Knights’ Castles Still Dot Mideast : Citadels: 12th-Century fortresses are where Crusaders battled Islamic armies. Some disappeared centuries ago with the advent of artillery and gunpowder. Others fell victim to modern warfare.

A thick noonday fog covers Mt. Khalil. The massive walls and silent towers of the Krak des Chevaliers rise out of it like a ghost ship adrift.

It has been 720 years since the last homesick Crusader rode from the gates of this invincible fortress. Long gone, too, are the sultans and their victorious Muslim armies.

Today, in the fields below the deserted Krak, Syrian peasant women in billowing pantaloons till their crops.

Almost 500 miles to the west in Egypt, the view from the ramparts of Saladin’s Citadel is a panorama of the pollution and bedlam of bustling modern-day Cairo. Reportedly built with the sweat of Crusader prisoners and finished in 1183, the Citadel was a masterpiece in its day, a state-of-the-art castle of the 12th Century.

Unlike the Krak des Chevaliers, a castle frozen in time, Cairo’s Citadel suffers the aches and pains of old age.

“If only the Citadel had been put on ice about 1492, how splendid it would be today,” said Islamic art historian William Lyster. “But it wasn’t, so what we see today only hints at its former glory.”

Lyster has just published “The Citadel of Cairo,” the first in-depth look at the fortress so long at the heart of Cairo history.

Last spring, surrounded by fog and the throbbing drums and songs of young Syrian merrymakers, Lyster led a group of Cairo-based Americans through the Krak des Chevaliers. It was his first encounter with the Syrian castle that Lawrence of Arabia called the best in the world.

“It’s more wonderful than I could ever imagine,” Lyster says.

The Krak des Chevaliers--the Castle of the Knights--and Saladin’s Citadel are among the most famous survivors of hundreds of fortresses running up, down and around the mountainsides, lost in the deserts and dominating the cities of the Middle East.

The men who built them and fought over them became legends in their own time: Saladin, Richard the Lion-Hearted, Raymond de Saint-Gilles.

Some castles disappeared centuries ago, with the advent of artillery and gunpowder. Others survived only to fall victim to the mayhem of modern warfare.

But there is something enduring about castles, even if time has left them militarily obsolete.

“You love castles the way you love pirates,” Lyster said. “They remind us of childhood, stories of knights and courtly love. The tales of Sir Walter Scott.”

Fortifications have played a vital role in military operations since the Iron Age. In biblical times, the Assyrians, feisty ancestors of the Iraqis, were skilled at walling cities and battering down enemy fortifications.

Romans mastered the techniques. Flavius Silva successfully overcame the Jewish stronghold at Masada by building a siege wall with 12 towers.

A few centuries later, in the Dark Ages, the architects of Constantinople perfected all that had come before. The city had a moat 60 feet wide and 20 feet deep, backed by a row of battlements and two more walls, each studded with 96 towers.

The elements of moats, towers and walls became standard for castle-builders. In the Middle Ages, Crusaders going and coming in the Middle East liked what they saw and took home the idea of having a castle of one’s own.

“Richard the Lion-Hearted was so impressed with Middle East citadels he returned to France to build Chateau Gaillard, one of the most powerful castles ever constructed,” Lyster says.

Lyster says it’s difficult to say a particular fortress belonged to Muslims or Crusaders because they changed hands so often.

“As a gross generalization, I can say that the Muslims preferred to build castles in cities. The Crusaders built country castles.

“Muslims at the time were used to city life, to urban comforts such as bathhouses. European knights generally came from agricultural roots. They were suspicious of neighbors. And the average Middle Ages knight took a bath once in his lifetime, if then.”

The Krak des Chevaliers is an example of a basic Muslim fortress turned into a Crusader castle. Captured by the Hospitalers in 1144, the fortress became a masterpiece of military might.

Towering 2,300 feet above sea level, the castle was enlarged to hold 2,000 to 3,000 knights, with storehouses to withstand years of siege.

Lyster says the Krak was so imposing that the great Islamic warrior Saladin took one look at it and said, “No way.” Off he went with his army.

If time has been kind to the Krak, not so Syria’s other two great medieval castles, citadels in Damascus and Aleppo. Both were in the center of town, Lyster says, and like Cairo’s Citadel they have suffered from centuries of urban life.

The Citadel in Cairo has changed so much that it is doubtful that Saladin would recognize it as his. At any rate, Lyster says, Saladin never saw the completed fortress. He forsook “backwater” Cairo for “sophisticated” Damascus.

Still, some of the Citadel’s spirit survived until last century.

But then an Albanian commander, Mohammed Ali, not known for impeccable taste, “tore down the fortress’s harem palace and put in its place a gaudy mosque,” Lyster says. “So, today when we see the Citadel, we see his domes and minarets, not the original fortress.”

Despite their aura and intrigue, castles have their down side, Lyster notes.

“They were awful places,” he says. “No privacy. The smell of animals. Nobody would like to live in one.”