A History of the Crusades-Vol 3 (49 page)

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.