of the Madaba mosaic. Then came a period of Persian invasions and Imperial decay, followed in 637 by the conquest of Jerusalem by ʾOmar. Notwithstanding the tolerance of the earlier Khalifs, Moslem rule inevitably arrested the development of Christian religious art; and such gifts as the Holy Places now received came rather from the West, through the liberality of Charlemagne, than from the Byzantine East. The first Western note is struck by certain monastic foundations, in particular by those which afforded hospital treatment for pilgrims. The fanaticism of the mad Khalif Hakim in the first years of the eleventh century led to the almost complete destruction of Christian religious buildings; and the efforts of the Emperor Constantine Monomachus could barely cope with the vastness of the ruin. The exhausted Eastern Empire could only attempt a hasty restoration of the Holy Sepulchre; while a few hospitals were constructed’ by merchants of Amalfi. The situation was reversed by the liberation of the Holy Places at the hands of the Crusaders in 1099.
The character of the artistic renascence of Jerusalem in the twelfth century and during the lifetime of the Latin Kingdom has often been misunderstood. Because it coincided with the Byzantine renascence under the Comneni, because a judicious adaptation of local conditions introduced certain technical formulae and certain innovations in the art of the West, because the co-operation of Greek craftsmen has been definitely established, it has been thought that Palestine, and Jerusalem in particular, were a fruitful school in which Frankish architects acquired the knowledge which made possible the full development of their art. The study of the surviving monuments indicates that such was not the case. The technical structural detail and the decoration of the principal buildings of the Crusading period indicate that they are products of Romanesque art, similar to the buildings which arose throughout the West after the first half of the eleventh century.
The remarkable castles with which the Crusaders endowed Palestine and Syria are alluded to in Part I., § 5.
