‘Deck thyself now with majesty and excellency; and array thyself with glory and beauty.’ JOB XL, 10
The Franks of Outremer allowed the commerce that should have established their country to slip out of their grasp. But in some of the arts they kept control of their productions. Their achievements here were remarkable; for the colonists were not numerous and only few of them can have been artists. Moreover they had come to a land whose artistic traditions were far older than their own; nor could they find there the materials to which they were used. Yet they began to develop a style which answered satisfactorily to their needs.
Most of their smaller works of art have perished. The turbulent history of Syria and Palestine has not permitted the survival of things that are delicate and fragile. Their architecture was more durable, though there, as in most medieval countries, there is little left except for military and ecclesiastical monuments. Even in these change and decay have altered the original form. Apart from the holiest shrines of Christendom, which the Moslems were too scrupulous to touch, but which later Christians have repaired, the churches that still stand were preserved because they were adapted to become mosques. Others have fallen into ruin. The Frankish castles and fortifications were all so severely damaged in the course of the wars that the Moslem conquerors were obliged, if they wished to use them, to reconstruct much of them, especially the outside walls and the gates. What man left alone, nature helped to ruin, in that earthquake-stricken land. Even where modern archaeologists have brought their scholarship to the work of restoration, as at Krak des Chevaliers, it is not always possible to distinguish clearly between what is Crusader and what is Mameluk.
The first buildings that the Crusaders needed to construct were for their defence. Churches and palaces must wait till the country was securely held. The walls of the towns had to be repaired, and castles built to guard the frontiers and to serve as safe administrative centres for the country districts. The fortifications of the main cities only required to be patched here and there; except in the few cases where the Crusaders had only forced an entry by breaching the walls. At Antioch the great defence system constructed by the Byzantines towards the close of the tenth century had suffered very little damage. The Latin princes had no need to add to them. Similarly little repair work was required on the Fatimid walls of Jerusalem, though the Crusaders seem almost at once to have made alterations and improvements to the Tower of David. But soon they began to build castles in towns where the fortifications were already adequate. These castles were all built on the edge of the town and could be defended independently. Their lords wished not only to be able to carry on resistance even if the town fell to the enemy, but also to be in a position to awe the town, should it prove unruly. The first castle that can be dated with certainty is Count Raymond’s at Mount Pilgrim, built in 1104 to provide him with headquarters while he besieged Tripoli. It was outside the town, though Moslem Tripoli was later built at its base. But of Raymond’s own work little more than the west wall now survives. The castles of the Princes of Galilee at Tiberias and Toron must have been built about the same time. But the first great age of castle-building began in the second decade of the twelfth century, under Baldwin II, and was continued under Fulk, when such magnificent fortresses as Kerak of Moab, Beaufort and, further north, Sahyun, were constructed, as well as the smaller forts of Judaea, such as Blanchegarde and Ibelin.
The Byzantine Castle
The Crusaders found military architecture far more highly developed in the East than in the West, where the stone-built castle was only now beginning to appear. The Romans had studied military defence as a science. The Byzantines, stimulated by the endless foreign invasions that they had to face, had evolved it to suit their needs, and the Arabs had learned from them. But the Byzantines’ problems were not the same as the Crusaders’. The Byzantines assumed that man-power was always available; they could afford large garrisons. They took immense trouble to defend their cities well. The walls of Constantinople were still able, a thousand years after they were built, to defy the up-to-date cannon of the Ottomans, and the walls of Antioch struck the Crusaders with admiration. But the Byzantine castle was not much more than a fortified camp. It was designed to deal with an enemy whose armaments were less formidable than the Byzantines’; for the Arabs, who were their most dangerous rivals, were less advanced in siege-machinery. Its walls did not have to be solid; for a system of outworks, of which the main feature was at least one ditch of considerable width, prevented the enemy from bringing his battering-rams or grappling-ladders close up against them. Towers were built with a slight salient at regular intervals along the walls, less to defend the walls themselves than to give the archers and pitch-throwers of the garrison a longer range into the enemy lines. The keep in the centre of the enceinte was designed not to be an ultimate point of defence, but, rather, to be a storehouse for armaments and provisions. Except for a few examples on the Armenian frontier where semi-independent border barons lived, the Byzantine castle was not intended to be a residence. The commander was a professional soldier who left his wife and children at home. Finally, though advantage was taken of natural defences, the inaccessibility of the site was not the first consideration. The main use of the castle was as barracks. It was inconvenient to force the soldiers to toil up and down a mountain every time that they moved.
The Arabs tended to follow the Byzantine models, though, as their armies were essentially mobile and aggressive, they were less interested in problems of defence.
The Crusaders studied the military architecture that they found on their journey eastward, and learned much from it. But their essential needs were different. They were always short of manpower and could not maintain large garrisons. Their castles therefore had to be far stronger and easier to defend. The site must be chosen for its defensive qualities. Every slope and hillock must be used to the fullest advantage, and, as scouts to carry messages could seldom be spared, each stronghold should be able to see and signal to its neighbour. Walls had to be far thicker and taller, to be able to stand up to a direct attack; for the defence of outworks involved too many men. At the same time the castle must serve as a residence for the lord and an office for his administration. The Franks brought their feudal methods with them and they were governing an alien people. The castle was the seat of local government. Its enceinte should also be large enough to give protection to flocks and herds during the frequent enemy raids. The castle, in fact, played a far more important part amongst the Franks than ever amongst the Byzantines or the Arabs.
Twelfth-century Castles
In the West the castle was as yet no more than the solid square keep or donjon, of a type perfected by the Normans. It was inadequate for the requirements of Outremer. The Crusaders were obliged to be pioneers. They borrowed many ideas from the Byzantines. It was from them that they learned the use of machicolation, and the value of placing towers along the curtain wall; though there they soon made an amendment, as they discovered that a rounded tower gave a wider range than the rectangular towers that the Byzantines preferred. Their smaller castles built in the earlier twelfth century, such as Belvoir, were built on the usual Byzantine design, with a more or less rectangular outer wall, studded with towers, enclosing a central space which contained the keep. But the sites were chosen so as to dispense with elaborate outworks, and the whole construction was far more solid. Byzantine work was often incorporated. At Sahyun the wide Byzantine fosses were completed by a narrow channel, ninety feet deep, cut through the solid rock. The Franks also added the portcullis, which had not been used in the East since Roman times, and the bent entrance, which the Arabs were beginning to favour but which the Byzantines seldom employed, probably because it was inconvenient for the heavy engines that they kept within the castles.
The larger castles were naturally more complicated. A fortress such as Kerak had to house not only the lord and his family but also the soldiers and clerks required for the administration of a province. In such a castle in the twelfth century the keep, with the residential quarters, was usually at the furthest and most easily defensible corner of the enceinte. Store rooms and the chapel were usually placed in the central space, while other towers round the enceinte were large enough to contain barrack-rooms and offices. The plan varied according to the terrain of the assiette, the area on which the castle was situated. The keep was still a simple rectangular tower, on the Norman model, usually with only one entrance. The masonry was solid and plain, but some attempt was made to decorate the residential quarters and the chapel. Unfortunately none of the twelfth-century decoration in the castles has survived. Those castles that remained Christian after Saladin’s time were redecorated in the next century. The Saracens altered those that they occupied themselves; and the remainder fell into ruin.
As the twelfth century advanced, there were certain changes in the plan of castles. It became to be considered more logical to put the keep, which was the strongest portion of the castle, at the weakest section of the enceinte; and the keep itself was usually rounded rather than rectangular, as a rounded surface resisted bombardment more effectively. More doors and posterns were provided. The size of castles tended to increase, particularly when the Military Orders built castles for themselves or took over castles from the lay nobility. In the castles of the Orders there were no ladies to be accommodated; and though high officials might be provided with elegant quarters, every resident was there for a military purpose. The larger fortresses, such as Krak or Athlit, were military towns capable of housing several thousand fighting men and the servants necessary for such a community. But they were seldom filled to capacity. The defences were now usually strengthened by- the use of a double, concentric enceinte. The great Hospitaller castles, such as Krak and Marqab, had a double girdle. The Templars followed the same system at Safita, but as a rule they preferred the single enceinte; their chief thirteenth-century castles, Tortosa and Athlit, kept to the earlier pattern, but in both cases the longer sections of the walls rose straight from the sea. Across the peninsula which joined Athlit to the land there was a complicated double line. The Teutonic castle at Montfort also kept to a single enceinte. The idea of the double enceinte was not new. The land-walls of Constantinople were built with a double line in the fifth century, and in the eighth the Caliph al-Mansur surrounded his circular city of Baghdad with a double line. But the Hospitallers were the first to apply it to a single castle, though it could only be used for a castle of considerable size.
Defensive weakness of the Castles
Other thirteenth-century improvements were the carefully smooth facing of the curtain walls, to give less hold to grappling-ladders, the wider use of machicolation and of loopholes for archers, which were now usually given a downward slant and sometimes a stirrup-shaped base, and greater complication in the entrance gates. At Krak there was a long covered approach, commanded by loopholes in the side-walls, then three right-angled corners, a portcullis and four separate gates. Posterns were provided at unexpected corners, a device first introduced by the Byzantines.
These huge fortresses, with their solid masonry, superbly situated on crags and mountain-tops, seemed impregnable in the days before gunpowder was known. The terrain usually made the use of ladders impracticable, nor could siege-towers to dominate the walls be brought up unless there was some flat ground outside and no fosse. It was often hard enough for the besiegers to find a close enough site on which to place mangonels or balistas for hurling rocks. The chief technical danger was the mine. Engineers would dig a tunnel under the walls, propping it up as they went with wooden posts, which were eventually set alight with brushwood, causing the tunnel-chamber, and with it the masonry above to collapse. But mining was impossible if the castle was built, like Krak, on solid rock. When a castle fell it was usually for other reasons. In spite of store-rooms and cisterns, famine and thirst were real dangers. The lack of man-power often meant that the defences could not be properly maintained. The kingdom often could not afford to send a relieving force, and that knowledge induced pessimism amongst the garrison. In the full flush of Saladin’s triumphs the great castle of Sahyun, which was reputed to be the strongest of its time, only resisted the Moslems for three days.
The importance of the Crusader castles lies in the sphere of military rather than of aesthetic history. Returning Crusaders brought back to Europe the ideas that had found expression there; and such castles as Richard Coeur-de-Lion’s Château Gaillard introduced them to the Western world. But the castles in the East had their aesthetic value. Their chapels are amongst the best examples of the ecclesiastical architecture of Outremer. Their Great Halls, of which the loveliest is at Krak, are comparable with the best early Gothic halls of western Europe. Their residential quarters, which survive to give us some idea of the palaces of the nobility of Outremer, show delicacy and taste. The chamber of the Grand Master at Krak, high up in the south-west tower of the inner enceinte, with its ribbed vaulting, its slender pilasters and its simple but well carved decorative ornamental frieze of five-petalled flowers, was perhaps more elegant than most rooms in the great fortresses, but it must have been paralleled in the richer castles and palaces in the towns. Its style is the thirteenth-century Gothic of northern France, while the Great Hall has stone tracery that is akin to work at Rheims, in the contemporary Church of Saint Nicholas.
The castles were mainly the work of engineers. The churches were intended to be works of art. When the Crusaders arrived in the East they found an old tradition of building there, suited to the country. Wood was a rare commodity. All that the forests produced was used for shipbuilding and for armaments. The architects therefore had to build without beams. Their roofs were of stone, and were usually flat, so as to provide a terrace in the cool of the evening. Vaulting was generally used to support the roof, and the pointed arch, with its ability to carry heavy weights, was already fashionable. The Syrian builder’s native style was the Byzantine-Arab, which had been perfected under the Ommayad Caliphs, but he was in touch with later Abbasid developments and with Fatimid architecture and its North African influences. He had recently seen Byzantines working on the Holy Places and in Antioch, and there had been an influx of Armenians, skilled craftsmen with their own styles.
The Architecture of the Holy Places
The first church that the Crusaders built in the East was the Cathedral of Saint Paul at Tarsus, which was finished before 1102. It is a coarse inelegant building, in the style of the Romanesque churches of northern France, but with its arches pointed. It is rectangular, with two aisles and a nave lined with alternate piers and columns. The columns come from some ancient building. Their capitals are simple blocks with triangles cut out of the corners, a form of decoration to be found in the Rhineland, but also in Armenia, and here probably made by Armenian workmen. In its crude way it gives a foretaste of later Crusader architecture.
As soon as the colonists were safely settled, their first care was to repair the Holy Places and then to provide their main towns with suitable churches. Of the most sacred shrines the Church of the Nativity at Bethlehem, built by Constantine and repaired by Justinian, was still in good order. The only architectural additions made by the Crusaders were a simple Gothic cloister, erected probably about 1240, and a north and south doorway to the Grotto of the Nativity, built about 1180 in a late Romanesque style with a pointed arch and acanthus-decoration on the capitals which is probably Syrian work. They also built monastic buildings round the church, which have now been destroyed. But the most venerated church of all, that of the Holy Sepulchre at Jerusalem, seemed to them inadequate. After its destruction by the Caliph Hakim, the Byzantines had rebuilt the Rotunda surrounding the tomb itself, but they had flattened the east end and built three apses there. The chapel of St Mary the Virgin had been attached to the north of the Rotunda and the three chapels of Saint John, the Trinity and Saint James to the south. Golgotha had been rebuilt as a separate chapel, as had Saint Helena’s chapel with the grotto of the Invention of the Cross. The buildings were all sumptuously decorated with marbles and mosaics. The Crusaders decided to bring all the buildings together under one roof. The main work was apparently carried out after an earthquake in 1114 and before 1130, though parts were unfinished at the time of Baldwin II’s death in 1131; and the whole new edifice was not consecrated till 15 July 1149, the fiftieth anniversary of the capture of the city. The belfry was added about the year 1175.
The plan of the new building was inevitably affected by the site, which was limited on the, south by the rock of Golgotha and on the east by the drop to the Chapel of Saint Helena, which lay several feet lower than the Rotunda. The Crusaders therefore broke down the east wall of the Byzantine Rotunda, destroying its apses, and replacing the central one by a large arch leading into a new church. This consisted of a choir with a dome on pendentives near the west end, with an aisle and an ambulatory going all round it, and with a curved east end, with three apses. Between the central and the southern apse a stairway led straight down into Saint Helena’s chapel. The south aisle lay against the chapel of Golgotha, which was rebuilt, though the Byzantine mosaics were retained together with the entrance columns. West of Golgotha and between it, the Rotunda and the chapel of Saint John, a new atrium was built, to include the Stone of Anointing and the tombs of Godfrey and King Baldwin I. A doorway, the present main entrance, led from the atrium into a courtyard. Along the north aisle there was an outer aisle, mainly of Byzantine construction, opening on to another courtyard, from which a passage led past the chapel of Saint Mary into the Street of the Patriarch. A third courtyard surrounded the chapel of Saint Helena and was itself surrounded by new buildings erected to house the Augustinian Priors to whom the church was now entrusted.
Churches in Jerusalem
Such of the Crusaders’ work as has survived the sack by the Khwarismians in 1244, the passage of time and the disastrous fire of 1808 shows a kinship to the great Cluniac pilgrimage churches, in particular that of Saint Sernin of Toulouse, which Pope Urban II consecrated immediately after the Council of Clermont. The ambulatory is strongly reminiscent of those of Cluny itself and Saint Sernin. The difference lies in the proportions. The architects of the Holy Sepulchre kept their columns lower and sturdier, to keep them in harmony with those of the Byzantine Rotunda, whose design was probably intended to resist earthquake shocks. The decorative details, except where Byzantine mosaics and capitals were retained, can be compared to many in southern and south-western France. The carvings, particularly the figure-carvings on the lintels, seem mostly to be the work of the school of Toulouse, though they were probably carved locally. In general it seems that the architects and artists of the whole monument were Frenchmen, probably from south-west France, brought up in the Cluniac tradition. The architect of the belfry is known to have been called Jordan, a name usually given to children baptized in the holy river. He was probably born in Palestine.
The Church of the Holy Sepulchre was the only older shrine to which the Crusaders made extensive alterations. They repaired several small chapels, such as that of the Ascension on the Mount of Olives and the tomb of the Virgin at Gethsemane. To the Dome of the Rock, when it became the church of the Templars, they only added decorative marble and iron-work, and the Mosque al-Aqsa was equally untouched, though the foundations were reconditioned to provide stables and store-rooms, and buildings were set up round the mosque to house the Order, while a wing added on the south-west became the favourite residence of the Kings. In most of the towns that they colonized they found churches too badly ruined to be worth repair or else they left them to the indigenous sects that were already in possession. They took over some older monasteries, but on the whole preferred to erect their own buildings. Sometimes they used previous sites and foundations, as with the basilica of Mount Sion; sometimes they slightly changed the orientation of the older site, as with the church at Gethsemane. More often they chose their own sites, or completely rebuilt churches on traditional sites.
Apart from the Templars’ churches, which were circular in shape, the invariable design for a small chapel was a rectangle, with an apse, sometimes included in the outer wall, at the east end. The masonry was solid. A single vault, pointed and cross-ribbed, supported a flat stone roof. Such chapels were built in every castle, even in such desolate fortresses as that on the hill of the Wueira, by the ruins of ancient Petra. Larger churches also were rectangular, with side-aisles running the length of the building, separated from the nave by pillars or piers. There were almost always three apses, usually hidden from the outside in the thickness of the wall. The great Cathedral at Tyre and one or two other churches had short transepts, which made the floor-plan cruciform but had no structural significance. The Cathedral at Tortosa has a diaconicon and a prothesis built out at the south-east and northeast corners. A few churches, such as Saint Anne’s at Jerusalem, and, apparently, the Cathedral at Caesarea, had domes on pendentives over the space before the sanctuary; but the roof was usually flat or barrel-shaped. The side aisles were almost invariably covered by groined vaults. The nave had either a groined vault or one long pointed and ribbed barrel-vault. When the aisles were lower than the rest of the church, there would be windows along the clerestory. Windows, even those at the east end, were small, to keep out the fierce Syrian sunlight. With very few exceptions arches were pointed. Towers were rare. The abbey-church on Mount Thabor had two towers, one on either side of the west entrance, each containing a small apsed chapel at ground level. Belfry towers were sometimes attached to the church, but never as an integral part.
Church Decoration
The decoration of the twelfth-century churches was simple. Columns from ancient buildings were often used. The capitals varied. Some were ancient, some copied from the Byzantine and Arab styles of Corinthian and basket-work, made perhaps by native masons or by Franks who had noticed local designs, and some in the Western Romanesque style. Some churches, such as that at Qariat el-Enab, had frescoes in the Byzantine style, and there were mosaics in the Cenacle on Mount Sion and in the chapel of the Dormition next to it. Byzantine artists may have worked there, as they certainly did at the Nativity at Bethlehem, sent there by the Emperor Manuel along with their materials. But pictorial ornament was rare. Carved decorations round the arches were usually chevron or dog-tooth. Very little figure sculpture has survived. The voussoirs of the arches were often cushioned. Another favourite decoration was a simple rosette.
The general effect of the twelfth-century churches was somewhat heavy, almost squat in comparison with contemporary work in the West. This was due to the need to avoid the use of wood and to guard against earthquake; but the result was usually well-proportioned. The Crusaders undoubtedly brought with them their architects, who were imbued in the styles of France, particularly of Provence and the Toulousain, but they clearly took the advice of local builders. Their use of pointed arches was learned in the East. The first known examples in the West are in two churches built about the year 1115 by Ida of Lorraine, the mother of the first two Frankish rulers of Jerusalem. Her eldest son, Eustace of Boulogne, had recently returned from Palestine. It is difficult not to believe that returning architects popularized the new device in the West, where it was developed to suit local structural needs.
It is impossible to make generalizations about the origins of the various architectural and ornamental detail. The dome of Saint Anne’s at Jerusalem closely resembles the domes that French architects built in Perigord; but the same type of dome, built on pendentives without a drum, could be found in the East. Romanesque carving is so often akin to Byzantine and Armenian carving that clear distinctions cannot easily be made. It is probable that figure-carvings and the more fantastic capitals were the work of Frankish artists, but the traditional designs of the acanthus or the vine-leaf were provided locally. The chevron pattern seems to have travelled southward, even in Europe, from the north; but the dog-tooth was already known in the East. It appears, as does the cushioned voussoir, on the great Fatimid gate, the Bab al-Futuh, at Cairo, which was itself built by Armenian architects from Edessa, a city where the Byzantines had a few decades previously been responsible for much new building.
Mosaics and Frescoes
In the pictorial arts the surviving examples show so strong a Byzantine influence that it seems doubtful whether any Frankish artist worked in the East. The mosaics at Bethlehem were certainly designed and erected by artists from Constantinople, whose names were Basil and Ephrem, though they worked in co-operation with the local Latin authorities. Western as well as Eastern saints are depicted and the inscriptions are in Latin as well as in Greek. The mosaic Christ in the Latin chapel at Calvary is probably their work. The rapidly perishing frescoes at Qariat el-Enab are Byzantine in style, but while the choice of subjects is Eastern, the inscriptions are Latin. There were certainly Greek artists working in Palestine in about 1170 under the Emperor Manuel’s patronage, who were responsible for frescoes at the Orthodox monasteries of Calamon and St Euthymius. No doubt the Latin fathers at Qariat engaged them to decorate their church. The little church at Amioun, not far from Tripoli, is sometimes taken from its architecture to be a Crusader monument; but its dedication to a Greek saint, Phocas, its Greek inscriptions and its Byzantine frescoes show it to have always been an Orthodox shrine. It illustrates the difficulty of a sharp differentiation between local and Frankish styles. Many Frankish churches profited from gifts obtained by their prelates from the Emperor at Constantinople. The great Archbishop William of Tyre tells us that he was given sumptuous presents for his Cathedral by the Emperor Manuel; and the corpse of Bishop Achard of Nazareth, who visited the Imperial city to negotiate Baldwin III’s marriage and died there, came back equally well laden. Throughout the twelfth century, particularly in the time of Manuel, there was frequent intercourse between Outremer and Byzantium, and the Byzantine artistic influence must have been great. It lingered on into the next century. The description given by Wilbrand of Oldenburg of the palace of the Ibelins at Beirut, with its mosaic and its marbles, suggests Byzantine work. The Old Lord, John of Ibelin, who built it, was the son of a Byzantine Princess.
The palace at Beirut was an exception. The thirteenth-century architecture in Outremer kept closer than the twelfth-century to French traditions. With the restriction of Frankish territory to little more than the coastal cities, native workmen and native traditions seem to have played a smaller part. The last important church to be finished before Saladin’s conquests was the Cathedral of the Annunciation at Nazareth. The building was destroyed by Baibars, but the remarkable figure-sculpture that remains is purely French. The great doorway that most of them adorned appears to have closely resembled those of many of the French cathedrals of the time, and the whole building was probably nearer to the French than the previous local style. The chief church to be built in the thirteenth century, that of Saint Andrew at Acre, was a tall and graceful Gothic building. Few traces of it now remain, but the descriptions and drawings of earlier travellers all emphasize its height. Its side-aisles were tall and lit by long, narrow, acutely pointed windows, with a delicate blind arcade running round the outside walls beneath them. We cannot tell how the clerestory or the east end were lit, but over the west door there were three larger windows, and above them three in the form of an mil de boeuf All that now survives of the church is a porch, probably from the west end, which was carried on camel-back to Cairo after the conquest of Acre and set up as an entry to the mosque built in memory of the conquering Sultan, al-Ashraf. Its proportions are tall and delicate. A series of three slender pilasters alternating with two even more slender carries the curve of the arch on each side, and the moulding of the curve corresponds to the pilasters. In the space of the arch there is a trefoil arch, pierced by an oeil de boeuf. The style is the early Gothic of the south of France.
The Psalter of Queen Melisende
The thirteenth-century work at Krak des Chevaliers shows the same taste for greater height. The Grand Master’s airy chamber and the great banqueting hall are both entirely Western in spirit. The latter has a porch whose proportions are very similar to that of Saint Andrew at Acre, though its pilasters are less delicate; but it had an elaborate rose-window in the centre of the arch, where Saint Andrew had an oeil de boeuf.
There are unfortunately very few monuments of the thirteenth century left; but in general the style of Outremer was coming close to the contemporary French Gothic style of Lusignan Cyprus and had moved away from the more indigenous style of the previous century. The surviving work at Nazareth suggests that Crusader art was keeping in touch with the Gothic movement in the West. Saladin’s conquests induced many native craftsmen to throw in their lot with the Moslems. The collapse of Byzantium at the turn of the century inevitably diminished Byzantine influences; and the Third Crusade brought many more Western artists and workmen to the East. At the same time the growing hostility between the Latin and Orthodox churches probably inspired a sharper distinction between their styles.
Only one twelfth-century illuminated manuscript exists which is known to come from Outremer. This is the Psalter known as that of Queen Melisende. It certainly belonged to a woman, and as it mentions the deaths of Baldwin II and of Queen Morphia, but not that of King Fulk, it has been assumed to have belonged to Melisende and to have been written before Fulk’s death. It might, however, equally well have been made for Melisende’s sister, Joveta, Abbess of Bethany; and in that case, as any mention of Fulk would have been irrelevant, it could date from any year during Joveta’s lifetime, that is to say, till about 1180. The text was written by an accomplished Latin scribe and the decorative headpieces seem Latin rather than Byzantine, but the full-page illustrations are Byzantine, in the style of the eastern provinces of the Empire. The signature of a painter called Basil appears; and it is possible that this was the same Basil who was responsible for some of the mosaics at Bethlehem in 1169. The pictures have some resemblance to those in a lectionary in Syria decorated by Joseph of Melitene in the time of a Bishop John, who has been identified with the Bishop that reigned there from 1193 to 1220. It is possible therefore that the artist of the Melisende Psalter was a Syrian trained in a Byzantine school, and it is probable that the work was made for the Abbess Joveta towards the end of her long life.
There is an interesting series of manuscripts, usually considered to be Sicilian work, which modern research proves to have been written at Acre about the time of Saint Louis’s sojourn there, from 1250 to 1254. They are markedly Byzantine in style. Louis had made extensive purchases from the Emperor Baldwin II of Constantinople, and it may be that amongst the objects that he acquired were manuscripts which were sent to him at Acre and inspired the artists working there. It is impossible to say whether the school outlasted the King’s return to France.
Minor Arts
Of the minor arts very little has been preserved; and it is impossible to tell what was made locally and what was imported from the East or from the West. Furniture and objects of daily use came no doubt from workshops on the spot, but most ornamental goods probably came from abroad, from Constantinople or the great Moslem cities, or were brought by visitors from France or Italy. A collection of objects found in the nineteenth century in the foundations of the monastic buildings at Bethlehem included two brass basins which seem to belong to the Mosane school of the twelfth century and which are engraved with a series of pictures illustrating the life of Saint Thomas the Apostle, a pair of silver candlesticks which seem to be Byzantine work of the late twelfth century, another pair of candlesticks of Limoges enamel of the late twelfth century, and a larger candlestick and a crozier-head of Limoges enamel of the thirteenth century. The iron grill set up by the Crusaders in the Dome of the Rock may be local work but strongly resembles the Romanesque iron work of France.
The iron candelabra used in the churches were probably made on the spot but follow the usual designs of western Europe. No identifiable pottery or glass has survived. Coins and seals were made locally. The former were intended for use in the East and therefore followed local Moslem patterns, even having inscriptions in Arabic. The seals of the twelfth century are simple and crude, but those of the thirteenth century are more graceful and elaborate. A reliquary of crystal set in a stirrup-shaped and jewel-encrusted piece of silver and containing an inner case of carved wood, now preserved at Jerusalem, may be indigenous, though the crystal and silver work probably came from Central Europe. Of ivory-work there are the two delicately carved plaques that serve as covers for the Psalter of Queen Melisende. The one has medallions giving the story of David, with the Psychomachia in the corners, the other the Works of Mercy, with fantastic animals in the corners. The iconography is Western rather than Byzantine, though the royal costumes are Byzantine, the animals Moorish and the decoration Armenian in inspiration. It seems unlikely that there should have been any ivory-worker of such a high calibre living in Jerusalem. The plaques were probably a gift from elsewhere.
The slightness of the evidence should not be interpreted to mean that little was done. If architecture flourished, it is likely that the other arts flourished also, and gave the same reflection of life in Outremer. The eclectic architecture of the twelfth century is that of colonists that were ready to fit themselves into the land to which they had come, though they were continually reinforced from the West. But the disasters at the end of the century ended the old balance. In the thirteenth century few of the older great families of Outremer survived. Their place was taken by the Military Orders, who were mainly recruited in the West and had little feeling for local traditions. In the cities the native elements were now set apart. Acre looked westward. Wealth was in the hands of the Italians and power usually in the hands of potentates from the West or their deputies. More and more of the nobility retired to Cyprus, where a new Gothic civilization was arising. A few echoes from Byzantium and the East were still heard, but they were growing faint. Byzantium was in eclipse. The older Arab culture was extinguished by the Mongols, and the newer culture of Mameluk Egypt was aggressively hostile. In Antioch the synthesis may have been continued, but pillage, earthquake and decay have destroyed all the evidence. Further south the attempt of Outremer to build its own characteristic style was ruined on the field of Hattin. The modest, sturdy work of twelfth-century Outremer was a prelude that led to nothing. Thirteenth-century Outremer was only a distant province of the Mediterranean Gothic world.