Category:Caesarea Maritima (subject)

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Caesarea Maritima was a seaport on the Mediterranean.

Overview

The seaport of Caesarea, originally a small fortified Phoenician and Greek anchorage named Strabo's Tower, was built in the 1st century BCE by Herod the Great and renamed in honor of Augustus. Its artificial harbor was the largest on the eastern Mediterranean coast and one of the technical wonders of antiquity.

After 6 CE Caesarea was used by the Romans as the capital of the province of Judea and the seat of the Roman Governors, except the brief period in which the rule of Caesarea was granted to Herod Agrippa.

Christian sources refers to Caesarea as a place where the new faith was preached by Philip and Peter, and as the port of arrival and departure of Paul's journeys. Caesarea was also the place where Paul was in custody for two years under Felix and Festus, before being sent to Rome.

Caesarea remained under Roman control during the Jewish War. Josephus reports that at the outbreak of the hostilities all 20,000 Jews living in Caesarea were massacred by the Greek mob. It was in Caesarea that Vespasian was acclaimed emperor by his own legions. The new Emperor turned the city into a Roman colony.

Herod's harbor was severely damaged c150 CE by an earthquake, but the city still flourished during the Byzantine period, becoming one of the major centers of Christianity in the East. Caesarea declined rapidly after the Islamic conquest. Louis IX of France built there a short-lived Crusader fortress. After the Muslim reconquest, Caesarea laid in ruins, only to be used to resettle a small group of Circassian and Bosnian refugees in the 1870s and 1880s.

Today Caesarea is a popular archaeological site, visited by thousands of tourists.