Frankish rural settlement in the Latin kingdom of Jerusalem.

Frankish rural settlement in the Latin kingdom of Jerusalem. RONNIE ELLENBLUM. Frankish rural settlement in the Latin kingdom ofJerusalem Latin Kingdom of Jerusalem:see Jerusalem, Latin Kingdom of. . xxi+321 pages, 14 plates, 21 figures, 9 maps, 5 tables. 1998.Cambridge: Cambridge University Press Cambridge University Press (known colloquially as CUP) is a publisher given a Royal Charter by Henry VIII in 1534, and one of the two privileged presses (the other being Oxford University Press). ; 0-521-55401-2 hardback 45 [poundssterling] & $69.95. For a century, from the start of Mr Thomas Cook's tours in the1840s until the abandonment of the Mandate and withdrawal from Palestinein 1948, the British enjoyed something like a mystical love affair withthe Holy Land. Towards the end of this period, Gen. Allenby'scapture of Jerusalem seemed for a brief moment like the culmination ofthose Crusades which for decades had been taught in the classroom as achivalrous chiv��al��rous?adj.1. Having the qualities of gallantry and honor attributed to an ideal knight.2. Of or relating to chivalry.3. Characterized by consideration and courtesy, especially toward women. and rather English adventure. Allenby's address from thesteps of the Citadel on 11 December 1917, promising respect andprotection for the institutions, practices and property of Jews, Moslemsand Christians alike, offered a new dawn. Not least in the care of antiquities: at once, the British setabout looking after (or at least reporting on) the ancient buildingswithin the area they held, appointing Capt. E. Mackay as `Inspector ofAntiquities, Occupied Enemy Territory Administration (South)'. Atthe same moment, A.W. Clapham, then with the army in Palestine, butalready since 1912 on the staff of the newly formed Royal Commission onHistorical Monuments in England, took leave to produce the greatcoloured plan of the Latin Priory of the Holy Sepulchre SEPULCHRE. The place where a corpse is buried. The violation of sepulchres is a misdemeanor at common law. Vide Dead bodies. in Jerusalem,which appeared in the first volume of The Antiquaries Journal in 1921.The setting up of a Department of Antiquities soon followed and lives ontoday in its successor, the Israel Antiquities Authority. Historicalsites and monuments were listed; record files were set up, containingfor each site the reports of inspectors, plans, photographs and squeezesof inscriptions; sites were excavated and published; and (Pringle,Churches A-K, p. 3) `a higher degree of professionalism, both in conducting excavationsand in publishing them, may also be detected in the excavations byothers carried out under the watchful eye of the Department'sdirector and his professional staff.' An important outcome of the Department's work was thepublication in 1937 of C.N. Johns' Palestine of the Crusades (Johns1937), to accompany a map at a scale of 1:350,000, its appearance thesincerest form of tribute to the `period maps' of the ArchaeologyBranch of the Ordnance Survey Ordnance SurveyNounthe British government organization that produces detailed maps of Britain and IrelandNoun 1. Ordnance Survey - the official cartography agency of the British government , devised and produced virtuallysingle-handedly by ANTIQUITY'S founding editor, O.G.S. Crawford.There is a real sense in which Denys Pringle's great Corpus is inthe direct line of descent Noun 1. line of descent - the kinship relation between an individual and the individual's progenitorsfiliation, lineage, descentfamily relationship, kinship, relationship - (anthropology) relatedness or connection by blood or marriage or adoption not only from the work of the Department, butalso from that great tradition of field archaeology in Britain of whichthe Department itself was the heir and emulator. It is peculiarlyappropriate that Prof. Pringle was, after his Jerusalem days, for manyyears on the staff of Historic Scotland Historic Scotland is an executive agency of the Scottish Executive, responsible for historic monuments in Scotland.Its website states: "Historic Scotland was created as an agency in 1991 and was attached to the Scottish Executive Education Department, which , itself formerly one of thoseinspectorates and Royal Commissions which placed this tradition on asound footing within government. The publication of the second volume of The Churches of theCrusader Kingdom of Jerusalem completes the corpus except for Acre,Jerusalem, and Tyre, respectively the greatest of Crusader cities, theseat of the Latin Patriarch Latin Patriarch can refer to: Latin Patriarch of Alexandria Latin Patriarch of Antioch Latin Patriarch of Constantinople Latin Patriarch of Jerusalem , and a metropolitan see, which will have awhole volume to themselves. With the first volume (reviewed in ANTIQUITY67 (1993): 691-2) we now have a clear view of the magnitude of the taskaccomplished. The aim was to provide a complete corpus of all churchbuildings of both Western and Oriental rites, built, rebuilt or simplyin use in the Crusader kingdom from the capture of Jerusalem in 1099 tothe fall of Acre in 1291. The objective (Churches A-K, p. 3) was to make `this archaeological information more easily accessible and toprovide thereby a starting point Noun 1. starting point - earliest limiting pointterminus a quocommencement, get-go, offset, outset, showtime, starting time, beginning, start, kickoff, first - the time at which something is supposed to begin; "they got an early start"; "she knew from the for further work of a particular orcomparative kind. At the same time, in order that the Corpus should beas comprehensive as possible, and in view of the fact that churchremains are still being discovered, it is not limited toarchaeologically attested structures alone, but also includes churchesknown only from documentary sources.' So what do we have? There seem to have been about 400 churches inthe Crusader kingdom. Of about half of these there is somearchaeological evidence surviving. The first two volumes of the Corpushave 307 entries, comprising 282 numbered entries for identified oridentifiable churches, supplemented by 25 discussions of uncertain,unproven, or nonexistent non��ex��is��tence?n.1. The condition of not existing.2. Something that does not exist.non and hence un-numbered cases. About a hundredmore churches will be added with the publication of Acre, Jerusalem andTyre in Volume 3. The 282 in Volumes i & 2 are distributed over 157different places: 119 places have only a single church; 19 places have 2churches, 4 have 3, 5 have 4, and 3 have 5. There is a long tail: fiveplaces with eight, nine, ten, eleven, or twelve churches respectively,and two with fourteen each. This does not, of course, include Acre with40, Jerusalem with 30, and Tyre with 16: Joshua Prawer's figures(we shall have to wait to see what Pringle says). The types of church covered are as wide as these figures mightsuggest: local churches of unidentified status, parish churches,churches at special sites (for example, the church at Abu-Ghosh markingthe site where Christ appeared at Emmaus (No. 1), or the Monastery ofthe Holy Cross just outside Jerusalem (No. 145)), castle chapels andcastle churches, monastic churches (with their monastic buildings), and10 cathedrals, Ascalon, Beirut, Bethlehem, Caesarea, Hebron, Lydda,Nazareth, Sebaste, Sidon and Tiberias. This roll-call at once revealsnot only some of the great set-piece entries (for example, Bethlehem,Nos. 61-3) but also the geographical range. This is the kingdom ofJerusalem sensu stricto, and today involves Israel (including Gaza, theWest Bank, and the Golan), with parts of Lebanon, Jordan and Egypt. Thisis obvious from the 10 maps hidden away at the back of Churches L-Z,which might usefully have shown the boundaries of the kingdom. A quibble QUIBBLE. A slight difficulty raised without necessity or propriety; a cavil. 2. No justly eminent member of the bar will resort to a quibble in his argument. here, in these otherwise superbly edited volumes: no hint except in thePreface that these maps exist, no list of them in the contents, nomention of them where the explanations of the two systems of gridreferences are given, and no reference on the maps to explain the gridsystems. Perhaps they were an afterthought? And there are errors in themaps: Karak (No. 129-33) is in the wrong place on Map 10, andalWu'aira on Map i is the site whose normative head-name in theCorpus is Wadi Musa (No. 277-8). Each entry, however short or long, follows the same format:normative head name with alternative site names, medieval and/or modernArabic Modern Arabic may refer to: Modern Standard Arabic living varieties of Arabic , Crusader, Hebrew, followed by number, name or identification ofthe church, and grid reference grid referenceNouna series of numbers indicating the location of a point on a map . The text then follows with photographsmostly by the author (and all the better for it, as he knows exactlywhat he wants to show) and plans and elevations in a uniform style and(where possible) to a uniform scale of 1:200. These drawings are of aconsistently high quality, marked by an elegance of simplicity andclarity, and are mostly the work of Peter Leach, as is very rightlyrecognized on the title page of both volumes. Some have been publishedbefore and are here redrawn, but many appear here for the first timebased on the fieldwork undertaken for the Corpus. As with the maps,there is an editing oddity: the key to the conventions used is givenonce only, at the end of the Introduction in Churches A-K, and this isthe only place I have found where the point about uniform scale is made.The figures all have drawn scales, but without some indication in thecaptions, for example to state if the scale is other than 1:200, it isnecessary to have a scale rule to hand at all times when makingcomparisons. The texts are rigorously systematic, comprising (as required) ageneral introduction to the site, and then, for each church, sections onhistory, description, epigraphy epigraphy:see inscription. (inscriptions, seals, etc.), discussion,date visited, and sources. To keep matters within bounds, the texts aredirected to identification, building history and architecture (ChurchesA-K, p. 4): `architectural discussion of an art-historical as opposed to apurely descriptive kind has been kept to a minimum. Similarly, theinstitutional histories of monastic houses, religious orders andcathedral chapters....' These self-imposed limitations should not deter art andinstitutional historians. Whether consulting one of the shorter entries,for example that for Rachel's Tomb beside the road to Hebron, justsouth of Jerusalem (Churches L-Z, pp. 176-8), or one of the majorpieces, such as the cathedral church of the Annunciation This article refers to the basilica in Nazareth. For information on the church associated with the Blagoveschenskaya Tower in Russia, see Kremlin towers or Cathedral of the Annunciation. at Nazareth,the same approach, the same scrupulous attention to detail as well as tocomprehensiveness and clarity are apparent. In both cases, fullattention is given to the pre-Crusader development of the site, as wellas to its documentary and structural history in the Crusader period, andto its subsequent fate and investigation. In the case of Rachel'sTomb, this leads to the conclusion that there is no certain evidence forCrusader construction or use, and hence the entry is not given a number,but this in no way diminishes the attention given, as the remarkablelist of sources, occupying over a column, testifies, by far the mostthorough listing to my knowledge available anywhere. The cathedral atNazareth presents a major problem: raised to the ground in 1263, theCave of the Annunciation Annunciationdove and lilypictured with Virgin and Gabriel. [Christian Iconography: Brewer Dictionary, 645]ElizabethMary’s old cousin; bears John the Baptist. [N.T. remained intact, accessible to both Christiansand Muslims. The Franciscans built a new church on the site in 1730;this was enlarged in 1871 and demolished in 1955 to make way for theinfamous present structure. There have been excavations of the site onat least five occasions. All this is fully presented in 8 full-pagedrawings of plans and reconstructed elevations and in 11 photographs,which also include a proper selection of the outstanding late Crusadersculpture, the whole entry occupying 24 pages, a tour-de-force in itsown right. Not to say that churches of the Eastern rites are omitted. Asubstantial summary is always given of the history of a church if itexisted before the arrival of the Crusaders, as for example atBethlehem, Hebron, or Mount Tabor Mount Tabor (Hebrew: הר תבור‎, Greek: Όρος Θαβώρ. The account of Hebron, occupying 16pages and fully illustrated, breaks entirely new ground in itsdescription, illustration and discussion of the Tombs of the Patriarchsand the hitherto virtually inaccessible Cave of Machpelah, surveyed inrecent years by a party from the Israel Department of Antiquities (as itthen was). No description of Prof. Pringle's concern for thechurches of the Eastern rites can be complete without mentioning hisaccount of the Monastery of St Sabas (Nos. 216-17), otherwise known asMar Saba Coordinates: Mar Saba is a Greek Orthodox monastery overlooking the Kidron Valley in the Judean desert. It was founded by Saint Sabas of Cappadocia in the year 439. , in the Judaean Desert, which remained in Orthodox handsthroughout the Crusader period. This is still a notoriously difficultcomplex to understand (despite the appearance of Patrich (1995), whichshould now be added to the sources for this entry), but this relativelyshort (8-page) entry is unmatched as a summary of the later periods ofthe monastery. One can safely say that in every case the Corpus will be --certainly should be -- the first port of call for anyone seriouslyinterested in any of the sites it covers. The range of sources examined,the sophistication so��phis��ti��cate?v. so��phis��ti��cat��ed, so��phis��ti��cat��ing, so��phis��ti��catesv.tr.1. To cause to become less natural, especially to make less naive and more worldly.2. of their criticism and use, the clarity of theirexposition are consistent: and remarkable, and this is true for bothwritten documents and architecture. Denys Pringle's Corpus must beone of the outstanding examples of the proper combination of written andarchaeological evidence in medieval studies, a triumph for its author,for its publisher, and notably for the British School of Archaeology inJerusalem. The recent closure of the School as recommended by theBritish Academy's ill-judged Wilson Report on British Schools andInstitutes abroad has been universally deplored. It is good to be ableto report that in the face of very great difficulties the school willprobably now live on in some sort within the framework of the Committeefor British Research in the Levant Levant(ləvănt`)[Ital.,=east], collective name for the countries of the eastern shore of the Mediterranean from Egypt to, and including, Turkey. . There is much here which reflects the style and method of thecounty volumes of the English, Welsh and Scottish Royal Commissions, thetwo latter still happily with us, but whereas they would have needed ateam to produce these volumes and still have taken at least as long,Pringle has produced them essentially on his own with the invaluablecontribution of Peter Leach's skill as surveyor and draughtsman. In the midst Adv. 1. in the midst - the middle or central part or point; "in the midst of the forest"; "could he walk out in the midst of his piece?"midmost of all this, Prof. Pringle found time to write hisSecular buildings, put together on very much the same lines andpublished in the same format, as a companion to the Corpus, thedifference being that this is designed as a gazetteer gazetteer(găz'ĭtēr`), dictionary or encyclopedia listing alphabetically the names of places, political divisions, and physical features of the earth and giving some information about each. . The entries arevery much shorter, with little or no historical content, but with crispdescriptions of what is visible and concise but comprehensive lists ofsources. As a result, 238 sites are covered in 95 pages. There are noexclusions: Acre, Jerusalem and Tyre appear here along with the rest,and the length of their respective entries is a fair indication of thecharacter of the gazetteer. The other big difference is the 14-pageintroduction which condenses a great deal of crucial information withthe help of four tables and covers `Towns and Cities',`Castles', `Other Non- or Semi-Fortified Rural Dwellings',`Water Supply and Drainage', and `Agricultural and IndustrialInstallations'. The very brevity of the Gazetteer brings its own problems. I wasinterested to see, for example, that in the entry for Belvoir Castle Belvoir Castle (pronounced Beaver) is a stately home in the English county of Leicestershire, overlooking the Vale of Belvoir (grid reference SK820337). It is a Grade I listed building. theonly indication that this is actually a complex multi-period structureis given by the scarcely legible hatching in figure 16 showing thegatehouse to the inner ward as secondary. There are actually three majorperiods at this point and the structural history of the castle as awhole, which has never been properly published following its clearancerather than excavation by the Israeli Ministry of Tourism, needsreconsideration (see now Pringle 1996). The second volume of the Corpus and the Gazetteer-appeared too lateto be used by Ronnie Ellenblum in Frankish rural settlement, but the twoapproaches are complementary, the one descriptive, the other analytical.Frankish rural settlement sets out to examine the contrasting modelswhich have been used to describe rural society in the Latin kingdom. Upto the end of the 1940s, the idea that held the field was that theFranks had become part of an integrated `Franco-Syrian' societyconsisting of the Franks and their indigenous subjects, living `togethernot only in the countryside, but in the cities, in the mountains, in theports, and even in the ranks of the Occidental army' (Rey 1866: 17,as quoted by Ellen-blum, p. 3). This interpretation was replaced in the1950s by the contrary view that Frankish rural settlement was verylimited. As Joshua Prawer Joshua Prawer (he: ; November 22, 1917–April 30, 1990) was a notable Israeli historian and a scholar of the Crusades and Kingdom of Jerusalem whose work often attempted to portray Crusader society put it (1980: 102-3, `the Crusaders'society was predominantly, almost exclusively, an urban society'.Frankish urban and Muslim rural society were depicted as being almosttotally segregated and as having very limited social, cultural, andgeographical relations. Under this `existing model', as Ellenblumcalls it, Frankish settlement in the Levant was of very limited scope.Just why this view was taken, whether it is correct, and how it shouldbe modified is the theme of this book. From a review of 235 Frankish rural sites, including castri,castelli, villages, farm houses, manor houses, mills, isolated buildingsand `unknown' sites, Dr Ellenblum sets out to show `that within theboundaries of the Latin kingdom [excluding South Lebanon] there was anintensive Frankish settlement which resembled, in many aspects, thesettlement types which existed in southern Europe during the sameperiod' (p. 36). It is the distribution of these sites whichprovides the key, for they are located essentially only in sparselypopulated agricultural areas or where there was a local Christianmajority. `Where there was a Muslim majority, there was no Frankishsettlement' (p. 36). Ellenblum's concept of a `Frankish-local Christian'society differs profoundly from both the `existing model' of asegregated society and the earlier model of a fully integrated`Franco-Syrian' society comprising Western and Eastern Christiansand Muslims. It is summarized in the concept of `Frankishsettlement' as opposed to that of `Crusader settlement'. Thus,the Crusader stage was limited in space and time and was bellicose bel��li��cose?adj.Warlike in manner or temperament; pugnacious. See Synonyms at belligerent.[Middle English, from Latin bellic ,whereas `rankish settlement' was civilian and extended over a muchlonger period. The phases could be seen as `two consecutive stages inthe creation of a "Settlement Frontier"' (p. 277). Theconsequences of the exclusion of the Muslim elements were immense, forwhat had begun as a Crusader-Muslim conflict became in time aMuslim-Christian struggle. These are profound points. They are a remarkable demonstration, inwhatever way the argument may fall out in the end, of the power ofarchaeological evidence to question established positions constructedfrom written sources and from only the more obvious and striking of thearchitectural-archaeological remains, the great castles and the walledtowns. If the pre-1940s model was influenced by French colonialist ideasof the enlightened role of the Franks in the medieval Levant, and theexisting model by Zionist interpretations of the relations between theEuropean immigrants and the local Muslim population and by Britishpost-colonial attitudes, Ronnie Ellenblum's interpretation may alsobe a child of its time, influenced by the realities of the contemporarycultural and political background, as he readily admits. It is not to be expected that these very different studies byEllenblum and Pringle should agree in every detail or even in theirconclusions, nor can the authors be expected in the future to agree ontheir interpretations. This is wholly fruitful. Both scholars haveopened up new lines of enquiry, produced a huge amount of new materialto be further investigated, and deserve our gratitude. CambridgeUniversity Press has served scholarship well by the publication of suchbeautifully printed studies of a world that remains of centralimportance not only to scholarship but to the conduct of contemporaryaffairs -- which in sometimes surprising ways is illuminated by boththese works. References JOHNS, C.N. 1937. Palestine of the Crusades: historicalintroduction and gazetteer. Jaffa: Commissioner for Lands & Surveys,Survey of Palestine. PATRICH, J. 1995. Sabas, leader of Palestinian monasticism monasticism(mənăs`tĭsĭzəm, mō–), form of religious life, usually conducted in a community under a common rule. : Acomparative study in eastern monasticism, fourth to seventh centuries.Washington (DC): Dumbarton Oaks Dumbarton Oaks is a 19th century Federal-style mansion with famous gardens in the Georgetown neighborhood of Washington, D.C. It currently houses the Dumbarton Oaks Research Library and Collection . PRAWER, J. 1980. Colonization activities in the Latin Kingdom, inJ. Prawer, Crusader Institutions: 102-42. Oxford: Clarendon Press. PRINGLE, D. 1996. Belvoir, in J. Turner (ed.), The dictionary ofart. London: Macmillan. REY, E.G. 1866. Essai sur la domination francaise en Syrie durantle moyen age moy��en age?n.The Middle Ages.[French : moyen, middle + age, age.] . Paris. MARTIN BIDDLE, Hertford College, Oxford OX11 3BW, England.