Merle (castle)
| Merle Castle | ||
|---|---|---|
| Alternative name (s): | Tartura, Tell Dor | |
| Creation time : | between 1110 and 1180 | |
| Castle type : | Niederungsburg | |
| Conservation status: | ruin | |
| Place: | Dor | |
| Geographical location | 32 ° 36 '58.5 " N , 34 ° 54' 57.5" E | |
|
||
The Merle Castle , also Tantura (Arabic: الطنطوره) or Tell Dor (Arabic: تل دور) is the ruin of a crusader castle in Israel .
location
The castle is located on the southwest corner of an ancient settlement hill ( Tell ), the acropolis of the city of Dor , on the Carmel coast . It secured the coastal road between Haifa and Caesarea Maritima in what was then the Kingdom of Jerusalem .
history
In the 12th century, the baron of the nearby rule Caesarea had the castle built on the ruins of Dor and the natural harbor there used again. The castle was given to the de Merle family as a fief and named after them. The Merles were later the Ibelin in Jaffa loan fee . For the construction, all layers of the settlement were first removed except for the adjacent rocks. A trench five meters deep separated the fortress from the rest of the hill. It could perhaps be flooded with sea water. The fortress was built with stones from the ruins of the Hellenistic and Roman Dor. Coins from Amalrich I (1163–1174) and Johann von Brienne (1210–1225) were found in the robbery .
The castle had become the property of the Knights Templar until 1187 , when the castle was conquered by Sultan Saladin after the Battle of Hattin in 1187 . The Templars conquered the castle shortly afterwards, at the latest as part of the Third Crusade . In the fall of 1191 Richard the Lionheart stopped here with the crusade army while he was waiting for the fleet from Acre .
The nearby fortress of Château Pèlerin , one of the last Templar castles in the Holy Land, had to be abandoned in 1291 and was then destroyed by the Mamluks . Merle probably shared this fate a few years earlier. Later there was an Ottoman watchtower here.
In 1898 Kaiser Wilhelm visited the ruins of the Crusader Castle.
literature
- Ephraim Stern: Dor: ruler of the seas, nineteen years of excavations at the Israelite-Phoenician harbor town on the Carmel coast . Israel Exploration Society. Jerusalem 2000.
- Jerome Murphy-O'Connor: The Holy Land . Oxford Archaeological Guide. Oxford University Press, 1998, pp. 232-236.
Web links
- maxime.goepp.free.fr (French)