The study of castles has formed a major part of crusade historiography since its inception in the early nineteenth century. Fortification has been taken to represent the magnificence of the efforts to rule the Holy Land and the battle between Christianity and Islam. Recently, however, scholars have recognised that, inasmuch as castles were celebrated as the epitomes of resilience and hostility, military architecture was far more dialogical than previously noticed. The design of castles involved a highly nuanced familiarity with the culture from which they were intended to defend. This article seeks to show that not only the physical characteristics of castles but also ideas about what made them religiously successful, in their capacity to enact and protect ritual spaces, were shaped through a dynamic inter-religious dialogue. Taking Safed as a case study, this article brings together three narratives—in Latin, Arabic and Hebrew—that share the attempt to laud the castle by drawing a dialectic between its strategic might and the sanctity of the soil upon which it is built. While the three accounts differ radically in their political stakes, the rhetorical strategies they employ in order to contemplate the spiritual efficacy of the castle is profoundly entangled.

中文翻译：

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神圣的防御工事：Safed 兴衰的三部曲

自 19 世纪初期兴起以来，对城堡的研究已成为十字军史学的重要组成部分。防御工事被用来代表统治圣地的努力以及基督教与伊斯兰教之间的斗争的辉煌。然而，最近，学者们已经认识到，由于城堡被认为是韧性和敌意的缩影，军事建筑比以前注意到的更具对话性。城堡的设计涉及对他们打算防御的文化的高度细致的熟悉。本文旨在表明，不仅城堡的物理特征，还有关于是什么使它们在宗教上取得成功的想法，以及它们制定和保护仪式空间的能力，都是通过动态的宗教间对话形成的。以 Safed 为例，本文将拉丁文、阿拉伯文和希伯来文的三种叙述结合在一起，试图通过在其战略力量与其所建土地的神圣性之间建立辩证法来赞美这座城堡。虽然这三个叙述在政治利益上截然不同，但他们为了思考城堡的精神功效而采用的修辞策略却深深地纠缠在一起。