ABSTRACT
In the summer of 1271 Montfort Castle was besieged, occupied and dismantled by the Mamluk army under Sultan Baybars. Over the following seven centuries the ruins have occasionally been visited and described by travellers, but it is only since the middle of the nineteenth century that the former Teutonic stronghold in the Western Galilee has been subjected to serious examination. In the nineteenth century Montfort was described by scholars and travellers from various nations, among others the British Rev. Henry Baker Tristram, Frenchmen Ernest Renan, Victor Guérin and Emmanuel G. Rey, and the Dutch traveller Charles W.M. Van de Velde. 1 Tristram and Rey published the earliest known plans of the castle, that of Tristram accompanied by a remarkably inaccurate section, and Van de Velde produced a rather fine illustration of the castle and the building below it in Wadi al-Qurayn (Nahal Kziv) viewed from the north-west (Figure 8.1). In 1877 Horatio H. Kitchener visited Montfort and subsequently published, together with a detailed description of the ruins, a largely accurate plan. 2 Kitchener took the earliest known photograph of the castle, viewed from the south-west. In the early twentieth century Montfort was examined by Ernest William Gurney Masterman (1907) 3 and underwent its first archaeological excavations when, in 1926, an expedition was organised by Bashford Dean, curator of the Arms and Armor Department of the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York. In 1955 a survey of Montfort was carried out by the Israel National Park Authority in preparation for large-scale restorations. 4 These, however, were never undertaken. In the 1980s a new survey of the castle was part of the Israel Antiquities Authority Survey of the Western Galilee, in 1994 a small excavation took place in the western Great Hall prior to conservation work and architect Mike Turner, working on behalf of the National Parks Authority prepared plans for development of the site and some conservation and restoration work was carried out. 5 In 1982 the British School of Archaeology in Jerusalem (BSAJ) surveyed the building below the castle in Nahal Kziv. 6 In 2006 a new research project commenced survey work at the castle on behalf of the University of Haifa, 7 and in the summer of 2011 the first season of excavations of the Montfort Castle Project took place in the Great Hall at the western end of the castle, one of the few parts of the main building not entirely excavated by the American expedition. 8 Cornelius Van de Velde's illustration of the castle, 1851 https://s3-euw1-ap-pe-df-pch-content-public-p.s3.eu-west-1.amazonaws.com/9781315567495/4d07424a-b29d-4ed6-8ffd-a9693d7ef2d5/content/fig8_1_B.jpg" xmlns:xlink="https://www.w3.org/1999/xlink"/>
