Gulf of Suez

The Gulf of Suez is the western arm of the Red Sea, running for about 300 km between the Egyptian mainland and the Sinai peninsula. In the twelfth and thirteenth centuries its narrow isthmus, only 100 km of desert from the Mediterranean, was one of the most strategically contested corridors of the medieval world.

No Crusader force ever held territory on the gulf itself. Control belonged to the Fatimids and, after 1171, the Ayyubids of Cairo. But the gulf’s western shore was the staging ground for every Egyptian army that marched on Jerusalem, and the wells at Bilbais and the fort at Qulzum anchored the sultan’s road to Palestine.

For Latin pilgrims returning home from the monastery of St Catherine in Sinai, the gulf was the western edge of the wilderness they crossed on the way back to Cairo and the sea-lanes to Italy.