Syria

Tortosa of the Crusaders, known today as Tartus, was an important pilgrimage port and a strategic gateway between the Mediterranean and the Syrian interior. Tartus stands at the seaward end of the Homs Gap, which cuts through the Jebel al-Sariya, the coastal mountain range, while at the eastern end of the gap lies the important city of Homs and beyond that Damascus, which together with Cairo in Egypt was the mustering place of Muslim forces directed against the Franks of Outremer. In defence against this threat the Templars fortified Tortosa, whose cathedral stands as the finest survival of Crusader religious architecture outside Jerusalem, and in the mountains they built Chastel Blanc, or Safita as it is known today, which together with the nearby Hospitaller castle of Krak des Chevaliers gave the Crusaders complete control over the one important route between the interior of Syria and the sea. In 1291, the year when Outremer was overwhelmed by the final Mameluke assault, the Templars at Tortosa hung on two months longer than the defenders at Acre, and they clung on to their offshore island of Arwad for yet eleven years more.

The old quarter of Tartus, Tortosa of the Templars, Is built within the remains of the Crusader citadel. A good section of Its sea wall runs along the Mediterranean, while on the landward sides the citadel Is encircled by an Inner and outer wall. Much of these land walls survive, though they can be difficult to follow because houses have been built Into the arches and bastions and are fixed against the walls themselves. The citadel occupied less than a quarter of the Crusader city and that too was surrounded by a wall, almost entirely vanished now. Its southern end marked by a freestanding square tower about 500 yards to the south of the citadel and just opposite the little harbour where you can catch a launch to the Island of Arwad.

Tortosa was originally In the hands of the Count of Tripoli (Trablus down the coast In northern Lebanon) who placed It In the care of the Templars following Its brief occupation by Nur al-DIn In 1152. The knights held out against Saladin’s siege In 1188 by bolting themselves Inside the keep, which rises just behind the sea wall. Entering through an opening In the sea wall you thread your way through the tangle of streets and jumble of habitations that fill the citadel enclosure. A little square with a leafy cafe opens up Immediately behind the remains of the Templars’ keep. On the north side of the square are the traces of a thirteenth-century Templar banqueting hall, while to the northeast are the remains of their chapel.

But what is especially worth seeing is the Cathedral of Our Lady of Tortosa, which lies 300 yards to the southeast, beyond the citadel walls but within what was the line of the Templars’ city walls. If in doubt you can ask for the kanisa, church, or the mathaf, museum, which is what the cathedral has become, though during the centuries following the withdrawal of the Crusaders from the Holy Land it served as a mosque, a stables and an Ottoman barracks. A chapel, reputedly the first dedicated to the Virgin, is known to have been built here in the third century, long before the Roman Empire officially tolerated Christianity. When two centuries later the chapel was felled by an earthquake, the disaster was proclaimed a miracle, for the altar had survived. The Count of Tripoli built upon this history when he began construction of the cathedral in 1123 to house the miraculous altar and receive the prayers of pilgrims. But the church you see today was largely rebuilt by the Templars after they withstood Saladin’s attack on Tortosa in 1188 when he destroyed most of the city, including much of the cathedral.

bu enter Our Lady of Tortosa from the west, where the cathedral presents a blank wall pierced only by a small door, above which is a triangular arrangement of windows with slightly pointed arches marking the transition from the Romanesque to the Gothic. The impression is more of a fortress than a church, and you notice the vestiges of corner towers that would have served a defensive purpose. Not that it was of any help to eighteen-year-old Raymond, heir to the thrones of Antioch and Tripoli, who in 1213 was stabbed to death outside this door by two Assassins.

When you step inside you discover a medieval French cathedral, the most graceful religious building of the Crusaders in Syria. It is bare of Christian ornament, and its empty volume swallows the whispers of occasional visitors. Undazzled by detail, your eyes follow the trajectories of massive arches which soar from acanthus capitals, and you are impressed with the sense that Our Lady of Tortosa was built by men who meant to stay in the Holy Land forever.

Safita (Chastel Blanc)

Safita is approached through ascending terraces of orchards and olive groves. The town of stone-built houses painted white and pink, now an attractive summer mountain resort, has grown up around the castle the Templars called Chastel Blanc, an outpost of Tortosa against Assassin territory to the northeast and contributing towards the defence of the Homs Gap. The encircling walls of the fortress are gone but their pattern remains evident in the layout of streets and houses; what remains is the massive hilltop keep, visible against the sky for miles in every direction.

As Chastel Blanc was a Templar fortress it should come as no surprise that on entering the keep you discover that the ground floor was built as a church. Its high and dimly lit vaulted nave is rounded off by an apse at the east end with a sacristy on each side. The church was never turned into a mosque nor deconsecrated, and it now serves the Greek Orthodox community which moved here in the nineteenth century after being squeezed out of the Hauran in southern Syria by the Druze. A staircase to the right of the doorway takes you up to the first floor, which served as an armoury and housed the garrison. A further staircase leads to the open terrace at the top of the tower, in part still crenellated, with panoramic views of the town and the surrounding landscape, ranging as far as Krak des Chevaliers along the horizon to the southeast and a glimpse of the Mediterranean to the west.

Krak des Chevaliers

Krak des Chevaliers, known in Arabic as Qalaat al-Husn, was a Hospitaller castle, not a Templar one, but it is mentioned here because it was part of that network of defences in the southern Jebel al-Sariya and along the Syrian coast that was the shared responsibility of the two military orders. Krak is also almost entirely undamaged and is a superb example of the concentric system, with one defensive wall set within the other, each one higher than the one before, which allowed for successive stages of retreat if need be, the defenders always having the advantage of dominating the attackers from a greater height. Situated on a mountain ridge within sight of Safita and overlooking the Homs Gap, the castle was built and expanded in phases by the Hospitallers from 1144 onwards. Its control of this strategic corridor and its fon/vard position, so close to Homs and Hama and nearly intersecting the interior route between Damascus and Aleppo, caused one Saracen chronicler to describe it as ‘a bone stuck in the very throat of the Muslims’. Yet despite repeated attempts against it, Krak held firm, and even Saladin, after his great victory over the Kingdom of Jerusalem at Hattin in 1187, took one look at its defences and marched away.

After climbing up a dark vaulted switchback ramp and passing through a portcullis you enter the court, a narrow and economical space faced on one side with an elegant loggia, where the light sifts through fine stone tracery reminiscent of Rheims. ‘Grace, wisdom and beauty you may enjoy, runs the Latin inscription cut into the stone, ‘but beware pride which alone can tarnish all the rest.’ Beyond the loggia is a great dining hall and behind that a huge nave-like chamber, at one time filled with kitchens and bakeries, granaries and storage jars, for siege was always expected and the major castles were stocked with provisions to last up to five years. Opposite the loggia is a barrel-vaulted twelfth-century chapel built in the Romanesque style and later converted to a mosque.

The best place to appreciate the magnificence of Krak’s position is from the Warden’s Tower where a spiral staircase rises to a graceful and voluminous chamber, the

Grand Master’s apartment. Below you, like some giant nautilus, swirl the concentric circles of the castle’s defences, the vast structure seeming to sail like a battleship high above rolling waves of orchards and wheat fields, a bountiful landscape as familiar as Provence.

Krak was not taken; it was given away. In the last years of Outremer, Krak and Safita and the other mountain castles became isolated, vulnerable and undermanned outposts facing the gathering storm of an overwhelming Mameluke enemy. Finally, after Krak had been in Christian hands for 161 years, and after a month’s siege, the Hospitaller knights accepted Sultan Baybars’ offer of safe passage and in 1271 rode to Tortosa of the Templars and the sea for the last time.