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the Harrowing of Hell from the Melisende Psalter

The art of the crusades, meaning primarily the art produced in Middle Eastern areas under Crusader control, encompassed roughly two artistic periods in Europe, the Romanesque Period, and the Gothic period, the transition between the two occurring around the middle of the 12th century.

The military crusaders themselves were mostly not noticeably interested in artistic matters, or sophisticated in their taste. Probably their most notable and influential artistic achievement was the Crusader castles, many of which achieve a stark, massive beauty. They developed the Byzantine methods of city-fortification for stand-alone castles far larger than any constructed before, either locally or in Europe.

The crusaders encountered a long and rich artistic tradition in the lands they conquered at the end of the 11th century and the beginning of the 12th. Byzantine art and Islamic art (that of both the Arabs and the Turks) were the dominant styles in the crusader states, although there were also the styles of the indigenous Syrians and Armenians. These indigenous styles were incorporated into styles brought by the crusaders from Europe, which were themselves highly varied, stemming from France, Italy, Germany, England, and elsewhere.

An example of the mixture of different styles is the Melisende Psalter, an illuminated manuscript produced in the mid-12th century, perhaps for Queen Melisende of Jerusalem. It reflects her European and Armenian heritage, and is also influenced by Byzantine and Islamic techniques. The monastery of St Catherine, Sinai was an important centre where a school of manuscript and icon painting that blended European and local influences emerged. Fortunately it has also been a very secure home for its collection of art, so we have a good number of survivals that are still there, and hardly any from elsewhere. Artists who can be identified on stylistic grounds as originating in France and Italy (Venice and Apulia) worked there, producing work mixing Byzantine and Western conventions, but usually with lettering in Greek. This was possible because by a quirk of Orthodox history the church there was in communion with both the Catholic and the other Orthodox churches, and so the normal sectarian divides that separated the crusaders from even the local Chistians did not operate. Another example of the mixture of styles is the Church of the Holy Sepulchre in Jerusalem, the renovation and rebuilding of which was completed in 1149.

Krak des Chevaliers, the largest Crusader castle

After the rapid collapse of the Kingdom of Jerusalem in the late-12th century, which must have destroyed a great part of the artwork the crusaders produced, they were mostly confined to a few cities on the Mediterranean coast until Acre was conquered in 1291. Their artistic output did not cease during the 13th century, and shows further influences from the art of the Mamluks and Mongols.

There was also crusade-related art produced back in Europe, from the many illuminated crusade chronicles such as the Old French translation of William of Tyre, to architecture such as the round churches built by the Knights Templar in the style of the Holy Sepulchre, and the Sainte-Chapelle in Paris built to accommodate relics brought back from the East. Luxurious printed textiles began to be produced in Europe at around the end of the Crusades, and may well have been another influence. In general, it is often not possible to say with certainty whether influences or new types of objects arriving in Europe at this period did so via Islamic Spain, the Byzantine world, or the Crusader states. Historians tend to discount the importance of the Crusader States in this regard, despite the very well developed Italian trading networks there. European castle-building was certainly decisively influenced by the crusaders.

• Romanesque art
• Gothic art
• Kingdom of Jerusalem

• Jaroslav Folda, Crusader Art in the Twelfth Century, B.A.R., 1982.
• Bianca Kühnel, Crusader Art of the Twelfth Century: A Geographical, an Historical, or an Art Historical Notion?, Berlin, 1994.
• Jaroslav Folda, The Art of the Crusaders in the Holy Land, 1098-1187, Cambridge University Press, 1995.
• Daniel H. Weiss, Art and Crusade in the Age of Saint Louis, Cambridge University Press, 1998.
• Jaroslav Folda, Crusader Art in the Holy Land: From the Third Crusade to the Fall of Acre, 1187-1291, Cambridge University Press, 2005.

• University of Michigan article

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