Crusader sites in Transjordan — the Lordship of Oultrejordain

Across the Jordan, the Crusader Kingdom extended south through the rugged plateau east of the Dead Sea all the way to the Red Sea at Aqaba. This was the Lordship of Oultrejordain — the kingdom's largest and most exposed fief, granted to Pagan the Butler under King Fulk in the 1130s and famously held in the 1180s by the reckless Reynald of Châtillon.

Oultrejordain's great castles dominated the King's Highway, the caravan road carrying Damascene and Egyptian trade and the annual Hajj pilgrimage to Mecca. Kerak, the Crusaders' largest castle in the region, was built by Pagan in 1142 and survived multiple Ayyubid sieges. Shobak (Montreal), founded by Baldwin I in 1115, watched the road further south. Aqaba on the Gulf of Aqaba was the kingdom's southernmost outpost, and from it Reynald of Châtillon launched a notorious raid down the Red Sea in 1182–83 to pillage Muslim shipping along the Hejaz coast — an episode that did more than anything else to make the destruction of his lordship Saladin's personal priority.