Château Pèlerin

Château Pèlerin (Old French: Chastel Pelerin; Latin: Castrum Perigrinorum, lit. 1 mi) south of Haifa. Château Pèlerin is located inside the Atlit naval base. The Knights Templar began building the fortress in 1218 during the Fifth Crusade. One of the major Crusader fortresses, it could support up to 4,000 troops in siege conditions. It became for a short time the headquarters of the Crusaders; according to Claude Reignier Conder its architecture "must have made ‘Athlit perhaps the finest town of the period in the country".

It has been described as the "crowning example of Crusader military architecture", although T. E. Lawrence found it lacking in elegance and imagination in terms of military architecture, settling on massiveness instead. In early August 1291, three months after the Siege of Acre, the forces of Al-Ashraf Khalil conquered Atlit, which was at that point the last remaining Crusader outpost in Syria, thus permanently ending Crusader presence in...