Montfort Castle - The Principal Teutonic Castle in the Latin East
The thirteenth century castle, Montfort is located in the foothills of the western Galilee, 14 kilometres east of the nothern coastal town of Naharia. Montfort was the principal castle of the Teutonic Order, a military order established at the end of the twelfth century in the port city of Acre (Akko). It was built on lands purchased by the order in the 1220s and served the order for less than 50 years, falling to the Mamluks in a siege in the summer of 1271. Since then it has lain in ruins, visited and described by travellers over the centuries. In 1877 the castle was surveyed by Horatio H. Kitchener for the British Survey of Western Palestine and in 1926 an expedition was sent out by the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York to carry out excavations at the castle with the aim of recovering a suit of 13th century armour for the collection in the museum's Department of Arms and Armor .
In 2006 the Montfort Castle Project (MCP) was set up by a team from the University of Haifa. The MCP is sponsored by the Zinman Institute of Archaeology at the University of Haifa and the Society for the Study of the Crusades and the Latin East (SSCLE).