Raymond of Aguilers, who wrote a chronicle of the First Crusade (1096–1099), relates that on the morning of June 7, 1099, the Crusaders reached the summit of Nebi Samuel, and when they saw the city of Jerusalem, which they had not yet seen, they fell to the ground and wept in joy; the Crusaders named the place “Mount of Joy”, for this reason. The Crusaders built a fortress on the spot, on an area of 100 x 50 m.[
The 12th-century Jewish traveller Benjamin of Tudela visited the site when he travelled the land in 1173. According to him, the Crusaders had found the bones of Samuel “close to a Jewish synagogue” in Ramla on the coastal plain (which he misidentified as biblical Ramah), and reburied them here, at this site (which he mistook for biblical Shiloh). He wrote that a large church dedicated to St. Samuel of Shiloh had been built over the reburied remains. This may refer to the abbey church of St. Samuel of Montjoie built by Premonstratensian canons and inhabited from 1141 or 1142 to 1244. In 1187 seven of its canons were martyred during Saladin’s reconquest of the Holy Land
