Besides the King the military Orders were, by a special privilege allowed to maintain castles. The Templars' castle of Gastria was destroyed after a short life. The keeps at Kolossi and Khirokitia belonging to the Hospitallers or Knights of Rhodes were not particularly strong, being intended rather to resist a coup de main by pirates or a rising of the serfs than to hold out against either the king or the king's enemies.

Military architecture in Cyprus, like ecclesiastical architecture, is fundamentally French in character. There were three types of castle. The first comprises mountain castles whose lay-out was essentially irregular and governed by the terrain, such as St. Hilarion, Kantara and Buffavento. The second, contrasting type is the lowland castle, built on a regular plan, viz. rectangular with four corner towers; in France this is the commonest of the standard plans for castles and can be seen at Semur-en-Auxois, the Bastille, Dourdan and elsewhere. The design is traditional and ancient, in fact it derives from the Roman or Byzantinc castrum and is copied in the castles at Kyrenia, Famagusta and Sigouri. The third type consists of simple towers, either quite isolated or accompanied by only secondary works, as at Kolossi, Pyla, Kiti and Cape Akamas.

The castles at Gastria and Limassol are in too incomplete a state to be included in any definite category but the former seems to have been one of those castles that had no flanking works and was defended only by its ditches, a type which according to Baron Rey was the normal one for the Templars in Syria. Limassol Castle may have consisted originally of a single massive tower with some secondary buildings or of a combinatior, of two keeps joined by two curtain walls, as can be seen at Niort and Le Blanc. There are other examples of castles with two keeps at Vernod and Excideuil in the Dordogne, at St. Odile in Alsace and elsewhere. The summit of St. Hilarion is crowned by two massive towers, roughly of the same dimensions, linked to each other and the castle by a plain curtain wall.

These two towers are exactly comparable to the isolated tower in the centre of Kantara Castle, at the highest point in the enceinte, now called 'The Queen's Chamber'. Baron Rey does not agree to these redoubts being called keeps because they are not suitable for living in, having no seigneurial chamber with fire-place; or store-rooms, or a well - all these things are found in keeps in France and make them proper castles, capable of standing a long siege.

I must point out however that we have plenty of small keeps such as Vernod or the old tower at Duingt near Lake Annecy or the keep of St. Pierre-d'Allevard (Isère) only two metres in diameter on the inside, which are in no way superior to the redoubts of St. Hilarion and Kantara.