We spent last weekend in the fabulous Dana Nature Reserve, and stopped off to see the castle at Karak, one of the great Crusader fortresses, on the way back to Amman. This is roughly how I tried to explain it to Ruby, who is 7, nearly 8, going on 17…
Well, Roobs, glad you like ‘Arabic cream cheese’. It’s called labneh. You see that castle over there, just on the other side of the square? Well perhaps one of the most interesting things about it is that the people who built it were… can you guess who they were? They were English and French! Yes, English like us! What were they doing out here? Well, hundreds of years ago they came because they believed, because very important people told them, that it was important to try and capture the city of Jerusalem which is… you know that valley we just drove up? Well if you go down it to the Dead Sea, cross the water, and then go up about the same distance on the other side, that’s where Jerusalem is.
Anyway, they thought their religion was the best and other religions were bad, and because Jesus hung out in Jerusalem they needed to take it back from the people who lived there, who weren’t even Christian. That’s what they said, anyway. In fact it became a big chance for anyone who wasn’t doing too well at home, or who wanted adventure or to become rich. Most of the poorer people walked here. Imagine that! One or two must have come from Brighton, although of course Brighton didn’t exist it was so long ago. But where Brighton is now. Imagine! It took them a year or more sometimes. Maybe they could have done it quicker if they’d been walking all the time, but they had to stop during winter, and when they ran out of food and so on.
And eventually they stayed 200 years or so, these English and French and other Europeans. The people here couldn’t really distinguish between them all and just called them all Franks. So towards the end it must have seemed like they belonged here, because they could have been born here and their parents and grandparents and great-grand parents before them. And some of them stayed here and married local Arabs and they say that people here are unusually blonde and have blue eyes. Look at the waiter who just brought the food. Not right at him! But do you notice he has blue eyes? Who knows, maybe his great-great-great-great-great-great-grandparents were English!
Can you see how steep it is, what a long way down it is from the drawbridge? Well they would have chosen this site specifically because it is so hard to get to if someone else wanted to attack it. It was only captured once in its whole history, when a general called Saladin took it. This Saladin was one of those people who was known for being generous. There’s a story that during the battle to capture it, a couple inside the castle, which was really like a small town with a thousand people or more living in it, they got married and the mother of the bride sent out a letter and some cakes to Saladin, even though he was an enemy on the other side, asking him not to attack one of the towers where the couple were having their honeymoon. And he agreed, and told all his men not to attack that tower. I wish we knew which one! Imagine, they were fighting a war but he didn’t attack because they were having their honeymoon!
So much for the guide book. Later when we got home there was some fascinating stuff about Saladin and Raynald of Chatillon, the Crusader lord he was besieging. Raynauld was a brutal adventurer it seems, born obscure but twice married to rich aristocratic women. He once decided to pillage Cyprus and when the bishop of Antioch wouldn’t agree, had him stripped naked, covered in honey and left out in the sun all day. He precipitated another war between the Latin Kingdom of Jerusalem and Saladdin because he broke an agreement not to plunder the caravans which passed through Karak, and then tried to threaten Mecca itself by manning pirate ships on the Red Sea.
In the end Saladin killed him with his own hand, in direct revenge for all the treaties he had broken. Saladin killed Raynauld while sparing King Guy of Jerusalem, who had been taken with him – Guy had nominally been Raynauld’s lord but said, probably truthfully, that he had been unable to control his vassal. There’s an amazing description by the historian Imadedine al-Isfahani, who was actually present at the scene (just as he was at the crucial Battle of Hittin).
There’s the possibility that by executing Raynauld and sparing Guy, Saladin successfully maintained a rift among the Crusaders between a hard and soft line. It was only two years after the fall of Karak that Saladin retook Jerusalem.
