The Siege of Kerak

Kerak (al-Karak), a powerful Crusader castle on a high spur east of the Dead Sea in the land of Transjordan, the lordship the Franks called Oultrejordain, commanded the desert road that linked Crusader and Muslim Syria with Egypt and Arabia, the very road along which the pilgrim caravans travelled toward Makkah. In the 1180s it was held by Raynald of Chatillon, a Frankish lord notorious among the Muslims above all others: a breaker of truces who plundered the merchant and pilgrim caravans that passed beneath his walls, and who had gone so far as to launch a fleet into the Red Sea to raid the coasts of the Hijaz and threaten the holy cities of Makkah and Madinah themselves, an outrage that made his name hated throughout the Muslim world. Salah al-Din (Saladin, rahimahu Allah), as he gathered the strength of Egypt and Syria for the great struggle, twice marched against Kerak, in 1183 and again in 1184, surrounding the castle and battering its walls with mangonels; on the first occasion a wedding was being celebrated within the besieged castle even as the stones fell. On both occasions the fortress, immensely strong, held out until a Crusader relief army approached and Salah al-Din withdrew. Kerak did not fall then; but Raynald's continued treachery was among the immediate causes of the war that came to its head three years later, when Salah al-Din destroyed the Crusader army at the Horns of Hattin, took Raynald captive and put him to death with his own hand, and went on to retake Jerusalem. This scene depicts the siege of Kerak, the great castle on its spur and the army of Salah al-Din below. In keeping with the project's ethics any figure is anonymous and at a distance.