The defeat at Hattin and the subsequent fall of so many castles to Saladin had a traumatic effect on Crusader castle architects. The castles which were founded or remodelled in the thirteenth century differed from their twelfth-century predecessors in ownership, distribution and design.

By this time very few castles remained in the hands of the lay nobility except in the coastal cities where some families like the lords of Sidon and Caesarea and the Ibelins in Beirut managed to maintain at least a shadow of their former status. None of their buildings survives from this period and the thirteenth-century fortifications which do survive at Sidon and Caesarea were not built by the lords. We do, however, have one record from this time which sheds a rather surprising light on the life-style of these nobles. In 1212 the aristocratic German traveller Wilbrand of Oldenburg passed through Beirut and has left a description of the castle of John of Ibelin. One tower, newly built since the reconquest of the city by the Crusaders in 1197, had a chamber overlooking the sea on one side and gardens on the other, which was luxuriously decorated with marble panels like lightly rippling water on the floor and painted clouds ‘which seemed to move’ on the ceiling. In the middle there was a richly decorated tank with a fountain shaped like a dragon whose waters cooled the air and beside which, the no-doubt travel-weary writer says he would ‘willingly sit for all his days’. The whole passage gives an idea of the luxury which could be found in some Crusader castles, an aspect of their architecture whose physical traces have almost entirely disappeared.