Montfort

Winner of the 2017 Verbruggen prize

Montfort Castle, located in the western Galilee, was the principal fortress of the Teutonic Order, one of the three great military orders of the Crusader period. It was built in the early thirteenth century and occupied and dismantled by the Mamluk army in 1271. It is among the finest examples of Crusader spur castles. This present volume includes discussions by 23 scholars, experts in their fields, in 28 chapters covering every aspect of past and recent scholarship on the history of the Teutonic Order and the castle, travellers’ descriptions, the architecture, the geographical setting, the material culture of the garrison, and detailed descriptions of the 1926 archaeological expedition to Montfort and the ongoing work of the Montfort Castle Project.

Winner of the 2017 Verbruggen prize, awarded annually by the De Re Militari society for the best book on medieval military history. The awarding committee stated that the volume offers ‘a through exploration of all the sources, archaeological and literary, relating to an important site. A model for future work.’

Contributors are Laura Aiello, Zohar Amar, Tamar Backner, Adrian J. Boas, Nativ Dudai, Rafael Frankel, Jonathan J. Gottlieb, Lydia Perelis Grossowicz, Timothy B. Husband, Nurith Kenaan-Kedar, Rabei G. Khamisy, Robert Kool, Dorit Korngreen, Rafael Lewis, Nili Liphschitz, Cecilia Luschi, Lisa Pilosi, Mary B. Shepard, Vardit Shotten-Hallel, Kristjan Toomaspoeg, Andrea Wähning, David Whitehouse, and Mark Wypyski.

Adrian J. Boas (Ph.D, Hebrew University of Jerusalem, 1995) is Professor of Crusader and Medieval Archaeology at the University of Haifa and is the president of the international Society for the Study of the Crusades and the Latin East. He has published extensively on Crusader history and archaeology including several books on Jerusalem, domestic architecture, and the Military Orders, and has excavated several urban and rural sites and castles.
Rabei G. Khamisy (PhD, University of Haifa, 2014) is a lecturer at the Department of Archaeology of the University of Haifa and a member of the Zinman Institute of Archaeology. He has excavated at a number of sites in Israel and is completing a book on the administration of settlement in the Galilee during the Crusader Period.

Winner of the 2017 Verbruggen prize, awarded annually by the De Re Militari society for the best book on medieval military history. The awarding committee stated that the volume offers ‘a through exploration of all the sources, archaeological and literary, relating to an important site. A model for future work.’

"The last couple of decades have been marked by a series of major advances in our understanding of the archaeological remains surviving from the crusader period, particularly those pertaining to the kingdom of Jerusalem... This present work on Montfort Castle expands upon this trend and is, in essence, a survey and summary of the achievements of the Montfort Castle Project (MCP), which was originally started in 2006 by scholars working at the University of Haifa. This project is still underway, so this book provides an interim report on progress so far... Overall, this work stands as testimony to the diligence, inter-disciplinary skill and methodological originality both of the project team as a whole and of Boas and Khamisy (who authored many of these articles) in particular. This is a very impressive piece of work and I feel sure that the team will continue to produce further thought-provoking results in the years to come."
Nicholas Morton, in Islam and Christian–Muslim Relations 28.2 (2017), 237-8.

"Boas' fundamental collection offers a lot of new material and fresh views and will stimulate upcoming discussions in the scientific community."
Thomas Wozniak, in H-Soz-Kult, https://www.hsozkult.de/publicationreview/id/rezbuecher-27936