Pot Of Gold Coins And A Single Earring Hidden From The Crusaders Behind The Wall Of A Well 900 Years Ago Found Intact In Ancient Israeli Home dailymail.co.uk

The directors of the excavation, the IAA’s Peter Gendelman and Mohammed Hatar, said the coins in the cache date to the end of the 11th century.

That makes it possible ‘to link the treasure to the Crusader conquest of the city in the year 1101, one of the most dramatic events in the medieval history of the city’, an IAA statement said.

The Crusades were a series of religious wars with the stated goal of restoring Christian access to the holy places in and near Jerusalem – a sacred city for Jews, Christians and Muslims.

The crusade which captured Caesarea was led by Baldwin I of Jerusalem, who ruled the Crusader kingdom between 1100 and 1118.

It followed the First Crusade and is often known as the Crusade of the Faint-Hearted due to the number of people who joined it having turned back from the First Crusade.

After being crowned in Jerusalem on 25 December 1100, Baldwin fought several battles between Jerusalem and the port city of Ashkelon.

Caesarea fell on 17 May 1101 after a siege of 15 days. According to the Antiquities Authority, most inhabitants of the city were massacred by Baldwin I’s army between 1100 to 1118 CE.
Baldwin I also captured Arsuf in 1101, Acre in 1104, Beirut in 1110, and Sidon in 1111. By 1112 he had captured all the coastal cities except Ascalon and Tyre.

The authority said it can be presumed that the treasure’s owner and his family likely died in the Caesarea massacre or were sold into slavery.
The bronze pot in which the trove was held for the past millennium, which is itself a valuable item, was secreted between stones in a 1.5 meter-deep well.

The discovery was made during an excavation and conservation project at the Caesarea World Heritage site.

It was located in a house in a neighborhood dating to the Abbasid and Fatimid period, 900 years ago.

This bronze pot, which shows indications of once having an original metal lid, was given a makeshift ceramic stopper before being placed into the watering hole, according to The Times of Israel.

‘The people broke a piece of ceramic and put it in as a stop-gap lid so the coins wouldn’t fall out,’ Dr. Robert Kool, coin expert at the authority, told the paper.
They would have been unable to return to the site of the cache and retrieve their hidden gold.

‘According to contemporary written sources, most of the inhabitants of Caesarea were massacred by the army of Baldwin I (1100-1118), king of the Crusader Kingdom of Jerusalem,’ it added.

‘It is reasonable to assume that the treasure´s owner and his family perished in the massacre or were sold into slavery, and therefore were not able to retrieve their gold.’

The cache is of a unique combination of coins not yet seen in Israel consisting of two types of coins: 18 Fatimid dinars, well known from previous excavations in Caesarea, where it was the standard local currency of the time,’ said Dr. Robert Kool, coin expert at the authority.

‘And a small and extremely rare group of six Byzantine imperial gold coins.

‘Five of the coins are concave and belong to the reign of the Byzantine Emperor Michael VII Doukas (1071-1079 CE).’

Caesarea was constructed in the first century BC by King Herod at a time that Judea was part of the Roman empire.

Through the centuries, Caesarea was conquered several times.

First built by Herod the Great between 20 and 11 BC, Caesarea proved an important port city to several conquerers, including the Roman and Byzantine empires.

Archaeologists think the pot of gold was stashed as invaders ransacked the city, some 900 years ago.

An earring and gold coins that were discovered at the port of Caesarea, Israel. The coins in the cache dating to the end of the eleventh century, make it possible to link the treasure to the Crusader conquest of the city in the year 1101. +9
A picture taken on December 3, 2018, shows ancient gold coins and an earring uncovered at an excavation site in the Israeli Mediterranean town of Caesarea +9
An earring and gold coins that were discovered at the port of Caesarea, Israel. The coins in the cache dating to the end of the eleventh century, make it possible to link the treasure to the Crusader conquest of the city in the year 1101.

WHAT WERE THE CRUSADES?
The Crusades were a series of religious wars with the stated goal of restoring Christian access to the holy places in and near Jerusalem – a sacred city for Jews, Christians and Muslims.

Events leading up to the Crusades began in 1071 when the Seljuk Turks defeated the Byzantine army.

The Byzantine emperor then called on fellow Christian leaders and the Pope to come to the aid of Constantinople and free Jerusalem from 372 years of Muslim rule.

Many answered the call, angered by the destruction of many Christian sacred sites and the persecution of Christians under the Fatimid caliph Al-Hakim.

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Under Al-Hakim in the early 11th century, thousands of churches were destroyed throughout the ancient Christian heartland of the Middle East, and when the Seljuk Turks captured Jerusalem in 1077, just 22 years before it fell to the Crusaders, they too massacred some three thousand inhabitants.

All these Islamic attacks on the West occurred before the First Crusade. Some scholars even argue that the very idea of ‘holy war’ was learned from the example of Islam on the march.

All these events led to the main series of Crusades, primarily against Muslims in the Levant, occurred between 1095 and 1291, producing some of the bloodiest conflicts in history.

Raymond of Agiles described the capture of Jerusalem by the Crusaders in 1099: ‘Some of our men cut off the heads of their enemies; others shot them with arrows, so that they fell from the towers; others tortured them longer by casting them into the flames.

Piles of heads, hands and feet were to be seen in the streets of the city. It was necessary to pick one’s way over the bodies of men and horses. But these were small matters compared to what happened at the temple of Solomon, a place where religious services ware ordinarily chanted.

What happened there? If I tell the truth, it will exceed your powers of belief. So let it suffice to say this much at least, that in the temple and portico of Solomon, men rode in blood up to their knees and bridle reins.’

The First Crusade (1095-1101)Crusader armies defeated two substantial Turkish forces at Dorylaeum and at Antioch, reaching Jerusalem with only a fraction of their original forces. In 1099, they took Jerusalem by assault and created small crusader states, which became the ‘Kingdom of Jerusalem’.

The Second Crusade (1147-49)After a period of relative peace in which Christians and Muslims co-existed in the Holy Land, Muslims conquered the town of Edessa. A new crusade was called for by various preachers. French and German armies marched to Jerusalem in 1147 but failed to accomplish any major successes.

The Third Crusade (1187-92) in 1187, Saladin, the Sultan of Egypt captured Jerusalem. Pope Gregory VIII called for a crusade which was undertaken by King Richard I of England (Richard the Lionheart), Holy Roman Emporer Frederick I, and King Philip II of France. They defeated the Muslims near Arsuf but failed to take of Jerusalem. Richard left the following year after establishing a truce with Saladin.The Fourth Crusade (1202-04)

The Fourth Crusade was initiated in 1202 by Pope Innocent III, with the intention of invading the Holy Land through Egypt. Because they subsequently lacked provisions and time on their vessel lease the leaders decided to go to Constantinople, where they attempted to place a Byzantine exile on the throne, before sacking the city .

The Fifth Crusade (1217-21) The Fourth Council of the Lateran (1215) formulated a plan for the recovery of the Holy Land. A crusading force from Hungary and Austria took back. In the second phase, crusader forces attacked Cairo. Flooding in the Nile forced them to choose between surrender and defeat.

The Sixth Crusade (1228-29, 1239) Through diplomacy by Emperor Frederick II Jerusalem, Nazareth, and Bethlehem were delivered to the Crusaders for a period of ten years. This was the first Crusade that had no Papal involvement.The Seventh Crusade (1249-52) Fought in Egypt, the crusaders lost a decisive battle at La Forbie in Gaza. This battle is considered by many historians to have been the death knell to the Christian States.

The Eighth Crusade (1270)Organised by Louis IX in 1270 to come to the aid of the remnants of the Crusader states in Syria. However, the Crusade was diverted to Tunis, where Louis spent only two months before dying. The crusade achieved a partial success in that Christian religious were allowed to live peacefully in the region.

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