ordered his troops to scale the walls in several places simultaneously, enabling them to penetrate the city. During the Mamluk area, the ruins of Caesarea Maritima by the Crusader fortress near Caesarea on the Mediterranean coast lay uninhabited.
Ottoman period
First in 1664 a settlement is mentioned. It consisted of 100 "Moroccan" families, and 7–8 Jewish ones. In the late 17th century it again declined.
Caesarea lay in ruins until the nineteenth century, when the village of Qisarya (Arabic: قيسارية, the Arabic name for Caesarea) was established in 1884 by Bushnaks (Bosnyaks) – Muslim immigrants from Bosnia, who built a small fishing village on the ruins of the Crusader fortress on the coast.
Petersen, visiting the place in 1992, writes that the nineteenth-century houses were built in blocks, generally one story high (with the exception of the house of the governor.) Some houses on the western side of the village, near the sea, have survived. There were a number of mosques in the village in the nineteenth century, but only one ("The Bosnian mosque") has survived. This mosque, located at the southern end of the city, next to the harbour, is described as a simple stone building with a red-tiled roof and a cylindrical minaret. It was used (in 1992) as a restaurant and as a gift shop.
British Mandate
The Jewish kibbutz of Sdot Yam was established 1 kilometre (0.62 mi) south of the Arab town in 1940. The Arab village declined in economic importance and many of Qisarya's Arab inhabitants left in the mid 1940s, when the British extended the Palestine Railways which bypassed the shallow-draft port. Qisarya had a population of 960 in 1945, with Qisarya's population composition 930 Muslims and 30 Christians in 1945. In 1944/45 a total of 18 dunums of Arab village land was used for citrus and bananas, 1,020 dunums were used for cereals, while 108 dunums were irrigated or used for orchards.
During
