T. E. Lawrence’s Undergraduate Dissertation – Page 142

are exceedingly delicate. One thing is quite certain: the keep form of castle in Syria is the earliest. To determine what followed these castles in the favour of the Latins is a more complicated question. Of course there were multitudes of castles built between 1150 and 1200, but, for one thing, these buildings are hard to get at and, for another, when reached they have invariably been rebuilt. The only exception to the rule is the little hold of the Chastel- let or Castle Jacob (Bat el Ahsar ... or Kaidat Gisr Benat Yakub ...) two miles down the river Jordan below Lake Hûleh. It was begun, finished, taken, and destroyed in 1178 - 79, but unfortunately Saladin's troops razed it so completely that it is almost uninteresting. What does remain fairly visible is mainly a towerless curtain-wall of no great strength. Saladin probably found it much the same, since it was built in five months, and mined in five days. There was never more than a single line of wall. The group of castles around Tiberias, and as far to the north as Beaufort are all known to have been built in the latter half of the twelfth century. They are Safad, built in 1140 rebuilt c. 1180, and again c. 1266, a Templar castle; Hunin destroyed in 1167 and 1187 and rebuilt by Baibers, with Safed, in 1267; Toron (Tibnin ...) built before 1105 in the first instance, and again after 1150, after 1218, and at some date in the sixteenth or seventeenth centuries; Belvoir