Aqaba Fortress

Also known as Aqaba Castle, Mamluk Castle of Aqaba, Qasr al-Aqaba

The Aqaba Fortress — Qasr al-Aqaba, also called the Mamluk Castle — is a fortified caravanserai on the northern beach of the Gulf of Aqaba. Its present fabric dates mainly to the early sixteenth century, when the Mamluk sultan Qansuh al-Ghuri rebuilt earlier fortifications on the site to guard the hajj road running south from Cairo to Mecca and Medina. The Crusaders had briefly dominated this corner of the Red Sea. From about 1116, Baldwin I's island castle of Île de Graye on Pharaoh's Island, a few kilometres off the Aqaba shore, taxed pilgrim shipping and caravans passing between Egypt and the Hejaz until Saladin's forces recovered it in 1170. The Mamluk and later Ottoman fortress reoccupied the same strategic choke-point three centuries later, policing the same pilgrim traffic that the Frankish garrison had once preyed on. In the century before the First World War the Ottomans used the caravanserai increasingly as a military stronghold. It was taken by the Arab Revolt forces of Sharif Hussein, Auda abu Tayi and T. E. Lawrence on 6 July 1917 in the famous overland assault from Wadi Rum that opened the southern flank of the Hejaz campaign.

Coordinates: 29.5218°, 35.0020°

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