"The Krak of the Knights, described by T.E. Lawrence as 'the best preserved and most wholly admirable castle in the world,' is the easternmost of a chain of five castles sited so as to secure the Homs Gap...The castle stands upon a southern spur of the Gebel Alawi, on the site of an earlier Islamic 'Castle of the Kurds.' In 1142 it was given by Raymond, Count of Tripoli, into the care of the Knights Hospitallers, and it was they who, during the ensuing fifty years, remodelled and developed it as the most distinguished work of military architecture of its time.
