Guide
Namrun Castle stands in the Çamlıyayla district of Mersin, in the Taurus mountains, commanding the way to Tarsus and the Cilician Gates. Because its general character points to an earlier date it is said to have been the Assyrian fortress called Illubru. In the Middle Ages, when it formed part of the Armenian Kingdom of Cilicia, the castle was known as Lampron and was the ancestral seat of the Armenian Hethumid princes.
The Byzantine emperor Constantine IX Monomachos gave authority over Tarsus and its region to an Armenian noble named Ablgharib, who was also appointed governor of Cilicia; he encouraged other Armenian families to settle in the region and was buried at Paperon castle when he died.
In the third quarter of the eleventh century the Byzantine emperor Alexios I Komnenos granted the government and revenues of the Namrun region as a fief to Ōšin son of Hetum, one of the Armenian nobles who first settled this Byzantine holding, along with the title of Sebastokrator, a high honorific of the Byzantine empire. After the castle was repaired and strengthened it became an almost impregnable base of the Hethumid dynasty.
During the First Crusade in 1097 Baldwin reached Tarsus by way of Namrun Castle. When Tarsus passed to the crusaders, Sis became the capital of the Armenian Kingdom of Cilicia. Ōšin, who helped the crusaders and kept good relations with them, gave up to their control all the places he held apart from Namrun. The small Armenian principalities of the region, which had been fighting one another constantly over succession, came to terms and united during the crusader advance, and the Hethumid house founded by Ōšin was attached to the Rubenids.
After several failed attempts at siege in 1171, 1176 and 1182, the castle was taken at the beginning of the thirteenth century by King Levon I of the Rubenid house through a stratagem: he married his niece to one of the Hethumid nobles, and while everyone was at the wedding feast at Tarsus his army seized the castle.
In the early 1240s the castle became the centre of a serious revolt against the Armenian king when Constantine, baron of Namrun, joined the Seljuk sultan Gıyâseddin Keyhüsrev II and attacked King Hetum I. The counter-attack that ended the revolt was led by the constable Smbat, baron of Papeřōn; Constantine was captured and executed for treason in 1250. In 1309–10 the castle served for a short time as the prison of Henry II, the Lusignan king of Cyprus.
