A History of the Crusades (26 page)

In addition to the larger castles, which served both as baronial or royal residences and as garrison posts, a number of other fortified structures are recorded. They include watch posts, consisting of small enclosures sited to survey roads and to allow their garrisons to communicate with neighbouring inhabited centres by fire signal or messenger; and estate houses, similar in function to the hall-houses and towers belonging to minor lords or fief holders that are found in Frankish Palestine and Syria.

One such, Belen Keslik Kalesi, is a two-storey building, measuring overall 18 by 8.5 m., with a ground-floor entrance in the centre of one of the longer sides, defended by slit machicolations. A stair in the corner of the barrel-vaulted basement led up to the main living area, which was lit by slit-windows. At Gösne and at two sites called Sinap, one near Lampron and the other near Çandir, the estate houses have rounded turrets or buttresses clasping the corners.

For reasons of security, Armenian society in Cilicia appears to have been based principally on castles, many of them sited high in the Taurus mountains. Settlement on the coast or in the plain was limited, and except for Sis (destroyed by the Mamluks in 1266), Tarsus, Adana, and Misis, which are mentioned as having churches, urban settlement was unusual. Indeed, the only urban church to survive, that of St Paul (or the Virgin) in Tarsus, is western in character, built so it seems during the first decades of the twelfth century. It has three barrel-vaulted aisles, supported on colonnades.

Most of the surviving Armenian churches and chapels are in castles. One of the most significant is the church which T‘oros I built for his ancestors in the south bailey at Anavarza in IIII. Unfortunately this has become badly ruined since it was recorded by Gertrude Bell in 1905. It was built in smooth ashlar with a poured rubble concrete core. The plan was rectangular, with three barrel-vaulted aisles terminating in inscribed semi-circular apses. The arcades were of three bays, carried on plain rectangular piers with moulded imposts. Originally the interior was decorated with frescos. Both the west and the south door had a lintel and relieving arch, composed largely of antique spolia. The west front also had windows lighting the aisles and an oculus in the gable; the quoins were enhanced by decorative pilaster strips, and below the cornice ran an inscription recording the builder. In a secondary period an apsed room was added to the north side of the church.

At Çandir, the church of the constable Smbat was dedicated in 1251. Its general plan is similar to that of the church of T‘oros I, but it is less well preserved. Its vaulting has fallen, but may have taken the form of a domed hall rather than a
barrel-vaulted hall. The side apses are separated from the aisles and nave to form small barrel-vaulted rooms with the appearance of sacristies. This church also had an apsed side chapel or narthex added on to its south side.

Chapels form a more numerous class of ecclesiastical building. Mostly they consist of a single-celled barrel-vaulted nave, with semi-circular apse, either inscribed or rounded externally. Sometimes, as at Maran, Çem, Meydan, and Mancilik, they form part of the defensive circuit.

Cyprus, where Frankish dominion lasted for almost four centuries, has the most extensive architectural development of any of the areas settled by Latins, from the early Gothic cathedral of St Sophia in Nicosia to the Renaissance façade of the Palazzo del Provveditore (1552) in Famagusta. While Nicosia was the centre of royal and ecclesiastical administration, from 1291 Famagusta on the east coast assumed Acre’s role as the principal western commercial centre in the Levant; despite the robbing of stone from its buildings to construct Port Said in the mid-nineteenth century, its circuit of town walls still encloses the most exceptional group of Latin churches to survive anywhere in the East outside Jerusalem itself.

The commencement of work on the cathedral church of St Sophia in Nicosia is credited to Archbishop Eustorge of Montaigu (1217–49), though there is some evidence to suggest that construction had begun earlier. It was not until 1319, however, that the nave and narthex were completed by his successor Giovanni del Conte, and 1326 that the building was finally consecrated. The form is that of a thirteenth-century French cathedral, with the difference that the roofs above the vaulting are not of timber but are terraced according to the custom of the Levant; furthermore, the western towers were never completed. The building has a nave and aisles of five bays terminating in a rounded choir with ambulatory. The nave piers are cylindrical, while the vaulting of the ambulatory is carried on four reused antique columns. Five subsidiary chapels were attached to the
church, including a Lady chapel (1270) in the south transept, a chapel of St Nicholas in the north transept, and a chapel of St Thomas Aquinas also on the south, the latter being decorated by the late fifteenth century with painted ‘legends of the holy doctor’.

The cathedral church of St Nicholas in Famagusta was begun around 1300, and an inscription west of the south door records a resumption of work on it on the instructions of Bishop Baldwin Lambert in 1311. To judge from the uniformity of its confident French Gothic style the main structure seems to have been completed within the first half of the century. The first sight of its west front, with its three large doorways with gabled canopies, its wheel-headed six-light window, and its once prominent bell-towers, is reminiscent of Reims (1220s–1230s); indeed, the allusion may have been intentional, since it was here that the Lusignan kings of Cyprus were crowned king of Jerusalem. As with most Latin buildings in the East, however, western influences were not restricted to a single source, and the detailing of the interior has more in common with the rayonnant architecture of St Urbain in Troyes, begun in 1262.

Of the eighty churches that Nicosia was said to have had in 1567, only half a dozen or so remain. They include the early fourteenth-century Benedictine abbey of Our Lady of Tyre (now the Armenian church of the Virgin Mary) and the late fourteenth-century flamboyant Gothic church of St Catherine (now the Haidar Pasha mosque). A decline in building standards is discernible in the early sixteenth-century north façade of the Orthodox metropolitan church of St Nicholas (now known as the Bedestan), located south of the parvis of St Sophia; while the interior represents a blending of Greek and western late Gothic and Renaissance styles, the builders’ attempt to imitate the main west door of the cathedral appears flat and lifeless.

While in the two main cities western styles predominated, even in the churches of the Orthodox, Nestorians, and Armenians, a more Byzantine style prevailed in the countryside. Some country churches, however, had chapels added to them for the use of Latin immigrants: as at the family chapel of the Gibelets at Kiti and the monastery church of St John
Lampadistes at Kalapanayiotis. A small chapel built on a royal estate at Pyrga in 1421 not only has the distinction of having the name of the mason,
Basoges
, inscribed over the south door, but is decorated inside with paintings, including one representing the Crucifixion with kneeling figures of King Janus and his wife Charlotte of Bourbon. In other buildings, such as the Greek church at Morphou, which combines a dome with Gothic vaulting and foliage ornament, a Franco-Byzantine style may be discerned.

Few rural Latin monasteries survive. The most impressive is Bellapais, built on a rock escarpment overlooking the north coast east of Kyrenia. Originally an Augustinian house, founded by King Aimery (1194–1205), it adopted the Premonstratensian rule under Archbishop Thierry of Nicosia (1206–11). Benefiting from generous endowments from King Hugh III (1267–84) and his successors, it grew rich and influential. The buildings are set out around a rectangular court, to which a ribvaulted cloister was added in the fourteenth century. The church, dating from the early thirteenth century, lies on the south; it has a nave of two bays with flanking aisles, a crossing with inscribed transepts and a rectangular projecting chancel. On the east was the dormitory, above the chapter house and a barrel-vaulted undercroft. The refectory lay on the north and the cellarer’s range on the west, beyond which was a kitchen court; somewhere on this side was probably located the royal guest apartments, which King Hugh IV (1324–59) is known to have built for his own use.

Only the rock-cut ditch remains of the earliest Latin castle in Cyprus, that built by the Templars at Gastria in 1191. Another early castle, which is known only from archaeological excavation, was Saranda Kolones at Paphos. This was evidently built soon after 1191 and was destroyed by an earthquake in 1222. Although it has been ascribed to the Hospitallers, largely on account of its similarity to Belvoir, the evidence is not conclusive. It had a regular concentric plan. The inner ward was rectangular, with rectangular corner-towers and a rounded tower on the east, containing a bent entrance below a chapel. The outer wall had a variety of differently shaped towers, including
cylindrical, rectangular, triangular, cutwater, and polygonal; the rectangular outer gatehouse also had a bent entrance, and was approached by a timber bridge spanning the rock-cut ditch. The construction of a sugar mill in the castle’s basement suggests that soon after completion it was being used as an estate centre, whatever its original purpose may have been.

Sugar cane was an important cash crop of the south-western part of Cyprus under the Latins. The Hospitallers’ castle of Kolossi, built by the master Jacques de Milly in 1454, lay at the centre of a sugar-producing estate, and next to a sugar factory. At Kouklia (Old Paphos) a pair of refineries with water mills for crushing the cane, and remains of the kilns for boiling the liquid and crystallizing it in ceramic moulds, have been excavated near a royal manor house. Another factory, which in the mid-sixteenth century belonged to the Cornaro family of Venice, survives at Episkopi.

In Latin Cyprus, all castles, except for those belonging to the military orders, seem to have been under direct royal control. In Kyrenia, the Lusignans inherited a Byzantine castle, some 80 m. square, with cylindrical corner-towers and an outer wall or barbican on the south, defended by cutwater-shaped towers. In the thirteenth century, they rebuilt the north and east walls which faced the sea, and added new outer walls to landward on the west and south containing
chemins de ronde
leading to arrowslits; the castle presumably had corner-towers, but only one D-shaped one on the north-east survives. The royal apartments lay on the west, controlling the entry, with a chapel over the inner gate. The final Latin phase was in 1544–60, when the Venetians converted the castle into a regular artillery fortification by rebuilding the west wall, infilling the space between the double walls, and adding rounded bastions at the north-west and south-east corners, and an angled bastion on the south-west.

The thirteenth-to fourteenth-century royal castles in the Kyrenia range—St Hilarion (Dieudamour), Kantara, and Buffavento—also made use of sites fortified in Byzantine times. They have irregular plans, with a succession of baileys arranged to suit the natural topography. More regular planning is found in James I’s castle of Sigouri (1391), which had a rectangular
layout and corner-towers, surrounded by a ditch, and also apparently at La Cava, near Nicosia.

In the Venetian period, particular attention was given to improving the defences of the two major cities. In Famagusta the first campaign of works ran from 1492 to 1496 and included the thickening of the Lusignan citadel walls and the addition of rounded bastions to it for artillery defence; the town wall was also provided with rounded bastions, with artillery on top firing over a sloping glacis and other guns in casemates in their flanks covering the curtains. The second campaign (1544–65) included the octagonal Diamante Bastion at the north-east corner, the Land Gate on the south-west, preceded by a rounded ravelin containing two outer gates at right-angles to the inner one, and the Martinengo Bastion at the north-west corner, an angled bastion with orillons protecting the flanking artillery. A number of the leading North Italian experts in artillery defence were involved in the design of these works, including Michele Sanmicheli and his nephew Giangirolamo, who died in Famagusta in 1558.

In Nicosia, the circular wall, with rounded towers, eight gates and a ditch, which had been built by Peter II in 1372, was considered by the Venetian engineers to be too long to be adequately defended. It was therefore demolished, together with all that lay outside it, and replaced by a much reduced circular wall enclosing the town centre. Built under the direction of Giulio Savorgnano, this had three gates and eleven angled bastions with rounded orillons, each designed to contain 200 men and four artillery pieces. The ditch and outworks were still incomplete when Nicosia fell to the Turks on 9 September 1570. None the less, the walls of Nicosia represent today one of the finest examples of Italian Renaissance fortification surviving outside Italy.

ALAN FOREY

T
HE
emergence of military orders was one facet of the growing diversification which characterized the religious life of western Christendom in the later eleventh and early twelfth centuries. Members of military orders lived according to rules which were similar to, and in part based on, existing monastic regulations; but a religious way of life was combined with fighting. Military orders were also mainly composed of lay brothers. Although all these orders had brother chaplains, the majority of members were lay brethren, and authority rested mostly in their hands. In the leading orders they were grouped into the two ranks of knight and sergeant, with the latter rank comprising both sergeantsat-arms and non-military sergeants. Perhaps surprisingly, many military orders in addition included some women members, although these did not participate in military activities.