Masyaf Castle is a medieval fortress in the town of Masyaf, in Hama Governorate, Syria. It stands on a platform roughly 20 meters above the Orontes Valley, about 40 kilometers west of Hama. The Assassins captured it in 1141, and Masyaf served as the capital of a Nizari Ismaili emirate from the mid-12th century to the end of the 13th.
Rashid al-Din Sinan, known as the Old Man of the Mountain, ruled from the castle between 1166 and 1193 and refortified it. Most of its surviving remains date to his 12th-century construction. Saladin besieged it in May 1176, and the siege ended in a truce.
The Mamluk sultan Baibars seized the castle in February 1270. Restoration funded by the Aga Khan Trust for Culture began in 2000.
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