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Karak Castle, Jordan, twelfth century

The art of defending fortified places consists in putting off the moment of their reduction …

Frederick the Great.

The Franks fortified the coast with maritime castles, and coastal cities such as Tyre were rapidly ringed with defensive walls. It became clear almost immediately to the Kings of Jerusalem that possession of the Syrian coast was the key to the defence and survival of the Latin states. An offensive castle strategy was also undertaken. Castles such as Karak interrupted Muslim communications between Damascus, Egypt and Mecca, allowed for the pillaging of caravans, and could also act as a turnpike to extract fees for safe passage from merchants.

Of course an exposed inland castle, with a limited garrison, was always at risk of being enveloped and slowly starved out, however strong its walls might be. In classic castle warfare, as practised with exemplary skill by the Crusaders of Syria in the twelfth century at least until King Guy’s loss of the field army at the Battle of Hattin in 1187, the defenders of a fortified place aimed simply to hold out until the arrival of the kingdom’s field army. This was a lesson that Frederick the Great still stressed when instructing his generals in 1747.

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In fact Karak became the archetypal offensive castle. After it came into the possession of Reynald of Châtillon in 1176 he used it as his base for attempts to sack Mecca itself and for raids into the Red Sea and against the port of Jeddah. Reynald’s strategy, though commonly condemned by historians, may also be viewed as the only logical aggressive or expansionist outlet for the Crusaders as their little kingdom was hemmed in by the Mediterranean on one side, by an increasingly powerful Muslim foe to its east, and with Egypt a newly reinvigorated power under Sultan Saladin.

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Karak fell to Saladin’s nephew in 1188. Two previous sieges had ended in failure, the first of these included the legendary withholding of bombardment by Saladin upon a tower in which the newly wed Humphrey of Toron was spending the first night of his marriage with Isabella of Jerusalem. During the second siege the Muslims attempted to fill the giant ditches surrounding the castle as they attempted to get mangonels close enough to make an impact on its walls. The third siege took several months to bring the garrison to surrender, but could be continued in the confidence that no relief army was coming to push Saladin’s men from the walls as the Crusader field army had been smashed by the Sultan at Hattin.

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