In estimating the architectural results of the Frankish rule, we must remember the short time available—so far as all but the coast towns were concerned. But a traveller, who visited the country in 1185, tells us that the Franks had done much for the mural decoration of their churches, of which, beginning with Tancred’s church on Mt Tabor in 1111, they erected a number down to the catastrophe of Hattin. William of Tyre specially mentions the munificence of Queen Mélisende in founding a church and convent at Bethany, of which her youngest sister was Superior, and her splendidly bound copy of the Gospels is in the British Museum. In the Church of the Holy Sepulchre, and in the Cathedral and Castle of Tortosa, still linger traces of the Crusaders. It has been remarked that in their architecture more than in aught else the Franks of Palestine remained Westerners.
In conclusion we may ask how Frankish society in Palestine compares with Frankish society in Cyprus and in the Latin Principalities of the present Greek Kingdom. Very different from either Frankish Palestine or Frankish Greece was the condition of the Kingdom of Cyprus, created by a mere accident of the Crusades, which nominally continued the tradition of the Kingdom of Jerusalem. While the reason of the latter’s existence was war, Cyprus was essentially a commercial state, to which the loss of Acre was a blessing in disguise. So long as the Kings of Cyprus, in their capacity of Kings of Jerusalem, had territory on the opposite coast of Syria, they were necessarily involved in continental wars, and could not devote themselves to the development of their own island; as was the case of the Kings of England, so long as they held the damnosa hereditas of the Plantagenets in France. Cyprus was, like England, defended by the sea; like England, she became one of the marts of the world, in an age when the crusading spirit had died away, and trade was the attraction that led men to the East. The Popes, by prohibiting trade with the Saracens after the loss of the Holy Land, procured for Cyprus a monopoly; and Famagosta surpassed Constantinople, Venice and Alexandria. Moreover, warned by the example of Jerusalem, the Kings of Cyprus cut down the privileges of the nobles, who were denied the right of coinage and jurisdiction over the middle class. Consequently, the Cypriote monarchy was more independent, and continued to prosper until it allowed—and this should be to us a warning—foreign competitors, under the guise of commerce, to creep into its cities and ultimately to dictate its policy.
All the Latin states in the East, whether in Jerusalem, Cyprus, or Greece proper, presented examples of that difficult political experiment—the rule of a small alien minority over a large native majority of a different religion, an experiment worked most successfully in those states, like Lesbos under the Genoese Gattilusj, where the Latin rulers became assimilated with the ruled. But in Frankish Greece the feudal states were not commercial; and the Venetian and Genoese colonies were, except in Negroponte, quite distinct from them. The Frank conquerors of Greece did not go thither with the noble aims which led some of the leaders of the first Crusade to the Holy Land; on the contrary, they turned aside from the recovery of the Holy City to partition a Christian Empire. Yet the moral standard of the Franks in Greece was much higher than that of their predecessors in Palestine, or their contemporaries in Cyprus. Possibly, the reason was that they lived healthier lives, and had fewer temptations. Big maritime commercial towns, like Tyre and Acre, and Famagosta, did not exist, and country life was more developed. Certainly, the Chronicle of the Morea is more edifying reading than the Letters of Jacques de Vitry on the condition of Acre at the time of his appointment as its bishop in 1216. But in one respect Frankish Palestine and Frankish Greece present the same strange phenomenon—that union of antiquity with the Middle Ages, of the biblical and the classical with the romantic, which inspired the second part of Faust. To find the feudal system installed at Hebron and Athens, at Shechem and Sparta, at Tiberias and Thebes, to read of Princes of Galilee and of Princes of Achaia, causes surprise only surpassed by that which we should have felt in August, 1914, had we been told that before four Christmases had passed, Australians and New Zealanders would have shared in the taking of Jerusalem.
AUTHORITIES
1. Recueil des Historiens des Croisades. Seventeen vols. Paris: Imprimerie Nationale, 1841-1906.
2. Gesta Dei per Francos. Ed. J. Bongars. Two vols. Hanover, 1611.
3. Geschichte des Königreichs Jerusalem, 1100-1291. Von R. Röhricht. Innsbruck: Wagner, 1898.
4. Regesta Regni Hierosolimitani, 1097-1291, and Additamentum. Von R. Röhricht. Œniponti: Lib. Acad. Wagneriana, 1893-1904.
5. Les Colonies franques de Syrie aux xiiᵐᵉ et xiiiᵐᵉ siècles. Par E. Rey. Paris: Picard, 1883.
6. Numismatique de l’Orient Latin, avec Supplément. Par G. Schlumberger. Paris: Leroux, 1878-82.