A History of the Crusades

by Jonathan Riley-Smith

  It was a bold choice to decorate the holy site of Nazareth primarily in monumental sculpture, remembering of course that the sculpture was no doubt intended to be painted. It was a choice apparently made to give Nazareth a distinctive identity in contrast to the more heavily Byzantine-influenced projects at Jerusalem and Bethlehem. Finally, it was a choice that indicated a new level of maturity and development within the realm of crusader artistic activity: combining a distinctively western medium with eastern stylistic influence and iconographic elements in the service of a programme specially attuned to a unique holy site. Previously the most important achievements in crusader art were to be found in painting—both miniature and monumental—and architecture. In the 1170s and 1180s, however, figural sculpture becomes the newly prominent medium.

  Following the death of King Amalric in 1174, the fortunes of the Latin East declined precipitously. King Baldwin IV valiantly attempted to fend off Saladin, but he succumbed in 1185 to leprosy. His successor, Baldwin V, reigned for less than two years before he died, at the age of 8. Sculptors from the Templar workshop prepared the most elaborately decorated of all royal tombs for the boy king in 1186–7. Others worked on a project to rebuild and decorate the Coenaculum, the site of the Last Supper, in the church of St Mary on Mount Sion. This important site is one of the last crusader projects before the fall of Jerusalem, and one of the few which reflects some authentic Gothic influence on the otherwise Levantine–Romanesque configuration of twelfth-century crusader art.

  Following their catastrophic defeat at the Horns of Hattin on 4 July 1187, the Frankish settlers lost Jerusalem on 2 October 1187. The Latin East, and crusader art, was dealt a severe, almost fatal, blow by Saladin, not only because of the loss of land and resources, but also by the destruction and dispersals. When Jerusalem was taken, Imad ad Din, a Muslim chronicler wrote: ‘Jerusalem was purified of the filth of the hellish Franks.’

  In order for the Frankish settlements to continue, political, ecclesiastical, and commercial viability and stability had to be re-established. The Third Crusade at least partly restored the Latin kingdom and a major new component was added to the Latin East with the conquest of Cyprus in 1191 by Richard I of England, but the major holy sites were not regained.

  Crusader art continued after 1187, especially after the retaking of Acre in 1191, but its circumstances and context were fundamentally changed. The sites of its production were altered dramatically: the ports of Acre and Tyre were now the main cities because there was no longer a focus on the holy places inland. All of the major patrons had relocated: the patriarch of Jerusalem, the Hospitallers, and the Templars were headquartered in Acre, and the king no longer necessarily resided in the Latin kingdom: he sometimes lived on Cyprus. Patronage expanded, becoming less exclusively aristocratic and ecclesiastical, and more bourgeois: the king and patriarch were joined by merchants and soldiers from commercial towns and ports along the coast. Thus while the religious function of some crusader art continued for liturgical and devotional use, new non-religious, secular purposes emerged. Crusader art becomes less distinctively tied to its roots in the Latin East, to the Holy Land specifically, and becomes more a part of the commercial and artistic ‘lingua franca’ of the Mediterranean world in the thirteenth century.

  Some slender threads of continuity were apparently maintained from twelfth-century developments. Manuscript painting was produced by scriptoria in Acre and possibly Antioch in the 1190s. A missal now in Naples was probably done by a south Italian artist working in Acre in the tradition of the scriptorium of the Holy Sepulchre. A monumental bible, now in San Danieli del Friuli, shows exquisite and distinctive Byzantine, Armenian, and even Syrian-influenced style and iconography in a series of historiated initials unlike anything from Jerusalem or the West. The possibility exists that the unique features of this artist can be explained in the context of Antioch, despite the absence of comparable examples from this period.

  Because the holy sites remained in Muslim hands after the Third Crusade, Pope Innocent III sent another crusade to the East in 1202. As we have seen, it was diverted to Constantinople and a third Latin enclave came into being in the Near East after 1204. The Latin empire, consisting of Constantinople and Frankish Greece, generated much castle building, but little painting or sculpture survives on the churches. Whether there was manuscript illumination and icon painting remains an open question, but one major fresco cycle with images of St Francis is extant in a Constantinopolitan chapel of the Kalenderhane Camii, dating from c .1250. Enormous booty from the sack of Constantinople by the Fourth Crusade, especially in the form of reliquaries and other goldsmiths’ work, sent back to Europe, partly compensated for the interruption of the flow of pilgrims’ souvenirs from Jerusalem after 1187. Despite the ransom paid by Louis IX for the relics of the Crown of Thorns in the 1240s, however, there is little evidence that a thriving Frankish metalwork industry developed in the Latin empire before its demise.

  In the Latin kingdom, the need for castle building remained a top priority even while truces between Franks and Muslims kept the precarious peace. The Hospitallers enlarged and strengthened their great castle at Crac des Chevaliers, perhaps shortly after an earthquake of 1202: the entire system of outer walls and towers was added at this time and, in addition, the main chapel was redone with a new south entrance and a fresco of the Presentation in the Temple was executed for an external chapel on its north side. The paintings at Crac and in the castle chapel of Margat, done in the 1200s, are important because they demonstrate that the military orders and especially the Hospitallers sponsored figural arts for their soldiers. Farther south, the Templars built Chastel Pèlerin in the winter of 1217–18, with manpower made available from a crusading expedition led by Andrew II of Hungary and Leopold VI of Austria. A remarkable round church, now in ruins, is one of the most distinctive architectural components of this castle, but the only figural decorations to survive are three sensitively carved heads in Gothic style on corbels from the great hall. Finally, the castle of Montfort was built in the hills west-north-west of Acre at the time of Frederick II’s crusade in the late 1220s, to be the headquarters of the Teutonic Knights. Montfort was one of the earliest crusader castles to be excavated; a variety of objects was found on the site, including small-scale figural sculpture, largescale foliate sculpture on bosses for vaulting systems, and fragments of glass for stained-glass windows.

  After 1204, a variety of expeditions set out to aid the Holy Land. Of these, ironically it was only Frederick II who, although excommunicated twice in the process, managed to regain the holy sites, not by conquest, but by diplomacy. In February 1229 he signed a treaty with Sultan al-Kamil by which Christians reoccupied the holy places of Jerusalem, Bethlehem, Lydda, and Nazareth, but no new building or other significant artistic activity was apparently allowed at these sites under the terms of the agreement.

  Very little important art associated with the Latin kingdom from the late 1220s to the early 1240s is known. Manuscript illumination apparently continued with the production of the Riccardiana Psalter and a sacramentary now in the British Library; the Pontifical of Apamea was also executed, but received no figural decoration. Significant relics, presumably in suitable reliquaries made in the Latin kingdom, possibly in Jerusalem, were received in England from the Holy Land in the 1230s and 1240s at Bromholm and Westminster. Philip of Aubigny had his tombstone inscribed, decorated, and placed just outside the main entrance to the church of the Holy Sepulchre in 1236, the last known crusader burial at this holy place.

  When the truce of 1229 expired, hostilities resumed and in August 1244 the Khorezmian Turks overran and sacked Jerusalem. Only Bethlehem and Nazareth among the major holy places remained open to Christians thereafter. In the wake of this disaster, King Louis IX came to the aid of the Holy Land in 1248. When his attack on Egypt failed, he went to the Latin kingdom where he resided for four years, rebuilding fortifications at Acre, Caesarea, and Jaffa, and building a new castle at Sidon. Louis had a s
trongly reinvigorating impact on the kingdom religiously and artistically. Religiously, the king manifested his exemplary devotion by his symbolic visit to the holy site of Nazareth in 1251, restating the centrality of these places to European Christianity. Artistically, Louis is apparently responsible for breathing new life into crusader painting at Acre.

  Two major manuscripts produced at Acre during Louis’s sojourn redefined what crusader painting would look like in the second half of the thirteenth century. The Arsenal Bible was a selection of Old Testament texts translated into Old French, assembled with a royal programme of frontispiece decoration. These panel miniatures established strong links to the Sainte-Chapelle in Paris, highlighted ideals of kingship in the Holy Land, and celebrated the strong women of the Old Testament, possibly as parallels to Louis’s intrepid wife, Margaret, who accompanied him on crusade and ransomed him from prison in Egypt. In style the Arsenal Bible is a distinctive blend of Gothic stained-glass ornamental motifs and Byzantine-influenced form executed by a crusader artist trained in the Franco-Italian tradition. It is closely comparable to aspects of the St Francis frescos done in Constantinople.

  The same Franco-Italian formal characteristics under strong Byzantine influence are found in the second of the Acre manuscripts, the Perugia Missal. This manuscript is significant because its style parallels that found in the Arsenal Bible and is closely comparable to icon painting now extant in works preserved in St Catherine’s monastery on Mount Sinai: compare the Crucifixion in the manuscript to an icon of the Crucifixion on Sinai with very similar stylistic and iconographical features. Furthermore, the Perugia Missal calendar preserves an entry commemorating the Dedicatio ecclesie Acconensis on 12 July, explicit evidence that this codex was written and decorated by a crusader artist in Acre c .1250.

  The appearance of icon painting as an important new medium of crusader art is most apparent between 1250 and 1291. Whereas icons painted for Frankish patrons already existed in the twelfth century, it is from the second half of the thirteenth century that the greater number survive, almost all in the monastery of St Catherine’s, Mount Sinai. Among all crusader painting, these icons are the most problematic in terms of determining the artist’s background, place of execution, patron, and function, but they also provide us with some of the most outstanding crusader work of the period. A bilateral icon with the Crucifixion on one side and the Anastasis on the other is such an example. Probably done by an artist of Venetian background, the iconography is a combination of Byzantine and Frankish elements, the inscriptions are large, handsomely designed Latin texts, and the expressive style with strong linear proclivities is close to the Byzantine model it was copying.

  Some crusader icons show the hands of several different painters. A triptych also now at St Catherine’s has an enthroned Virgin and Child flanked by angels as the central interior image, combined with an unusual set of four scenes of the life of Christ reflecting the joys and sorrows of the Virgin, on the interior of the two wings. The style of the life-of-Christ scenes is clearly very closely associated with the Arsenal Bible miniatures, whereas the enthroned Virgin and Child was done by a crusader painter in the manner of Italian thirteenth-century painting under the influence of Byzantine icons.

  The Virgin and Child image of the triptych forms a point of reference for one of the greatest problems of crusader art after 1250. How does the variety of crusader painting relate to Byzantine (Constantinopolitan and provincial), Armenian, Italian (Maniera Greca), and Cypriot (Maniera Cypria) art of this period, as well as the art of the ‘lingua franca’, that is, painting thoroughly Byzantine-influenced, but clearly non-Byzantine in origin, for which a specific place of execution, a particular artistic context, and a patron cannot be identified? The Virgin and Child of the triptych, for example, is clearly crusader in its admixture of artistic components and is probably from Acre, whereas the Kahn Madonna in the National Gallery of Art in Washington, DC, has been proposed to be Constantinopolitan and is essentially purely Byzantine, while the Pushkin Madonna in Moscow is identified as art of the Maniera Greca and said to be from Pisa. Against these important examples of the 1250s and 1260s, the famous Mellon Madonna in the National Gallery in Washington, DC, appears to be a work of the ‘lingua franca’. Where was it done, for whom, and for what purpose?

  Despite this difficult problem, much progress has been made in the study of crusader icons, revealing a previously unimagined diversity of origins. Besides icons attributed to Acre on stylistic grounds and to Sinai based on site-specific iconography in the period 1250–91, we also have crusader icons for which attributions have been proposed to Lydda (an icon of St George, now in the British Museum), Resafa (an icon of St Sergius, now on Sinai), and to the Qadisha Valley region near Tripoli (St Marina, now in the Menil Collection, Houston). Other problematic icons, such as various Virgin and Child Hodegetria icons now in St Catherine’s, may shed important light on contemporary developments on Cyprus.

  After Louis IX returned to France in 1254, Frankish power declined steadily in the face of relentless Mamluk conquests. In these dangerous times, it is remarkable that artistic activity continued at Acre, and indeed a new secular art developed. Cut off from their Christian confrères inland and growing more and more isolated, the settlers increasingly relied on artists who came from the West. The last major crusader artist so far identified was a manuscript illuminator who came from Paris after 1276 and worked in Acre during the last decade of its existence. Heading a large and productive workshop, the Hospitaller Master produced a wide variety of illustrated books, mostly secular, for members of the Order of St John and others. His output included illustrated codices of the History of Outremer by William of Tyre, the Histoire Universelle, the Livre de César, and even the Livre des Assises by John of Ibelin, all in the vernacular, Old French. His style was purely French Gothic of the 1270s, to which the eastern ambience contributed new aspects of colour and iconography. His last manuscript cycle remained unfinished and his hand has not been found elsewhere; we may wonder whether he died during the final siege of Acre in May 1291.

  Of those Frankish settlers who survived the siege of Acre, some relocated on Cyprus where the Hospitallers and Templars briefly established their headquarters. Frankish culture in the eastern Mediterranean lived on in Lusignan Cyprus, Frankish Greece, and after 1309 on the island of Rhodes. But the multicultural, cosmopolitan crusader art that had characterized the settlements on the Syrian and Palestinian coast, and especially the Latin kingdom of Jerusalem, was never equalled by the developments in these more provincial circumstances in quality and quantity, or richness and diversity. The Latin Orient lived on in markedly changed circumstances after 1291, but crusader art did not.

  Crusader art developed in all media during the twelfth century, but flourished in the thirteenth mainly through architecture and painting. After 1187 it was still strongly Byzantineinfluenced with occasional Syrian and Armenian aspects that combined with important western European components, especially French and Italian traditions, to produce a distinctive multicultural regional phenomenon. While crusader art participated in the artistic ‘lingua franca’ of the Mediterranean world, it did not lose its identity. Although certain features of crusader art—and certain crusader artists—appeared to be strongly colonial from time to time, it was not a colonial art.

  The development of crusader art was markedly less coherent between 1187 and 1250 than earlier, but the re-establishment of a centre of crusader painting in Acre between 1250 and 1291 gave new focus and vitality to the enterprise. Whereas crusader art in the twelfth century had drawn its function and inspiration directly from the religious and political importance of the holy sites in Jerusalem, Bethlehem, and Nazareth, after 1250, indeed after 1187, the pilgrimage aspect declined sharply. In the thirteenth century, crusader art became an art of the remarkably prosperous commercial port cities, especially Acre. The fact that so little of this art survives is testimony to the policy of destruction and ‘cleansing’ of the Frankis
h presence in Muslim-held territory. Christian holy places were tolerated after 1291, but at Nazareth and elsewhere the stipulation was that ‘stone shall not be set upon stone to rebuild the church’.

  Ultimately the crusades failed to realize the goals which Urban had enunciated at Clermont in 1095. Yet collectively the crusaders produced art that was magnificent and complex, and this accomplishment, at least, lives on to this day.

  8

  Architecture in the Latin East

  1098–1571

  DENYS PRINGLE

  ALMOST five centuries of architectural development, from Romanesque to Renaissance, are represented in the buildings of the Latin settlers on the Levantine mainland and in Cyprus. In view of the mixed cultural background of the incomers and the diversity of local cultures and building traditions that they encountered in the East, what is perhaps most striking is that there do seem to have emerged styles that were both coherent and distinctive. One contributory factor may have been the materials available for building.

  Stone was the traditional building material in the Middle Ages throughout the Levant. Limestone and sandstone were readily available, and basalt in the Jabal Druze (south of Damascus), eastern Galilee, and the Homs Gap. Chalk and limestone also produced lime for mortar and plaster. Quarries were often located near building sites, though finer freestone might sometimes be transported several kilometres. At Belvoir in Galilee (1168–87), for example, while most of the castle was built from local basalt quarried from the surrounding ditch, the chapel was built of a fine white limestone brought from Little Mount Hermon, some 15 km. away.