For the Christian armies of the First Crusade,
taking the city of Jerusalem in 1099 was the easy part — for their next trick, they’d rebuild
most of the city from scratch and then hope to God they could actually hold the place. With
the assembled crusading armies mostly heading back West, the new King of Jerusalem relied on
monastic military orders like the Hospitaller and Templar Knights to defend the Holy Land and
protect the traveling Christians who brought the four Crusader States so much money.
Sugarcane and silk were all well and good, but the Pilgrimage business was a machine,
as visitors flocked to sites like the newly rebuilt Church of the Holy Sepulchre —
reconstructed by the crusaders in gorgeous Romanesque style around Jesus’ burial tomb and
the hill of Golgotha where he was crucified. Of course, the Holy Land was sacred to
Jews and Muslims as well as Christians, and the Crusader settlers were scant in
comparison to the existing population, with the exception of Jerusalem itself:
where all could visit but only Christians could live — no dice for the thousands of
Jews and Muslims who got displaced. This was strategically unideal, as inter-faith
cooperation (while possible) was uneasy, and the states of what’s known as “Outremer”
were heavily reliant on distant European manpower and money. By contrast, the threat
of Muslim reconquest was never far away. While the Franks could congratulate
themselves for a Job-Well-Crusaded, holding a thin strip of land thousands of
kilometers from European backup wasn’t a viable long-term strategy, so after Jerusalem
was captured by Sultan Saladin in 1187, the capital of a vastly-diminished Kingdom
shifted to the fortified port city of Acre. For the past century it had served
as the Franks’ main entry-point and became the biggest trading hub in the eastern
Mediterranean. So when the Third Crusade was called to retake the Kingdom from Saladin, Acre
was the ideal choice for where to hold the fort. And Acre absolutely was a fortress, with
gigantic tower-guarded walls and an enclosed harbor defending an impressively-robust medley of
militaries: including all three Monastic Knightly Orders and the combined navies of Venice, Genoa,
and Pisa. And this kind of city was familiar to those Italian Merchant Republics, as Acre
functioned like another island-outpost in their overseas empires, rather than the capital
of a full Crusader State. And it soon began to feel like there really wasn’t much of a Kingdom
left outside of Acre and a few other cities, as Six subsequent crusades over the 1200s failed to
secure their holdings, culminating in the Mamluk capture of Acre in 1291, whereupon the Crusaders
were kicked out of the Holy Land for good. With Levantine terrafirma now quite firmly
closed, the Crusaders pulled back a step and resettled on the island of Cyprus. It had been
Byzantine on-and-off for centuries, but around the Third Crusade it quickly changed hands several
times, ending up as the Crusader Kingdom of Cyprus in 1192. And once it no longer had to bother
ferrying hopeless knights over to the front, Cyprus in the 1300s was free to become the
mercantile hub for trade with the Muslim world, and the producer of enough
sugar to sweeten all of Europe. With cashflow like that, the capital of
Nicosia and the main port of Famagusta could go absolutely wild on grand
cathedrals in the new gothic style, inspired by the trends back in France but
unique in their simplicity and clarity. And Cyprus was the rare place where you could see an
Orthodox Gothic church, as the island was home to a majority Greek population, with Catholic French
and Italians focused in the cities. And of course, those Italians knew a useful island when
they saw one, so Genoa and Venice competed for influence over the French Lusignan dynasty
throughout the 1400s. This familiar struggle left the Kingdom of Cyprus weak enough
for Venice to simply snap it up in 1489, enjoying one of the most prosperous islands in the
Mediterranean for one last century of Latin rule. As the centuries dragged on and the Holy Land
was lost, some Crusaders were happy to settle for plain old Land. After taking some notes
on maritime statecraft from the Italians, the Hospitaller Knights took the island of Rhodes
as their base in 1310 and pestered the Ottoman Empire enough to get chased out in 1520, soon to
settle into their new home on the island of Malta. Just like old times, Step One was Not Dying: as
the Ottomans furiously besieged the island in 1565 but surprisingly failed to defeat those sturdy
Knights. And true to their Crusading roots, the swashbuckling Knights of Malta continued badgering
Ottoman ships and tussling with their pirates. After so confidently placing their little island
right in the thick of Mediterranean conflict, the Knights sought to avoid a repeat of the Great
Siege, so they set about fortifying their shiny new capital city of La Valletta: building coastal
watchtowers, an aqueduct to bring in fresh water, and, of course, buttloads of churches.
Starting with a Cathedral to the Knights’ patron Saint John, a combination of big
privateering revenue and close contact with southern Europe kicked off a golden
age of Maltese Baroque Art and Architecture. And so Malta remained Christendom’s
unsinkable citadel of limestone. Just as soon as the Crusaders stepped
into Jerusalem in 1099, they were already on the back-foot, struggling not only to
hold all these distant kingdoms but also figuring out what on earth to do with them. But
as much as I myself have taken pot-shots at the abundant pointlessness of the whole endeavor,
each of these cities were at one point on that fascinating threshold between the Abrahamic
faiths — first in the Holy Land and later, as they got pushed back, on the islands — always
building on old foundations but still creating something unique and new. Over time, the Crusader
states understood their purpose very differently, and, I think, slowly came to realize
that Holy Land was a flexible concept. Thank you so much for watching! I don’t want to
get back on my old Crusade Tirade but I DO feel it necessary to acknowledge the tens of thousands
of Jewish and Muslim (and Orthodox) civilians who were killed or forcibly displaced in the wake of
the Crusades. That doesn’t really fit into my cute little narrative about cities and architecture but
oh boy did it happen. It’s easy to get Crusading tunnel-vision and focus on grand strategy,
but in this case, it’s important to remember that was happening right outside the proverbial
Frame of Action. Alright, I’ll see you next time. Video source: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=43VBf0YFnXM
