Military ·Medieval ·Regional ·Near East & N. Africa

Crusader Castles of the Levant

Fortifications of the Crusader states, by builder and phase.

213 records 1098–1291 CE 33.40° N · 35.57° E

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Fig. 1 Interactive distribution of the 213 geolocated records on a live carto-positron base · globe / flat projection · decimal degrees (WGS 84).

Abstract

The military architecture of the Latin East — castles, towers, and fortified towns of the Crusader states — attributed to builder, order, and construction phase. The dataset supports study of frontier defence between the First Crusade and the fall of Acre.

Record

Theme	Military — conflict & fortification
Region	Near East & N. Africa
Temporal range	1098–1291 CE
Geographic coverage	Regional
Records	213 geolocated entities
Data source	Wikidata + archival gazetteer
Centroid	33.40° N · 35.57° E
Last revised	Feb 2026

Provenance & sources

Compiled from a curated spreadsheet corpus (n = 213) and reconciled against Wikidata entities. Geographic coordinates were verified against published gazetteers prior to publication.

· accessed 2026-02-12

SPARQL query

SELECT ?item ?itemLabel ?coord ?inception WHERE { ?item wdt:P31 ?class . ?item wdt:P625 ?coord . OPTIONAL { ?item wdt:P571 ?inception . } SERVICE wikibase:label { bd:serviceParam wikibase:language "en". } }

Recommended citation

Ortelius Editorial Board, ed. “Crusader Castles of the Levant” [dataset]. Ortelius: A Research Atlas of Thematic Cartography, Study AT-024. 2026. doi:10.5281/ortelius.024

DATASET CC BY 4.0 · ENRICHMENT CC0 · CARTOGRAPHY MIT

Data & reproducibility

The published dataset is distributed as CSV with a derived GeoJSON edition; coordinates are decimal degrees on the WGS 84 datum. DOI 10.5281/ortelius.024.

↓ data.csv ↓ data.geojson