Page 76 - A Walk to Caesarea / Joseph Patrich

62 Historical Review

to utterly destroy the city walls and to fill in the moat and the harbor. The work
took two weeks to complete and Baybars took part in the destruction. The city
itself, which had passed to Muslim rule, was not demolished and its inhabitants
were not put to death. Destruction of the city was completed in 1291 by Sultan al-
Ashraf Khalil, who ordered the systematic demolishment of every Crusader fortress
along the coast. This total destruction is described in the reports of Abu al-Fida’
(1321), Ludolf of Sudheim (c. 1350), and Johannes Poloner (c. 1421).

After the Crusader Period

The site of Caesarea remained desolated for some 400 years, Johannes Poloner,
who passed through the area in 1421, spoke of swamps teeming with crocodiles.
Only in the seventeenth century was there a certain change, under Ottoman rule,
when Muslim fishermen tried to settle there. This was a short-lived attempt. The
Christian traveler Nicholas Binard (1617) notes that the residents of Caesarea are
Turks, Arabs, Moors, and Jews. According to Eugenius Roger (1629–1634), it was a
miserable place, with no remnant at all of its former splendor: Living there are about
one hundred Moorish families and seven or eight Jewish families housed in squalid
dwellings in the eastern part of the city; it has no church nor Christian person. The
residents had moved some distance away from the shoreline in fear of plunderous
attacks by the Knights of Malta, who sought to take captives for slaves. He further
tells that Jews dealt in cotton, olive oil, sesame, and wheat. This merchandise came
from the interior of the country and was sold to Greek merchants who came by
ship from Constantinople.

The ruins of Caesarea became a source for construction materials, especially in
the time of Jazzar Pasha, during the erection of his mosque in Acre at the end of
the eighteenth century.

Bosnian Settlement in Caesarea (Figs. 65a–b)

At the Congress of Berlin, held in 1878 following the war between the Russian and
Ottoman Empires in 1877/8, the independence of Slavic Bosnia Herzegovina from
Ottoman rule was ratified, and the area was transferred to the jurisdiction of the Austro-
Hungarian Empire. Under the aegis of the new Christian rule, the members of the
Muslim-Slavic aristocracy in the area of Mostar and Cognitza, who were landowners,
felt threatened by the Christian farmers, so they asked permission from Sultan Abdul
H. amid II to go to live in a different region within the bounds of the Ottoman Empire.
One of the groups of refugees from Bosnia Herzegovina, which initially numbered
22 families, was allotted a portion of the ruins of Christian Caesarea, and they also
received large plots of land for cultivation outside the confines of the walled ruins.
Two other groups settled on the ruins of H. urvot Hadidun (H. orvat H. idot) and
Sufsafi near Pardes H. anna. Other Bosnians settled in Yanun, east of Nablus. The