![]() “To distinguish so many mixed up bodies and body parts took a huge amount of work, but we were finally able to separate them out and look at the pattern of wounds they had sustained,” says study co-author Martin Smith, a biological anthropologist at Bournemouth University, in the statement. Louis, which was attacked in 12.īlingBling10 via Wikimedia Commons under CC SA 3.0 The mass graves are located close to the Castle of St. Some of the bones show signs of charring, suggesting a number of the bodies were burned. Wouldn’t it be amazing if King Louis himself had helped to bury these bodies?”īased on the positioning of body parts, the researchers say the remains were probably left to decompose on the surface for some time before being dropped into a pit. “He went to the city after the battle and personally helped to bury the rotting corpses in mass graves such as these. “Crusader records tell us that King Louis IX of France was on crusade in the Holy Land at the time of the attack on Sidon in 1253,” says study co-author Piers Mitchell, a biological anthropologist at the University of Cambridge, in the statement. ![]() The mass graves are located near the castle, and the researchers say it is “highly likely” that the Crusaders died in one of these two battles. Louis, but it fell again, this time to the Mongols, in 1260. The next year, Louis IX of France had the structure rebuilt as the Castle of St. But in 1253, Mamluk forces attacked and destroyed the fortress that the Crusaders were using to defend the city. The wounds that covered their bodies allow us to start to understand the horrific reality of medieval warfare.Įuropean forces captured Sidon-an important port city-in 1110 C.E., after the First Crusade, and held it for more than a century. The researchers also found European-style belt buckles and a Crusader coin, along with artifacts like fragments of Persian pottery and iron nails. “When we found so many weapon injuries on the bones as we excavated them, I knew we had made a special discovery,” says lead author Richard Mikulski, an archaeologist at Bournemouth University in England, in a statement.Īnalysis of tooth isotopes and DNA showed that some of the deceased were born in Europe, while others were the offspring of European Crusaders who had children with locals in the Middle East, the Daily Mail’s Stacy Liberatore reports. The archaeologists published their findings in the journal PLOS One. Most of the injuries were to the fighters’ backs, suggesting they may have been killed while fleeing-possibly by adversaries on horseback, based on where the blows fell on their bodies. The team found the skeletons of the young men and teenage boys in Sidon, on the Mediterranean coast, reports Ben Turner for Live Science.Īll of the bones bear unhealed wounds from stabbing, slicing or blunt force trauma. Archaeologists in Lebanon have unearthed two mass graves containing the remains of 25 Crusaders killed in the 13th century.
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