Kerak — Crusader Castle on the Mountain

Riding the King's Highway south from Madaba, you see it long before you arrive: a dark stone crown on a mountain ridge 900 meters above the Dead Sea valley. Kerak Castle is one of the largest and best-preserved Crusader fortresses in the Middle East, a vast ship of stone 220 meters long whose galleries, stables and dungeons burrow seven levels deep into the ridge it commands.

The Crusaders of the Kingdom of Jerusalem built it from 1142 as the capital of Oultrejourdain, taxing the caravans that passed between Damascus and Mecca. Under its most infamous lord, Raynald of Châtillon, those attacks on Muslim caravans provoked Saladin himself; after the Crusader catastrophe at Hattin in 1187, Saladin's armies besieged Kerak for months until it fell in 1188. The Mamluks under Baybars later enlarged it, and their finely drafted masonry is easy to spot beside the rougher Crusader stone. Walking the dim vaulted galleries with a guide — kitchens, barracks, a chapel, cisterns — is as close to the world of the Crusades as the Middle East offers.

The town of Kerak around the castle remains a lively provincial capital with a historically mixed Christian and Muslim population, famous for its hospitality and for jameed — the dried yogurt at the heart of mansaf, Jordan's national dish, which was born in these highlands. Kerak breaks the journey perfectly between Amman or the Dead Sea and Petra.

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