THE COLONIALIST MODEL OF REY, PRUTZ, AND DESCHAMPS

Rey and Conder, like many of those who followed them, linked the concept of the border – drawn from the field of modern political geography – with the Frankish kingdom. They therefore assumed that the Latin entities also had definite borders that could be drawn on a map. The borders of these states, it was claimed, were not the result of military or political coincidence; on the contrary, they were based on natural contours that afforded them a political significance. Furthermore, to many of the scholars who studied the geography of the Latin Kingdom, it was self-evident that Crusader fortresses had been built first and foremost in order to defend these natural borders. At the beginning of his study of the monuments of Crusader military architecture, Rey describes the natural frontiers (frontières naturelles) of the ‘Christian principalities in Syria’. He believed them to have stretched from the Taurus Mountains and the sea in the north through the principality of Edessa ‘which under Baldwin de Bourg became a French principality’; this in order to check the advance of the princes of Mosul and Baghdad ‘[who] hurried to the help of the princes of Syria’. In Rey's opinion, the eastern natural frontier of the ‘Christian strongholds’ was ‘the chain of Lebanese mountains that towered between the Christians and the sultanate of Damascus’.

According to Rey, the Crusader fortresses of the kingdom of Jerusalem formed two types of strategic defence networks.