St George of Labeyne

The fief of St George de la Beyne lay in Western Galilee, about twenty kilometres east of Acre. Its caput was the twin village now called Deir al-Asad and Bi'ina — together they formed the single medieval settlement the Franks knew as Saint Jorge Labane, and the fief also drew in the nearby hamlets of Sajur and Buqei'a.

The Latin name is a hybrid. Joshua Prawer suggested "la Beyne" came from the Arabic al-Ba'ina, the older Semitic name of the village that survives in Bi'ina today; "Saint George", borrowed from the dedication of the village church, may in turn reflect a corruption of the Arabic sajara, "grove".

It was a modest but militarily significant holding — the Assises de Jérusalem record that it owed ten knights to the royal host, a heavy service for a rural fief. Before 1164 it was held by Philip of Milly and then his brother Henry; on Henry's death it passed to Henry's daughter Helvis of Milly. In November 1179 Count Joscelin III of Courtenay — the titular Count of Edessa living out his exile in the Kingdom of Jerusalem — acquired the stewardship, and by February 1182 had consolidated full control of the fief.

Saladin's victory at the Horns of Hattin in July 1187 carried the valley into Muslim hands; a legal transfer to the Pisans in 1188 was never enforced on the ground. The fief returned to Frankish rule with the advance of 1220, and by 1249 had come under the full control of the Teutonic Knights, whose Galilean estates it joined. Prince Edward of England raided the village in 1271 during his brief crusade, destroying it and massacring several of its inhabitants. In 1283 the German pilgrim Burchard of Mount Sion still described it as sitting "in between the mountains, in a very rich, fertile and pleasant valley".

At the centre of the village stand the much-battered remains of a 12th-century Frankish church, identified by Denys Pringle as an abbey church of St George and noted by earlier visitors (Victor Guérin in 1875) as a three-naved, three-apsed building of the Carthusian type. Those walls are the reason the village is today called Deir al-Asad — "the lion's monastery" — a name given to the Crusader ruins long after the fief itself had been forgotten.

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