So far as the art of glass is concerned, we may note in the thirteenth century a strange contrast between the East and the West. For while in both lands the material was applied essentially to supply a scheme of colour in decoration, in the West its use was restricted to the stained glass in the windows of churches; in the East the source of colour was obtained from translucent enamels applied to the surface of glass lamps and vases. The Saracens, in the stained glass of their windows, merely followed in the old Byzantine lines; the pierced framework of plaster, filled in with fragments of coloured glass, is but a development of the marble chassis of the Romans and the later Greeks. In the West, on the other hand, the art of building up pictures by means of segments of glass was rapidly developed, while the ‘hollow ware,’ the verrerie in daily use, had, as we have seen, received little attention, and it was reserved to the few precious pieces of enamelled glass brought from the Holy Land to find a place along with the plate and jewellery in the inventories of princes.
The fabulous wealth accumulated by the Fatimi caliphs of Egypt (908-1171 A.D.) became proverbial in later days. Makrisi, writing about the year 1400, quotes from an older writer the description of the treasure-house of the Khalifah Mustansir Billah. This building was sacked and burned with all its contents during a military riot between Turkish and Soudanese troops in 1062. Here among the vast accumulation of Oriental wealth were, it is stated, many thousand vases of rock crystal and others of sardonyx. We hear also at this time (but not in the list of these treasures) of glass mirrors in filigree frames, and of vessels of glass ornamented with figures and foliage. How the decoration in this last case was given we are not told, but the reference is probably to carvings in relief: at any rate it would, I think, be an anachronism to look for enamelled glass in this connection.
There is, however, one application of glass that we can definitely associate with these heretic caliphs, but this is scarcely an artistic one. The little coin-like discs of glass stamped with an inscription in Arabic had their prototypes in Roman times; a few rare examples have been found with the heads of Roman emperors and letterings in Latin. Among the Saracens these coin-like discs continued in use as late as the fifteenth century. In all cases, I think, they come from Egypt. The glass discs of the Fatimi period are, however, the most abundant and these are of special interest, as they bear the name of the ruler, while those of the later Memlook times have only private inscriptions. The glass varies from an amber tone to a dark bottle-green, but many are quite opaque and of a purplish black. As these little discs are of uniform weights, corresponding to parts and multiples of the gold dinar and the silver dirhem, they were at one time regarded as coins; they are now, however, recognised as weights, but essentially weights for weighing coins. Indeed a contemporary Arab writer (985 A.D.) distinctly states that in his day in Egypt they used money weights of glass; and an Arab traveller of the time mentions incidentally that such weights have this advantage, that they cannot be readily increased or decreased. The inscription occupies generally the whole surface, but a few of them bear a rough design—a ‘seal of Solomon’ or a rosette. Larger weights of glass are rare, but some of a cylindrical form weighing more than a pound may be seen in the British Museum. In Dr. Petrie’s Egyptian collection at University College is a large mass of black glass with a solid ring handle, the whole some four inches in height. This is probably a weight, but its date is uncertain.
On the whole, the art of the Fatimi caliphs who had their capital at Cairo (Misr) was still under Byzantine influence. The change of style that we have dwelt upon is rather to be associated with the Kurdish and Turkish Emirs, who, ruling first in Upper Syria and Mesopotamia, finally overwhelmed the effeminate and heretic Fatimi dynasty. To find the country where the new style arose we must look not to Egypt, but to the tract of land lying along the frontier of the Byzantine and Sassanian empires, from Tabriz to the north, by Mosul to Bagdad and Bassorah. The old Persian and Sassanian elements here doubtless prevailed over the Byzantine tradition; but the word Persian must not be applied to the new art, for the Turkish element was perhaps as important as the Iranian. It was under the Memlook sultans, almost all of them Turks by birth, that the great mosques that gave to mediæval Cairo its special cachet were erected. As for the artists themselves, though a few may have come from the Persian borderland, they were, for the most part, of the old stock of the land, and many were doubtless Christians.
In the towns of the Syrian coast, the change of mastership did not interfere with the work of the glass furnaces. We have seen in the Syriac manuscripts how fragments of Arabic are interlarded with the old indigenous dialect in passages treating upon the manufacture of glass. Around Hebron the manufacture of glass on primitive lines was carried on through the Middle Ages: a German pilgrim of the fifteenth century speaks of the many furnaces in which the ‘black glass’ was melted: the industry is indeed even now not extinct. There is one form of early Arab glass which we may perhaps associate with this centre. Certain long nail-shaped bottles, square in section and pointed at the base, have sometimes been classed with the old primitive glass of Egypt and Phœnicia, on the ground probably of the ‘dragged’ decoration of white on a black base found on some of them. But Franks was undoubtedly right in attributing these elongated flasks—they are sometimes of considerable size—to Saracenic times.[[104]]
William of Tyre says that the glass of his native town was exported to all countries, and Benjamin of Tudela, the Spanish Rabbi, praises the beauty of the glass vases there made. There were, he tells us, four hundred Jewish glass-makers and shipowners in Tyre, and in other cities of the coast the glass industry was in the hands of the Jews. This was about the middle of the twelfth century. The Jews long before that time had, it would seem, a monopoly of glass made with lead. It was to them, then, that the first enamellers must have gone for their materials. An Arab writer distinguishes among the exports from Sour (Tyre) both objects of verroterie and glass vessels worked on the wheel.[[105]] Of the glass-works of Tripoli, one of the last towns held by the Franks, I shall have something to say in a future chapter.
Just as in the case of the glass found in Egyptian and in early Greek tombs, so now with the enamelled glass of the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries, we are once more brought face to face with the question as to where it was made—in Syria or in Egypt. Syria was at this time again under rulers who had their capital in Egypt; there are indeed few important periods in Egyptian history when this has not been the case. Alexandria, it is true, had fallen from its old position,[[106]] but it is distinctly recorded that glass was made in the fourteenth century at Mansourah, the recently founded ‘town of victory,’ above Damietta. At many places in Upper Egypt, especially at Achmin, fragments, most of them, but not all, to be referred to Saracenic times, have been found. But on the whole the evidence for a Syrian origin for this enamelled ware is much stronger,—I say the origin, because it is just in the case of those rare pieces to which an early date can be ascribed that we can be certain of an Asiatic provenance.
The enamelled glass of the Saracens forms, as I have said, a compact group. The specimens that we have of it are all, or nearly all, handsome pieces, worthy, apart from their archæological interest, of a conspicuous place in our museums or on the shelves of the most fastidious amateur. Their number is strictly limited—indeed Herr Schmoranz has drawn up a careful list which claims to contain every known example.[[107]] Thanks in great measure to the researches of this expert, we are able now to make a rough general division of this glass into two classes:—
1st. Vases, goblets, and basins of many forms, brought for the most part from Syria. The bulk of the enamelled glass in this division appears to date from the thirteenth century. Several famous pieces have for centuries been preserved in the treasuries of Western churches. For these it is claimed that they have been brought back from the Holy Land by crusaders and pilgrims—filled, some of them, with earth taken from Bethlehem or other holy spots.
2nd. Lamps, obtained almost without exception from mosques in Cairo. These lamps belong, as a class, to the fourteenth century. Only of recent years has much attention been given to them; they were almost unknown to the older collectors.[[108]] The supply appears, however, to be already exhausted. The decoration on these lamps is on the whole more broadly treated, with less detail and finish, than that found on the vases and goblets of our first class.