Muslim Fortresses in the Levant: Between Crusaders and Mongols (91 page)

The sultan is the only personage mentioned y name in the inscription. His soldiers are described as
mujāhidūn
but none are further identified. The inscription communicates contemporary political propaganda to the local population that has just been occupied by a new regime. Its main intention is to reassure the people that the conquest was a righteous act. It emphasizes the legitimacy given to the sultan by God himself, who had ordered the campaign and the restoration of the fortress. Furthermore, it promises that those who participated in the siege will be rewarded. An inscription of this type was another sign of sovereignty, rather like the minting of a new coin.
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An important fact revealed here is that the construction project at Safad was partly financed by the sultan’s own treasury. This was not always the case; funds for restoration and the garrison’s upkeep were occasionally collected from the nearby region, as at Marqab.
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Karak’s garrison was paid by the sultan.
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The rich agricultural land around
, which belonged to Bīlīk, probably provided part of the resources for the building of the fortress.

Qāqūn

The fortress of Qāqūn is situated in the eastern perimeters of the Sharon, 1 km north of the modern settlement of Gan Yoshiyya. Although it was the only site restored by Baybars in the region of the Sharon, none of the Mamluk sources provide a detailed architectural description of its fortifications. Ibn
says it became a strong fortress, but his emphasis is on the town’s public buildings, the reservoir, the newly-built mosque and the khan.
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The town of Qāqūn, which became a
wilāya
(an administrative center of a district) in the reign of
b. Qalāwūn,
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was by then a well-established stage in the
barīd
between Tīra and
(a section of the route that ran from al-Gaza to Jenin and Damascus), and in addition it maintained a dovecote.
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Qalqashandī (d. 821/1418) describes Qāqūn as a pleasant town with a bath-house, and a mosque. It had no surrounding walls, but it had a fine (
) fortress.
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Earlier Frankish sources are of little help. The fortress Caco (Qāqūn) is briefly mentioned by Fulcher of Chartres and William of Tyre in 1123, but no description of the site is given.
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The village passed into the hands of the lord of Caesarea in the last quarter of the twelfth century. It was taken by Baybars in 1265 together with Caesarea and Arsuf.

Qāqūn is mentioned again during Baybars’s reign in the Mamluk chronicles,
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and in the
Gestes des Chiprois
, which recounts King Hugh of Cyprus and Jerusalem and Prince Edward of England’s attempt to conquer the site in 1271. Whereas the Muslim accounts refer only to the battle, the Templar of Tyre, a contemporary Frankish source adds a short descriptive phrase:

… and they besieged some Saracens within a tower at Qaqun. It was very strong, surrounded with ditches filled with water. They came near to taking it, but our men were afraid to linger too long while the alarm went out across the land, since the Saracens would then assemble from all parts. So our men departed and retuned to Acre with all their loot, safe and sound.
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This is the longest description e have of the fortifications of Qaqun.

The reason for the re-establishment of the fortress by Baybars is provided by two sources, one Muslim, the other Frankish. Although they give very different perspectives they seem complementary. According to Ibn al-Furāt, Baybars ordered the restoration of the fortress since he saw it as his responsibility to defend the local population: “his subjects living in those parts needed a place of protection so he decreed that the castle of Qāqūn [Caco] should be restored. This was done and it became a strong place.”
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Burchard of Mount Sion (who visited the area between 1271 and 1285) suggests that the Mamluks “placed a garrison of soldiers here to watch the Pilgrims’ Castle.”
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Ayalon follows Burchard’s suggestion (although he does not mention this source in his discussion). According to Ayalon, because the Mamluks had a relatively poor navy, they established small garrisons in fortified towers as a means of guarding the coast, after they demolished the fortifications of the harbor towns.
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Although Qāqūn is considerably smaller than
and al-Bīra, it belongs to the same category of advance warning and protection as the fortresses established by the Mamluks along the Euphrates frontier. Baybars combined the two strategies; he settled Türkmen along the coast,
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and garrisoned Qāqūn in order to give the new population a fortified center. The garrison was connected to the capital in Caio and to Damascus via the
barīd
. A similar strategy was adopted six hundred years earlier, by the Umayyad governor of Syria,
b. Abī Sufyān (r. 661–80). After the conquest of the coastal plains,
brought soldiers from the contingents of the
(of Indian origin) and the al-Sayābija (of Persian origin) to settle in the region and help strengthen the coast in case a Byzantine fleet tried to re-conquer the region.
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