Sidon on the Lebanese coast: a Fatimid garrison port taken by Baldwin I of Jerusalem and Sigurd of Norway in 1110, seat of the crusader lordship of the Grenier family, fortified with its Sea Castle in 1227–1228, and lost by the Templars to the Mamluks in July 1291.
Sidon stands on a low promontory on the southern Lebanese coast, about 40 kilometres from both Beirut and Tyre, with a rocky island sheltering its northern harbour. The crusaders called it Sagette, Arabic writers Sayda. A Fatimid garrison port, it became in 1110 the seat of one of the four great baronies of the Kingdom of Jerusalem.
That crusader period left the two castles that still frame the old town, one on the island and one on the ancient tell, before the last Templar garrison gave Sidon up to the Mamluks in July 1291.
A leading Phoenician city, famous for glass and purple dye, Sidon became a Roman colony and then a Byzantine bishopric under the metropolitan of Tyre. After the earthquake of 551 wrecked Berytus, the modern Beirut, its law school took refuge in Sidon, but the town was small when the Arabs came.
Yazid ibn Abi Sufyan and his brother Mu'awiya took Sidon, Beirut and Byblos after the fall of Damascus, in 636 or 637 (the Arabic histories, written two centuries later, differ). Under the Umayyads and Abbasids it was a small fortified port of the province of Damascus.
The Fatimid caliphs of Cairo, who fought the Seljuk rulers of Damascus for the coast, recovered Sidon for the last time in 1088 and strengthened it in 1098. The Persian traveller Nasir-i Khusraw, passing through in 1047, found a stone wall with three gates, a Friday mosque laid with patterned mats, and a market so richly decorated that he thought the town was expecting the sultan, until he was told it always looked like that.
In 1108, the usual dating, Baldwin I of Jerusalem attacked Sidon with ships from Italian cities, but an Egyptian fleet beat the Italians outside the harbour, Turkish horsemen rode from Damascus to relieve the town, and he withdrew.
In 1110 King Sigurd of Norway reached Acre with, by the saga's count, sixty ships. From about 19 October Baldwin's army invested Sidon by land while the Norwegians closed the sea and a Venetian fleet kept off the Fatimid squadron at Tyre. The siege of Sidon lasted 47 days, and the town surrendered on terms between 3 and 5 December 1110, the sources differing by two days. By Arabic accounts the governor, garrison and many townspeople left for Damascus, and those who stayed were soon made to pay 20,000 dinars.
Baldwin gave Sidon to Eustace Grenier, a Flemish knight who already held Caesarea. With Beaufort, the inland castle King Fulk took in 1139 and granted to its lords, it ranked among the kingdom's four great baronies. Eustace was regent during the captivity of Baldwin II of Jerusalem in 1123 and died that June.
Eustace's grandson Reginald, lord by 1171, spoke Arabic, married Agnes of Courtenay, mother of Baldwin IV, and in 1174 backed Raymond III of Tripoli for the regency. He escaped from Hattin with the rearguard in July 1187, and Saladin entered Sidon without a fight later that summer and pulled down its defences.
Reginald held out at Beaufort. In 1189 he offered Saladin the castle, and even his own conversion to Islam, and used the months of grace to repair and stock it; when the ruse was exposed he was imprisoned, and the garrison surrendered on 22 April 1190 in exchange for his release.
The crusade sent by the emperor Henry VI occupied the ruined town in the autumn of 1197. King Aimery of Lusignan restored it to Reginald under a truce of 1198 with al-Adil which, by the Arabic accounts, divided Sidon between the Franks and the Ayyubids.