Episode Details

Perched on a 650 meter hill in the Homs Gap of Syria, Krak des Chevaliers began in 1031 as a Kurdish garrison placed by the Mirdasid emir of Aleppo, Shibl al-Dawla Nasr, earning it the Arabic name Hisn al-Akrad, the Fort of the Kurds. Crusaders passed it in 1099, and in 1142 Count Raymond II of Tripoli handed it to the Knights Hospitaller, a religious order of healers that had turned into a wealthy military force. After earthquakes in 1170 and 1202, the Hospitallers rebuilt it as a concentric castle with a garrison of about 2,000, an 80 foot thick sloping glacis, nine meter outer walls, rounded towers, and a 137 meter bent entrance corridor lined with murder holes.

By the 1260s the surrounding farmland had been burned and the tribute income was gone, and the Grand Master complained in 1268 that only 300 brethren remained in the east. In 1271 the Mamluk sultan Baibars bombarded the walls with mangonels for 36 days and undermined the southwest tower, but the knights held the inner ward. After a ten day lull, a sealed letter from the Grand Master in Tripoli gave them permission to surrender. It was a forgery. The castle later became a mosque, an Ottoman garrison, a village of 500 people, a French restoration project in 1933, a UNESCO site in 2006, and a target during the Syrian civil war.

• Why King Andrew II of Hungary called the castle the key of the Christian lands in 1218 and funded it with a yearly income
• How the glacis blocked siege towers, battering rams, and mining while also absorbing earthquake shock
• The box machicolations shared with the Citadel of Aleppo and the unresolved question of who copied whom
• Why a face-saving forged letter worked on starving knights when 36 days of bombardment had not
• The French mandate paying villagers one million francs to leave, and Crusader frescoes preserved under Ottoman plaster