The Fall of Hisn al-Akrad

Hisn al-Akrad, the Castle of the Kurds, which the Crusaders rebuilt and called the Crac des Chevaliers, stands on a high hill in the gap between the coastal mountains and the interior of Syria, guarding the road from the sea to Homs. Held and vastly strengthened by the Knights Hospitaller, who made it the chief of their castles and the centre of their power in the region, it became the most famous and one of the most formidable fortresses of the whole Crusader enterprise, a concentric stronghold of two great rings of walls, round towers, a massive sloping glacis and a moat, garrisoned and provisioned to withstand any siege. In 1271 the Mamluk sultan al-Zahir Baybars (rahimahu Allah), who had made it his work to drive the Crusaders out of Syria stronghold by stronghold, brought his army and siege engines against it. After a siege of about a month his miners and mangonels breached the outer ward, and the surviving defenders withdrew into the inner castle; they were induced to surrender, the chroniclers say, by a letter, perhaps forged in the name of their own grand master, ordering them to give up the castle, and were allowed to depart in safety. The fall of the Crac, long thought impregnable, was a heavy blow to the Crusader cause and a signal step in the Mamluk reconquest of the Syrian coast that would end, twenty years later, with the fall of Acre. The castle, taken intact, was repaired and held by the Mamluks, and survives today as the best-preserved Crusader castle in the world. This scene depicts the siege of 1271, with the great fortress on its hill and Baybars's army below. In keeping with the project's ethics any figure is anonymous and at a distance.