Krak des Chevaliers

Never taken by assault, surrendered on a forged letter

Krak des Chevaliers stands on a 650-metre hill in the Homs Gap in western Syria, about 40 kilometres west of Homs and close to the border with Lebanon, commanding the old road between Homs and Tripoli. UNESCO calls it the best-preserved example of a Crusader castle and an archetype of the medieval castle, and T. E. Lawrence called it "perhaps the best preserved and most wholly admirable castle in the world."

Its name traces its owners. In 1031 the Mirdasid emir of Aleppo and Homs settled Kurdish troops on the hilltop, and the fort became Hisn al-Akrad, the fortress of the Kurds; the Crusaders garbled that into Le Crac, and later generations romanticised it as Krak des Chevaliers, the fortress of the knights. In 1142 Raymond II, Count of Tripoli, handed it to the Knights Hospitaller, who rebuilt it until an earthquake struck in 1170. A second great building phase in the 13th century turned it into a concentric castle, with an outer wall around the inner ward, a steep sloping glacis against siege engines and earthquakes, round towers housing the knights, and unusually elaborate box machicolations. In its golden age it held a garrison of about 2,000 and drew tribute from the whole surrounding country. In 1188 Saladin came to attack it, looked at it, judged it too strong and marched away.

It fell by a trick. Sultan Baibars arrived on 3 March 1271 and set up mangonels; on 29 March his miners brought down a tower in the south-west corner and his men stormed the outer defences. After a lull of ten days the besiegers sent the garrison a letter, supposedly from the Grand Master of the Hospitallers in Tripoli, giving them permission to surrender. The letter was a forgery, but the knights accepted it and gave up the castle on 8 April 1271, after a siege of 36 days. The Mamluks added their own construction later that century.

By the early 20th century a village of about 500 people had grown up inside the walls. The French scholar Paul Deschamps began clearing and studying it in 1927, the villagers were moved out in 1933, and the castle was restored. Since 2006 it has been a UNESCO World Heritage Site together with Qal'at Salah El-Din.

The civil war reached it in 2012. Shelling in August 2012 damaged the Crusader chapel, airstrikes hit it in July and August 2013 during the siege of Homs, and government forces retook it in March 2014. Reconstruction and conservation have been under way since, with UNESCO reporting on the castle every year.