T. E. Lawrence’s Undergraduate Dissertation – Page 162

been once comparatively lofty, and it has a very great talus. Its numerous dead angles, undefended, are however the reverse of attractive. Tortosa was another great fief of the Templars: they seem to have occupied it in 1150, or the year after, when the great square tower, described in the siege of the place after Hattin, was already standing. For the rest, Tortosa is defended by semi-circular ditches and slight curtain towers, apparently of the Byzantine age, for it was a fortress when the Latins came, and the present arrangement of ditches is almost the only possible one. The walls are little credit to their designer. It is more pleasant to turn to the buildings of the knights of the Hospital, finding the beginnings of their work in parts of their castle of Banias, and tracing it down through Crac and Markab. From the beginning it is a style absolutely different from the pseudo-Byzantine in fashion in Syria when it was introduced, and it left no legacy behind it in the Arab fortifications of a later date, except conceivably in the box machicoulis so common in Arab work of the late thirteenth century. Banias, which "the earliest Hospitaller castle that can be certainly dated, was destroyed by El Mu'azzam in 1213, after the Hospitallers had lost it finally in 1164. It was a much-disputed place, continually besieged by one party or other, on account of its very formidable position"over"the great