Muslim Fortresses in the Levant: Between Crusaders and Mongols (7 page)

4.2 Towers added and renewed in Mamluk fortresses

Acknowledgements

This study is based on my dissetation, which examined the Ayyubid and Mamluk rural fortresses and the concept of defense in Greater Syria in the late twelfth and thirteenth centuries. It was supervised by Professor Reuven Amitai and Professor Ronnie Ellenblum from the Hebrew University of Jerusalem. I would like to thank them both for their valuable advice, guidance and help in funding several of the field trips that were the bases of this research.

Part of the study was financed by the Israeli Science Foundation and a grant from the Faculty of Humanities at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem.

The librarians at the following institutions, who assisted all along the way, deserve special praise and thanks: the Jewish National Library in Jerusalem; the Fine Arts Library at Harvard; Mt Scopus Humanities and Social Science Library at the Hebrew University; the Rockefeller Library in Jerusalem; the library of the Institute of Archaeology and the Aerial Photographic Archives in the Department of Geography at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem.

Special thanks are due to my editor Mrs Mira Riech, Mrs Miri Shmida from the Cartographic Laboratory at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem who prepared several of the maps, and Noam Tamari from Studio Ze Tel Aviv who worked on the photographs and graphics that accompany this study.

Professor Gideon Shelach from the Hebrew University of Jerusalem invited me to join his excavations in Northeast China in the summer of 2006. This was followed by a short trip to Inner Mongolia. It was a marvelous experience, an opportunity to glimpse the great steppe and to visit several medieval Chinese fortifications. Parts of this study were written during this visit to China. I owe much to him for offering this trip and sponsoring my travels during that summer.

I would like to thank Professor Arthur Segal from the Department of Archaeology at Haifa University who helped and advised on any problem concerning construction methods. His careful explanations and illustrations always clarified matters.

I am equally in debt to the following two professors from the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, Professor Michal Biran, for her translation of the Chinese source on gunpowder, and Professor Shaul Shaked, who translated the Persian source on siege warfare. Difficulties in Arabic translation were solved with the help of Professor Amitai, Mr Ofer Efrati, and my khushdāshiyya Shai Shir, Amir Mazor, and Yonatan Meroze. Military technology was often discussed with Shai Amisar, who patiently explained the chemistry of gunpowder and eventually built a model of the counterweight trebuchet to illustrate its problems and advantages. Yinon Engoltz spent a hard and long day measuring and weighing Mamluk catapult stones in Acre. Asad
, the park manager at
Nimrod, showed me several secrets of the fortress that I would never have found on my own. Haim Barabé explained the architecture at his excavation in Safad, and described the finds that provide the dating. One of my favorite trips was made together with the Shlomo Rotem, who drew and reconstructed with great skill some of the architectural ruins and brought them back to life. I am most grateful to colleagues and friends for hearing out my ideas, and their many helpful comments. Any mistakes and faults in this study are entirely my own. My parents’ encouragement and support has been unstinting and I dedicate this book to them with gratitude and love.

Notes on transliteration

Arabic terminology is italicized and transliterated according to
Mamlūk Studies Review
. Common Arabic words such as amir and sultan are written without diacritical points. Most of the sources in Arabic are translated into English by the author unless otherwise noted.

Place names are brought in the Arabic version as they appear in contemporary medieval sources. The rankish names are mentioned in brackets, for example
al-Akrād (Crac des Chevaliers). When the context deals explicitly with Frankish historical events, the name place appears in the Latin or the old French version.

Well-known place names appear in their current usage in English (Aleppo, Cairo, Damascus, and so on).

The Mongol and Turkish names are transcribed as if they were Arabic.

Abbreviations

Introduction

During the summer of 1998 I participated in a survey of several fortresses in southern Jordan. The signing of the Israeli-Jordanian peace treaty in the winter of 1994 allowed our small group to walk the grounds of sites previously studied from photos and plans.
¹
On our return to Jerusalem a heated discussion took place, in which the Mamluk sultan Baybars (r. 658/1260–679/1277) was declared “builder of the great Crusader fortresses.” This preliminary survey slowly revealed the scale of mamluk construction work in fortresses previously ruled by the Franks.

Crusader fortresses in the Levant have long since become pilgrimage sites for scholars studying twelfth- and thirteenth-century history and military architecture of the Latin East. The magnitude of research and publication on the subject is overwhelming. Other than the large citadels of Damascus, Cairo and some of the smaller central Syrian cities, twelfth- and thirteenth-century Muslim rural and frontier strongholds have not been thoroughly studied. Ayyubid and Mamluk phases built upon Crusader fortresses are briefly mentioned, occasionally ignored and sometimes attributed to the Franks.

In the past two decades Muslim military architecture in the Levant has attracted a growing number of scholars combining different methods of research such as surveys, excavations and the study of the Arabic primary sources. Thus, the events that led to the building of twelfth- and thirteenth-century Muslim fortifications and their architectural development are slowly being constituted.

Historical background

During much of the twelfth century the Franks dominated the military scene in the Levant. The unification of gypt and a large part of Syria under the rule of
gradually changed the balance of power in the region. Though the ranks had lost much of their military strength,
successors could not maintain a firm united political or military front against the Franks. This situation led to a new status quo, and for a period of 67 years (1193–1260) the Frankish states and the Ayyubid principalities were engaged in a struggle in which no side managed to gain a definite advantage over its adversary. It is important to note, however, that between 1292 and 1244 there were also relatively long periods in which both sides coexisted peacefully. The balance of power tilted in favor of the Franks only when a
new Crusade arrived and the local armies received substantial reinforcements (the fifth Crusade, 1217–21; the expedition of 1228 led by Fredrick II; the Crusade of Theobald of Champagne and Richard of Cornwall, 1239–41; and the Crusade of Louis IX, 1250–54). After the battle of La Forbie (1244) the Franks’ dependence on western aid became even greater. Other changes in the military balance of power occurred when Ayyubid-Frankish alliances were formed between various factions. These only increased the already existing tension among the Ayyubid rulers. It is against this background of the declining power of the Crusader states that the first Ayyubid fortresses were built.