Reimagining the Crusades
Crusaders Krak de Chevaliers
(Peter Horree/Alamy Stock Photo)
Krak des Chevaliers in western Syria was built between 1142 and 1271 and is largely intact. It is one of the most striking of the nearly 100 Crusader castles found across the Middle East.
These medieval fortifications, coupled with the few written accounts left by Christian and Muslim sources, have long painted the Crusaders as little more than aggressive invaders focused on murder and plunder and uninterested in creativity or innovation, says Adrian Boas, an archaeologist at the University of Haifa. But he and a new generation of excavators are now uncovering a more nuanced picture of Crusader life from digs in castles, rural settlements, and urban areas, learning what they built, ate, and drank, how they fought, and even how they were buried during their long sojourn in the East.
In the summer of 1187, Saladin’s forces assembled on the shore of the Sea of Galilee 75 miles north of Jerusalem. The king of Jerusalem, Guy Lusignan, in turn, gathered his troops at a spring at Sepphoris to prepare for the battle. Sepphoris was considered the traditional site of the birth of Jesus’ mother Mary, at which time it was a thriving Roman city, and it served as a strategic watering hole for Greek, Roman, Byzantine, Arabic, and Ottoman travelers and armies through the millennia. Crusaders had used the area on and off for more than a century.
https://www.archaeology.org/issues/315-1811/features/7041-reimagining-the-crusades
