Krak Des Chevaliers By Carol Miller

"By using a mirror of brass you may see to adjust your cap; by using antiquity as a mirror you may learn to foresee the rise and fall of empires." T'ai Tsung (627-650 A.D.)

 I can still hear the clatter and rumble of the horses' hooves. They echo in my eardrums, in my dreams, or perhaps just in my imagination, against the stones of the vaulted galleries and passageways that lead from the bright sunlight into the gloom inside the great castle. That most marvelous and intricate of castles. The castle Lawrence described as "perfect".

"The Fortress of the Knights", known as the "bone in the throat" of the Muslim armies that tried to take it, had many names. Karak, Kerac, Krak or Crac, Qalaat al-Hosn. A small fortress on the site had been called "The Castle of the Slope". For the Emir of Homs in the year 1011 it was Hisn al-Akrad, the "Castle of the Kurds", for the garrison of Kurdish soldiers stationed there.

In June of 1110, the Crusaders under the command of Tancred, Prince of Antioch, occupied the modest enclave. Theirs was a time romanticized into a notion of heroism, honor and duty, when Christian Europe, apparently convinced of God's personal devotion to its cause, invaded Muslim lands, which it would occupy, in the end unsuccessfully, for nearly two hundred years.

Finding the nearly inaccessible hilltop setting, that dominated the countryside all around, suitable to their needs, Tancred's Frankish Hospitallers designed mighty fortifications, and created the most elaborate of military defenses, a masterpiece of architecture and construction at the service of soldierly teamwork in the era that preceded the use of heavy artillery.

The European notion of a castle ("kastro" in Greek, "castrum" or "castellum" in Latin) evolved out of the walled camps of the Roman legions, encompassing the notion of the fortified villa of the Roman noble or the burg of the Germanic chieftain, conceived on a rude but massive scale with only security in mind, eminently indifferent to comfort, while it additionally attempted to emulate the extraordinary military architecture the Crusaders were to discover in the Levant, built, in fact, during the early years of the Umayyad advance by engineers and architects who were in many cases Christian. Bridges, aqueducts, fountains, reservoirs, cisterns, public baths, fortresses, and turreted walls with cunning machicolations, were embellishments applied in one castle after another, enriched during the Asia adventure and then reinvented on European soil after the collapse of the Crusades.

The classic castle (see: G.G. Coulton, Life in the Middle Ages, Cambridge University Press, 1930) was ideally situated on a hilltop promontory or cliff face, whose rocky supports could then be integrated into its fortifications, which in themselves began with a wide, deep fosse or moat. The earth thrown upward and inward from the moat formed a mound into which bound bundles of square posts were often sunk, thus propitiating a continuous stockade, the eventual foundations, as it happens, for a second layer of walls. A cleated drawbridge, which led to an iron gate or portcullis, generally spanned the moat; this served to protect the massive door in the castle wall. The enclosure contained stables, kitchen, bakery, storehouses, deposits for oil and wine, latrines, sewers, dormitories, laundry, and a chapel, the latter usually adjacent to the dining hall. The keep or donjon, often a large square tower that ultimately evolved into the more efficient round tower -- dark, crowded, virtually without windows and these covered only with a dirty cloth, just one room to a floor -- housed the king or master. The lowest floor was usually a storehouse or prison (the dungeon). The second level served as an audience hall, court of justice, and at mealtimes a dining area with movable facilities of multiple uses. When the light faded or candles expired pads or mattresses came out. Ladders and trap doors, or winding stairs, connected the floors. Walls were adorned with banners, weapons and armor. Stone floors were carpeted with rushes, pine needles or tree branches.

The adaptations at Krak des Chevaliers served the single-minded purpose of a unique circumstance. According to Lawrence it was "the best preserved and most wholly admirable castle in the world". The castle was entered, he goes on to say (see: Crusader Castles, first published in London in 1936) by means of a plain gate, "and then, turning left at a ninety degree angle, a vaulted passage, almost dark, continued as far as a tower dating from the Hospitaller period. A large trap-machicoulis, among other defenses, had been installed in the roof. To reach the inner ward it was necessary to penetrate still further, to another tower, that dominates a dark vaulted passage, ascending steeply. To surprise this entry would therefore be extremely difficult."

Another flight of stairs provided access to the upper court, next to the stables, which accommodated as many as 500 horses. Still more steps lead to the platform uniting the three great towers that together formed the donjon. "They overtop by many [meters] any other tower in the fortress and are magnificently built of huge blocks of stone. From these towers the great wall, known to Arab historians as 'the mountain', slopes outwards and downwards for some thirty meters to the thick greenish mud and water of the moat. The reason for making the wall with so great a batter and such thickness - another thirty meters-is a little hard to find. Neither mining nor earthquake could faze it."

The huge castle, though claim was made to twice as many, was manned by a scant 2000 men, hand picked, disciplined campaigners from among the impoverished or vagrant or landless who joined the Crusades. In effect, extraordinary inducements brought out hordes of volunteers for the march to Jerusalem. Serfs were liberated from their bondage to the soil, freemen were exempted from taxes, death sentences were commuted to life service in Palestine. Timeless propaganda, certainly still extant today, stressed the atrocities and the blasphemies of the Muslims, while reaffirming the tales of lascivious Oriental pleasures, exotic and somehow tainted riches, and luscious, sultry women eager to be ravished by valiant and chivalrous men.

"The Crusades," says historian Will Durant, "were the culminating act of the medieval drama, and perhaps the most picturesque event in the history of the clash of faiths, between Europe and the Near East." (see: The Age of Faith, Simon & Schuster, 1950). All the technological development of the time, the expansion of trade, and the territorial aspirations of Christendom, even the fervor of religious belief - or at least the superstition or obsession associated with it - were funneled into legends of chivalry and feudalism, their glamour, their greed, and their ultimate cruelty, an apogee that lasted two hundred years, "fought," Durant reminds us, "at the expense of the souls of men, in the pursuit of profit and pillage."

Durant describes three "proximate causes" for the Crusades -- a word derived from the Spanish cruzada, "marked with a cross" or "bearing the cross". First was the advance of the Seljuk Turks, who in 1070 took Jerusalem from the Fatimids and barred free access to the various Christian cults. With this the unhappy and frustrated Christians unleashed an avalanche of tales of oppression and desecration, while they appealed for papal aid.

Second was the "dangerous weakening" of the Byzantine Empire, as a result of Turkish assault. Orthodox emperor Alexius I (1081-1118), setting aside his theological pride, appealed to Latin Europe in the person of Pope Urban II, reasoning that "it would be wiser to confront the infidels on Asian soil than wait for them to swarm through the Balkans into Europe."

Third was the ambition of the Italian city-states, especially Pisa, Genoa, Venice and Amalfi, following the Norman capture of Sicily and the Christian triumph over Muslim rule in Spain, to extend their growing commercial potential throughout the Mediterranean.

And after it was over, and all the professed purposes of the Crusades had failed, Jerusalem was in Mamluk hands, the Palestinian and Syrian ports captured for Italian trade had been lost, and Muslim civilization, as Durant professes, "had proved itself superior to the Christian in refinement, comfort, hygiene, education, and war." The pretensions and duplicities of the popes "to provide peace in Europe through a common purpose" had been "shattered by nationalistic ambitions and the 'crusades' of popes against emperors."

Through all of this, Krak des Chevaliers held fast. The tight-knit military team, for all practical purposes, lived well, by obtaining supplies in the form of grains, produce and live animals, from the villages that dotted the base of the castle hill. Olive presses were installed in the storage rooms. Generous quantities of fresh, potable water arrived by means of an aqueduct still in evidence under the south wall, and was artfully channeled into the various ducts, that ultimately emptied into the moat. Rain water flowed from terrace catchments into cisterns.

In 1163 Nuradin, then Sultan of Damascus, unsuccessfully confronted Frankish troops in the Buqai'ah Valley below the castle. In 1188 Saladin attempted a siege, then wisely withdrew. Finally, during the winter of 1271, the Mamluk king al-Zaher Baibars besieged the presumably invulnerable fortress. When his troops were able to enter and occupy the castle, door by door and tower by tower, the Franks, in despair, surrendered.

The taking of Krak was a Muslim triumph, and a denouement in the Crusades. Baibars, with Malek-es-Said Bereke-Khan, and Kelaoun, added a miqrab to the twelfth century Gothic chapel of St. George, orienting it to Mecca, and a stone minbar is on view in the chapel to this day. The inner walls, damaged during the assault, were carefully repaired. Arabic inscriptions adorned the solemn stone facing above a new entrance gateway. Since hygiene, under the Franks, was minimum, the Mamluks added Arab baths with their pools and ducts, as well as new inner towers - including the famous "Tower of the King's Daughter"-and confected, as well, monumental perimeter walls and outer towers, especially along the southern rim, that amounted to the outermost shell, designed to enclose the second and third ramparts completed by the Europeans in the late twelfth century, and which embraced, in turn, the earlier fortress, built before 1170.

Krak des Chevaliers, under Arab rule, became the seat of the Vice-Sultanate. A new garrison was stationed in the three-hectare enclosure. Visitors made a point of stopping during their travels, to parade along the ramparts, or to wander the intricate web of interconnected upper terraces -- in order to better appreciate the marvelous view of the Mediterranean in the distance, the looming peaks of the Alawite mountains, and nearby, the vineyards, rolling woodlands and the flocks of sheep or herds of camels in the local villages -- while at their feet was strewn the astonishing architectural "anatomy" of the fortress itself. Ibn Batuta, on his way from Tripoli to Homs early in the fourteenth century, visited the castle in order to make notes, especially on the novel use of the machicoulis that had been enthusiastically adopted in the construction of the Islamic citadels in Aleppo, Damascus and Bosra, among others.

In time, however, the castle's importance dwindled and its greatness faded to vague rumors. Villagers invaded the precinct, until in 1934 the Department of Antiquities and Museums had them evicted, and so, among other treasures, recovered the fresco, "The Presentation of Jesus at the Temple" (currently on view in the Cathedral-Museum in Tartous) as well as the fortress itself, as National Patrimony. It is probably one of Syria's most beloved tourist destinations. The skein of inner passages and vaulted hallways, vast galleries, tunnels, turrets, independently of the diagrams in any guidebook, is a puzzle to be deciphered in dreams, perhaps. Surely the visitors hear, as I do, the singular sensation of the horses' hooves pounding, as they charge out of the bright sunlight up the dark, vaulted entranceways, the sound echoing off the venerable stones. A common phenomenon? By no means. I was indignant when we visited Qalaat Marqaab, the basaltic "Black Castle" near Banyas just north of Tartous. "This is a dead castle," I complained to Ghassan, my interpreter and guide. "The stones are dead. There are no sounds of the horses' hooves."

"But madam," answered Ghassan sadly, "the horses were never stabled in Marqaab. They were kept in the village at the foot of the castle."

Carol Miller, sculptress, journalist, photographer, a resident of Mexico City, has traveled extensively in Syria. Her research, her fluent style, her passion for archaeology and history, have enriched her articles, that appear regularly on www.syriagate.com For bio and abstracts of other books see www.amazon.com, www.barnesandnoble.com or www.xlibris.com/bookstore