26
Do not let your strong defences and fortresses deceive you and make you conceited. With this sincere advice, I may add this also very clearly that even if Alamut were one of the fortresses of the heavens, I could level it to the ground by the grace of God.
The Sultan Malikshah writing to the Assassin Grand Master Hasan-i-Sabbah.
The destruction by Kilij Arslan of the second wave of Crusaders left Outremer with a manpower problem. Local levies could be raised, and indeed many local Syrians and Turks were still to be found in the ranks of the Latins even at the death of the kingdom in 1291, but it was not enough. The Crusaders therefore built extensively and they built well, because fortifications effectively tackled much of their problem of a lack of men and knights to defend the territories they had won.
The Muslims had some experience of artifice in fortification from the Byzantine castles and fortified cities they had taken from the Greeks but the technology employed and sheer size of structures such as Crak de Chevaliers would surely have inspired a degree of awe or least doubt over the ability of siege engines to bring down such a fortress. It seems likely that because of the highly mobile nature of first Arab and then later Turkish warfare, fortification was never really that highly developed in the medieval Islamic world. Indeed, the Persian word used to describe Alamut, the greatest fortress of the Assassins sect, is qal’a, which like the Arabic qasr translates simply as ‘fortified place’ rather than castle per se. It is perhaps therefore better to view pre-Crusade Islamic fortresses as boltholes or refuges not dissimilar to the fortified villages of Umbria, Tuscany and the Marches of contemporary Italy. These were not structures designed, like a Western medieval castle, to strategically dominate a large area of fertile land. Nor were they built in a greatly ‘scientific’ manner like the huge concentric castles of the Crusaders. As a result siege warfare in the Middle East had not been well developed and relied to a great extent on the ability to starve out the occupiers of a castle. A well-prepared and fortified foe was, needless to say, a difficult proposition, especially for a large army consuming provisions at a faster rate than the besieged were.
Crak de Chevaliers is the epitome of Crusader castle building, with its enhancement of natural defences by the addition of immense moats, glacis and curtain walls and turrets, and the ability to form killing zones from its protruding towers. Its bakeries, cisterns and dry stores were immense and any foe daring enough to want to challenge its walls with his mangonels would have very limited options for placing his siege artillery as there is barely a level patch of land surrounding the fearsome Hospitaller stronghold.
The Muslims would only reach such levels of sophistication in fortification under the Mamluk sultans of Egypt, in response to the two-front war they had to fight in Syria against the Crusaders and the Mongols. Evidence of their rapidly-acquired skills of fortification can also be seen in Crak de Chevaliers in Sultan Baybars’s addition of a square tower to give extra protection for the access bridge.