A Castle in Cyprus attributable to the Hospital?*

The castle in question is at Paphos, once capital of Cyprus and later a regular port of call on the route to the Holy Land. In the twelfth century it was a Byzantine outpost, guarded by a detachment of Varangians, whose establishment surrendered to Richard the Lionheart's emissaries in 1191. It was known to them as the Castellum Baffes, but has not survived. The remains of a second castle at Paphos were recognized by the Abbé Mariti in the mid-eighteenth century on a low hill near the harbour; they were later ploughed over and likewise forgotten. A likely site for Mariti's castle, known from its scatter of broken columns as Saranda Kolones, used to be assigned to a temple of Aphrodite, ¹ but in 1957 I seized an opportunity to vindicate the learned Italian and, in excavations spread over the next thirty years, substantial remains of a compact crusader castle of concentric plan were uncovered (see Figure 5.1). ²