© koninklijke brill nv, leiden, ���7 | doi � �. ��63/9789004307766_0�3 CHAPTER 21 Coin Finds (1926–2012) and the Use of Money at Montfort Robert Kool Introduction Contrary to popular imagination, often fuelled by a potent mixture of European Romanticism and local lore, large Crusader castles have yielded disappoint- ingly few material remains of money. Until now surveys and excavations of some of the largest forti- fications in the Kingdom of Jerusalem and the north- ern Principalities, Beaufort, Safed, Château Pelerin, Belvoir, Jerusalem’s Citadel and Montreal (Shawbak) have produced little or no coin finds of significance.1 In contrast, it is often the smaller, lesser known castles 1  For Beaufort see Kennedy, 1994, pp. 5–7. As far as I know no coins were ever found here. The keep was surveyed in 1936 by Paul Deschamps and the architect Pierre Coupel together with 65 soldiers who cleared Beaufort’s inner enclosure. Their plans were published in Deschamps, 1939b. Later surveys which focus on architectural elements of the castle, like that of Grussenmeyer and Yasmine, 2003, do not mention any coin finds. For a good survey of past and more recent excavations at Safed Castle and its environment see Barbe, 2010. Here also we only have scattered references to medieval coins, mostly Mamluk. The only report of Crusader period coinage from Safed comes from an excavation of the adjacent medieval fau- bourg which was inhabited consecutively during the Ayyubid occupation of Safed (1188–1240) and its Frankish reoccupa- tion (1240–1266). See Kool 2015. The Coins from Jerusalem Street, Safed (Zefat). ʿAtiqot Volume 81: 91–97. At Belvoir Castle some coins were found during excavation and clearing works, together with arrow heads and other metal objects, see Ben Dov, 1969, p. 27, but no details are provided of their context, nor were they ever published. The IAA archives contain an unpublished preliminary report of the first season of excavations at Belvoir (August-November 1963), inter alia of the fill and the remains of an Arab village intra muros, the Crusader donjon and inner castle. The finds included some 30 coins, mostly thirteenth century Ayyubid fulus of Al-Kamil Muhammad (1218–1238). At Montreal (le Crac de Montreal/Karak al Shawbak) where no Crusader period levels have been excavated, only later periods; a single coin was found which helped to date the palace. See Brown, 1989, pp. 287–304. In the coastal Templar fortress of Château Pelerin which was extensively excavated in 1930–1934, c. 300 Crusader period coins were recovered. However, almost none of them were found in the castle’s perimeter, but rather in the adjacent fortified burgus/faubourg, outside the castle’s walls. See Metcalf, Kool and Berman 1999, p. 91. and towers/castra in the Kingdom of Jerusalem like Arsur (Arsuf/Apollonia), Vadum Iacob or Bethgibelin (Bet Guvrin) that have yielded relative substantial coin finds, considering their smaller sizes.2 A number of obvious reasons explain the dearth of coin finds in large castles: pillaging of money and other valuables during hostilities;3 extensive rebuild- ing which took place within these castles during suc- cessive periods; widespread robbery of material from such high profile castle locations over hundreds of years; and “unfriendly” excavation methods, particu- larly during the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Fieldwork methods used during this period in medieval castles in the Near East focused primar- ily on the exploration and study of larger architectural elements, often to the detriment of a systematic search of smaller artefacts like coins. The medieval coin finds of the large spur castle of Montfort, as small as they are, take on a special signifi- cance in the light of the above. This is particularly so because most of the coins were excavated from within the castle’s central section, west of the keep which contained its domestic quarters and in a large ceremo- nial “Great Hall” built, used and destroyed between the 1227 and 1271.4 These finds thus are clearly connected to the daily business of the castle’s inhabitants intra 2  Excavations at Arsur (Apollonia/Arsuf) have already yielded hundreds of such medieval coin finds identified by the author. Most of them remain unpublished at present. For Vadum Iacob see Kool, 2001; 2002; 2006; 2008. For Bethgibellin see See Kool, 2007. 3  Helmut Nickel (1989, p. 36) put it succinctly in his article on the 1926 Montfort expedition: “Evidently the victors searched and sacked the castle before they put it to the torch. Of mov- able items, only seemingly worthless or unusable broken objects . . . were left behind . . .” Often, ruins of the large cas- tles were resettled, sometimes for hundreds of years by entire villages built within the castle’s perimeter and on its main walls. For a good example see the contemporary castle of Château Pelerin see http://www.iaa-archives.org.il/zoom/ zoom.aspx?folder_id=193&type_id=20&id=19618 or Belvoir, above footnote 1. 4  For a discussion on when construction at Montfort began see above, Chapter 1.