A History of the Crusades (22 page)

The most outstanding project of the 1140s was, of course, the rebuilding of the church of the Holy Sepulchre. Chroniclers say remarkably little about the church—pilgrimage church, patriarchal cathedral, and state church of the Latin kingdom— but it was dedicated on 15 July 1149, fifty years after the crusader conquest of Jerusalem, and shortly after the leaders of the ill-fated Second Crusade had returned home to Europe.

The plan to rebuild the Byzantine church had apparently evolved in the early 1130s after the coronation ceremonies were moved from Bethlehem to Jerusalem; the main work was carried out in the 1140s. The programme was impressive; as we will see in
Chapter 8
the holy sites were reorganized within the context of a unified architectural complex anchored by the aedicule of the Holy Sepulchre, the hill of Calvary, and the Prison of Christ. For this purpose a western pilgrimage-road
church plan for the crossing, choir, and ambulatory with radiating chapels was introduced to integrate the pre-existing rotunda into a single building with two domes, a bell tower, and a magnificent new southern main entrance. Major decorative programmes of figural and non-figural capitals were introduced on the interior and exterior. The entire interior of the church and the Calvary chapels were given a vast programme of mosaics of which only one image of Christ survives; the Anastasis mosaic in the eastern apse now lost is at least reflected in the design of the seal of Patriarch Amalric of Nesle (1157–80). The south transept façade was resplendent with mosaic imagery of the
Noli Me Tangere
and handsome carved lintels, the latter deriving from Italian sources. Over the left door, a series of scenes illustrated the life of Christ as related to holy sites located in and around Jerusalem. Over the right door, a vine-scroll lintel evoked the
arbor vitae
under what may have been an image of the Crucifixion in the tympanum above. Overall the architectural and decorative programme of the Holy Sepulchre was rich and varied, a magnificent statement of the amalgamation of East and West in this unique crusader project. As the culmination of a long undertaking to decorate this most important holy site—a project probably not fully finished until well into the 1150s—the crusader church of the Holy Sepulchre set a high standard for schemes at Bethlehem and Nazareth yet to come.

Whatever Melisende’s role in the rebuilding of the church of the Holy Sepulchre, she abruptly dropped out of public prominence following Baldwin III’s forceful accession to power in 1152. The only subsequent project with which she can be associated is her handsome tomb, located in the Valley of Jehoshaphat, just inside the entrance of the Tomb of the Virgin. That she was a remarkable woman is reflected in the eulogistic verbal portrait accorded her by William of Tyre.

Baldwin III began his reign by introducing a new royal coinage identified with an image of the Tower of David, that is the citadel of Jerusalem where he had wrested power away from his mother. He followed this with a great military victory in 1153, the conquest of Ascalon, which had remained in Fatimid
hands since 1099. Meanwhile both the military orders of the Knights Templar and the Knights Hospitallers were beginning to take a major role in the defence of the Latin East. During this period of relative prosperity and stability, churches in honour of St John the Baptist were erected at Ramla, Gaza, and Sabastiya. The cathedral at Sabastiya, which contained the tomb of St John, was the first major Latin church in the East to receive a programme of historiated capitals on its façade, in a manner similar to many French churches: this church is unusual because of its direct architectural ties to the cathedral of Sens. In fact most Latin churches were built in a distinctively Levantine–Romanesque style, with broad pointed arches, flat roofs, and often a dome over the crossing.

Baldwin III was not known for his artistic patronage, but his younger brother, Amalric, was. Shortly after his accession to power in 1163, Amalric sought to forge a new alliance with the Byzantines against the Fatimids in Egypt. With this end in mind, he introduced a new coin type which emphasized the Byzantine Anastasis rotunda in the church of the Holy Sepulchre, ordered that his regalia be designed along Byzantine lines, and married a Byzantine princess, Maria, in 1167. His most important artistic commission was also an important act of political statecraft and ecclesiastical diplomacy. Between 1167 and 1169 Amalric joined Emperor Manuel Comnenus and Bishop Ralph of Bethlehem in sponsoring a complete redecoration of the church of the Nativity.

The unique programme of mosaics and fresco painting carried out at Bethlehem was a joint project in which Orthodox and crusader traditions were brought together in terms of patrons, artists, and goals, with fruitful artistic results. A bilingual inscription in Latin and Greek on the south wall of the bema (sanctuary) of the church, now very fragmentary, recorded the commission. The Latin praised King Amalric as a ‘generous friend, comrade of honour, and foe of impiety’, Emperor Manuel as ‘generous donor and pious ruler’, and Ralph as ‘generous… worthy of the bishop’s throne’. The Greek version referred to the three donors and identified Ephraim as the mosaicist who finished this task in the year 1169.

The programme was enormous, on a scale with the interior of the church of the Holy Sepulchre. Mosaics of the Virgin and Child, feast scenes of the life of Christ, and the Nativity—all strongly Byzantine in style and iconography—were located in the apse, transepts, and grotto respectively. Down the nave there were images of the Seven Oecumenical Councils of the Church (south wall) and six provincial councils (north wall). Between the clerestory windows, striding angels progressed towards the apse; below the councils there were bust-length portraits of the ancestors of Christ. On the interior west wall there was a large image of the Tree of Jesse. On the columns of the nave below, additional devotional icons of eastern and western saints were added in fresco to complement the images previously painted.

This project was a milestone in crusader artistic development because many artists from a variety of backgrounds took part. Basilius, mosaicist of the angels in the nave, was Syrian Orthodox. A Venetian artist named Zan, that is John, appears to have worked in the south transept. Ephraim, a Greek Orthodox monk and mosaicist, seems to have overseen the work. Thus, for a major programme of monumental painting at one of the holiest sites in Christendom, we find a multicultural team of artists working together under joint Frankish– Byzantine sponsorship. The integration of eastern and western elements of style and iconography by a number of artists from different traditions is therefore quite reminiscent of the Melisende Psalter, but occurs here on a much larger scale. Here the heavily Byzantine-influenced medium of mosaics and the Greek of most council texts combine with Syrian Orthodox content in the council texts, and strong crusader elements—such as the Tree of Jesse, the use of bilingual inscriptions, Latin for the text in the image of the Seventh Oecumenical Council, and the very idea of an inscription to identify patrons and artists— to produce a remarkably rich, harmoniously integrated, and high quality result.

The work at Bethlehem apparently inspired a variety of other decorative programmes in fresco painting—at Abu Ghosh, at the Damascus Gate chapel, at Bethany, even at Crac des
Chevaliers far to the north—but none in mosaics. It is, therefore, surprising to find that the most important subsequent artistic projects in the Latin kingdom were carried out in sculpture during the last years before the fall of Jerusalem in 1187. The Hospitallers decorated the chapel of their castle at Belvoir with handsome figural sculpture in the early 1170s and the Templars sponsored a large and important workshop in the Temple area in Jerusalem in the 1170s and 1180s to decorate their conventual buildings in and around the Templum Salomonis. The most important endeavour in the 1170s, however, was the project sponsored by the archbishop of Nazareth to rebuild and decorate the church of the Annunciation over the holy site of the House of the Virgin, where the Incarnation had taken place.

The church of the Annunciation was the only Latin church to receive a full programme of portal sculpture in the manner of French twelfth-century examples: a tympanum with an enthroned image of Christ Incarnate with angels, voussoirs (arch-stones) with signs of the zodiac, and statues on either side of the doorway of apostles and prophets. The most creative sculptural programme was reserved for the interior, however, where the aedicule over the grotto of the Annunciation was given a series of remarkable polygonal capitals. These capitals represented narrative incidents from the lives of the apostles who had founded this church at Nazareth, according to tradition, in honour of the Virgin Mary. Moreover, larger rectangular capitals appeared on the piers of the church immediately surrounding the shrine monument. Very likely these sculptors were ‘crusaders’, that is, Frankish settlers born in the Latin East, trained in their craft by French masters, working in a dynamic fluid style in the local stone under the influence of indigenous Christian traditions as well as of Muslim architectural sculpture.

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.