Al Marqab castle: Unveiling mysteries of the Hospitaller graveyard

AMMAN — Al Marqab was established in 1062 and the site was purchased by the Order of St John in 1187 from the Mazoir family. The knights immediately set to the organisational and architectural transformation of Al Marqab, which made the castle the most important administrative centre of the Hospitallers in Syria and one of the most extensive Crusader fortified sites by the beginning of the 13th century.

Next to the castle complex of the knights covering six hectares on the volcanic mountain plateau was an outer suburb which spread over an estimated 10 hectares of the western slopes of the castle mountain, noted a Hungarian Arabist, historian and archaeologist Balazs Major, who studied sites in Syria as a member of Syrian – Hungarian Archaeological Mission (SHAM).

Despite the regional turmoil, the mission was very active in the past decades.

"This complex is one of just a few centres of the military orders that possessed its own treasury and chancellery and also had a Haute Cour operating within its walls.

According to the description of the pilgrim Wilbrand von Oldenbourg in 1212, more than a thousand armed men were serving even in peacetime," Major said, adding that similar to other garrisons of castles of military orders, only a minority here belonged to the Hospitaller elite – the sergeants-at-arms – but due to its prominent position amongst the Hospitaller hierarchy there must have been a relatively high number of full members of the order serving in Al Marqab, especially after the fall of its famous sister castle, the Crac des Chevaliers in 1271.

Although scholars must expect a considerable number of dead from the garrison of the border castle of Al Marqab, no burial that can be connected to them has yet been discovered.

As the skeletons of females and children showed, the 13th-century cemetery of the outer suburb that was excavated by the SHAM in the summers of 2010 and 2011 was probably reserved primarily for the inhabitants of the civilian settlement.

"The most obvious place for the burial of Hospitaller personnel would be the monumental castle chapel, which is explicitly mentioned in the statutes of the chapter general of September 1263, in connection with the duties of the priors for the souls of the deceased," Major explained, adding that geophysical surveying conducted by the SHAM in 2008 did not find evidence of burials under the huge and mostly undisturbed pavement stones of the chapel.

The only area of the chapel that was intended to receive human remains was the pointed arch alcove in the northern wall of the chapel, which, judging from its prominent position and size must have been intended to hold a sarcophagus or a large reliquary, Major said, noting that since the entire area of the Hospitaller citadel was built upon or paved after 1187, the existence of a cemetery in the citadel area seemed very unlikely.

"For this reason, the unearthing of an almost intact medieval burial at the southern end of the vaulting labelled I.1.D, which borders the central courtyard of the citadel from the east, came quite as a surprise in the summer of 2011," Major explained, adding that previous excavations of the SHAM proved that the present fortress of the Hospitallers was constructed after levelling almost all of the former buildings found on the southern part of the mountain plateau.

Amongst the first buildings to be constructed by the order was the chapel that bordered the central courtyard on the south, and the dormitory attached to it from the north and bordering the courtyard on the east.

The former buildings of the Mazoir castle in the southeastern corner of the central courtyard were also demolished by the construction workers, who even cut part of the foundation wall of the chapel into an earlier wall running almost parallel to it.

Moreover, the barrel-vaulted hall labelled I.1.D was in all probability attached to the dormitory building over the eastern edge of the originally open courtyard at the very beginning of the 13th century, Major said, adding that it seems to have been destined for industrial activities of some kind from the very beginning.

"Considering this fact, the burial found inside I.1.D must have predated the construction of the vaulting. The male body in the grave was buried in a way very characteristic of the Latin population of the Crusader states. It was placed in a shallow, east-west oriented grave with its head pointing towards the west and its arms crossed above its abdomen. The grave itself was covered with 30–40 cm of earth and contained no archaeological objects buried with the person," Major elaborated.

As the chapel has no traces of burials, the southeast corner of the central courtyard that was not yet built upon and that was next to the northern entrance of the chapel, as close as possible to the holy area, would have made an ideal place for a cemetery for the knights.

The well-built adult, possibly in his thirties, was buried in this prestigious area without any grave goods, which might point to the possibility that he belonged to the inner ring of the Hospitaller elite serving in Al Marqab, Major speculated.

"The statutes were very strict in prohibiting the possession of any personal belongings for the members of the order and this is reflected in the decrees concerning the burials: '…if any of the brethren have made a disposition of private property at his death, and whilst still living shall not reveal it to his Master, let no divine office be celebrated for him, but let him be buried as one excommunicated; and if whilst still living he should have private property and he shall have concealed it from his Master, and afterwards it shall be found upon him, let that money be tied around his neck, and let him be led naked through the Hospital of Jerusalem or through the other houses where he dwells,…'.

The existence of this grave raises the possibility that the early cemetery of the Hospitallers, before the second big construction wave, was in the southeastern corner of the central courtyard right beside the northern gateway to the chapel," Major highlighted.

The construction of the vault I.1.D must have necessitated the exhumation of the burials accumulated during the previous two decades or so.

The reason for leaving this lone grave behind might come from the fact that this burial, which was likely from the early phase, was squeezed between the wall of the chapel and the foundation walls of an earlier structure, and thus it escaped the attention of the workers and the body remained at its original final resting place where it was placed at the end of the 12th century, Major underscored.