Montfort Castle

A spur, in the topographic sense, is a narrow ridge projecting from a larger hill, and Montfort is a spur castle. The ground falls away on three sides into the gorge of Nahal Kziv, and burgenwelt.org puts the ruin at 271 metres above sea level. The only approach that is not a climb is from the east, where the spur joins the hillside.

That is where the defences are. Two ditches were cut straight through the rock of the spur, and behind them stands a D-shaped tower-keep, the first part of the castle to be built and the part covering the highest and most exposed ground. Burgenwelt gives the tower as 25 by 21 metres and records ashlar blocks in the masonry measuring 150 by 90 by 90 centimetres.

Everything else is strung out west of the keep along the crest, because the crest is all there is. An elongated two-storey building, the main domestic range, runs from the keep towards a three-storey administrative block at the lower western end, and a small vaulted structure, now badly ruined, closes the western tip. The way in was at that far end, through a three-storey gate tower built as a half tower.

The outer ward lies about 50 metres down the northern slope, marked by a wall that curves up the western slope and stops south-west of the castle. By the end of the 2016 season the excavators had found no trace of it continuing south of the castle, and the outer works may never have been finished. Adrian Boas puts the speed of the castle's fall in 1271 down to that and to the weakness of the position.

• Two dry ditches cut through the rock at the eastern end
• The D-shaped tower-keep, 25 by 21 metres, built first
• The elongated two-storey domestic range along the crest
• The three-storey administrative block, with two tall vaulted halls still standing at ground level
• The half-tower gate at the western end, three storeys and well preserved
• The outer ward and its wall, about 50 metres down the northern slope

The estate was farmland long before it was a castle. The French de Milly family took it soon after the First Crusade, and it passed to Muslim hands with Jerusalem after Saladin won at Hattin in 1187. Neither side thought it worth much: a farm above a stream well inland, near no border and no main road. What changed its value was the loss of Jerusalem. After the Third Crusade the capital moved to Acre, and this spur was suddenly about eight miles from the seat of government.

The Teutonic Order bought the land in 1220 and started renovating the farm buildings. The motive was internal politics, not strategy: the order had been founded in Acre in the late twelfth century and was under pressure there from the Templars and the Hospitallers, who wanted to absorb it. Boas told Haaretz that the purpose of building the castle seems to have been to move some of the order's administration, such as the archives and perhaps the treasury, from Acre to a more isolated location.

Turning a farm into a castle took outside money. Grand Master Hermann von Salza applied to Pope Gregory IX and got it, in contributions gathered from pilgrims and donors in Europe. Burgenwelt's history adds two specifics: an annual grant of 100 bezants settled on the works by Bohemond of Antioch from 1228, and a ten-year indulgence from Gregory in 1230 remitting a seventh of church penance to anyone who gave.

When the building was finished is not agreed. Wikipedia's infobox gives 1228 to 1240 with further work in the 1260s; burgenwelt dates the start to 1229, the year von Salza first mentions the works in writing, and calls the castle likely complete by 1240; KKL-JNF's page for Goren Park, where the walk starts, says 1226. For all that expense the Grand Master seems hardly ever to have used the place. Boas told Haaretz he was probably very rarely in residence, perhaps once or twice, and that there is very little on record.

In 1266 an army under two of Baibars' emirs besieged Montfort. The defenders held and the Mamluk force eventually withdrew. That siege was known only from medieval texts until 2019, when the excavation reported the first physical evidence of it: a layer of destruction debris attributed to the 1266 campaign.

The second attempt was different. By 1271 most of the Crusader strongholds had already fallen, and Baibars came himself, with several military engineering units. On Rabei Khamisy's reading of the Mamluk sources, published in Boas's 2017 volume on the castle, the rabad or faubourg fell after about three days, the bashura or outer bailey the day after that, and the German defenders still holding out in the keep surrendered on the fifteenth day.

Burgenwelt tells it differently: a siege of seven days ending in capitulation on 12 June 1271, after the collapse of the western wall. The two accounts agree on the year and the outcome and not on the length or the mechanism, and neither addresses the other. The settlement is not in dispute. Terms had been negotiated in advance, the garrison left with all its belongings and walked back to Acre, and the Mamluks then demolished the castle over twelve days.

Why it fell so fast is an open question with named positions on both sides. Boas points to the weakness of the position and the unfinished outer works. Nicholas Morton of Nottingham Trent University adds Baibars' pillaging of the order's estates and the morale of a garrison that had watched three more military order castles fall the same year.

One warning about dates on the ground: KKL-JNF's page for Goren Park says Baybars destroyed the castle in 1231, forty years before the siege every other source describes. The operator is reliable on the trail and not on the chronology.

This is the rare Crusader site in Israel where the question of what is original and what is reconstruction has a short answer: nothing has been put back. The castle has lain in ruins since 1271, in the Montfort Castle Project's own phrase, and the standing masonry is what survived twelve days of deliberate demolition and centuries of collapse on top of it.

It became visible because of an unusual expedition. Horatio Kitchener surveyed the ruin in 1877 for the British Survey of Western Palestine. Then in 1926 Bashford Dean, curator of Arms and Armour at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York, organised a dig here with William L. Calver in charge on site; the project's own account says the aim was to recover a suit of thirteenth-century armour. It removed 4,500 tons of debris and exposed almost the whole central part of the castle.

Modern work began with survey rather than spade. Adrian Boas ran two seasons in 2006 and 2007 for the Zinman Institute of Archaeology at the University of Haifa, funded by the Israel Science Foundation, recording the upper ward, the lower fortifications, the mill in Nahal Kziv and the masons' marks, with aerial photogrammetry, 3-D laser scanning and a conservation assessment. Excavation followed in August 2011 under licence G-72/2011 and has run most summers since.

The 2011 season settled the shape of the western block: three storeys, with a basement of two barrel vaults, the Great Hall above it carrying an octagonal pier and pilasters, and what Boas reads as the castellan's quarters above that. The dig produced limestone vault ribs in two sizes bearing masons' marks, a monolith pier base, painted plaster and stained glass. Two tall vaulted halls still stand at ground level.

The walls carry the sieges as well as the building. A dividing wall in the hall was dated to repairs made before 1271, after damage caused either by the earthquake of 1259 or by the first siege in 1266, and the excavators could not choose between the two. On the north wall of the central wing, the 2012 and 2013 seasons exposed evidence of undermining, apparently Mamluk work during the siege of 1271.

The plan of Montfort is interesting; the rubbish is more so. What the excavations have turned up, reported season by season in Haaretz by Philippe Bohstrom, is a brotherhood living better than the word monastic suggests.

In January 2017 the dig published a Nine Men's Morris board with its playing pieces, a large quantity of glass vessels, and the bones of European pigs, turtles, deer, sheep and cattle. Alongside those came gilded furnishings, stained glass windows, frescoed walls and sculptural decoration, and from the working end of the castle chain mail and scale armour fragments, thirteenth-century coins, belt buckles and tunic buttons, iron forge slag, and a bone workshop turning out buttons and crossbow nuts.

In November 2018 came the largest single discovery of the modern project: a previously unknown Gothic hall beneath the castle, decorated with grisaille stained glass, which Boas suggested may have been where the order's Grand Chapter met. A year later the destruction debris from 1266 gave those luxuries a date to sit before. The stables in the outer ward, dug in 2014 and 2015, produced flagged flooring, roof beams on double arches, horseshoes, mangers and coins.

There is no road to Montfort and no car park at the castle. The usual approach starts at Goren Park, on the far, northern side of the canyon, off Route 899 between kilometre markers 11 and 12. KKL-JNF established the park in 1963 over some 2,000 dunams and calls it the first large park in the country made up entirely of native Israeli common oak woodland.

From the Scenic Lookout recreation area, a disabled-accessible path runs to the observation point over the castle. That view across the gorge is the photograph everyone has seen of Montfort, and for a good share of visitors it is the entire visit, which is a reasonable choice honestly made. The castle is on the other side of the canyon.

To reach it, take the red-marked footpath from the lookout. It drops into Nahal Kziv, crosses the stream and then climbs a steep dirt path straight up to the fortress; KKL calls the climb taxing, and the return is the same way. Near the riverbed are a water-driven flour mill, which KKL dates to the twelfth century, and a Crusader dam. Denys Pringle's gazetteer records the mill's upper floor being converted into a guesthouse in the thirteenth century.

The stream is what makes the walk pleasant rather than merely steep. Nahal Kziv runs 39 kilometres and is classed as perennial, although Wikipedia's account notes that pumping by Mekorot at Ein Ziv leaves the reach between Ein Ziv and Ein Tamir effectively intermittent, with dependable year-round flow resuming below Ein Tamir.

It is also where Israel put its Persian fallow deer back into the wild. Breeding at the Carmel Hai-Bar, from three animals brought from Germany in 1976 and four from Iran in 1978, had produced around 150 deer by the mid-1990s. Releases into Nahal Kziv began in 1996, and by early 2002 some 120 had gone out and 40 fawns had been born in the field.

• Scenic trail: about 8 km among the cliffs of Nahal Kziv
• Path across the park: 1.5 km, red-marked, north to south, with 1.4 km back on the main scenic route
• Sinkhole Path: a 500 m circular route through karst hollows
• Montfort footpath: red-marked, down into the gorge, across the stream and steeply up
• Accessible path: from the recreation area to the Montfort observation point