A History of the Crusades (35 page)

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4 A twelfth-century ground plan of the church of the Holy Sepulchre in Jerusalem, showing Christ’s tomb in the centre of the lower, aerial view. The circular plan of the site was widely imitated elsewhere in Latin Christendom during the medieval period the Temple Church in London being one surviving example.

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5 Divine assistance. The turning point in the First Crusade was the victory at Antioch on 28 June 1098, which to many of the crusaders was accomplished with the assistance of an army of angels, saints, and the ghosts of their dead, led by St George. Not long after the battle it was depicted over the door of the church of St George at Fordington in Dorset.

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6 Taking the cross. A crusader receives his cross from a bishop; he has already been given the scrip (purse) and staff of a pilgrim. The separate ceremonies of taking the cross and receiving the symbols of pilgrimage were merged in the later twelfth century.

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7 The cathedral of Jubayl (Gibelet), as rebuilt following an earthquake in 1170, with an open-air baptistery attached to the north side.

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8 The castle of Segura de la Sierra in Andalusia was given to the order of Santiago in 1242 during a period of rapid Christian advances in Spain. In 1245 it became the scat of the order’s
comendador mayor
of Castile, who had earlier been based at Uclés.

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9 The temple church in London. Military orders depended on the favour of patrons, many of whom entered an order shortly before death or chose burial there. These effigies arc of William Marshal, first carl of Pembroke, who died in 1219, and his son William, the second earl, both of whom received burial in the Templars’ London church.

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10 In this illustration from the treatise on chess by Alfonso X of Castile, a Christian and a Muslim face one another, an image perhaps of the
convivencia,
or coexistence between Christians and Muslims, that was sometimes achieved in medieval Spain. Even so, many Arabic treatises on chess stressed the value of the game as training in military strategy for warriors in the
jihad.

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11 A contemporary pen drawing of a Hussite wagon fortress. These improvised defensive structures proved ideal for the rapid deployment of crossbows and field guns. Note the depiction on the tent of the chalice, access to which at the eucharist was a principal demand of the
utraquists (= in atraque specie,
‘[communion] in both kinds’).

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12 The battle of Lepante, 1571. The last great crusading victory, Lepanto did not, as was once thought, turn the tide of war in the Mediterranean against the Ottoman Turks; but it did raise morale amongst the Catholic powers.

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13 Elevation and plan of the Teutonic Order’s great fourteenth-century water mill at Danzig; an example of the efficient technical and commercial organization which underlay the order’s economy.

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14 Ruins of the Teutonic Order’s castle and octagonal tower at Weissenstein in Estonia in the northern part of the Livonian orderstate; the brethren continued to defend this distant area until 1561.