He had done this before. Shlomi Katzin, a graduate student in the Department of Maritime Civilizations at the University of Haifa, was swimming off Israel’s Mediterranean coast when he spotted a group of divers carrying metal detectors. Concerned they were looting antiquities, he drove them away. Then he looked down at the seabed — and saw a hilt.
It was his second Crusader sword.
Katzin had found a nearly identical weapon in 2021. That experience made the identification immediate. He reported the find to Deborah Cvikel, a nautical archaeologist at the university, who alerted the Israel Antiquities Authority. The authority granted special permission to excavate the sword, which measures 3 feet (1 meter) long and dates to the 12th century.
Cvikel described it as “an extremely rare find,” noting that “only a handful of similar swords from the Crusader period” — spanning A.D. 1095 to 1291 — are known anywhere in the country. The weapon had spent centuries packed in sand and encrusted with barnacles, hidden beneath the surface of a coastal anchorage.
What the scan revealed
Rather than scraping away the marine buildup, researchers brought the sword to a hospital and ran it through a CT scanner. The noninvasive approach preserved the encrustation while allowing a look at the iron core beneath. What emerged was a portrait of slow destruction: the blade appeared fractured, and only a small portion of the original iron remained intact.
Still, enough survived to draw conclusions. The sword was built for one-handed combat. Its design, according to the announcement, suggested the weapon likely belonged to a Crusader — possibly a Frankish knight.
Sára Lantos, a researcher in the same department, placed the object in its broader context. “In the Middle Ages, the sword became a symbol of the knights and knighthoods, as well as a symbol of the Christian faith,” she said. “The discovery and study of such a symbolic and personal object are rare, and enrich our knowledge of the material culture of the Crusader period.”
A window into coastal warfare
The Crusades brought waves of Western European knights into the Holy Land, sanctioned by the Catholic Pope, to wrest control of the region from Muslim rule. Weapons recovered from the period offer direct evidence of how those campaigns played out on the ground — and, apparently, along the shore.
Cvikel noted that the find “contributes greatly to our understanding of the use of maritime anchorages and the lives of warriors during this period.” Swords were not typically discarded in the 12th century, which makes the presence of two such weapons at the same stretch of coastline — both found by the same student — difficult to explain by chance alone.
Research into the sword is ongoing.
Photo by Pixabay
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