Crac des Chevaliers stands on a spur of the Jebel Ansariyya, overlooking the Homs Gap, the one low corridor between the Mediterranean coast and the Syrian interior, and that is why it was built here. In 1142 the Count of Tripoli gave the site to the Knights Hospitaller, who rebuilt it over the following century into the greatest castle of the Crusades, with two concentric rings of walls, a moat, a long, sloping ramp, and a great hall with Gothic vaults. At its peak it could hold a garrison of some two thousand men, with stables, storerooms and an enormous cistern.
Saladin passed it by in 1188, deciding that it was too strong to take. The Mamluk sultan Baibars finally forced its surrender in 1271, reportedly with a forged letter instructing the knights to surrender. After that it served the Mamluks and later the Ottomans, and eventually villagers set up homes inside the walls. T. E. Lawrence, who walked here as a young Oxford student in 1909, called it perhaps the best-preserved and most wholly admirable castle in the world. UNESCO listed it in 2006, along with Qal'at Salah El-Din, another castle in Syria's coastal mountains.
The fighting of the Syrian civil war reached the castle in 2012 and caused damage to its upper works, and the country has been difficult and unsafe for visitors for many years. Anyone thinking of riding here needs to look at current travel advice and the realities of borders and permits before going anywhere near it, and the ride titles listing Baalbek in Lebanon are best treated as armchair material for now.
What a rider notices on the ground is the landscape. The Homs Gap is a fertile corridor of olive groves, orchards and wheat between the Lebanon range and the Ansariyya hills. Wind funnels through it, and spring is very green, with rain until April. Roads in the area climb in bends to the castle, with a final approach that is steep and narrow. Tallkalakh and the surrounding towns would have fuel and food in normal times.
Even from a photograph, the scale of the place is hard to forget.