Kerak, east of the Dead Sea: the castle Pagan the Butler began about 1142 as the seat of the crusader lordship of Oultrejordain, Reynald of Châtillon's base, besieged by Saladin in 1183 and 1184 and surrendered in 1188, then an Ayyubid treasury and a Mamluk fortress where deposed sultans, Baraka Khan among them, were kept.
Kerak stands at the southern tip of a plateau east of the Dead Sea, ringed by deep valleys and cut off from its town by a rock-cut ditch. The Franks called it Crac, or Crac des Moabites, and Arabic writers al-Karak. From about 1142 it was the seat of the lords of Oultrejordain, whose barony straddled the caravan road between Damascus and Egypt.
It held out against Saladin in 1183 and 1184 and fell to his troops only after Hattin had removed any hope of relief. Under the Ayyubids and Mamluks it became a treasury, a princely seat and a place to keep inconvenient rulers: Baraka Khan died there in exile, and deposed sultans used it to wait out their rivals until 1390.
The plateau lay in Iron Age Moab, and the town is traditionally identified with Kir-hareseth, the Moabite stronghold of the Books of Kings; its later name comes from the Aramaic karka, 'town'. After the Roman annexation of the Nabataean kingdom in 106 it belonged to the province of Arabia. The sixth-century Madaba mosaic map shows it as Charachmoba, a walled town on a height, and its bishop Demetrius attended a council at Jerusalem in 536.
Muslim armies first met Byzantine frontier troops in 629 at Mu'tah, which Abu al-Fida placed a day's march from Kerak, and the tomb of Ja'far ibn Abi Talib there was still visited in his time. Under the caliphs the town is barely recorded, but it kept many Christians: Syriac Christian farmers and shepherds sheltered in the town when Saladin arrived in 1183.
Baldwin I of Jerusalem built Montreal, far to the south, in 1115 or 1116 to watch the caravan road. By 1126 the barony around it belonged to Pagan the Butler, named as butler to Baldwin II of Jerusalem in 1120; Hans Eberhard Mayer argued that the butler and the lord of Montreal were different men, a view other historians have not followed.
About 1142, late in King Fulk's reign, Pagan moved his seat north to the plateau above the Wadi al-Karak, nearer the Dead Sea and Jerusalem, and began the castle that Latin writers also called Petra Deserti. One modern explanation links the move to a raid from Syria across the Jordan that Montreal had failed to stop. Pagan died in the late 1140s and his nephew Maurice succeeded him.
Oultrejordain had no fixed eastern frontier: it ran from the Dead Sea to the Gulf of Aqaba and faded into the desert along the pilgrim road. The thirteenth-century jurist John of Ibelin counted it among the four great baronies of the kingdom. Its wealth lay in the wheat, olives and pomegranates of the plateau, salt from the Dead Sea and tolls on the caravans.
On 31 July 1161 Philip of Milly gave his lordship of Nablus to Baldwin III of Jerusalem in exchange for Oultrejordain, though the king kept the caravan and Bedouin tolls. Philip strengthened Kerak with a ditch and towers, and in 1165 or 1166 he joined the Knights Templar, handing part of the lordship to the order, which he led as grand master from 1169 to 1171.
The barony then passed through his daughters. Stephanie of Milly lost her first husband, Humphrey III of Toron, about 1173, and her second, Miles of Plancy, was murdered in 1174. In 1176 or 1177 Baldwin IV of Jerusalem gave her in marriage to Reynald of Châtillon, lately ransomed after about fifteen years as a prisoner in Aleppo.
A charter of November 1177 is the first to style Reynald lord of Hebron and Montreal, and he owed the crown sixty knights. From Kerak he sat across the road joining the two halves of Saladin's empire. The chronicler Ernoul records two attacks on caravans in time of truce, and late in 1181 or early in 1182 Reynald rode as far as Tabuk on the road to Mecca.
In the winter of 1182–1183 he had at least five ships built in Oultrejordain and carried by camel across the Negev to the Gulf of Aqaba. The Franks took Ayla and blockaded the Egyptian fort on Pharaoh's Island while the rest of the flotilla attacked ships carrying pilgrims and goods along the Arabian coast, within reach of Mecca and Medina.
Saladin's brother al-Adil, governor of Egypt, launched a fleet on the Red Sea that relieved the island and trapped the raiders near al-Hawra. Reynald had already gone home. Saladin ordered the captives killed in cities across his lands, by one Arabic account two of them at Mina during the pilgrimage, and the Andalusian traveller Ibn Jubayr, landing at Alexandria in March 1183, saw Frankish prisoners brought in on camels.
In the autumn of 1183 Kerak was crowded for the wedding of Reynald's stepson, Humphrey IV of Toron, to Isabella I of Jerusalem, Baldwin IV's eleven-year-old half-sister, who had lived at Kerak since their betrothal in 1180. Saladin left Damascus on 22 October and closed on Kerak in November; al-Adil joined him with the Egyptian army on 22 November. The defenders abandoned the town the next day, and by Ernoul's account Reynald reached the castle only because one of his men held the bridge over the ditch.
William of Tyre, then chancellor of the kingdom, says six trebuchets in the town battered the north front and two more stood on a ridge to the south; Ibn al-Athir counts seven. The stones could not break the walls. Ernoul, who probably had the story from the bride's mother, Queen Maria, says Stephanie sent dishes from the feast out to Saladin, and he asked which tower the couple slept in and had his engineers spare it.
The news forced a decision in Jerusalem. Baldwin IV dismissed Guy of Lusignan as regent, had his nephew crowned co-king as Baldwin V on 20 November, and, blind and carried in a litter, went with the army to the Dead Sea before handing command to Raymond III of Tripoli. Saladin, who had sent his Egyptian troops home, lifted the siege on 3 December, and the royal army entered Kerak the next day.
Saladin returned in the summer of 1184 and tried to fill the northern ditch so that his engines could reach the wall, but withdrew after about four weeks as the royal army approached. In 1187 Reynald was captured at Hattin and killed by Saladin himself. Stephanie offered Kerak and Montreal for the release of her son Humphrey, but the garrisons refused her order. Blockaded since the spring of 1187, Kerak surrendered on terms, by the usual dating in November 1188, and Montreal early in 1189.