A History of the Crusades (25 page)

The church architecture of the military orders deserves special mention. Although in the West a number of surviving Templar and Hospitaller churches and chapels have circular or polygonal plans, apparently imitating the rotunda of the Holy Sepulchre (or in the Templars’ case arguably that of the Templum Domini), in the Latin East their churches were more often conventionally rectangular. Such, for example, are the Hospitallers’ castle chapels at Crac des Chevaliers, Margat, and Belvoir, and their churches at Bait Jibrin, the German hospital in Jerusalem (St Mary of the Germans), and Abu Ghosh (Castellum Emmaus). The latter was built around 1140 to commemorate Christ’s resurrection appearance on the road to Emmaus; appropriately enough, it was associated with a roadstation serving a twelfth-century pilgrimage route. Similarly, the Templars’ castle chapels at Tortosa and Chastel Blanc (Safitha) were rectangular, the latter taking the form of a keep or
donjon
; but the chapel built at Chastel Pèlerin (‘Atlit) sometime after 1218 was twelve-sided and that at Safad (1240–60) was also possibly polygonal.

In addition to religious buildings, the Latin settlers constructed a range of secular works throughout the period of their occupation of the Levant. Apart from castles, these have received relatively little scholarly attention, partly because many of them fall into the class of civil engineering rather than architecture, and partly because the lack of diagnostic architectural traits, such as sculpture or masonry marks, means that it is often difficult to be sure whether a given structure is Frankish or Muslim.

Most of the towns and cities of the Latin East had existed before the crusader conquest, and the same is true of their town walls. Consequently there is scant mention of building work on walls in the twelfth century. After 1187, however, when
Frankish control was reduced to a thin coastal strip, much greater effort went into strengthening the defences of towns such as Ascalon, Beirut, Tyre, Sidon, Acre, Caesarea, Jaffa, and Tortosa, often with direct assistance from the West.

For their water supply, most towns relied on cisterns and wells, though in the case of Tyre, Antioch, Caesarea and Jerusalem, these were supplemented by ancient aqueducts. Covered markets of the twelfth century survive in Jerusalem, where some of the shop fronts bear the letters
SCA ANNA
, showing that they belonged to the abbey of St Anne. In Acre part of the royal customs house, or
Chaine
, survives in the Ottoman Khan al-‘Umdan. Crusader harbour works, incorporating those of the Abbasid and Fatimid periods, survive at Sidon, Tyre, Caesarea, Arsuf, and Acre; and a thirteenth-century bath-house has been excavated in the town adjoining the Templar castle of Chastel Pèlerin.

Documentary and archaeological evidence suggest the existence of two different types of urban house. The oriental type, closed to the outside street and with its main rooms opening on to a central courtyard, containing a cistern to catch the rain from the roofs, is attested by written sources in Jerusalem, and by excavated examples at Caesarea. The latter were apparently built in the eleventh century, but were extended and kept in use by the Frankish newcomers in the twelfth. The second type of house is similar to those found in the West in areas bordering the Mediterranean, with shops, magazines, or a
loggia
opening on to the street at ground level and several floors of domestic apartments, or ‘solars’, above. Examples are recorded in Jerusalem, Acre, Caesarea, and Nablus.

Although in most cases the inhabitants of the cities built upon an infrastructure existing from before the conquest, some new foundations also occurred. In Acre, the new suburb of Montmusard was formally laid out and walled by 1212, increasing the size of the city by half as much again. The walled faubourg attached to the Templars’ Chastel Pèlerin was probably built and occupied between the 1220s and 1265, when it was sacked by Baybars. We also find Frankish ‘new towns’, which although primarily agricultural had burgess courts and
specialist tradesmen among their inhabitants, indicating that they were in effect towns in the making. At al-Qubaiba (Parva Mahumeria), al-Bira (Magna Mahumeria), and al-Zib (Casal Imbert), the settlements had regular plans, with houses laid out end-on to a main street and with burgage plots running back from them. At al-Shaubak (Montreal) in Transjordan and Mi‘iliya (Castrum Regis) in Galilee, however, the settlements were set within the encircling walls of a royal castle.

In the countryside a range of secular building types is represented in the archaeological record. Functionally they may be categorized as follows: castles, held by major lords or military orders; small castles or semi-fortified manor houses—the equivalent of the French ‘maison forte’, or the English ‘moated manorhouse’—held by lesser lords, knights, or sergeants; estate centres or court buildings (
curiae
), occupied by estate officials, stewards, or village headmen; and the ordinary village houses of Franks and indigenous inhabitants. To relate these categories to the surviving buildings, however, is not easy, since many of them are ruinous and undocumented.

Few village houses survive, though some have been partially excavated. The more solidly built structures in the ‘new town’ of al-Qubaiba have an urban character, with workshops on the ground floors, and domestic accommodation above. A handful of hall-houses are known, good examples being those at Khirbat al-Burj, Kidna, and Bait ‘Itab. The latter was originally a free-standing two-storey building, 13.3 by 29 m., with a door defended by a slit-machicolation and a stair within the wall leading up to the hall on the first floor. In a secondary phase, it was incorporated into a courtyard building, consisting of four ranges set around a central courtyard, with an entrance on the south. The hall was now approached directly from the courtyard by means of an external staircase. In 1161, Bait ‘Itab was sold to the Holy Sepulchre by the knight John Gothman in order to pay his ransom from the Muslims. It seems likely therefore that the hall had formed the centre of his lordship.

A number of other such courtyard buildings are known. Some of them also probably represented the centres of lordships. But one, established on the village lands of Aqua Bella,
west of Jerusalem, appears to have been an ecclesiastical building, quite possibly an infirmary belonging to the Hospitallers, who owned the village in the 1160s. Another, which developed around a tower at al-Ram (Rama, Ramatha), north of Jerusalem, may be identified as the courthouse of the Holy Sepulchre’s steward, at which the inhabitants of the ‘new town’ were obliged to pay their rents. The general form of a building is therefore not always a reliable indicator of a particular function, especially when little survives.

Castles representing the centres of lordships would have had broadly similar functions to some hall-houses and courtyard buildings; the principal difference lay in their degree of defensibility. Indeed some castles seem to have developed from unfortified or semi-fortified structures. In those of St Elias (al-Taiyiba) and Belmont (Suba), for example, north-east and west of Jerusalem respectively, an original inner ward, consisting of a courtyard building with minimal provision for active defence, was later surrounded by a polygonal outer enceinte with a sloping talus, following the contours of the site.

More obviously defensible structures were towers, of which over seventy-five have been documented in the kingdom of Jerusalem alone, some apparently isolated, some surrounded by an enclosure wall; others developed in time into fully fledged castles, as at Tripoli, Latrun, Mirabel (Majdal Yaba), and Beaufort (Qal‘at al-Shaqif Arnun). Many towers, however, also seem to have had a domestic purpose. This is particularly obvious in the case of the larger ones, such as the bishop’s tower at Bethlehem, the stewards’ towers at al-Ram and al-Bira, and those in the castles of ‘Ibillin, Qal‘at Jiddin, Qaqun, Madd al-Dair, Burj al-Ahmar, and ‘Umm al-Taiyiba. Indeed, not only is the general layout of these towers similar to that of a hall-house, comprising a living area above a vaulted basement and below a flat terrace roof, but analysis of their internal areas shows that they were often of comparable size. Smaller towers (i.e. below 60–70 m.2 internally) may have served a broader range of functions, for example as refuges and lookout posts. But even a relatively small tower like that at Jaba‘, which was sold to the abbey of St Mary of Mount Sion by the knight Amalric of
Franclieu (X
oruit
1171–9), had a solar chamber on its first floor.

Other castles appear to have been conceived from the start with military rather than domestic considerations in mind. Examples include the four-towered castles which William of Tyre describes being built to encircle Ascalon in the 1130s and 1140s: Blanchegarde (Tall al-Safi), Ibelin (Yibna), Bait Jibrin, and possibly Gaza. In 1136 Bait Jibrin was granted to the Hospitallers. Its garrison would therefore presumably have consisted of a group of knights living in community, with a dormitory, refectory, kitchens, chapel, and other claustral buildings set around the central courtyard. A similar type of plan is found in the Hospitallers’ later castle of Belvoir, built from 1168 onwards, where the four-towered inner ward had a fifth tower containing a bent entrance added to it, and an outer ward containing service buildings and accommodation for the lay members of the garrison. However, such castles were not peculiar to the military orders, for Blanchegarde and Ibelin were granted to secular owners, and Darum (Dair al-Balah) and Mi‘iliya (Castrum Regis), both of which existed by 1160, were royal castles. It may be assumed that these would have contained a hall, chambers, chapel, and kitchen for the lord or castellan. The castles of Montfort (Qal‘at Qurain) and Jiddin (Judyn), which the Teutonic Order built in Galilee in the early thirteenth century to a typical Rhineland castle plan, with a principal tower and adjoining accommodation block enclosed by a high curtain wall, also demonstrate that in castle planning the military orders were accustomed to adapting secular castle types to their own needs.

During the twelfth and thirteenth centuries, a number of advances were made in the art of fortification in the Latin East. They included the development of more sophisticated gateways, defended by elaborate combinations of gates, portcullises, and murder-holes, often, as at Belvoir, Tyre, Sahyun, Tortosa, Jerusalem, and Caesarea, with an indirect or bent approach. Curtain walls were constructed with rows of arrow-slits at different levels, and with projecting machicolations at the wall-head to prevent attackers approaching their base. The most
significant advances, however, concerned the proliferation of outworks, designed to keep the enemy and his siege towers and stone-hurling artillery at a safe distance from the main walls. Similar developments were also taking place in western Europe, though they lagged behind the East, where the Franks had already encountered ‘concentric’ planning when they first laid siege to places such as Jerusalem (1099), Acre (1103), Tyre (1124), and Ascalon (1153). In castles, concentric planning occurs at Belvoir and Belmont before 1187, and at Darum by 1192. Some of the more spectacular concentric-plan castles, however, achieved their final form only in the thirteenth century. They include Hospitaller Crac des Chevaliers and Margat, and Templar Chastel Pèlerin and Tortosa, the latter of which were never taken by assault.

Remains of other structures from the period of Latin occupation may still be found in the countryside; they include horizontal water-mills and dams, cisterns, bridges, roads, stables, kitchens, and industrial installations producing sugar, salt, olive-oil, wine, iron, glass, and lime.

Cilicia was settled by increasing numbers of displaced Armenians from the mid-eleventh century onwards, under the aegis of the Byzantine emperor. In January 1199, the Rubenid Baron Leo united his dynasty with the rival pro-Byzantine Het‘umids and had himself crowned king. Although the kingdom lasted until 1375, culturally it remained very mixed. A former Byzantine province already partly settled by Turks, from 1097 Cilicia’s southern and eastern coastal areas were also colonized by Franks; and from the 1190s onwards, the Venetians, the Genoese, and the military orders were also granted concessions. Although King Het‘um I was able to reach an accommodation with the Mongols in the 1240s, it was the Mamluks of Egypt who were to represent the greatest threat, and who were finally to extinguish the kingdom in 1375.

The turbulent history and cultural diversity of Cilician Armenia is reflected in its architecture. The structures that have
left the most obvious imprint on the landscape are the fortresses. However, the dating and cultural attribution of these have only recently been put on a sound footing, thanks to the work of Robert Edwards. Among the features that distinguish Armenian work are: irregular planning, following contours of the site, often with a succession of baileys, one below the other; the rounding of external angles and use of rounded or horseshoe-shaped towers; the splaying of the base of the wall; the lack of keeps or
donjons
; battlements with rounded-topped merlons, divided into sections by interposed towers; a lack of ditches; gates having an indirect approach to them, and wingdoors with a draw-bar, preceded by a slit-machicolation; gatehouses containing either a bent entrance or two gates separated by a vaulted passage with murder holes; embrasured or casemated loopholes with stirrup bases and rounded heads cut from a single stone; and a preference for pointed arches and vaults. Most castles also contain a chapel and a cistern.

Although it has often been assumed that most of the Cilician castles date to the period after Leo I was crowned king, it now appears that a good number date from the preceding period when the rival Het‘umids and Rubenids were establishing themselves in the region. Many castles contain work of various periods. At Anavarza, for example, the castle predates the First Crusade, whose participants added to it by constructing a
donjon
on part of the site; the final Armenian phase is represented by modifications subsequently made to it, which are dated by an inscription to 1187–8. The island castle of Korykos was a Byzantine work of the early twelfth century, which Leo I and Het‘um I repaired. Other castles, such as Baghras and Silifke, appear to be essentially Frankish works.