Life and Lifestyle in the Crusader Kingdoms: Domestic Architecture

The way we build our homes both reflects and shapes our lives. Thus the lay-out of homes reveals a great deal about the society in which they were built. Was collective living or privacy preferred? Was light or security more important? Was luxury or convenience given precedence?

As a novelist, it is impossible to evoke a bygone age or to depict a period effectively without knowing how the homes of characters were built and how they functioned.

The Bishop of Oldenburg, traveling to the Kingdom of Jerusalem in 1212, was stunned by the luxury of the residences of the elite. According to Sir Steven Runciman in his "Families of Outremer," Oldenburg was particularly impressed by the Ibelin palace in Beirut: 

Its windows opened some on the sea, some on to delicious gardens. Its walls were paneled with plaques of poly-chrome marble; the vaulted ceiling [of the salon] was painted to resemble the sky with its stars; in the center of the [salon] was a fountain, and round it mosaics depicting the waves of the sea edged with sands so lifelike that [the bishop] feared to tread on them lest he should leave a foot mark.

Unfortunately, nothing of this palace remains today. 

The same is true of the Lusignan palace in Nicosia, but Volume 4 of A History of the Crusades: The Art and Architecture of the Crusader States, Hazard, Harry W ed. provides the following summary:

The royal palace, adjoining the church of St. Dominic, seemed to travelers the finest in the world. Its great throne room, its balconies, its golden ornaments, its tapestries, pictures, organs, and clocks, its baths, gardens and menageries suggest the most sumptuous of medieval residences. (p. 175)

While both the above passages refer to palaces (baronial and royal respectively), the following is a more general commentary on Frankish domestic architecture in the crusader states. Writing after the re-conquest of Jerusalem by Saladin in 1187, Ibn-Khallikan wrote:

"the infidel had rebuilt [Jerusalem] with columns and plaques of marble...with fair fountains where the water never ceased to flow--one saw dwellings as agreeable as gardens and brilliant with the whiteness of marble; the columns with their foliage seemed like trees." (quoted in Hazard, p. 138.)

Yet only scattered fragments of this sophisticated urban secular architecture from the crusader period have survived into the present. Even these remains have largely been obscured by the changing styles and functions of that altered the appearance of crusader structures almost beyond recognition in subsequent centuries. 

However, descriptions such as those cited above as well as systematic analysis of the archeological evidence enables us to imagine a great deal. As a novelist writing about the crusader kingdoms, I am compelled to utilize all existing sources, both written and archaeological — and then add a hefty dose of imagination. What follows is a short survey of the key elements that would have defined an urban dwelling in the crusader kingdoms.

Due to a general scarcity of wood, the basic building material in the Middle East in the crusader period was stone and/or brick. The latter, and often the former, was plastered over and whitewashed, both inside and out, or faced with marble in the case of important and representational buildings. The floors of poorer dwellings were either beaten earth or cut out of the bedrock, while upper floors were plaster. In wealthier homes the floors were usually flagstone on the ground floor, marble or mosaic. Courtyards were usually paved with cobbles.

The basic building block of houses in the Holy Land were vaults. Barrel vaults were the easiest and most fundamental building block and could be stacked on top of one another at perpendicular angles for several stories. A good example of this is the Hospitaller Castle of Kolossi. Below are three images of vaulted chambers: one an upstairs chamber from the Hospitaller castle at Kolossi, one a cellar from the Byzantine/Crusader castle of St. Hilarion, and the third showing a wine or oil press in the ground-floor chamber, something very common in the crusader kingdoms.

Groin vaults and rib-vaults, however, was also common, particularly in larger structures such as palaces, monasteries, customs houses, and the like. Here is an image of beautiful vaulting from Bellapais Monastery on Cyprus.

Most houses in the crusader states appear to have had at least one, and in urban areas -- particularly in the 13th century -- as many as three upper floors. The upper floors were often reached by means of an external stairway over a arch (see photo below), or by means of internal wooden stairs or even ladders through trap doors. In larger, rural structures, stairs could also be built into the thickness of the walls. The house below, located on Kythera, is much younger (17^th century Venetian), but it has many of the features of crusader urban architecture.

Most buildings in the Middle East were crowned, then as now, by flat roofs (that might be decoratively crenelated) that often provided additional living or work space in the form of a roof-top terrace that could be shaded from the sun by canvas awnings, or a vine arbor. 

Whether used as a terrace or not, rooftops almost always collected rain water in a cistern.  Indeed, even the poorest and smallest of urban dwellings had cisterns, often several. All had settlement tanks to help purify the water.  Water could be pumped from these tanks to the kitchens or latrines. 

Many urban dwellings would have been built around one or a series of courtyards. These in turn contained cisterns or sometimes wells, kitchen and formal gardens, or working space, depending on the wealth of the occupant. The courtyard below in Jerusalem has many medieval elements and does not look so very different from what it could have looked like in the 12^th century.

The courtyard in the next photo is from the Hospitaller headquarters in Acre. It is an example of a more spectacular, 13^th century courtyard and only relevant for public buildings, but it is indicative of style, taste and crusader capabilities.

Poorer residents, who could no afford a house large enough to surround one or more courtyards often shared a communal courtyard. Around a courtyard, several dwellings were clustered, all with access to the common courtyard.  

Despite the prevalence of courtyards, Frankish houses were not inward-looking. Unlike their Arab contemporaries, the houses of the rich had beautiful balconies and logias that looked out over the streets from the upper stories. The roof of the logia in urban areas might be supported either by an arcade or by pillars. Some of these pillars were reclaimed Roman pillars, employed in a new function, but the Franks were skilled at producing pillars themselves and the capitals of these were famous -- even among their enemies -- for the lifelike quality of their decoration. In rural settings the logia could be even more dramatic as in the example below from St. Hilarion on Cyprus.

The working class on the other hand had workshops and store fronts that opened onto the street at ground level.


Doors throughout the Frankish territories from the mid-12th century until the end of Frankish rule were usually made by a wide, slightly pointed arch. This arch, borrowed from the Arabs before the beginning of true Gothic architecture in the West, was the dominant, indeed iconic, shape of crusader architecture. Poorer dwellings or secondary doors, however, could be square.

Windows could be either arched or square, with the Romanesque forms of “double-” or “triple-light” windows as common in the Holy Land as in the countries of the crusaders’ origin. Below is a lovely example of a medieval portal in Jerusalem, and left and right are two examples of windows from St. Hilarion and Krak de Chevaliers respectively.

 

Because there were major glass producing centers in the crusader states (notably Tyre and Beirut), window glazing was more common in the crusader states than in the West, a fact supported by both archaeological finds and descriptions. Right is an example of crusader glass manufacture. While the context is different, this glass demonstrates the very high quality of the industry generally.

Archaeological evidence suggests the Franks used both plate glass and round glass set in plaster (the latter being presumably much cheaper and more common) for their windows. Below is an example of the round glass technique used here in the Templar Church in Famagusta, Cyprus.

As the description at the start of this essay indicated, interior décor could include poly-chrome marble, but mosaics and glazed tiles may also have been used. Certainly, a wide variety of crusader glazed pottery has been found, using cream colors, yellows, greens and blues. The pottery gives us some indication of what colors and motifs could have been used on floor and wall tiles, although the evidence is lacking. To the right is an example of crusader pottery.

However, we also know that the Turks and Saracens were very fond of brilliant blues and turquoise tiles in later centuries, and these may also have been available to the crusaders. At least I like to imagine it so! Below is an example of modern tile work just to hint at the possibilities.

As for mosaics, the description at the start of the article is perhaps the best indication of quality and the fact that life-like motifs were possible in the crusader era. However, we should not forget that mosaics floors were very common in the Roman and Byzantine periods, and the many crusader residences in fact dated from earlier periods and retained these older tiles. Below is a picture of tiles that date back the 4^th century AD and were allegedly commission by St. Helena. Particularly under the influence of the Byzantine brides of Baldwin III and Amalric I, Byzantine styles and artists were welcomed and employed in the crusader kingdoms. They would easily have produced tiles similar to this example from the Church of the Nativity in Bethlehem.

Last but not least, as the contemporary written descriptions stress, no description of urban architecture in the crusader states (at least for the “upper crust”) would be complete without reference to gardens. Frankish elites oriented their houses so that their (glazed) windows looked out at either views (such as the ocean) or gardens. The Holy Land offered a variety of beautiful vegetation from trees such a palms and olives, lemons and pomegranates, to flowers such as hibiscus and oleander. Frankish gardens would have been beautiful indeed.  So to conclude, here is a picture of a garden in the crusader church of St. Anne in Jerusalem today.

Note: All photos except the glass and pottery were taken by the author. 

Recommended reading: Andrian Boas' Domestic Settings: Sources on Domestic Architecture and Day-to-Day Activities in the Crusader States, Brill, 2010.

Life in the crusader kingdoms is described in my three part biography of Balian d’Ibelin:

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Writing Biographical Fiction: Saladin

I'd like to close this series on Writing Biographical Fiction with a look at one of the  most challenging characters I had to deal with: the heroic and famous Sultan Salah ad-Din, known in the west as Saladin.

When writing about Saladin in a novel one is always confronted by the fact that he has long been viewed as the epitome of Saracen “chivalry.” Indeed, in the last century it became common to suggest that, while the crusaders were treacherous barbarians, Saladin stood out as a paragon of virtue and honor, a shining light of decency and chivalry in an otherwise brutal age.  This is the view of Saladin that dictated the highly sympathetic portrayal in Ridley Scott's film “The Kingdom of Heaven.” It is the image that dominates the mind of most readers coming to a book about the crusades.

Yet, as Andrew Ehrenkreutz catalogues in his meticulously documented and detailed biography of Saladin published in 1972, Saladin frequently used deceit, hypocrisy, propaganda, bribery, extortion, murder and, ultimately aggressive war to establish an empire in the Near East.  Ehrenkreutz also notes that Saladin spent much more time and money fighting (and killing) fellow Muslims than he did fighting Christians; Saladin was responsible for the loss of many more Sunni Muslim lives than Christian ones.

A depiction of Saladin based on Ehrenkreutz would be too extreme -- and certainly too much to swallow for readers raised on the Kingdom-of-Heaven Saladin. That isn't what I wanted. However, it was important to me that I didn’t simply serve up the legend without any acknowledgement of historical reality.  Thus, in developing the Saladin of my novels, I sought to balance the two views of Saladin and focus on portraying him not as “good” or “bad” but rather as a highly effective political leader. I wanted a “worthy adversary,” for Balian and the crusader states, but not one who was a caricature of either virtue or villainy. I sought to create a man who was ambitious and ruthless in attaining and maintaining power, but also capable of generosity and magnanimity -- when it did not run contrary to his interests. Likewise, I sought to explain Saladin’s behavior by analyzing possible motives.

A particularly good example of this is the famous instance in which Saladin gave Balian d’Ibelin a safe-conduct to cross Saracen-held territory to enter Jerusalem and remove his wife and family after the Battle of Hattin but before the fall of Jerusalem. Not only was this a magnanimous gesture to a Christian lord and a foe, it was topped by Saladin sending some of his own personal body-guard to escort the Lady of Ibelin to safety after her husband broke his word, and — ceding to immense pressure from the Christian population in Jerusalem — agreed to take command of the defense of the Holy City. But the “chivalrous” character of these gestures is somewhat mitigated by the fact that the Lady of Ibelin was also a Byzantine princess and a relation of the ruling Greek Emperor Isaac II Angelus, with whom Saladin had just concluded a treaty of alliance. It was still a generous gesture since Maria Comnena, Lady of Ibelin, was not a close relative of Isaac II, but Saladin’s decision was certainly salted with a pinch of self-interest.

Equally important to me in my portrayal of Saladin was his unbending hostility to Christianity and his commitment to jihad. This has nothing to do with whether Saladin was “good” or “bad” (I’m not trying to make him a medieval ISIS leader), but it is essential to understanding what options were available to the Christian leaders. It is, as Israeli governments can testify, impossible to make peace with people who do not recognize your right to exist. Too many histories and novels are written on the premise that the crusader states could have co-existed with their Muslim neighbors indefinitely. This is simply not logical. Jihadist Islam requires good Muslims to spread the religion ― including by the sword ― and recognizes the right of select other religions to live under Islamic rule only under humiliating and burdensome conditions.

Last but not least, the Saladin of my novels is a man of his age and culture, and I have drawn on Arab chronicles and Islamic writings to depict his probable attitudes toward, above all, women. Muslims in this period found the presence of women in public life (such as queens, castellans etc.) not only incomprehensible but disgusting. The very fact that women had names and faces known outside of the family circle was viewed as immoral and dishonorable. The fact that women had a voice in political affairs, could control wealth, influence politics, and even command men was even more offensive. The differing attitudes toward women was one of the most crucial differences between Christendom and Islam in the 12^th century. As a novelist with strong female characters, it would be nothing short of negligent not to highlight this fact.

Likewise, the dependence of 12^th century Syria and Egypt on slaves is fact that I had no wish to gloss over or ignore. Particularly in the third book of the series, the contemporary attitudes toward slavery is an important issue and plot-line. Although I use the historical figure Imad ad-Din most directly to address this theme, quoting directly from his own works, Saladin too is consciously used as a representative of the world from which he came. In this sense, Saladin in my novels is both a character and a symbol ― but then so is Balian.

Saladin plays a significant role in the second two books of the Jerusalem trilogy.

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Writing Biographical Fiction: Conrad de Montferrat

19th Century Depiction of Conrad de Montferrat Of all the historical characters in my Jerusalem trilogy, Conrad de Montferrat is the one other writers unanimously paint as the villain par excellance. Even Andrew Latham, an otherwise meticulously accurate historian, found it convenient to cast Montferrat as a diabolic evil monster obsessed with this own power in The Holy Lance.

It’s easy for novelists to fall into the cliché because one of the surviving primary sources, Itinerarium Peregrinorum et Gesta Regis Ricardi, delights in heaping abuse on the man who dared to defy Richard the Lionheart. The Montferrat of English legend, therefore, was a man who shot a cross-bow at his own father, killed his doctors, abducted a princess, bribed bishops, intentionally withheld food from crusaders, undermined all efforts by Richard of England to defeat Saladin, and finally met his just end at the hands of an assassin. It would have been easy to follow the tradition of making Montferrat into a sort of medieval Darth Vader.

But I don’t like cartoon characters in my novels. I wanted a more nuanced and comprehensible man for my books. Turning to less biased, particularly German sources, I discovered what I was looking for: a man of “many parts” with a wealth of positive characteristics and achievements to balance the negative portrayal of the Itinerarium.

Conrad de Montferrat, born about 1145, was a first cousin of Emperor Friedrich Barbarossa and of the French King. His older brother, William, married Sibylla of Jerusalem.  Conrad’s younger brother, Rainier married Maria Comnena, the daughter of Emperor Manuel I. In short, Conrad de Monteferrat was closely related to the Holy Roman Emperor, the Emperor of the Eastern Roman (Byzantine) Empire, the King of France, and the ruling Queen of Jerusalem. Conrad de Montferrat was not — as some modern novelists would have you believe — an “adventurer” or a parvenu.

Furthermore, Conrad was a very well-educated, well-traveled and militarily experienced nobleman. He supported his father in his wars and in 1179 prominently defeated the forces of the Holy Roman Emperor taking the Imperial chancellor captive. He subsequently went to Constantinople, where he was greatly admired for his good looks, charm and military prowess. Although he wisely departed Constantinople after Emperor Manuel I's death -- and shortly before his younger brother and sister-in-law were murdered by the usurping Emperor Andronicus, at the invitation of Emperor Isaac Angelus Conrad returned in 1186 to marry the Emperor’s sister Theodora.  Conrad was raised to the rank of “Caesar,” and put down a rebellion led by the popular general Alexios Branas in a battle where he demonstrated exceptional personal courage. His success led his brother-in-law to look on him with jealousy and suspicion, however, and Conrad soon feared for his life (his brother, after all, had been murdered in Constantinople only five years earlier). He fled Constantinople, and took ship for the Kingdom of Jerusalem, arriving there only days after the catastrophe of Hattin.

Conrad sailed into the harbor at Tyre when it was already invested by land by the Sultan’s army. Negotiations for the surrender were allegedly already underway, whether as a ruse or in earnest. Conrad immediately and forcefully advocated defiance. With so many other cities ripe for surrender, Saladin chose not to fight for Tyre, but withdrew to capture Sidon, Beirut, Caesarea, Jaffa, etc. Meanwhile, the people of Tyre, which included not only the usual residents but the survivors of Hattin and refuges from across the north of the Kingdom of Jerusalem, swore allegiance to Montferrat. 

When Saladin returned to finish off Tyre in November 1187, he brought with him Conrad’s father, the aging Marquis de Montferrat, who had fought and been taken captive at Hattin. Saladin offered to release the Marquis in exchange for the surrender of Tyre. The chronicles tell a dramatic tale in which Conrad pointedly refused the deal, saying his father had “lived long enough already” and fired a crossbow in his direction (probably intended to miss or to kill one of his Saracen escort). Much has been made of this as proof of Conrad’s perfidy or callousness. Yet,  the chronicles agree that Conrad’s father called out something to the effect of “well done” when Conrad refused to surrender. The old Marquis of Montferrat, who had fought long and hard for the Holy Land, did not want to see the last remaining bastion of the kingdom surrendered. I found myself liking Conrad for his iron nerves!

In addition to the old Marquis, Saladin had brought another means for reducing the city: the Egyptian fleet. Tyre was now truly besieged and crammed as it was with refugees and cut off from resupply the situation rapidly became critical. Montferrat devised a trick: he led the enemy to believe that people were rioting and some of the wealthier residents were going to attempt a breakout. The chain across the harbor entrance was lowered as if to let the ships escape.  The Saracens took the bait. They shot into the harbor, thinking they were about to take the city by the back door. Instead, they found themselves attacked by the Pisan vessels in the harbor and fired on from the surrounding walls, towers and buildings. The very next day, January 1, 1188, Saladin ordered his army to disperse and withdrew.

All of the above reflects well on Conrad de Montferrat’s capabilities as a determined, resourceful, and clever commander. But it was his political actions that generally draw approbation and they started a year and a half later when, out of the north, a small Frankish army led by none other than the architect of the disaster at Hattin, Guy de Lusignan, appeared before the gates of Tyre. King Guy ordered the gates of the last free city of his kingdom opened to him. Conrad de Montferrat refused. Again, I can’t say that I blame him.

Guy continued south to lay siege to Acre, which was now held by a Saracen garrison. Thus, when the crusaders started to arrive in increasing numbers in 1190 and 1191 most of them joined the siege of Acre because it was the only active fighting available. While this should have increased Guy de Lusignan’s stature, in fact, the arriving contingents of troops tended to recognize their own leaders rather than Guy. Then in November 1190 Guy’s position was fatally undermined by the death of his wife and both his daughters. Guy, always unpopular, widely viewed by the barons of Jerusalem as a usurper, and discredited by Hattin, lost his last vestige of legitimacy with his wife’s death. The High Court of Jerusalem recognized Sibylla’s younger sister Isabella as the rightful ruler of Jerusalem after Sibylla’s death.

Only there was a problem. The Constitution of Jerusalem recognized the rights of women to rule in their own right, but only if they had a male consort capable of leading the army of Jerusalem. Isabella’s husband Humphrey de Toron had already betrayed the High Court when the High Court was trying to oppose Guy’s usurpation of the throne in 1186. The High Court was not prepared to recognize Humphrey as king. That meant that Isabella had to be separated from him and married to a man more acceptable to the barons of Jerusalem. The details of this are described in The Abduction of Isabella. For now suffice it to say that Conrad was the man they chose.

The Itinerarium and most subsequent sources portray Conrad as the driving force behind his marriage to Isabella. He is described as scheming and bribing, as unscrupulous and duplicitous. These portrayals, however, completely ignore the essential fact that it was the High Court of Jerusalem that decided on the marriage of a female heir and the fact that the High Court consistently supported Conrad over Guy. The overblown outrage of the chronicles likewise obscures the plain fact that Isabella was below the age of consent at the time of her marriage to Humphrey (she was 11) and the marriage was without question invalid according to contemporary canon law. While it is also highly probable that Conrad was ambitious and coveted the crown, it is absurd to portray his marriage to Isabella as a travesty of justice or an act of moral depravity. In my novel, therefore, I emphasize the role of the High Court, while nevertheless depicting Conrad as very ambitious and eager to gain the favor of the High Court.

By the time the Kings of France and England arrived in the Holy Land, there were two rival claimants to the (largely fictional) throne of Jerusalem: 1) Conrad, supported by the High Court and deriving his claim through the legitimate heir, Isabella, and 2) Guy, clinging to the title he had from his now dead wife because he’d been crowned and anointed. Their rivalry immediately became a proxy war between Philip II of France, who backed his kinsman Conrad, and Richard I of England, who backed his vassal Guy. Unfortunately for Conrad, Philip II soon tired of crusading and sailed away, while Richard I remained and recaptured much of the fertile coastal plain although he was unable to regain Jerusalem. In my novels, it is this conflict that initially puts Balian and Richard on opposing sides and so in conflict with one another.

During the critical eleven months from October 1191 to September 1192, Richard I periodically sought a negotiated settlement with Saladin. Not surprisingly, Conrad feared that Richard would negotiate a deal that left him high and dry, and so he tried to cut a deal of his own. This has been portrayed as the height of infamy by the supporters of Richard, but it is hard to see why it was legitimate for Richard to negotiate with Saladin but not for Conrad. Saladin, meanwhile, had a strong interest in playing Conrad and Richard off against one another and sowing dissension in the Frankish camp. However, it appears that Conrad was so desperate (or determined) to get a little kingdom (or county) of his own that he was prepared to fight his fellow Christians, and this seemed to me very telling. Conrad was resourceful, brave, and clever, but he was also ruthlessly ambitious.

In fashioning the Conrad de Montferrat of my novel Envoy of Jerusalem I tried to do justice to him as a complex character full of charm, ambition, talent -- and opportunism. I believe he would have used his charm very judiciously and intelligently to win over the heiress of Jerusalem – even before the succession crisis. She was after all, a guest in “his” city of Tyre, which makes my version of events diverge from the usual portrayal of Isabella as abducted and abused by a man she hates. His ambition and talent are depicted in his defense of Tyre, his refusal to admit Guy, and bid his for the crown.  However, on the assumption that a man with so many enemies was not always pleasant and congenial, I have also made him arrogant, self-willed, immune to advice and at times unscrupulous.

The Conrad de Montferrat is a major character in  Envoy of Jerusalem. 

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