Art of the Crusades

The military crusaders themselves were mostly interested in artistic and development matters, or sophisticated in their taste, and much of their art was destroyed in the loss of their kingdoms so that only a few pieces survive today.

On the whole the Eastern Christian styles were more significant influences than Islamic art; the artists working in the Crusader lands are assumed to have had the same variety of backgrounds.

Many art historians attempt to guess the backgrounds, in terms of ethnicity, place of birth and training, of the artists involved with particular works, an effort treated with caution by Kurt Weitzmann, Doula Mouriki, and Jaroslav Folda, author of the most recent detailed survey.

In the second period the Kingdom of Jerusalem was now hugely reduced in size to control only a few coastal towns and the areas around them, which were gradually whittled away by the Muslims until the final Siege of Acre (1291) ended Crusader presence in the Levant.

The Saint Catherine's Monastery in Egypt was an important centre where a school of manuscript and icon painting that blended European and local influences emerged.

Fortunately it has also been a very secure home for its collection of icons (but not manuscripts in Latin, all of which were later destroyed, apparently under Russian influence), so a good number have survived there.

[4] An example of the mixture of styles is the Church of the Holy Sepulchre in Jerusalem, the renovation and rebuilding of which was completed in 1149; however only fragments of the large programme of mosaics now survive.

This was until the loss of Jerusalem in 1187 the institution with the main Crusader scriptorium, from which six manuscripts survive, made in a mixture of royal and church commissions.

[8] After the rapid collapse of the Kingdom of Jerusalem in 1187, which must have destroyed a great part of the artwork the crusaders produced,[9] they were mostly confined to a few cities on the Mediterranean coast until Acre was conquered in 1291.

In general, it is often not possible to say with certainty whether influences or new types of objects arriving in Europe at this period did so via Islamic Spain, the Byzantine world, or the Crusader states.