come from the Hospitaller Grand Master, Hugh Revel, telling the garrison to surrender; historians generally regard it as a forgery. On 8 April 1271 the defenders capitulated and were allowed safe passage to Tripoli. The Mamluks repaired the damage and added a large square tower on the south side, and the castle served as a Mamluk administrative centre.

In the decades after 1271 the castle lost its frontier role as the last crusader strongholds fell, ending with the fall of Acre in 1291. Arab travellers and geographers continued to describe it as a formidable fortress, and the Mamluks used it as the seat of a local district.

Later history and survival

Over the centuries a village grew up inside the castle walls. In the 1930s, during the French Mandate, the inhabitants were moved out and French archaeologists, led by Paul Deschamps, cleared and restored the building. Earlier, the young T. E. Lawrence had studied it for his Oxford thesis on crusader castles and praised it as perhaps the finest surviving castle anywhere.

In 2006 UNESCO inscribed the castle on the World Heritage List together with the nearby Qal’at Salah El-Din (Saladin’s Castle). During the Syrian civil war, rebel fighters occupied it from 2012 until March 2014, when government forces retook it; shelling and air strikes damaged parts of the structure. Since 2013 it has been listed, with Syria’s other World Heritage sites, as World Heritage in Danger.

By the numbers

Timeline

• 1031: The Mirdasid emir of Aleppo stations Kurdish troops on the hill (Hisn al-Akrad).
• 1099, January–February: Raymond of Saint-Gilles briefly occupies the fortress.
• 1110: Tancred of Antioch captures it.
• 1142: Raymond II of Tripoli grants the castle to the Knights Hospitaller.
• 1170: A severe earthquake damages the castle; major Hospitaller rebuilding follows.
• 1188: Saladin reconnoitres the castle but does not besiege it.
• 1271, early March: Baybars begins the siege.
• 1271, 8 April: The garrison surrenders and leaves for Tripoli.
• 2006: UNESCO inscribes the site on the World Heritage List.
• 2014, March: Syrian government forces retake the castle from rebel fighters.

Why it matters

Krak des Chevaliers shows what the military orders could build with Europe-wide resources, and how fortification ideas moved between Byzantine, Islamic and Western traditions. Its fall to Baybars marked the approaching end of the crusader states. Today it remains one of the most complete and evocative medieval castles in the world.