Art and Material Culture in the Byzantine and Islamic Worlds: Studies in Honour of Erica Cruikshank Dodd 9004457135, 9789004457133, 2021002168, 2021002169, 9789004457140

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Art and Material Culture in the Byzantine and Islamic Worlds

Mediterranean Art Histories STUDIES IN VISUAL CULTURES AND ARTISTIC TRANSFERS FROM LATE ANTIQUITY TO THE MODERN PERIOD

Series Editors Hannah Baader (Kunsthistorisches Institut, Florence) Michele Bacci (University of Fribourg) Gerhard Wolf (Kunsthistorisches Institut, Florence)

volume 4

The titles published in this series are listed at brill.com/mah



Erica Cruikshank Dodd Image by Terry Marner

Art and Material Culture in the Byzantine and Islamic Worlds Studies in Honour of Erica Cruikshank Dodd Edited by

Evanthia Baboula Lesley Jessop

LEIDEN | BOSTON

Cover illustration: The Great ʿUmari Mosque in Beirut (1996), before renovation. Photo by Marcus Milwright. Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Names: Baboula, Evanthia, 1968– editor. | Jessop, Lesley, 1950– editor. |  Dodd, Erica Cruikshank, honouree. Title: Art and material culture in the Byzantine and Islamic worlds :  studies in honour of Erica Cruikshank Dodd / edited by Evanthia Baboula,  Lesley Jessop. Description: Leiden ; Boston : Brill, [2021] | Series: [Mediterranean art  histories], 2213–3399 ; [volume 4] | Includes bibliographical references  and index. Identifiers: LCCN 2021002168 (print) | LCCN 2021002169 (ebook) | ISBN  9789004457133 (hardback) | ISBN 9789004457140 (ebook) Subjects: LCSH: Art, Byzantine. | Islamic art. | Art and society—Byzantine  Empire. | Art and society—Islamic countries. Classification: LCC N6250 .A673 2021 (print) | LCC N6250 (ebook) | DDC  709.02/14—dc23 LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2021002168 LC ebook record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2021002169

Typeface for the Latin, Greek, and Cyrillic scripts: “Brill”. See and download: brill.com/brill-typeface. ISSN 2213-3399 ISBN 978-90-04-45713-3 (hardback) ISBN 978-90-04-45714-0 (e-book) Copyright 2021 by Koninklijke Brill NV, Leiden, The Netherlands. Koninklijke Brill NV incorporates the imprints Brill, Brill Hes & De Graaf, Brill Nijhoff, Brill Rodopi, Brill Sense, Hotei Publishing, mentis Verlag, Verlag Ferdinand Schöningh and Wilhelm Fink Verlag. All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, translated, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise, without prior written permission from the publisher. Requests for re-use and/or translations must be addressed to Koninklijke Brill NV via brill.com or copyright.com. This book is printed on acid-free paper and produced in a sustainable manner.

Contents



Erica Cruikshank Dodd Passion, Serendipity, Curiosity, and the Making of an Art Historian ix Lesley Jessop Bibliography of Erica Cruikshank Dodd xiv Note on Transliteration and Dates xvii List of Figures and Tables xviii Notes on Contributors xxii



Introduction: Diversity and Identity in the Medieval Mediterranean and Beyond 1 Evanthia Baboula and Lesley Jessop

1

The Anaphoric Icon Observations on Some Byzantine Metapictures 19 Anthony Cutler

2

Two Icons of the Virgin and Child Hodegetria from St. Catherine’s Monastery on Mount Sinai Byzantine or Crusader? 33 Jaroslav Folda

3

The Thirteenth-Century Expansion of the Narthex of San Marco, Venice A Space for Dead Doges? 55 John Osborne

4

The Refectory of the Monastery of St. Mary in the Valley of Jehoshaphat, Jerusalem Crusader Painting at Crossroads 89 Glenn Peers

5

Orthodox Monasteries under Lusignan Rule Relations with Others, Relations with Their Own 108 Annemarie Weyl Carr

6

Church Embellishment in Medieval Egypt, Syria, and Cyprus Patronage and Identity 137 Mat Immerzeel and Bas Snelders

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7

The Tale of the Shared Church in Diyarbakir Narrative Traditions of the Co-use of Places of Prayer by Muslims and Christians 175 Angela Andersen

8

Beirut’s Great ʿUmari Mosque History, Memory, and Post-war Reconstruction 205 May Farhat

9

The Traditional Crafts of the Middle East and Central Asia in the Writings of European and North American Travellers 238 Marcus Milwright

10

To Not Know God Geometrical Abstraction and Visual Theology in Islamic Art 265 Rico Franses Index 287

Erica Cruikshank Dodd

Passion, Serendipity, Curiosity, and the Making of an Art Historian Lesley Jessop Imagine being a college student in Lebanon in the 1970s–80s: you go on a class trip where you meet the last Aramaic speaker in Syria, walk the oldest Roman Road, eat black truffles in Aleppo, and scandalize the bath attendants when all of you—guys and girls together—troop in to take a bath in the city’s Ottoman-era bathhouse. If, by good luck or careful planning, you were fortunate enough to know Erica Cruikshank Dodd and take her classes at the American University of Beirut, this would have been part of your experience. Erica’s energy, passion, and dedication as a teacher, augmented by her tireless organization of student trips, exposed students to the history of the region in a way that no-one else had done before. Erica’s interests in Byzantine and Islamic art were shaped by her upbringing in the multi-cultural environment of Beirut, Lebanon. Her initial passion lay with classical art, inspired by weekend trips visiting ruins with her father, who was Professor of Surgery at the American University. She attended Wellesley College, where she graduated with a degree in Classical Art in 1951, and then moved onto doctoral studies at the Courtauld Institute of Art in London. In choosing a graduate school, Erica had two requirements: she wanted to be in England and to be at the most prestigious art history institution she could find. She was accepted at the Courtauld Institute. Unfortunately, Erica had failed to notice that the Courtauld Institute did not teach classical art! When she discovered this on her arrival in London, she quickly adapted. Given her education and background—she had attended French schools in Beirut, studied Latin while at boarding school at Branksome Hall in Toronto, and learned Greek at Wellesley College—she was advised to work on Byzantine Art, under the supervision of the very exacting Hugo Buchthal. It was one of the turning points in her life. While still at the Courtauld Institute, Erica received a Junior Fellowship at the Dumbarton Oaks Institute in Washington, DC, where Ernst Kitzinger was the director. He quickly took Erica under his wing, stimulated her interest in early Byzantine silver, closely supervised her ground-breaking work on Byzantine silver stamps, and remained a mentor and friend for the rest of his life. Erica’s book, Byzantine Silver Stamps, which is based on her doctoral research and was published by Dumbarton Oaks in 1961, remains a standard

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text for any scholars of early Byzantine silver. She deciphered the control stamps that allow us to date the silver and thus provided a solid database for further studies in the field. Erica’s time in Washington was important for her personally as well as professionally. In 1959, while at Dumbarton Oaks to talk about the publication of her book, she became reacquainted with Peter Dodd. She had known Peter while she was growing up in Beirut, but this time things were different. They married one year later. Erica had been teaching art history at McMaster University in Hamilton, Ontario, but moved to join Peter, who was completing his PhD at Harvard. Erica still wanted to teach, but she had no position. She systematically made a list of colleges with art departments, contacted their chairs, introduced herself, and asked if any teaching was available. When she looks back, she cannot believe she had been so bold! Ironically, a chance meeting in Harvard Square determined the next course of her career. She encountered an old friend from Beirut who told her that the Center for Middle Eastern Studies at Harvard was looking for a Fellow in Islamic Art. Erica was familiar with Islamic art, as she had been surrounded by it in Beirut, but it was not something she had formally studied. Undaunted, Erica applied, and her application was successful. Thus, as a Fellow at the Center for Middle Eastern Studies (1960–63), Erica officially began her study of Islamic art and Arabic. Again, she knew some Arabic, but it was “kitchen Arabic,” and Erica knew that to have any credibility as an Islamicist she needed to learn classical Arabic. At the Center for Middle Eastern Studies, Erica began to think seriously about the image in Islamic art. It occurred to her that few people knew what Islamic art was about. There was a lot of talk about the love of pattern and the lack of figural religious imagery, but little interest in the Qurʾanic inscriptions. Here, Erica’s background in classical and Byzantine art served her well. She knew that the reticence to portray a god in human form had a long tradition and that classical philosophers associated a single god with the mind, or with logos meaning reason. This eventually passed into Christian and Jewish theology, with logos being translated as the Word. As Christian doctrine teaches that God sent his only Son to earth in the form of a man, in a Christian context it is acceptable to portray the Father and Son in human form. By contrast, Islamic teaching involves learning the Word of God, as revealed to Muhammad, and recorded in the Qurʾan. It follows, therefore, that Islamic art uses the Word to symbolize God. Her initial ideas on the topic were published in 1969 in the seminal article, “The Image of the Word: Notes on the Religious Iconography of Islam.”1 1 Erica Cruikshank Dodd, “The Image of the Word: Notes on the Religious Iconography of Islam,” Berytus: Archaeological Studies 18 (1969): 35–62.

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Following their time at Harvard, Erica and Peter taught in Montreal, and in 1965 they boarded a cargo ship for Cairo to take up fellowships at the American Research Center. As any visitor to Cairo knows, the city’s long and complex history has left a plethora of material remains. The pyramids, the sphinx, and the treasures of Tutankhamun are well known, but for Erica there was also Coptic and Islamic Cairo. Places like Wadi Natrun and Bawit were only a taxi ride away. Every Saturday, armed with her camera, she would go out to photograph Cairo and its environs, amassing an extensive photographic archive that is itself a treasure and has been an invaluable resource for her teaching and research. In 1966 Erica and Peter returned to the city of their roots, as they had both received appointments at the American University of Beirut. Initially, Beirut was a perfect location. Peter was a sociologist who was concerned with encouraging a better understanding between Muslim cultures and the West, and since Erica specialized in Byzantine and Islamic art, the environment provided her with a wealth of material for her research. She insisted that she had to see one new thing each year, and this meant there had to be multiple trips. Site trips with Peter expanded into family trips with one, two, three, and then all four children in tow. There were frequent trips to the monastic sites in the Qadisha Valley in northern Lebanon, drives across the desert to well-trodden sites like Palmyra, with stops along the way at less well known sites such as the monastery of Mar Musa al-Habashi and the Umayyad Castle at Qasr al-Hayr. Family trips turned into student trips, organized on a shoestring. Erica would hire a bus and a driver, and they would travel up to northern Syria to visit Aleppo and the so-called Dead Cities, to eastern Syria and the ruins of the ancient Sumerian city of Mari, or south via Damascus to the Roman ruins at Busra. In Beirut Erica further developed the ideas she had tentatively introduced in her Berytus article. She realized that an in-depth study of Qurʾanic inscriptions on Islamic buildings was long overdue. It was a collaborative project, but fraught with problems as civil war had broken out in Lebanon in 1975. The Image of the Word, written with Shereen Khairallah, was published by the American University of Beirut in 1981 and represents a first attempt to gather, categorize, and analyze Qurʾanic inscriptions on medieval Islamic buildings. Erica’s next major project was to study the medieval frescoes in Syria and Lebanon. Her interest in them was stimulated by a visit from Cyril Mango and David Winfield, who came to Beirut and asked Erica to guide them around the Lebanese sites. Previously, she had shied away from dealing with the complex cross-cultural influences that abound in the art of the Crusader period, but she was soon intrigued. Trips in search of more frescoes soon followed. This frequently involved trekking through the barren mountains, a hard and sometimes life-threatening task, to gather the information that forms

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the basis for her two books: The Frescoes of Mar Musa al-Habashi: A Study of Medieval Painting in Syria (Toronto, 2001) and Medieval Painting in the Lebanon (Wiesbaden, 2004). Erica’s documentation of these sites is invaluable, as due to the unstable political situation in the area, many of these sites are now inaccessible and, sadly, some have been destroyed. In 1986 Erica and her family left Beirut. The war was escalating and westerners were being kidnapped at an alarming rate. In 1986 three colleagues from the American University were killed and so, reluctantly, but out of concern for the safety of their children, Erica and Peter returned to North America. They spent the summer at the family cabin at Lake Champlain in the Adirondacks, and then Peter went to Islamabad to become the Director of the Fulbright Foundation and Erica moved to Victoria, British Columbia, in the fall. Erica had met John Osborne at the Byzantine Studies Conference in Oberlin, Ohio, in 1980, and afterwards they shared a flight from Cleveland to Toronto. At that time John was in the early stages of his career and was very excited to meet the Canadian who had done such important work on Byzantine silver stamps. By 1986 John was Chair of the Department of History in Art (now the Department of Art History and Visual Studies) and Anthony Welch was Dean of the Faculty of Fine Arts at the University of Victoria. When they discovered that Erica and her family had been left homeless by the civil war in Lebanon, John and Tony secured her a visiting faculty position in the Department of History in Art. In Victoria, Erica soon became known for her lively graduate seminars, as she could stimulate discussions amongst even the most shy and reticent students. By the same token, she maintained high standards. Woe betide the student who stated something as fact without being able to substantiate it with rock solid evidence. Erica also continued to organize student trips, although the visits to mosques in the Vancouver area were far less exotic than the sites in Lebanon and Syria. When Peter suffered a heart attack in Islamabad in the summer of 1988, Erica moved to Pakistan. While in Pakistan, she became interested in the inscriptions in the Wazir Khan mosque in Lahore2 and the decoration of Pakistani buses and trucks. When Peter retired in 1996, they returned to Victoria permanently. Erica was appointed an Adjunct Professor in the Department of History in Art, and Associate Fellow at the Centre for Studies in Religion and Society at the University of Victoria. Victoria provided her with an environment in which she could finally write and publish the research material she gathered during her 2 Erica Dodd, “The Wazir Khan Masjid in Lahore: A Study of the Inscriptions,” in Canadian Contributions the Study of Islamic Art and Archeology, ed. Marcus Milwright and Evanthia Baboula (Montreal: McGill-Queen’s University Press, forthcoming).

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years in Beirut and Islamabad. She has also resumed her research on Byzantine silver stamps and hopes to publish the new material in a revised addition of her first book. In 2010, Peter died from congestive heart failure and Erica later married her long-time colleague, Alan Batten, who had also just lost his partner of fifty years. They live in a small house, close to the beach, and close to the university. Erica is a frequent attendee at university lectures and continues to travel in search of new silver stamps. Her generosity outside the classroom continues on many levels. As an academic, she is always happy to discuss Byzantine and Islamic art with students and colleagues, and as a hostess she is quick to offer her house as a venue for pizza parties or end-of-term pot-lucks. If you are lucky, you may even be treated to one of her special Lebanese dishes. This book is our tribute to her.3 3 This foreword has been written following discussions with Erica Cruikshank Dodd, Frances Dodd, Janis Elliott, May Farhat, Nuha Khoury, and John Osborne.

Bibliography of Erica Cruikshank Dodd

Books

Byzantine Silver Stamps. Washington DC: Dumbarton Oaks, 1961. Byzantine Silver Treasures. Bern: Abegg-Stiftung, 1973. Image of the Word, with Shereen Khairallah. Beirut: American University of Beirut, 1981. The Frescoes of Mar Musa al-Habashi. Toronto: Pontifical Institute of Mediaeval Studies, 2001. Medieval Frescoes in the Lebanon. Wiesbaden: Reichert, 2004. Byzantine Silver Stamps. New and Revised Edition. Wiesbaden: Reichert, forthcoming.



Book Chapters

“Notes on the Monastery of Mar Musa al-Habashi, near Nebek, Syria.” In Crusader Art in the Twelfth Century, edited by Jaroslav Folda, 167–89. Oxford and Jerusalem: British School of Archaeology in Jerusalem, British Archaeological Reports, International Series, 152, 1982. “The Mosaic of the Fruit and the Knife in Khirbet al-Mafjar.” In Studies in the History and Archaeology of Palestine, edited by Shawqi Shaath, 325–45. Aleppo: Aleppo University, 1984. “The Question of Workshop: Evidence of the Stamps on the Sion Treasure,” and “Location of Silver Stamping: Evidence from the Newly Discovered Stamps.” In Ecclesiastical Silver Plate in Sixth-Century Byzantium, edited by Susan A. Boyd and Marlia Mundell Mango, 57–63 and 217–24. Washington DC: Dumbarton Oaks, 1993. “Christian Arab Sources for the Ceiling of the Palatine Chapel, Palermo.” In Arte d’Occidente: temi e metodi. Studi in onore di Angiola Maria Romanini, edited by Antonio Cadei, Marina Righetti Tosti-Croce, Anna Segagni Malacart, and Alessandro Tomei, 2:823–31. Rome: Sintesi Informazioni, 1999. “Jerusalem, Fons et Origo: Sources in Outremer for the Development of Western Medieval Art.” In Interactions: Artistic Interchange between the Eastern and Western World in the Medieval Period, edited by Colum Hourihane, 11–27. Princeton: Princeton University and University Park, Pennsylvania: Pennsylvania State University, 2007. “Painting the Liturgy in a Non-Chalcedonian Church.” In ΑΝΑΘΗΜΑΤΑ ΕΟΡΤΙΚΑ: Studies in Honor of Thomas Mathews, edited by Joseph D. Alchermes, Helen C. Evans, and Thelma K. Thomas, 135–42. Mainz: Philipp von Zabern, 2009. “Silver Objects with Stamps.” In The Wyvern Collection. Vol. 3, Byzantine and Sasanian Silver, Enamels and Works of Art, edited by Marco Aimone. London: Thames and Hudson, 2020.

Bibliography of Erica Cruikshank Dodd

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“The Wazir Khan Masjid in Lahore: A Study of the Inscriptions.” In Canadian Contributions to the Study of Islamic Art and Archeology, edited by Marcus Milwright and Evanthia Baboula. Montreal and Kingston: McGill-Queen’s University Press, forthcoming. “The Reception of Byzantine Art and Archaeology in the Middle East.” In The Oxford Handbook of Art and Architecture, edited by Ellen E. Schwarz, forthcoming.



Articles in Refereed Journals

“A Sassanian Silver Phalera,” with Andrew Alföldi. Dumbarton Oaks Papers 11 (1957): 237–45. “Byzantine Silver Stamps: Supplement I. New Stamps from the Reigns of Justin II and Constans II.” Dumbarton Oaks Papers 18 (1964): 237–48. “Byzantine Silver Stamps: Supplement II. More Treasure from Syria.” Dumbarton Oaks Papers 22 (1968): 143–49. “On the Origins of Medieval Dinanderie: The Equestrian Statue in Islam.” Art Bulletin 51, no. 3 (1969): 220–32. “The Image of the Word: Notes on the Religious Iconography of Islam.” Berytus: Archaeological Studies 18 (1969): 35–62. Reprinted in Late Antique and Medieval Art of the Mediterranean World, edited by Eva Hoffman, 185–212. Oxford: Blackwell, 2007. “On a Bronze Rabbit from Fatimid Egypt,” Kunst des Orients 8 (1972): 60–76 and 160. “China and Islam in the Maldive Islands. An Exhibition Presented at the Jafet Library, American University of Beirut, January 14–February 7, 1975, Curator, John Carswell.” Oriental Art 21, no. 3 (1975): 279. “Notes on the Wall Paintings of Mart Shmuni.” Archéologie au Levant. Recueil à la mémoire de Roger Sadah, Collection de la maison de l’orient et de la méditerranée, série archéologique 12 (1983): 451–61. “A Silver Vessel in the Collection of Elie Borowski.” Harvard Ukrainian Studies. Okeanos. Essays Presented to Ihor Ševčenko on His Sixtieth Birthday by His Colleagues and Students. Harvard Ukrainian Studies 7 (1983): 145–57. “Three Early Byzantine Silver Crosses.” Dumbarton Oaks Papers 41 (1987): 165–79. “The Monastery of Mar Musa al-Habashi, near Nebek, Syria,” Arte medievale 2nd ser., 6 (1992): 61–132. “Christian Arab Painters under the Mamluks.” ARAM 9–10 (1997–98): 257–88. “The Three Patriarchs of Mar Musa-al Habashi: Syrian Painting and Its Relationship with the West.” Al-Masaq 12 (2000): 99–139. “Mar Tadros, Bahdeidat. Paintings in a Lebanese Church from the Thirteenth Century.” Journal of the Canadian Society for Syriac Studies 1 (2001): 61–84.

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Bibliography of Erica Cruikshank Dodd

“Christian Arab Sources for the Madonna Allattante in Italy.” Arte Medievale, new ser., 2 (2003): 33–39. “The Stamps of Saint Eligius.” Numismatica e Antichità Classiche 36 (2007): 347–64. “Siculo-Arabic Ivories: Christian Motifs in Muslim Painting.” In Siculo-Arabic Ivories and Islamic Painting 1100–1300. Proceedings of the International Conference, Berlin, 6–8 July 2007, edited by David Knipp. Römische Forschungen der Bibliotheca Hertziana 36 (2011): 151–67. “On the Double Churches in the Lebanon.” Parole d’Orient 39 (2014): 313–37. “Palmyra and Poidebard.” ARAM 28, nos. 1 and 2 (2016): 541–54.



Book Reviews

Armenian Miniatures, by Lydia A. Dournovo. The Armenian Review 15 (1962): 77–78. From Byzantium to Sassanian Iran and the Islamic World: Three Modes of Artistic Influence, by Richard Ettinghausen; and The Formation of Islamic Art, by Oleg Grabar. Art Bulletin 57, no. 2 (1975): 267–70. The Petra Church, by Zbigniew T. Fiema, Chrysanthos Kanellopoulos, Tomasz Waliszewski and Robert Schick. American Journal of Archaeology 108, no. 3 (2004): 484–86. Christliche Wandmalereien in Syrien: Qara und das Kloster Mar Yarub, edited by Andrea Schmidt and Stephan Westphalen. Speculum 84, no. 3 (2009): 769–71.



Encyclopaedia Entries

“Largizione, Piatti di,” and “Tesori.” In Enciclopedia dell’arte antica classica e orientale. 12 vols. Rome: Istituto della enciclopedia italiana, 1961, vol. 4:478–79; 1966, vol. 7:753–60. Entries on Abbasid Art. In Die Kunst des Islam, edited by J. Sourdel-Thomine and B. Spuler, Propyläen Kunstgeschichte, Berlin, 1973, vol. 4:119–27. “Acquamanile (Islam),” “Amioun,” “Baalbek,” “Bahdeidat,” “Siria e Libano.” In Enciclopedia dell’arte medieval. 12 vols. Rome: Istituto della encyclopedia italiana, 1991, vol. 1:105–08 and 516–17, vol. 2:819–20; 1992, vol. 3:28–29; 1999, vol. 10:704–12. “Light,” “Logos/Word,” and “Offering.” In Encyclopedia of Comparative Iconography. Themes Depicted in Works of Art. 2 vols. 1:497–504 and 513–17; 2:665–70. Chicago and London: Fitzroy Dearborn, 1998. “Amyun,” “Bahdeidat,” and “Maʿad.” Gorgias Encyclopedic Dictionary of the Syriac Heritage, edited by Sebastian P. Brock, Aaron M. Butts, Georg A. Kiras, and Lucas von Rompay. Piscataway, NJ: Gorgias Press, 2011.

Note on Transliteration and Dates We have not imposed a particular system of transliteration of Greek, aiming for overall consistency within each chapter and respecting each author’s preference. This allows for occasional variant spellings across different authors: for example, Lampadistes and Lampadistis. We have, however, standardized Arabic names and terms following the conventions of the Encyclopaedia of Islam. Third Edition, omitting the markings for dotted consonants and long vowels. For example, we write shaykh and amir rather than sheikh and emir. Greek, Latin, and Arabic architectural and other terms are italicized throughout unless they are common in English usage. All dates are CE unless otherwise specified. Hijra dates have been used only where this is essential for clarity.

Figures and Tables Figures 1.1 1.2

Saint Philip, Mar Phokas, Amioun. Photograph: Erica Cruikshank Dodd 20 Tabularium, no. 1, Tesoro, Cappella Palatina, Palermo. Photograph: Heather Hoge 22 1.3 Tabularium, no. 1, detail, Tesoro, Cappella Palatina, Palermo. Photograph: Heather Hoge 22 1.4 Litany of the Hodegetria, Church of the Blacherna, Arta. Photograph: Anthony Cutler 23 1.5 Icon, Mother of God Machairiotissa, Monastery of Machairas, Cyprus. Photograph: Annemarie Weyl Carr 26 1.6 Mosaic icon, Virgin Hagiosoritissa, Museo Diocesano, Palermo 27 1.7 Icon, Virgin and scenes from the life of Christ, Monastery of St. Catherine, Mount Sinai. Photograph: Anthony Cutler 28 1.8 Triumph of John I Tzimiskes, Madrid, Biblioteca Nacional Vitr. 26-2, fol. 172v a 29 1.9 “Idea” relief, Castello Sforzesco, Civiche Raccolte d’Arte, Milan 29 1.10 Veneration of an icon of the Virgin Hodegetria, Kupferstichkabinett 78.A.9, Berlin, fol. 39v 30 1.11 Icon, Triumph of Orthodoxy, British Museum, London 30 2.1 Crusader icon (The Acre Triptych), central panel with the Virgin and Child Hodegetria enthroned with two standing angels, probably done in Acre, ca. 1250s (Central panel: 56.8 × 47.7 cm) Monastery of St. Catherine, Mount Sinai. Photograph: Folda Handlist (see ch. 2, n. 4): no. 66, p. 541 36 2.2 Crusader icon, Virgin and Child Hodegetria Dexiokratousa (bust-length), probably done in Acre or Sinai, ca. 1240s. (38.6 × 26.9 cm) Monastery of St. Catherine, Mount Sinai. Photograph: Folda Handlist: no. 57, p. 540 40 2.3 Crusader icon (formerly attributed to a Byzantine artist), Virgin and Child Hodegetria enthroned on a lyre-backed throne, with angels, probably done in Acre or Sinai, ca. 1260 (?) (35 × 26 cm), Monastery of St. Catherine, Mount Sinai 42 2.4 Crusader icon (formerly attributed to a Byzantine artist): Virgin and Child Hodegetria Dexiokratousa, bust-length, in mosaic, possibly done in Acre, Constantinople, or Sinai, early thirteenth century (47 × 34 cm; 34 × 23 cm without the frame), Monastery of St. Catherine, Mount Sinai 43 3.1 West façade, Church of San Marco, Venice. Photograph: Naya-Böhm, Venice 56

Figures and Tables 3.2

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Ground plan, showing locations of ducal tombs, Church of San Marco, Venice. By permission of Debra Pincus 57 3.3 Western arm of narthex, looking south, Church of San Marco, Venice. Photograph: Naya-Böhm, Venice 59 3.4 Northern arm of narthex, looking east, Church of San Marco, Venice. Photograph: Naya-Böhm, Venice 60 3.5 Sarcophagus of Doge Marino Morosini, detail, Church of San Marco, Venice. Photograph: Naya-Böhm, Venice 62 3.6 Tomb of Doge Vitale Falier, Church of San Marco, Venice. Photograph: Naya-Böhm, Venice 70 3.7 Tomb of Dogaressa Felicitas Michiel, Church of San Marco, Venice. Photograph: Naya-Böhm, Venice 71 4.1 Deesis, Monastery of St. Mary, Jehoshaphat, Jerusalem. By permission of The Israel Museum, Jerusalem 90 5.1 Narthex, view southward showing the mural icon of St. George, Anastasia Saramalyna to its right, the Latin Lady above it, and around them the paintings of 1332/33 showing the Last Judgment and saints, Panagia Phorbiotissa, Asinou. Photograph: Gerald L. Carr 112 5.2 East wall of narthex showing the Latin donor couple, St. Nicholas of the Roof, Kakopetria. Photograph: Annemarie Weyl Carr 116 5.3 Northward view across the naos toward the chapel of St. John Lampadistes and the proskynetarion with his icon, St. Herakleidios in the Monastery of St. John Lampadistes, Kalopanagiotis 119 5.4 Agia Mone/Monastery of the Priests, Church of St. Nicholas (seventeenth and nineteenth centuries) 121 6.1 Donor Philip, Church of Mar Fauqa, Amiun. Photograph: Mat Immerzeel 138 6.2 Donors John and Irene of Moutoullas, Church of the Panagia, Moutoullas. Source: Hein, Jakovljević and Kleidt, Zypern. Byzantinische Kirchen (1996), Abb. 94 140 6.3 Plan of the upper level of the Church of St. Mercurius (Abu Sefein). Source: Butler, The Ancient Coptic Churches of Egypt (1884, vol. 1), Fig. 7 143 6.4 Transitional zone of the altar room, Church of St. George. Photograph: Mat Immerzeel 145 6.5 Northern corridor of the upper level: archangel with commemorative inscription, Church of St. Mercurius. Photograph: Mat Immerzeel 147 6.6 Plan of the Church of al-Muʿallaqa. Source: Alcock and Gabra, The Coptic Museum (1993), Fig. 10 149 6.7 Virgin Blachernitissa, Church of al-Muʿallaqa. Photograph: Mat Immerzeel 150 6.8 Christ Pantocrator, canopy in the southern altar room of the Church of al-Muʿallaqa. Photograph: Adeline Jeudy 152

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6.9 Supplicating donor couple, Church of Mar Charbel, Maʿad. Photograph: Mat Immerzeel 154 6.10 Donor Simonin, Crac des Chevaliers. Photograph: Erica Cruikshank Dodd/ archives of the Index of Christian Art, Princeton 155 6.11 Head of a donor, Church of Mar Saba, Eddé al-Batrun. Photograph: Mat Immerzeel 156 6.12 Donor near St. George, Church of Mar Tadros, Bahdeidat. Photograph: Mat Immerzeel 157 6.13 Female donor, Church of the Panagia Phorbiotissa, Asinou. Source: Hein, Jakovljević and Kleidt, Zypern. Byzantinische Kirchen (1996), Abb. 5 162 6.14 Icon of St. Nicholas, Byzantine Museum of the Archbishop Makarios III Foundation, inv. no. BMIAM. 007; Frankish donor and his family. Source: Durand and Jovannoni, Chypre entre Byzance et l’Occident, no. 124 164 6.15 Doubting Thomas with donors, Church of the Holy Cross, Pelendri. Photograph: Annemarie Weyl Carr 166 7.1 Ulu Cami of Diyarbakir, main prayer hall façade. Photograph: Angela Andersen 178 7.2 Ulu Cami of Diyarbakir, main prayer hall interior. Photograph: Angela Andersen 179 7.3 Ulu Cami of Diyarbakir, west riwaq, detail of sculptural program. Photograph: Angela Andersen 181 7.4 Ulu Cami of Diyarbakir, west riwaq façade. Photograph: Angela Andersen 182 7.5 Ulu Cami of Diyarbakir, east riwaq façade. Photograph: Angela Andersen 182 7.6 Ulu Cami of Diyarbakir, east riwaq detail of sculptural program. Photograph: Angela Andersen 183 7.7 Ulu Cami of Diyarbakir, floorplan. Created by Angela Andersen 187 7.8 Ulu Cami of Diyarbakir, western riwaq vase detail. Photograph: Angela Andersen 188 8.1 ʿUmari Mosque and its surroundings, Beirut 206 8.2 West façade and principal entrance, ʿUmari Mosque, Beirut. Photograph: May Farhat 207 8.3 Plan, ʿUmari Mosque, Beirut. Photograph: Salih Mostafa Lamei 209 8.4 Door on northern wall, ʿUmari Mosque, Beirut. Photograph: May Farhat 217 8.5 City plan, Beirut. By permission of Michael Davie 220 9.1 Stereoscopic photograph published by Underwood and Underwood in 1900 entitled, “Crude makers of beautiful goods; making the famous inlaid pearl work, Damascus, Syria.” By permission of Library of Congress Prints and Photographs Division Washington: LC-DIG-ppmsca-10710 241

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9.2 Stereoscopic photograph dated 1903 by William H. Rau entitled “Making the beautiful pearlwork of the Orient, Damascus, Syria.” By permission of Library of Congress Prints and Photographs Division Washington: LC-USZ62-73947 241 9.3 Stereoscopic photograph published by Underwood and Underwood in 1900 entitled “There’s no place like home!; Dwelling and shop of a Gypsy blacksmith, Syria.” By permission of Library of Congress Prints and Photographs Division Washington: LC-DIG-ppmsca-10712 256 9.4 a and b Examples of handmade village pottery produced in Jordan, early to mid-twentieth century. Private collection, Amman, Jordan. Photographs: Marcus Milwright 258 9.5 a and b Views of a German artillery shell (dated February 1911) decorated with chasing and silver and copper inlay in Damascus in c. 1918. Private collection, Victoria, Canada. Photograph: Marcus Milwright 259 10.1 Minbar, mosque in the funerary complex of Sultan Faraj ibn Barquq, Cairo, early fifteenth century. Photograph: Rico Franses 266 10.2 Dome at the funerary complex of Sultan al-Ashraf Barsbay, Cairo, early 1430s. Photograph: Rico Franses 267 10.3 Minbar in the mosque of the Sultan Barsbay funerary complex, Cairo, early 1430s. Photograph: Rico Franses 270 10.4 Figure 10.1 with graphic overlay. Photograph: Rico Franses 271 10.5 Marriage chest, Catalonia, Kunstgewerbemuseum, Berlin, c. 1500. By permission of the Kunstgewerbemuseum, SMB/ Karen Bartsch 273 10.6 Figure 10.2 with graphic overlay. Photograph: Rico Franses 274

5.1

5.2

Tables Table categorizing the people memorialized or recorded as donors in the thirteenth century, the first half of the fourteenth century, and the year 1348: information from Paris, Bibliothèque Nationale (BnF), MS gr. 1588 123 Table categorizing the people memorialized or recorded as donors in the second half of the fourteenth century and the first half of the fifteenth century, and those cited by day but not year: information from Paris, BnF, MS gr. 1588 126

Notes on Contributors Angela Andersen specializes in the architecture of the Islamic world. She received the 2016 Margaret B. Sevcenko Prize and held a post-doctoral fellowship at the Aga Khan Program for Islamic Architecture at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in 2016–17. She has published articles on the Alevi Muslim minority and the role of community memory in understanding religious architecture. Evanthia Baboula is Assistant Professor of the arts of the Eastern Mediterranean at the University of Victoria. Her current research centres on the study of the cross-cultural encounters in the Crusader and Late Byzantine periods and the urban topography of southern Greece during the phase of Ottoman rule. Anthony Cutler is the Evan Pugh Professor of Art History at Pennsylvania State University. The recipient of numerous awards and fellowships, including the Slade Professorship of Art at Oxford University in 2012, he has written prolifically on medieval art, including works on ivory carving, such as The Hand of the Master: Craftsmanship, Ivory, and Society in Byzantium (Princeton University Press, 1994). He is currently working on a book entitled The Empire of Things: Gifts and Gift Exchange between Byzantium, the Islamic World, and Beyond. May Farhat is Assistant Professor of Islamic Art and Architecture at the American University of Beirut. She specializes in the architecture of Islamic Iran. She has also written on issues of art collecting and national identity in modern Lebanon, and is the author of “A Mediterraneanist’s Collection: Henri Pharaon’s ‘Treasure House of Arab Art,’” Ars Orientalis 42 (2012); and “Shiʿi Piety and Dynastic Legitimacy: Mashhad under the Early Safavid Shahs,” Journal of the International Society for Iranian Studies 47, no. 2 (2014). She is completing her book, Shiʿi Piety and Legitimacy in Early Modern Iran: The Shrine of Ali al-Rida in Mashhad. Jaroslav Folda is N. Ferebee Taylor Professor Emeritus of the History of Art, emeritus at the University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill. He has published extensively on Crusader art and has recently focused on the development and transmission of chrysography (golden highlighting). His book entitled, The Virgin and Child

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Hodegetria in Byzantine, Crusader and Central Italian Art in the High Middle Ages: The Radiance and Reflection of Chrysography on Icon and Panel Painting, was published by Cambridge University Press in 2015. Rico Franses is Associate Professor in the Department of Fine Arts and Art History, American University of Beirut, and Director of the University Art Collections and Galleries. He has published on Byzantine Art and on the relation of psychoanalytic theory to the visual arts and has translated Marie José Mondzain’s Image, Icon, Economy: The Byzantine Origins of the Contemporary Imaginary (Stanford, 2004). Mat Immerzeel is an art historian and archaeologist who specializes in the art of the Christian communities of the Middle East. He has been working at Leiden University in the Netherlands since 1989 and is currently at the Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam. He is the director of the Paul van Moorsel Centre for Christian Art and Culture in the Middle East and editor-in-chief of the journal Eastern Christian Art in its Late Antique and Islamic Contexts. Lesley Jessop is an Associate Fellow at the Centre for Studies in Religion and Society at the University of Victoria. Her early work focused on saints’ lives and the role of their images in medieval Italy and has been published in The Papers of the British School at Rome and RACAR. Her current research examines the role of secular art in an ecclesiastical context, with specific reference to thirteenth-century sculpture in France. Marcus Milwright is Professor of Islamic Art and Archaeology at the University of Victoria. He is the author of six books, including The Dome of the Rock and Its Umayyad Mosaic Inscriptions (Edinburgh University Press, 2016) and numerous other publications. He has completed his next book, which is entitled, The Queen of Sheba’s Gift: A History of the True Balsam of Matarea (to be published by Edinburgh University Press). He is the series editor of The Arts and Archaeology of the Islamic World (Brill) and creator of the Crafts of Syria website. John Osborne is Distinguished Research Professor and former Dean of the Faculty of Arts and Social Sciences at Carleton University in Ottawa. His publications cover

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topics ranging from the Roman catacombs, mural paintings from excavated churches such as San Clemente and Santa Maria Antiqua in Rome, and seventeenth-century antiquarian drawings of medieval monuments to the medieval understanding and use of Rome’s heritage of ancient buildings and statuary. Glenn Peers is Professor of Art History at the Department of Art and Music Histories, at Syracuse University. He was the editor of Byzantine Things in the World (2013), and author of Sacred Shock: Framing Visual Experience in Byzantium (2004) and Subtle Bodies: Representing Angels in Byzantium (2001). Bas Snelders is a researcher who specializes in aspects of identity and medieval ChristianMuslim interaction. He held a postdoctoral fellowship at the Université Sorbonne-Panthéon, Paris, in 2012–2013. He is also co-founder and member of the editorial board of the periodical Eastern Christian Art in its Late Antique and Islamic Contexts. Annemarie Weyl Carr is Distinguished Professor of Art History Emerita at Southern Methodist University in Dallas. She has published widely on Byzantine and post-Byzantine painting, art and issues of cultural interchange in the eastern Mediterranean, particularly on medieval Cyprus, and on women artists in the Middle Ages. A former president of the International Center of Medieval Art, she is now the Vice President of the Board of the Cyprus American Archaeological Research Institute in Nicosia.

Introduction

Diversity and Identity in the Medieval Mediterranean and Beyond Evanthia Baboula and Lesley Jessop This book grew out of a desire to honour the career of Erica Cruikshank Dodd and her multi-faceted interests in the arts of the eastern Mediterranean.1 In inviting scholars to contribute, our aim was to use visual and material culture as the lens through which to examine points of convergence among coexistent cultural milieux. More specifically, we were interested in the Christian and Islamic communities that occupied the shifting administrative spaces of the eastern Mediterranean during the Middle Ages. We present here a collection of essays from authors whose expertise covers a wide range of specialisms in material and visual culture that moved across different types of economic, religious, and political borders and across a geographical expanse that has promoted the very notion of borders to come under the microscope of much scholarly dialogue.2 The eastern Mediterranean has diachronically functioned as an entrepôt of people of different origins, beliefs, and habits; and while a geographical term such as this one is a heuristic device when it comes to analyzing the visual, material, or intellectual worlds contained “within,” it is now almost a trope that the Mediterranean was both fragmented and partaking in larger geographical, political and economic contexts that were both overlapping and changeable. In short, as several of the chapters show, this was a region where life trajectories could, and often did, change; as a result, the Mediterranean has defied past and present labelling, which is often based on fixed ethno-cultural identities. Our overarching goal was therefore to seek out the ways in which 1 Versions of some of the papers in the current volume were presented at “The Visual Culture of Byzantium in a Mediterranean Context,” a panel dedicated to Dr. Erica Cruikshank Dodd at the Fortieth Annual Byzantine Studies Conference (Simon Fraser University, Vancouver, November 2014). We thank the contributors of the panel: Jaroslav Folda, Annemarie Weyl Carr, Rico Franses, and Anthony Cutler. We are also grateful to the numerous colleagues and potential contributors who expressed an interest in this endeavour but who, for various reasons, were not able to participate. 2 See, for example, David Abulafia and Nora Berend, eds., Medieval Frontiers: Concepts and Practices (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2002); Steven A. Epstein, Purity Lost: Transgressing Boundaries in the Eastern Mediterranean, 1000–1400 (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2006).

© Koninklijke Brill NV, Leiden, 2021 | doi:10

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the commonalities in art and material culture were grounded in human interactions. Although the focus is on the Christian and Muslim communities, we also recognize that the religious affiliations of individuals and groups intersected with a multitude of social, cultural, and economic affiliations, which themselves could be reconfigured, adhered to more strictly, or abandoned altogether.3 The following chapters use a broad range of methodological approaches and do not claim to be comprehensive, nor do they highlight a single interpretative model. While concentrating on the traditional art historical categories of architecture, architectural decoration, and religious imagery, the plurality of topics and approaches can be seen, to some extent, as a reflection of the multitude of socio-cultural factors that informed the generation and communication of meaning during the medieval period and later. The majority of the chapters focus on the period of the twelfth to fourteenth centuries. Several venture beyond medieval times and bridge into the modern era in ways that not only follow Erica’s broad research interests, but also address how the afterlives of medieval buildings, artifacts, and practices help shape communal memory. The power of narratives invested in things, images, and buildings created continuities of meaning that often endured for centuries. Real or perceived continuities in cultural attitudes were related to malleable references that were often shared widely even if interpreted variously. We can see these as pools of fluctuating knowledge, which were curated, shaped, and codified in visual and material culture. Art and architecture have been critical mediators in the navigation of collective memory. Especially in times of intensified contacts such as the Crusades, well-established groups, newcomers, and minority groups could modify their relationship to shared understandings of things, images, and stories. Groups of people varied the intensity of their engagement with such knowledge, in effect either moving closer to or further away from them. By appropriating and reshaping narratives of visual and material culture, both dominant and minority groups could assert or redefine their sense of self and belonging even though, with the passage of time, we have tended to assume original traditions that were based on inflexibly discrete taxonomies.4 Erica’s 3 Glenn Peers (Ch. 4, current volume) explores the model of the middle ground in architectural ornamentation; see Richard White, The Middle Ground: Indians, Empires and Republics in the Great Lakes Region, 1650–1815 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991; rev. ed. 2011). 4 See Michel de Certeau, The Practice of Everyday Life (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1984); De Certeau, Heterologies: Discourse on the Other, trans. Brian Massumi (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1986). For examples of cultural transmission in the case of minority identities across the Mediterranean, see, for example, several chapters in Sacred

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work has been pioneering in her own willingness to look at such moments of interaction at a time when venturing outside a strictly delineated academic tradition was not the norm. The need to understand commonalities in art and material culture exemplifies the tension between the Mediterranean of identities and ethno-religious labelling and the Mediterranean of mutability and interactions, namely notions that have engaged much recent historical and art-historical writing.5 Early studies on the arts of the medieval Mediterranean tended to focus on establishing sources and categorizing works of art along geographical, political, and religious lines using labels such as Western, Byzantine, or Islamic. This type of categorization has increasingly come under review: for example, how can a single label accurately classify a work that contains Byzantinizing tendencies, but was produced in Egypt under Christian patronage during Ayyubid rule?6 Scott Redford asked the explicit question, “how Islamic is it?” when dealing with a late twelfth- or early thirteenth-century enamelled plate carrying an image of the apotheosis of Alexander the Great along with Arabic and Persian titulature associated with the Artuqid rulers of northern Mesopotamia.7 Increasing recognition of the fluidity of political borders and the intermingling of people, ideas, and technologies has meant that cultural products cannot always be neatly defined. The same point can be made about the expression Precincts: The Religious Architecture of Non-Muslim Communities across the Islamic World, ed. Mohammad Gharipour (Leiden: Brill, 2015); Brian A. Catlos, “Accursed, Superior Men: Ethno-Religious Minorities and Politics in the Medieval Mediterranean,” Comparative Studies in Society and History 56, no. 4 (2014): 844–69; Jeson Ng, “Women of the Crusades: The Constructedness of the Female Other, 1100–1200,” Al-Masaq 31, no. 3 (2019): 303–22. 5 For a historiographic review of relevant concepts, see Sharon Kinoshita, “Locating the Medieval Mediterranean,” in Locating the Middle Ages: The Spaces and Places of Medieval Culture, ed. Julian Weiss and Sarah Salih (London: Centre for Late Antique & Medieval Studies, King’s College London, 2012), 39–52. On cultural mobility, see Stephen Greenblatt, Cultural Mobility: A Manifesto (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2009); Eva Hoffman and Scott Redford, “Transculturation in the Eastern Mediterranean,” in A Companion to Islamic Art and Architecture. Vol. 1: From the Prophet to the Mongols, ed. Finbarr Barry Flood and Gülru Necipoğlu (Oxford: Wiley Blackwell, 2017), 405–30. 6 For example, Mat Immerzeel and Bas Snelders’ discussion of the frescoes of the Little Church, an annex of the church of al-Muʿallaqa in Old Cairo, in the current volume (Ch. 6). See also Sharon Kinoshita, “Re-viewing the Eastern Mediterranean,” Postmedieval: A Journal of Medieval Cultural Studies 2, no. 3 (2011): 369–85; Heather E. Grossman and Alicia Walker, eds., Mechanisms of Exchange: Transmission in Medieval Art and Architecture of the Mediterranean, ca. 1000–1500 (Leiden: Brill, 2013), where the chapters by Andrews, Georgopoulou, and Grossman stress that canonical terms in reality represent fluid, complex entities. 7 Scott Redford, “How Islamic Is It? The Innsbruck Plate and Its Setting,” Muqarnas 7 (1990): 119–35.

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of personal and group identities.8 On the other hand, the use of dynastic or cultural labels is still not just heuristically valuable but forms a basis on which one can begin the examination of the nature of cultural linkages.9 New lines of inquiry have recognized the problems inherent in some of these methods, however. Historical and art-historical notions of cultural distinctiveness and connectivity have expanded to explain the development of commonalities in traditions of visual art and material culture. The ground-breaking study of Janet Abu-Lughod connected regions as diverse as China and western Europe into an integrated world system of economic activity through a series of overlapping subsystems,10 while in the last two decades there has been an increasing engagement in art-historical scholarship with the opportunities created by phases of intensive cultural exchange. Concepts such as interaction, encounter, multi-culturalism, appropriation, hybridity, assimilation, influence, cultural fusion, acculturation, interculturation, convivencia and conveniencia,11 to name but a few, demonstrate the search for models that interpret the nature of cultural connectivity. As people travelled for trade, conquest, pilgrimage, dynastic marriage, or even pure adventure, they were exposed to worlds that were new to them just as they 8 For example, see Jeremy Johns, “The Greek Church and the Conversion of Muslims in Norman Sicily?” Byzantinische Forschungen 21 (1995): 133–57; Cemal Kafadar, “A Rome of One’s Own: Reflections of Cultural Geography and Identity in the Lands of Rum,” Muqarnas 24 (2007): 7–25. 9 Avinoam Shalem, “What Do We Mean when We Say ‘Islamic Art’? A Plea for a Critical Rewriting of the History of the Arts of Islam,” Journal of Art Historiography 6 (2012): 1–18. 10 Janet Abu-Lughod, Before European Hegemony: The World System A.D. 1250–1350 (New York: Oxford University Press, 1989); see also Jóhann Páll Árnason and Björn Wittrock, eds., Eurasian Transformations, Tenth to Thirteenth Centuries: Crystallizations, Divergences, Renaissances (Leiden: Brill, 2004). 11 Exemplified in Vivian B. Mann, Thomas F. Glick, and Jerrilyn D. Dodds, eds., Convivencia: Jews, Muslims, and Christians in Medieval Spain (New York: George Braziller, 1992); but challenged through a model that focuses on mutually beneficial convenience in cultural coexistence, as discussed by Brian A. Catlos, The Victors and the Vanquished: Christians and Muslims of Catalonia and Aragon, 1050–1300 (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2004); see also Catlos, Muslims of Medieval Latin Christendom, c. 1050–1614 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2014). For critical views and employment of some of the terms, see for example, Heather E. Grossman, “Syncretism Made Concrete: The Case for a Hybrid Moreote Architecture in Post-Fourth Crusade Greece,” in Archaeology in Architecture: Studies in Honor of Cecil L. Striker, ed. Judson J. Emerick and Deborah M. Deliyannis (Mainz: Philipp von Zabern, 2005), 65–73; William Tronzo, “Restoring Agency to the Discourse on Hybridity: The Cappella Palatina from a Different Point of View,” in Die Cappella Palatina in Palermo: Geschichte, Kunst, Funktionen: Forschungsergebnisse der Restaurierung, ed. Thomas Dittelbach (Künzelsau: Swiridoff, 2011), 229–37, 433–39, 579– 85; Hoffman and Redford, “Transculturation in the Eastern Mediterranean.”

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brought with them their old worlds of ideas and things. Studies have expanded to consider not just the existence of cultural exchange but what the practices surrounding it can tell us about people and places. This method was exemplified in a special 2004 issue of Gesta that examined artistic exchanges between Muslims and Christians in the medieval Mediterranean. The articles demonstrated the existence of sustained working relationships between the two religious groups and reminded us that dynamics of interactions between Muslims and Christians were much richer than anything allowed by linear models that focus on hostility and conflict on the one hand or idealized coexistence on the other, and that religious affiliation is a broad category of analysis that encompassed transformation of identities and groups.12 Some areas—notably Spain, Sicily, and Cyprus—have indeed long been emblematic in the study of cross-cultural connectedness. It is now recognized that expansive networks of exchange existed, and there is an increasing interest in addressing the significance of regions and objects that have previously been marginalized.13 For example, in acknowledging that it can often be futile to determine the origins of portable objects, Eva Hoffman asked why it is difficult to distinguish so many of the works of art produced in the Mediterranean between the tenth and twelfth centuries and explored the delicate nuances of connectivity across mutually recognizable elite cultures.14 A collection of essays edited by Colum Hourihane, Interactions: Artistic Interchange between the Eastern and Western Worlds in the Medieval Period, moved beyond the well-known centres and included discussions from less studied areas such as Armenia, Ethiopia, Coptic Egypt, Georgia, and Jordan.15 A special issue of Al-Masaq, Journal of the 12 Robert Ousterhout and Dede Fairchild Ruggles, eds., “Encounters with Islam,” special issue, Gesta 43, no. 2 (2004). 13 These issues are explored by Eva Hoffman, “Introduction: Remapping the Art of the Mediterranean,” in Late Antique and Medieval Art of the Mediterranean World, ed. Eva R. Hoffman (Malden, MA: Blackwell, 2007), 1–8; also engaging with a wide chronology, William V. Harris, ed., Rethinking the Mediterranean (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2005), which includes Peregrine Horden and Nicholas Purcell, “Four Years of Corruption: A Response to Critics,” 348–375; see also Matthew P. Canepa, ed., “Theorizing Cross-Cultural Interaction among Ancient and Early Medieval Visual Cultures,” special issue, Ars Orientalis 38 (2010), for a longer chronological framework than the medieval period; Jill Caskey, Adam Cohen, and Linda Safran eds., “Confronting the Borders of Medieval Art,” special issue, Medieval Encounters 17, nos. 1–2 (2011); Grossman and Walker, Mechanisms of Exchange. 14 Eva R. Hoffman, “Pathways of Portability: Islamic and Christian Interchange from the Tenth to the Twelfth Century,” Art History 24, no. 1 (2001): 17–50. 15 Colum Hourihane, ed., Interactions: Artistic Interchange between the Eastern and Western Worlds in the Medieval Period (Princeton: Index of Christian Art, Department of Art and Archaeology, Princeton University; University Park: Penn State University Press, 2007).

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Medieval Mediterranean, highlighted the role of North Africa in the exchange of material culture in the medieval Mediterranean.16 A multitude of research has addressed the cultural positioning of Jewish communities within the states of the Mediterranean, starting with the work of Shelomo Goitein, who illuminated the connections of the Jewish community of Cairo not only with the Mediterranean but also with the Red Sea and the Indian Ocean.17 Importantly, interactions manifested through the visual leftovers of the past allow us glimpses into a continuum of cultural processes that include ranges of attitudes rather than fixed practices: from incidental to systematic contacts, and from private fascination to adherence to ruling ideologies or communal identities across space. In 1949 Fernand Braudel pioneered the concept of a global history in his influential book La Mediterranée at le Monde Méditerranéen à l’époque de Philippe II.18 Peregrine Horden and Nicholas Purcell’s work, published in 2000, went further than Braudel’s model of a global sixteenth century and introduced to the historical discourse a paradigm of ecological variability that was intrinsically bound up with fragmented yet interdependent regional opportunities for ancient and medieval economic exchange within the Mediterranean and beyond.19 The utilization

16

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Other notable examples include: Antony Eastmond, Royal Imagery in Medieval Georgia (University Park, PA: Pennsylvania State University Press, 1998); Lynn Jones, Between Islam and Byzantium: Aght‘amar and the Visual Construction of Medieval Armenian Rulership (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2007). Alexander Metcalfe and Mariam Rosser-Owen, eds., “Forgotten Connections? Medieval Material Culture and Exchange in the Central and Western Mediterranean,” special issue, Al-Masaq, Journal of the Medieval Mediterranean 25, no. 1 (2013). The use of trade as a framework for perspectives on visual and material culture (see esp. 1–8) in that issue is applicable also on the eastern regions of the Mediterranean. Shelomo D. Goitein, A Mediterranean Society: The Jewish Communities of the Arab World as Portrayed in the Documents of the Cairo Geniza, 5 vols. (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1967–1993). More recently, see Jerrilyn D. Dodds, María Rosa Menocal, and Abigail Krasner Balbale, The Arts of Intimacy: Christians, Jews, and Muslims in the Making of Castilian Culture (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2008). Fernand Braudel, La Mediterranée et le Monde Méditerranéen à l’époque de Philippe II (Paris: Colin, 1949); The Mediterranean and the Mediterranean World in the Age of Philip II, trans. Siân Reynolds (New York: Harper & Row, 1973). Peregrine Horden and Nicholas Purcell, The Corrupting Sea: A Study of Mediterranean History (Oxford: Blackwell, 2000). For an attempt to combine archaeological and historical evidence in the reconstruction of the changing environment of the early medieval Europe, North Africa, and the Middle East, see Richard Hodges and David Whitehouse, Mohammed, Charlemagne and the Origins of Europe: Archaeology and the Pirenne Thesis (London: Duckworth, 1983). For recent reflections on the unities of the Mediterranean as applicable across the humanities: Brian A. Catlos and Sharon Kinoshita, eds., Can We Talk Mediterranean? Conversations on an Emerging Field in Medieval and Early Modern

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of a micro-regional lens highlighted the fact that Mediterranean history and cultural exchange have not been shaped by deterministic principles. Instead, questions about change and continuity are meaningful only in tandem with consideration of the multiple contexts of visual and material culture. Who are the agents of an observed change in visual and material culture, and who benefits from it? To what extent does a change reflect other social conditions, and how does it act upon them? Do change and continuity represent two opposite ends of a spectrum of ideas and practices? Attempting complex rather than binary responses, recent scholarship has underlined evolving perspectives of interactions manifested in visual culture as those of a world defined by a medieval type of globalism as much as localism.20 Let us turn to a prime example of historic forces at play in the main period with which this volume is concerned. The impact of the Crusades in the eastern Mediterranean was profound.21 The Byzantine emperor Alexios I provided a stimulus for the First Crusade when, in March 1095, he sent an embassy to the pope to request military aid in recapturing territories that had been lost to the Seljuk Turks. In November of the same year Pope Urban II preached to an enthusiastic ecclesiastical audience at the Council of Clermont and spoke Studies (Palgrave Macmillan ebook, 2017) https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-55726-7. For similar concepts in Francophone bibliography, see Damien Coulon, Christophe Picard, and Dominique Valérian, eds., Espaces et Réseaux en Méditerranée VIe–XVIe siècle, I: La configuration des réseaux (Paris: Éditions Bouchène, 2007). 20 See Alicia Walker, “Globalism,” in “Medieval Art History Today—Critical Terms,” ed. Nina Rowe, special issue, Studies in Iconography 33 (2012): 183–96. On the Mediterranean as an analytic category, see Kinoshita, “Locating the Medieval Mediterranean”; Mariam RosserOwen, “Mediterraneanism: How to Incorporate Islamic Art into an Emerging Field,” Journal of Art Historiography 6 (2012): 1–33. Among examples of the focus on interconnections, see William Tronzo, The Cultures of His Kingdom: Roger II and the Cappella Palatina in Palermo (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1997); Lucy-Anne Hunt, Byzantium, Eastern Christendom and Islam: Art at the Crossroads of the Medieval Mediterranean (London: Pindar Press, 2000); Maria Georgopoulou, “Orientalism and Crusader Art: Constructing a New Canon,” Medieval Encounters 5, no. 3 (1999): 289–321; Tehmina Goskar, “Material Worlds: The Shared Cultures of Southern Italy and Its Mediterranean Neighbours in the Tenth to Twelfth Centuries,” Al-Masaq 23, no. 3 (2011): 189–204. For an interdisciplinary examination, see Stephanie L. Hathaway and David W. Kim, eds., Intercultural Transmission in the Medieval Mediterranean (London: Continuum, 2012). 21 Examples of nuanced reflections on the Crusades include: Carole Hillenbrand, The Crusades: Islamic Perspectives (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2000); Angeliki E. Laiou and Roy P. Mottahedeh, eds., The Crusades from the Perspective of Byzantium and the Muslim World (Washington, DC: Dumbarton Oaks, 2001). For the arts of an earlier transitional period in the east Mediterranean, see Helen C. Evans and Brandie Ratliff, eds., Byzantium and Islam: Age of Transition, 7th–9th Century (New Haven: Yale University Press for the Metropolitan Museum of Art, 2012).

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of the need to liberate “Christian” lands. The Crusading fervour that followed sparked a two-century-long period of turmoil and transition in the eastern Mediterranean as rival factions struggled for control of the Holy Land. It ended with the final fall of the Crusader states of the Syrian littoral in 1291. Ironically, the Byzantine emperors themselves became victims of the Crusades. When the Venetians diverted the Fourth Crusade from Egypt to Constantinople, their actions resulted in Latin emperors occupying the imperial throne between the years 1204 and 1261. Although the Crusaders were ultimately unsuccessful in their goals of maintaining control over the Holy Land or Constantinople, the Crusades define a time of cultural and economic interaction that has had a long-lasting impact on Europe and the Middle East. Commercial enterprises flourished, and western eyes opened up to the rich exotic world of lands to the east. This has led to a fascination with the cultures of western Asia that has continued through to recent times, as discussed in the final chapters of this book. For all of their importance, a concentration on the period of the Crusades can carry with it a misleading Eurocentric perspective that minimizes the voices and experiences of Muslims, Christians, and Jews living in the Middle East and North Africa. It is worth noting that the Arabic chronicles and other written sources of the twelfth and thirteenth centuries are often more concerned with interactions, military and otherwise, between Islamic polities.22 Throughout the thirteenth century the threat posed by the westward expansion of the Mongol armies dominated the attention of the ruling dynasties of the Islamic world. Following the conquest of Baghdad and the execution of the last Abbasid caliph in 1258, the Mongols stood at the borders of Syria, menacing both Muslim and Frankish rulers alike.23 The broader point to be drawn from these historical events is that interactions between Europe and the Middle East need to be placed into a larger geographical and cultural context; just as the Jewish merchants of Cairo cultivated trading contacts with both the Mediterranean and the Indian Ocean, so the inhabitants of Syria and the surrounding regions were well aware that goods, ideas, and people circulated along arteries of communication leading across Asia and Africa. 22 23

For example, see Hillenbrand, The Crusades. For accounts of European emissaries sent to Mongol courts, see: John of Plano Carpini in The Mongol Mission: Narratives and Letters of the Franciscan Missionaries in Mongolia and China in the Thirteenth and Fourteenth Centuries, The Makers of Christendom, ed. Charles Dawson (New York: Sheed and Ward, 1955), 3–72; William of Rubruck, The Mission of Friar William of Rubruck. His Journey of the Court of the Great Khan Möngke, 1253–1255, trans. Peter Jackson with notes by David Morgan, Hakluyt Society second series 173 (London: Hakluyt Society, 1990).

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As several contributors note, Erica Cruikshank Dodd’s work has often demonstrated that interactions in the medieval Mediterranean world were not uni-directional, but that influence flowed both eastward and westward during the Crusader period. Building on commonalities observed in the material culture record, the chapters of the current volume frequently draw attention to unexpected avenues of change. Portable icons are one of the most distinctive remnants of piety from medieval Byzantium and the eastern Christian world. But despite the well-known names attributed to particular figural compositions and visual similarities seen across different “types” of icons, the apparent familiarity these elements breed does not necessarily unravel the complexities of what icons meant. Images of holy figures came to play an increasingly important role in the religious life of Byzantium following the Iconoclastic controversy of the eighth and ninth centuries. In the first essay, Anthony Cutler analyzes the role of an icon of the Virgin, a depiction of which adorns the headpiece of a charter of a Marian confraternity from the area of Thebes that found its way to Palermo probably in the mid-twelfth century. Considering that the Virgin impelled members of the brotherhood to transport her monthly to sites within the confraternity’s purview, Cutler argues that icons functioned as anaphorae, that is repeated references to images with similar forms, including icons with known toponymics (Virgin Naupaktetissa, i.e., of Naupaktos). The Byzantine perception of holy images was thus built on flexible relational frameworks of time and place, and thinking of icons as anaphorae underwrites the abiding mediation of images in the interaction of past and present in Byzantium. In addition, the portability of icons makes it difficult to determine exactly where, when, and by whom they were made. The movement of a widely recognizable type of icon from Byzantium to Sicily further testifies to the power of the origin stories of artifacts at times of intensified cultural appropriation. The chapter by Jaroslav Folda addresses these challenges from the perspective of the art of the Crusaders and that of their colonized people. Folda examines four icons of the Virgin and Child Hodegetria from the monastery of Saint Catherine at Mount Sinai. In an earlier study of these icons, Kurt Weitzmann identified two of them as Crusader (that is, they were produced in the Crusader states, by Crusader artists, and for Crusader patrons) and two as Byzantine. Folda makes the case that details on the “Byzantine” icons, such as chrysography (the practice of highlighting details with gold), are best understood within the context of western medieval portrayals of the Virgin as Queen of Heaven. The chapter concludes that the so-called Byzantine icons under discussion must now be considered as products of Crusader culture. Although the identification of artists through stylistic attributions does not necessarily lead to knowing who

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these artists were, this method significantly helps to elaborate on the Crusader translation of “Byzantine” stylistic elements as a way to express diverse and dynamic theological conceptions. In the aftermath of the Fourth Crusade, a wealth of spolia was brought back to Venice and incorporated into the refurbishment of the church of San Marco. As part of the thirteenth-century restorations that affected the appearance of the western section of the church, its narthex was substantially altered, including the addition of an extension along its north flank. The tombs of doges were occasionally located there until the mid-fourteenth century. John Osborne discusses the purpose of the extension of the narthex in the light of the use of such spaces in churches in Byzantium and Italy, and focuses on their funerary function. Osborne argues that the San Marco changes were related to the imperial pretensions of the Venetian doges, who may have planned to use this space as a place of ducal burial and commemoration following the model of the church of the Holy Apostles in Constantinople. Although this plan was not followed consistently, given the preference of subsequent doges for burial in mendicant churches, Osborne proposes that the changes to the narthex survive as a Venetian variant of the Byzantine parekklesion. The argument speaks to the strategic re-working of Venice’s identity in the aftermath of the Fourth Crusade. The above chapters show that both the making of images and their meanings are the outcome of complex creative forces that include tradition and innovation in reference to many different sources. Peers elaborates on the cultural admixture behind a fragmentary wall painting with a depiction of a deesis scene from the monastery of St. Mary at the valley of Jehoshaphat near Jerusalem. Combined references to Cluniac refectories in France, the decoration of Byzantine and eastern Christian monastic refectories, and the Crusader context of Jerusalem help the author argue that the painting is a manifestation of a dynamic middle ground between diverse artistic traditions. Drawing on an anthropological explanation of the middle ground as a process by which colonizers and the colonized adjust to their respective cultural differences,24 Peers underlines the flexible attribution of meanings in the art of the Crusading Middle East through, among other things, inventive readings and even misunderstandings of the elements incorporated in the art. He thus supports the idea that monastic settings provided fertile ground for transcending political and denominational boundaries. While all of the previous chapters to some extent demonstrate the intermingling of cultures of production and patronage from the Latin west with 24 White, Middle Ground.

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that of the eastern Mediterranean traditions, the chapters by Annemarie Weyl Carr and Mat Immerzeel and Bas Snelders use visual evidence to fill the gaps in our knowledge regarding artistic patronage. Despite the loss of significant Byzantine elite benefaction, Orthodox monasteries in Cyprus seem to have done well during the period of Lusignan rule. Weyl Carr asks how these monasteries survived during that time since written documents are relatively silent regarding how the Lusignan rule affected monastic life. The author therefore turns to the wall paintings of monastic churches, which reveal that the Orthodox non-titled community was increasingly generous in its donations; and that these donations were augmented by small but persistent contributions from the Latin Christians. The discussion also reveals a climate of shared expressions of devotion between people of the two main creeds, including significant female patronage. The denominational identity of churches therefore did not preclude interactions beyond social borders within a “mingled” culture; this also reminds us of the strong bond between lay groups and churches that went beyond monetary gifts to include icons and other painting, as is also evident in Cutler’s discussion. While Annemarie Weyl Carr explores the particular pattern of lay orthodox patronage in Cyprus, Immerzeel and Snelders offer an expansive picture of the relationship between colonizers and colonized as manifested in the patronage patterns of Christian churches under Islamic and Crusader rule, including Egypt and the Levant in addition to Cyprus. They demonstrate that during the periods of Fatimid and Ayyubid rule in Egypt, the Christian communities benefited from the generosity of an elite group of Coptic and Melkite laymen and even occasionally from the Muslim ruling class. In Syria and Lebanon, the patronage of churches shows that indigenous Christians living under Frankish rule interacted with a tolerant and often supportive ruling class. By drawing comparisons between Egypt, Syria, and Cyprus, the chapter draws into relief the increasing role of lay patronage under the regimes that did not seek to eradicate the freedom of competing Christian communities. While Christian notables filled in gaps of earlier aristocratic patronage in a wide area, it is also important to remember that each region had particular circumstances. In the case of Lusignan Cyprus, the authors focus on the paradox of Latin patronage in Orthodox churches, and show that the frequent sharing of patronage by Christians of different denominations testifies not only to interdependence in the expression of piety between communities, but also to the patronage resting on socio-economic determinants rather than strictly ethnic or sectarian divisions. Conquest affected not only artistic patronage, but also the shaping of sacred space. In contested areas, many churches have had a tortured history: some

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were taken over by Muslims and converted into mosques, others became spaces that were shared by members of the Orthodox and Latin Christian communities, or even by Christians and Muslims alike. Angela Andersen studies the Diyarbakir Ulu Cami, the extant buildings of which were constructed over the course of the eleventh and sixteenth centuries. Through an examination of textual, visual, and archaeological evidence, the chapter traces the development of the legend that the mosque was once a church and that Muslims and Christians shared the building immediately following the Arab conquest of the city in 639. Andersen points to the mixture of interwoven popular and academic beliefs that form the basis for such powerful legends, and concludes that the tale is a literary topos designed to show how the conquering Muslims were quick to set up places of prayer. The chapter demonstrates how enduring the interaction between past and present can be in the creation of communal memories based on dynamic versions of foundation stories. It also highlights the role of spolia in the process of negotiating Christian-Muslim relationships. Another variation on the creation of communal memory can be seen in the case of the twelfth-century cathedral built by the Crusaders in the French Romanesque style in the centre of Beirut. When the Mamluks gained control of the city in the late thirteenth century, only modest changes were made to convert the building into a mosque (the Crusader structure is largely extant), now known as the Great ʿUmari Mosque. May Farhat argues that a belated narrative about early Islamic usage has given rise to an increasingly controversial image of the history of the site. Farhat reconstructs the history mosque from its post-Crusader conversion through to the major renovations that took place following the end of the Lebanese civil war in 1991. The chapter establishes the role of the projection of dynamic narratives and the problematic usage of historical knowledge (and its uncertainties) in aid of political interests. The role of mosques has become central to historicising the past of Sunni Islam through interpositions on the (dis)continuities of material culture. Focusing on the recent past, but connected with the theme of the creation and recording of knowledge across time that runs through the second half of the book, the chapter by Marcus Milwright addresses the encounter of European travellers with the Middle East through attitudes that range from “orientalist” sensationalism to disinterested engagement with daily activity, specifically craft production. A critical reading of their accounts not only complements the reconstruction of historical craft practices (including manufacturing and the organization of production) in the region, but also reveals socio-cultural traditions that rarely attract attention in discussions of the dominant economic models of the past. Milwright also provides a cautionary tale on the use of textual sources, which are always mediated by the identity of the

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writer, the genre of writing, and the authors’ individual and collective biases and agendas; and finally, he also demonstrates how the search for past practices hinges on projections from later “knowledge.” The final chapter brings us full circle to the different approaches to the depiction of the human form by Christianity (as seen, for example, in chapter 1) and medieval Islam. How people incorporated the visual in their ritual practices within the polities of the Christian and Islamic world, though, was not simple. It is well known that Islam rejected anthropomorphic images of God, with the result that religious buildings and objects were adorned with Qurʾanic inscriptions in combination with abstract geometrical and vegetal motifs. Rico Franses offers an experiential approach to the nature of abstract ornament in Islam. Franses examines the grid-based interlace pattern known in Farsi as girih and its significance within a religious setting. While there can be little doubt that Muslims chose to employ passages of the Qurʾan on buildings and objects because of its preeminent status as the revealed word of God, debates continue as to whether there is any meaning inherent in the decorative patterning. Franses argues that, in its amalgam of rhythm and asymmetry, the geometric pattern can be understood as a form of visual theology that deserves to be acknowledged as a way of pursuing spiritual concerns. The chapter contends that the visual experience transcends verbal attempts at interpretation. Interlace thus both expresses divine creation and is a real-time participant in it rather than the product of a finite material process. Whether this interpretation can be extended to the iconography of ornamentation during all periods of Islamic history will doubtless remain the subject of intense debate.25 In examining the Mediterranean basin through the lens of its visual culture and the complex interactions between historical realities and narratives across time, the essays in this volume offer fresh ways of understanding its people, and reveal how the Christian and Muslim communities of the eastern Mediterranean adapted to their changing political landscapes. Particular 25

Several prominent scholars of Islamic art have noted that innovations in Islamic two- and three-dimensional ornament are grounded in broader developments in political, cultural, and intellectual history. For example, see: Gülru Necipoğlu, The Topkapı Scroll: Geometry and Ornament in Islamic Architecture. Topkapı Palaces Museum Library Ms H. 1956 (Santa Monica: Getty Center for the History of Art and the Humanities, 1995); Yasser Tabbaa, The Transformation of Islamic Art during the Sunni Revival (London: I.B. Tauris, 2001). On the evidence for continuity between late antique and early Islamic ornamental practices, see Terry Allen, Five Essays on Islamic Art (Sebastopol, CA: Solipsist Press, 1988). For the potential of a culturally literate analysis of the geometry of ornament, see Carol Bier, “Geometry Made Manifest: Reorienting the Historiography of Ornament on the Iranian Plateau and Beyond,” in The Historiography of Persian Architecture, ed. Mohammad Gharipour (London: Routledge, 2016), 41–79.

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interventions on objects, images, and buildings have given rise not only to visible changes in the material record, but have also been interwoven with the development of stories about their origin and subsequent life. These in turn have shaped and, to some extent, are still shaping communal identities. The chapters expand on the burgeoning scholarship in the arts of the eastern Mediterranean basin to increase our appreciation of a complex, fascinating, and often-misunderstood part of the world. Indeed, this field of investigation is rich, as many more avenues remain to be explored. Unfortunately, in recent years travel to parts of North Africa and the Middle East has become dangerous, and many historical monuments and works of art have been wantonly destroyed. This destruction is deplorable on many levels, not the least of which relates to the importance of visual culture in providing nuanced views into the past. It is important to know that for centuries, in locations that are now filled with conflict, people of different faiths and ethnic backgrounds found ways to co-exist in harmony.26 And although the title of the volume firmly indicates that this is a set of chapters that address culture “in” the Mediterranean,27 we hope that this is also a small step towards recognizing Erica Cruikshank Dodd’s inspirational searching for unforeseen movements of images and ideas that has contributed so much to a history “of” the Mediterranean. References Abulafia, David, and Nora Berend, eds. Medieval Frontiers: Concepts and Practices. Aldershot: Ashgate, 2002. Abu-Lughod, Janet. Before European Hegemony: The World System A.D. 1250–1350. New York: Oxford University Press, 1989. Allen, Terry. Five Essays on Islamic Art. Sebastopol, CA: Solipsist Press, 1988. Árnason, Jóhann Páll, and Björn Wittrock, eds. Eurasian Transformations, Tenth to Thirteenth Centuries: Crystallizations, Divergences, Renaissances. Leiden: Brill, 2004. Bier, Carol. “Geometry Made Manifest: Reorienting the Historiography of Ornament on the Iranian Plateau and beyond.” In The Historiography of Persian Architecture, edited by Mohammad Gharipour, 41–79. London: Routledge, 2016.

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It is worth keeping in mind the warning by Rosser-Owen, “Mediterraneanism,” 4: “… the Mediterranean has been adopted as a new al-Andalus, a medieval beacon of convivencia, the mythical paradigm of harmonious coexistence between the three Abrahamic faiths,” an admonition against romanticizing the past. Horden and Purcell, “Four Years of Corruption,” 356–57.

Diversity and Identity in the Medieval Mediterranean and Beyond 15 Braudel, Fernand. La Mediterranée et le Monde Méditerranéen à l’époque de Philippe II. Paris: Colin, 1949; translated by Siân Reynolds, The Mediterranean and the Mediterranean World in the Age of Philip II. New York: Harper & Row, 1973. Canepa, Matthew P., ed. “Theorizing Cross-Cultural Interaction among Ancient and Early Medieval Visual Cultures.” Special issue, Ars Orientalis 38 (2010). Caskey, Jill, Adam Cohen, and Linda Safran, eds. “Confronting the Borders of Medieval Art.” Special issue, Medieval Encounters 17, nos. 1–2 (2011). Catlos, Brian A. “Accursed, Superior Men: Ethno-Religious Minorities and Politics in the Medieval Mediterranean.” Comparative Studies in Society and History 56, no. 4 (2014): 844–69. Catlos, Brian A. Muslims of Medieval Latin Christendom, c. 1050–1614. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2014. Catlos, Brian A. The Victors and the Vanquished: Christians and Muslims of Catalonia and Aragon, 1050–1300. New York: Cambridge University Press, 2004. Catlos, Brian A., and Sharon Kinoshita, eds. Can We Talk Mediterranean? Conversations on an Emerging Field in Medieval and Early Modern Studies. Palgrave Macmillan ebook, 2017. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-55726-7. de Certeau, Michel. The Practice of Everyday Life. Translated by Steven Rendall. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1984. de Certeau, Michel. Heterologies: Discourse on the Other. Translated by Brian Massumi. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1986. Coulon, Damien, Christophe Picard and Dominique Valérian, eds. Espaces et Réseaux en Méditerranée VIe–XVIe siècle, I: La configuration des réseaux. Paris: Éditions Bouchène, 2007. Dawson, Chistopher, ed. The Mongol Mission: Narratives and Letters of the Franciscan Missionaries in Mongolia and China in the Thirteenth and Fourteenth Centuries. The Makers of Christendom. New York: Sheed and Ward, 1955. Dodds, Jerrilyn D., María Rosa Menocal, and Abigail Krasner Balbale. The Arts of Intimacy: Christians, Jews, and Muslims in the Making of Castilian Culture. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2008. Eastmond, Antony. Royal Imagery in Medieval Georgia. University Park, PA: Pennsylvania State University Press, 1998. Epstein, Steven A. Purity Lost: Transgressing Boundaries in the Eastern Mediterranean, 1000–1400. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2006. Evans, Helen C., and Brandie Ratliff, eds. Byzantium and Islam: Age of Transition, 7th–9th Century. New Haven: Yale University Press for the Metropolitan Museum of Art, 2012. Georgopoulou, Maria. “Orientalism and Crusader Art: Constructing a New Canon,” Medieval Encounters 5, no. 3 (1999): 289–321.

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Gharipour, Mohammad, ed. Sacred Precincts: The Religious Architecture of Non-Muslim Communities across the Islamic World. Leiden: Brill, 2015. Goitein, Shelomo D. A Mediterranean Society: The Jewish Communities of the Arab World as Portrayed in the Documents of the Cairo Geniza. 5 vols. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1967–1993. Goskar, Tehmina. “Material Worlds: The Shared Cultures of Southern Italy and Its Mediterranean Neighbours in the Tenth to Twelfth Centuries,” Al-Masaq 23, no. 3 (2011): 189–204. Greenblatt, Stephen. Cultural Mobility: A Manifesto. Cambridge, 2009. Grossman, Heather E. “Syncretism Made Concrete: The Case for a Hybrid Moreote Architecture in Post-Fourth Crusade Greece.” In Archaeology in Architecture: Studies in Honor of Cecil L. Striker, edited by Judson J. Emerick and Deborah M. Deliyannis, 65–73. Mainz: Philipp von Zabern, 2005. Grossman, Heather E., and Alicia Walker, eds. Mechanisms of Exchange: Transmission in Medieval Art and Architecture of the Mediterranean, ca. 1000–1500. Leiden: Brill, 2013. Harris, William V., ed. Rethinking the Mediterranean. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2005. Hathaway, Stephanie L., and David W. Kim, eds. Intercultural Transmission in the Medieval Mediterranean. London: Continuum, 2012. Hillenbrand, Carole. The Crusades: Islamic Perspectives. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2000. Hodges, Richard, and David Whitehouse. Mohammed, Charlemagne and the Origins of Europe: Archaeology and the Pirenne Thesis. London: Duckworth, 1983. Hoffman, Eva. “Introduction: Remapping the Art of the Mediterranean.” In Late Antique and Medieval Art of the Mediterranean World, edited by Eva R. Hoffman, 1–8. Malden, MA: Blackwell, 2007. Hoffman, Eva. “Pathways of Portability: Islamic and Christian Interchange from the Tenth to the Twelfth Century.” Art History 24, no. 1 (2001): 17–50. Hoffman, Eva, and Scott Redford. “Transculturation in the Eastern Mediterranean.” In A Companion to Islamic Art and Architecture. Volume 1: From the Prophet to the Mongols, edited by Finbarr Flood and Gülru Necipoğlu, 405–30. Oxford: Wiley Blackwell, 2017. Horden, Peregrine, and Nicholas Purcell. The Corrupting Sea: A Study of Mediterranean History. Oxford: Blackwell, 2000. Horden, Peregrine, and Nicholas Purcell. “Four Years of Corruption: A Response to Critics.” In Rethinking the Mediterranean, edited by William V. Harris, 348–375. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2005. Hourihane, Colum, ed. Interactions: Artistic Interchange between the Eastern and Western Worlds in the Medieval Period. Princeton: Index of Christian Art, Department

Diversity and Identity in the Medieval Mediterranean and Beyond 17 of Art and Archeology, Princeton University; University Park: Penn State University Press, 2007. Hunt, Lucy-Anne. Byzantium, Eastern Christendom and Islam: Art at the Crossroads of the Medieval Mediterranean. London: Pindar Press, 2000. Johns, Jeremy. “The Greek Church and the Conversion of Muslims in Norman Sicily?” Byzantinische Forschungen 21 (1995): 133–57. Jones, Lynn. Between Islam and Byzantium: Aght‘amar and the Visual Construction of Medieval Armenian Rulership. Aldershot: Ashgate, 2007. Cemal Kafadar. “A Rome of One’s Own: Reflections of Cultural Geography and Identity in the Lands of Rum.” Muqarnas 24 (2007): 7–25. Kinoshita, Sharon. “Locating the Medieval Mediterranean.” In Locating the Middle Ages: The Spaces and Places of Medieval Culture, edited by Julian Weiss and Sarah Salih, 39–52. London: Centre for Late Antique & Medieval Studies, King’s College London, 2012. Kinoshita, Sharon. “Re-viewing the Eastern Mediterranean.” Postmedieval: A Journal of Medieval Cultural Studies 2:3 (2011): 369–85. Laiou, Angeliki E., and Roy P. Mottahedeh, eds. The Crusades from the Perspective of Byzantium and the Muslim World. Washington, DC: Dumbarton Oaks, 2001. Mann, Vivian B., Thomas F. Glick, and Jerrilyn D. Dodds, eds. Convivencia: Jews, Muslims, and Christians in Medieval Spain. New York: George Braziller, 1992. Metcalfe, Alexander, and Mariam Rosser-Owen, eds. “Forgotten Connections? Medieval Material Culture and Exchange in the Central and Western Mediterranean.” Special issue, Al-Masaq, Journal of the Medieval Mediterranean 25, no. 1 (2013). Necipoğlu, Gülru. The Topkapı Scroll: Geometry and Ornament in Islamic Architecture. Topkapı Palaces Museum Library Ms H. 1956. Santa Monica: Getty Center for the History of Art and the Humanities, 1995. Ng, Jeson. “Women of the Crusades: The Constructedness of the Female Other, 1100– 1200.” Al-Masaq 31, no. 3 (2019): 303–22. Ousterhout, Robert, and Dede Fairchild Ruggles, eds. “Encounters with Islam.” Special issue, Gesta 43, no. 2 (2004). Rosser-Owen, Mariam. “Mediterraneanism: How to Incorporate Islamic Art into an Emerging Field.” Journal of Art Historiography 6 (2012): 1–33. Shalem, Avinoam. “What Do We Mean when We Say ‘Islamic Art’? A Plea for a Critical Rewriting of the History of the Arts of Islam.” Journal of Art Historiography 6 (2012): 1–18. Redford, Scott. “How Islamic Is It? The Innsbruck Plate and Its Setting.” Muqarnas 7 (1990): 119–35. Tabbaa, Yasser. The Transformation of Islamic Art during the Sunni Revival. London: I.B. Tauris, 2001.

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Tronzo, William. The Cultures of His Kingdom: Roger II and the Cappella Palatina in Palermo. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1997. Tronzo, William. “Restoring Agency to the Discourse on Hybridity: The Cappella Palatina from a Different Point of View.” In Die Cappella Palatina in Palermo: Geschichte, Kunst, Funktionen: Forschungsergebnisse der Restaurierung, edited by Thomas Dittelbach, 229–37, 433–39, 579–85. Künzelsau: Swiridoff, 2011. Walker, Alicia. “Globalism.” In Medieval Art History Today—Critical Terms, edited by Nina Rowe, special issue, Studies in Iconography 33 (2012): 183–96. White, Richard. The Middle Ground: Indians, Empires and Republics in the Great Lakes Region, 1650–1815. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991. Revised edition, 2011. William of Rubruck. The Mission of Friar William of Rubruck. His Journey of the Court of the Great Khan Möngke, 1253–1255. Translated by Peter Jackson, with notes by David Morgan, Hakluyt Society second series 173. London: Hakluyt Society, 1990.

Chapter 1

The Anaphoric Icon

Observations on Some Byzantine Metapictures Anthony Cutler On the cover of Erica Cruikshank Dodd’s invaluable corpus Medieval Painting in the Lebanon1 is a photograph of a splendid ruin: a once handsomely framed and rare icon of St. Philip seemingly transferred to the walls of Mar Phokas at Amioun in a suite of images sponsored by Philip, an otherwise unknown Crusader, who appears full-length, but still diminutive, beside the legs of his patron (Fig. 1.1). Simulating a painted panel in this fashion it is thus a metapicture, an image that purports to reproduce a work in another medium. Dodd paid little attention to its frame or to the fact that the image adopts the form of a painted icon. In what follows, I shall attempt to supplement her important discovery, even while I return to the study of an icon reproduced as the headpiece of a late eleventh- or early twelfth-century manuscript now in Palermo. It is the charter, produced in roll form, of a Marian confraternity from the area of Thebes, as hypothesized below (Figs. 1.2, 1.3).2 I enlarge the genre of this transported icon to include such works as the much better known “usual miracle” depicted in the church of the Blacherna at Arta (Fig. 1.4).3 My ultimate concern is not so much with the origins of the practice in which one image is shown contained within another, or the paths by which they emigrated to their current locales, as with the roles they played in the present situations they depict. 1 Erica Cruikshank Dodd, Medieval Painting in the Lebanon (Wiesbaden: Reichert, 2004), 40, 75, 161, 163, plates V, VI. Icons of St. Philip alone are rare. When I wrote the art historical portion of the entry on him in The Oxford Dictionary of Byzantium (3 vols., ed. Alexander Kazhdan et al. [New York: Oxford University Press, 1991], 3:1651–52), I knew only of a tenth-century example at Mount Sinai. For the other donor images in Lebanon, see Nada Helou, “Notes on Donor Images in the Churches of Lebanon,” in Bridge of Civilizations: The Near East and Europe c. 1100–1300, ed. Peter W. Edbury, Denys Pringle, Balázs Major (Oxford: Archaeopress, 2019), 233–245. 2 For the date and social circumstances of this document, see Anthony Cutler and William North, “The Gift of Service: The Charter of the Confraternity of the Virgin of Naupaktos,” in Donation et donateurs dans le monde byzantin, ed. Jean-Michel Spieser and Elisabeth Yota (Paris: De Brouwer, 2012), 207–19. 3 Myrtale Acheimastou-Potamianou, Η Βλαχέρνα της Άρτας Τοιχογραϕίες (Athens: Η εν Αθήναις Αρχαιολογική Εταιρεία, 2009). © Koninklijke Brill NV, Leiden, 2021 | doi:10

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Figure 1.1 Saint Philip, Mar Phokas, Amioun Photograph: Erica Cruikshank Dodd

The philosopher of art Tom Mitchell asked the question, “What Do Pictures Want?”4 From a Byzantine point of view, icons such as the Blachernitissa at Arta and the Philip at Mar Phokas wanted to move, and in so doing allay any doubt that we moderns might have about their animate intention.5 While the company of the forty-nine members of the confraternity who signed or 4 William J. Thomas Mitchell, What Do Pictures Want? The Lives and Loves of Images (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2005). 5 An early stage in this hesitation is represented by the chronicles that record how Duccio’s Maestà was processed in Siena on June 9, 1311, when the image is said to have been taken into the cathedral. Nonetheless, her declared function remained “to help preserve and increase the peace and well-being of the city.” See Alessandro Lisini and Fabio Iacometti,

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otherwise left their mark on the document (the tomos, as it is called in their words)6 which bears the icon of the Naupaktetissa that is our topic, leave no doubt that it is these brothers who regularly transport the image of the Virgin from one site to another, in whatever church the icon has its place, carrying it from there with holy hymns … to wherever one of us shall prepare its monthly resting place; from there again to another place where another [shall do likewise] and so successively in turn until the whole brotherhood has been encompassed; each one of us performing all service to this holy icon from an interval of one full month,7 it is clear that they were impelled by what they took to be “the all-holy and sacred icon of our pure mistress, the Mother of God and ever virgin Mary, who has a station … in the church of the glorious and supreme commander Michael, who is revered in the Monastery of the Naupactian Women in the neighbourhood τοῦ Γυρίου.”8 Given that the names subscribed include geographical designations as far afield as Daphni, Hosios Loukas (here called Stiris), the monastery of Hagia Photeine near Thebes, Karystos on the island of Euboea, Preventza in Aitolia and others, it is evident that the icon travelled widely, across at least 150 km. But wherever she goes she performs the same function, that of referring the viewer to her “home base,” her normal habitat and the point from which she set out on her itineraries. This information is purveyed not by the icon itself at the head of the tomos but by the words appended to it. Those who did not, or could not, read the tomos text were left without a verbal allusion to her point of origin, unlike the image at Arta where a three-line inscription announces that the scene depicts “the joy of the most holy Theotokos the Hodegetria the [one] in Constantinople.”9 Nonetheless, both representations are metapictures, avatars of images that in their own time were at once remote and celebrated. Both are referential, pointing to prior incarnations: the wall painting in the text that it bears alludes

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7 8 9

eds., Cronache senesi (Bologna: Zanichelli, 1931), 313–14. I am grateful for this reference to Elizabeth Bradford Smith. The fullest description of the document is to be found in Cutler and North, “Gift of Service,” 208–10. See also Maria Raffaella Menna, “La Miniatura con la Vergine Haghiosoritissa nella pergamena della Confraternita di S. Maria la Naupattitissa” in Nobiles Officinae: Perle, filigrane e trami di seta dal Palazzo Reale di Palermo, ed. Maria Andaloro (Catania: Maimone, 2006), 1:546–47 (with the earlier literature). John W. Nesbitt and John Wiita, “A Confraternity of the Comnenian Era,” Byzantinische Zeitschrift 68 (1975): 360–85; 364, lines 29–36; trans. 368–69, lines 34–41. Nesbitt and Wiita, “Confraternity,” 364, lines 24–28; trans. 368, lines 27–33. Acheimastou-Potamianou, ‘Η Βλαχέρνα, 82.

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Figure 1.2 Tabularium, no. 1, Tesoro, Cappella Palatina, Palermo Photograph: Heather Hoge

Figure 1.3 Tabularium, no. 1, detail, Tesoro, Cappella Palatina, Palermo Photograph: Heather Hoge

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Figure 1.4 Litany of the Hodegetria, Church of the Blacherna, Arta Photograph: David Hendrix/The Byzantine Legacy

to an event (and an image?) in the Byzantine capital; the icon that is the headpiece of our document, in its very physical specificity—the doubly-framed space, the gold ground inhabited by the son to whom she addresses her prayer, the tiled floor on which she stands10—to what is perhaps the most famous icon of this type, the Hodegetria at Constantinople. Both images connote other places and, being referential, I describe them as anaphoric, using the term not in 10

Although tiles of this sort are extant both in situ and in museum collections, for close parallels of the tenth century see Cutler and North, “Gift of Service,” 211 with note 180; sacred figures shown above or in front of such pavements do not become widespread until the early fourteenth century. Then a striking affinity with the floor on which our Theotokos stands is evinced by the hovering tetramorphs in the so-called Hoffman Gospels in New Haven, Beinecke Lib. MS 1145, fols. 114v and esp. 271v. See Nadezhda Kavrus—Hoffmann and Yuri Pyatnitsky, “New Perspectives on the Hoffmann Gospels. Introduction and the History of the Study of the Manuscripts,” Codices Manuscripti 76–77 (2011): 28 and plates 19, 20. See also Beinecke Digital Collections, Image ID 1385720, http://brbl-media.library.yale. edu/images/1385720_quarter.jpg, a reference for which I thank Nicole Paxton Sullo. Less close to the pavement in the Palermo charter, but still directly associated with the Virgin, is the simpler checkerboard floor which supports her throne on a mid-thirteenth-century triptych at Mount Sinai. See Maria Vassilaki and Robin Cormack, “The Monastery of St. Catherine at Sinai,” in Byzantium 330–1453, ed. Robin Cormack and Maria Vassilaki (London: Royal Academy of Arts, 2008), exhibition catalogue, 358–76, esp. 363, fig. 55, who see the work as executed “in a thoroughly Western style.”

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its liturgical sense, of the rite that rehearses Christ’s institution of the Eucharist at the Last Supper—“Do this in remembrance of me” (I Cor. II: 24–25)11—but in the broader manner of Aristotle (e.g., Nicomachean Ethics 1101b 20) to mean “referential” or “relational.” And I employ this usage to bring out the fact that all icons are, in one way or another, referential either in their inscriptions, as in the wall painting at Arta, or, where uninscribed as in our image, in their form. Like other icons, the Naupaktetissa, as she is called in the charter,12 is an “object of translation.”13 But before turning to other examples, it would be well to emphasize the unique circumstances in which the Mother of God finds herself in the instance at Palermo. She is, as noted, the headpiece of a manuscript and thus subject to conditions other than those enjoyed by other pictures. Moreover, she was its “owner,” as is indicated by its fourth signatory, Christopher Kopsenos, that is Christopher of Kopaïs, a lake to the north of Thebes and apparently a layman who promises to be “the servant, though unworthy, of the most holy Theotokos Naupaktitesa, to whom belongs the present charter.”14 Indeed, the perpetuation of her likeness was due expressly to the fact that “[i]n the course of time … the [earlier] charter underwent deterioration and was almost reduced to a state of total obliteration.”15 It takes little historical insight to see that this damage occurred because its predecessor was repeatedly posted—akin perhaps to the manner in which Luther’s ninety-five theses were nailed to the door of the Schlosskirche at Wittenberg—and detached for subsequent use. Yet the real wear and tear on the tomos would have been caused not by the fashion in which it was originally exhibited but by the way it was used. Whether the audience was broader than the confraternity or its membership gathered together to hear a rehearsal of the services to be rendered to the icon,16 its publication required unfurling its more than 140-cm length, an unrolling (and rerolling) that resulted in its attrition. This erosion 11 12 13 14 15 16

On which see Robert F. Taft, The Great Entrance: A History of the Transfer of Gifts and Other Pre-Anaphoral Rites of the Liturgies of St. John Chrysostom (Rome: Pontificium Institutum Studiorum Orientalium, 1975), 26–31. In the tomos, in addition to the name of the locus where the icon normally lives, both the term and its spelling vary considerably. See Nesbitt and Wiita, “Confraternity,” 364, line 28; 365, line 44; 366, line 98; and 368, line 166. I employ the term as it is used in the title of a book concerned with quite other examples of cultural transmission. See Finbarr Barry Flood, Objects of Translation: Material Culture and Medieval “Hindu-Muslim” Encounter (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2009). Nesbitt and Wiita, “Confraternity,” 366, lines 105–06, esp. ἧς ὁ παρῶν τόμος ἐστίν; trans. 371, lines 109–11. Nesbitt and Wiita, 364, lines 12–14; trans. 368, lines 13–16. The text opens by citing the words of Christ (Matt. 18:20) “where two or three are gathered together in my name there I am in the midst of them.” See Nesbitt and Wiita, 364, lines 2–4; trans. 368, lines 2–4.

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was unavoidable even if the text were not pursued to its final list of subscribers. But more was at stake in its historical use than merely physical ablation. The reading of a text is not only a way of materializing an idea but also, as Sukanta Chaudhuri pointed out a few years ago, a first step in its dispersal.17 And diffusion, energetic and purposeful, is explicitly proclaimed before the list of signatories as the objective of the entire enterprise: [W]e shall strive to augment, as it were daily, our holy association and fill its membership and extend it beyond the cedars, as the saying goes, of Lebanon so that we might obtain the praise of men and a manifold repayment from God, not only here, but much more at the final and one great accounting of our deeds.18 This universal ambition is signified in the headpiece by the paradoxical combination of the already-noted, detailed visual account of the picture’s setting and the absence of any designated locale. In this respect, the image at the head of the charter differs remarkably from other icons of the period, even those which grosso modo share its content. At the Machairas monastery on Cyprus its eponymous icon (Fig. 1.5)19 varies in that the Mother of God is shown in half length and looks at the viewer, even as she prays on his or her behalf to Christ in the arc of heaven at top left. But the signal difference from the image in Palermo is that the Machairas one is defined geographically: she is the Μαχαιριώτισσα (Machairiotissa) limited to that setting not by her “type” but by her epithet. By contrast, the Virgin’s paratextual presence at the head of the traveling tomos “overcomes,” as David Summers put it, “a … basic condition of human spatio-temporality, the impossibility of being in more than one place at a time.”20 Quantum theory aside, she appears virtually simultaneously at different sites, moving from one to another without changing her form, her properties, or the role she plays in the life of the community. Nonetheless, she works anaphorically. She is a referent, her devotees’ idea of the Mother of God as, conversely, this theological concept refers to Mary in her material state. She is transformed, from person to image, without any loss of her identity. Just so, the older charter—worn out as its successor’s proemium tells us—represents without hiatus the ancient liturgies conducted in 17 Sukanta Chaudhuri, The Metaphysics of Text (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2010). 18 Nesbitt and Wiita, “Confraternity,” 366, lines 81–87; trans. 370, lines 86–92. 19 Sophocles Sophocleous, Icons of Cyprus 7th–20th Century (Nicosia: Museum Publications, 1994), 77, no. 4. 20 David Summers, “Iconoclasm and Real Space,” in Idol Anxiety, ed. Josh Ellenbogen and Aaron Tugendhaft (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2011), 97–116, esp. 104.

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Figure 1.5 Icon, Mother of God Machairiotissa, Monastery of Machairas, Cyprus Photograph: Annemarie Weyl Carr

her name. Ontologically if not physically, the icon and the rules for its practice remain unchanged. That which changes is not the thing in itself but the history that it suffers. The best educated guess as to how the charter ended up in Palermo suggests that it was part of the loot that the Norman Roger II (r. 1130– 54), the builder of the Cappella Palatina, seized when he sacked Thebes in 1147 and famously carried off its craftsmen or -women to enhance the weaving industry in his Sicilian capital.21 If this was the case, and the parchment roll was indeed a spoil of war, then we can infer that the icon was a valuable thing in and of itself. Whether or not it was instrumental in the generation of a little mosaic icon from the cathedral of Palermo is anybody’s guess (Fig. 1.6). The Mother of God here turns in the opposite direction from that in the headpiece of the tomos but raises her hands in a similar gesture, all the while averting her gaze from that of the beholder. Maria Andaloro suggests that the mosaic icon dates to the second or third quarter of the twelfth century and calls both it and the miniature in our document the Hagiosoritissa.22 I have elsewhere discussed the appropriateness of this designation.23 For now I will elaborate only to say that this desire to classify smacks more of an early modern, Linnaean or Darwinian concern with taxonomy and morphological precision than of a Byzantine habit of mind. We are all familiar with the practice whereby such labels as the Hodegetria and the Eleousa were applied to icons of the Virgin that vary considerably in their “types.” And while such epithets suggest an 21 22 23

Menna, “La Miniatura,” 347. Maria Andaloro, “La Vergine Haghiosoritissa dalla cattedrale di Palermo,” in Nobiles officinae, 1:558–59. Cutler and North, “Gift of Service,” 208–09. There, too, I discuss surviving instances in a variety of mediums.

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Figure 1.6 Mosaic icon, Virgin Hagiosoritissa, Museo Diocesano, Palermo

atavistic concern with their supposed place of origin, their proliferation across time and space is evidence not of the survival of those best adapted to particular circumstances but of human agency in guaranteeing their success, in appropriating them to answer local needs, and in adopting them without modifying their types but only the epithets that are sometimes applied to them. I suggest that it is of some importance to an understanding of our headpiece to note that, like the micromosaic, it carries no locative or nominative indication. This does not mean that the confraternity’s Mother of God was an all-purpose icon, but it does mean that the types and epithets are fungible. In the well-known panel at Mount Sinai five “types” of the Virgin are set above scenes from the life of Christ, including two where her son is absent, labelled respectively the Hagiosoritissa and the Cheimitissa (Fig. 1.7). Mary’s bodily attitude in these last two is intermediate between the downcast eyes and averted gaze of the Hagiosoritissa and the raised head and eyes of the Cheimitissa who

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Figure 1.7 Icon, Virgin and scenes from the life of Christ, Monastery of St. Catherine, Mount Sinai Photograph: Anthony Cutler

looks up to an invisible God—Pascal’s Deus absconditus24—were it not that the icon is a mechanism and a miracle whereby the hidden God manifests himself, if only in the arc above her. There is no doubt that he is present to the icon’s spectator and the reader of the tomos. Just before the list of names at the end, the text speaks of the lord of peace who reconciles conflicts and binds us to him through ties of his most blessed compassion, may he be watchful of our society, cleansing us of all strife, guiding us in every good work throughout the whole of our lives, with the prayers and supplications of his holy mother …25 The resolution of conflict is brought about by his immanence, a presence enabled by the intervention of Mary who, as in the litany represented at Arta, moves among the crowd and hubbub of the city (Fig. 1.4). In this role, carried on high by a bearer, she is instrumental, as against the passive trophy, surmounting the enemy’s royal robes, brought to Constantinople by John I Tzimiskes (r. 969–76) and exhibited in a horse-drawn wagon at the triumphant climax of his Bulgarian campaign (Fig. 1.8). Represented in the unique manuscript in Madrid at least a century after this victory, the miniature departs in several respects from the text that it accompanies, even while it preserves Skylitzes’ account of the emperor’s white horse.26 There is no reason to see the icon 24

Blaise Pascal, Pensées de M. Pascal sur la religion et sur quelques autres sujets, 3rd ed. (Paris: Guillaume Desprez, 1671), 1, 59. Cf. Isaiah 45:15. 25 Nesbitt and Wiita, “Confraternity,” 366, lines 87–93; trans. 370, lines 92–97. 26 Skylitzes, Synopsis historiarum, ed. Ioannes Thurn (Berlin: De Gruyter, 1973), 310. The horse’s colour—obviously the salient feature for these historians—is likewise specified

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Figure 1.8 Triumph of John I Tzimiskes, Madrid, Biblioteca Nacional Vitr. 26-2, fol. 172v a

Figure 1.9 “Idea” relief, Castello Sforzesco, Civiche Raccolte d’Arte, Milan

depicted as anything other than a metapicture, a version produced without special attention to its “type” on the part of those who recorded the event. As has been pointed out astutely, the textual account was appropriated wholesale from Plutarch.27 Similarly derivative and certainly no less inert is an image in Milan of the Mother and Child carried on a draped litter by two men ahead of a procession brought up by the archbishop, his clergy and a group of laymen (Fig. 1.9). This follows in a long line of ancient monumental triumphs familiar to a succession of medieval stone-carvers.28 Yet to determine the sources of processional images like that in the Madrid Skylitzes or the relief in Milan is less interesting an exercise than to perceive the differences between these occasions on which the Virgin is “travelled,” that is, an object moved at will by those who venerate her, from others in which she is the motive force, the figure who impels action on the part of those who adore her. Two final instances will illustrate the difference. On a miniature inserted into the Hamilton Psalter, ca. 1300, in Berlin she drives the behaviour of a group—persons of different gender and age—who are yet united by the red garments that they display in common (Fig. 1.10).29 Clad in this uniform, they surely are not members of a family at prayer in their elaborate private by Leo the Deacon. Historiae libri decem, ed. Karl Benedikt Hase (Bonn: Weber, 1828), 158, lines 6–7. 27 See Michael McCormick, Eternal Victory: Triumphal Rulership in Late Antiquity, Byzantium and the Early Medieval West (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1986), 174. 28 Notably on the small frieze of Trajan’s arch at Beneventum. See, e.g., Mary Beard, The Roman Triumph (Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 2007), 125 and fig. 21. Here and elsewhere such reliefs offered a variable gallery in which the victorious emperor appears on horseback, or either himself or his loot is borne in a wagon. To the best of my knowledge the label IDEA inscribed on the Milan relief has not been satisfactorily explained. 29 Robin Cormack in Byzantium 330–1453, no. 177.

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Figure 1.10 Veneration of an icon of the Virgin Hodegetria, Kupferstichkabinett 78.A.9, Berlin, fol. 39v

Figure 1.11 Icon, Triumph of Orthodoxy, British Museum, London

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chapel but members of an association akin to those who subscribed to the charter of the Naupaktetissa. They constitute not a group shown at a unique moment, but at a regularly recurrent event in their devotional practice. Similarly “historical” and even more referential to enduring cult is the icon of the Triumph of Orthodoxy, created perhaps a century later, deposited on the podea of an altar that is flanked by the empress Theodora, her son Michael III and the patriarch Methodios in 843 and witnessed by the various champions of icons aligned in the lower register (Fig. 1.11).30 At the same time (and the temporal equation is not the least important aspect of the image), and in the conjunction devised by the icon’s painter, it constitutes satisfying if late testimony to the desire and power of the Theotokos to travel. We think of the Byzantines as thinking of icons as metaphors, as artefacts that display and perpetuate their models. Perhaps, instead, they should be considered as “anaphors,” things that stand in relation to her other material embodiments across space and time. References Acheimastou-Potamianou, Myrtale. ‘Η Βλαχέρνα τῆς Ἄρτας Τοιχογραϕίες. Athens: The Archaeological Society at Athens, 2009. Andaloro, Maria. Nobiles officinae: Perle, filigrane e trami di seta dal Palazzo Reale di Palermo. 2 vols. Catania: Maimone, 2006. Andaloro, Maria. “La vergine Haghiosoritissa dalla cattedrale di Palermo.” In Nobiles officinae: Perle, filigrane e trami di seta dal Palazzo Reale di Palermo, 1:558–59. Catania: Maimone, 2006. Beard, Mary. The Roman Triumph. Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 2007. Cormack, Robin, and Maria Vassilaki, eds. Byzantium 330–1453. London: Royal Academy of Arts, 2008. Exhibition catalogue. Chaudhuri, Sukanta. The Metaphysics of Text. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2010. Cruikshank Dodd, Erica. Medieval Painting in the Lebanon. Sprachen und Kulturen des Christlichen Orients 8. Wiesbaden: Reichert, 2004. Cutler, Anthony, and William North. “The Gift of Service: The Charter of the Confraternity of the Virgin of Naupaktos.” In Donation et donateurs dans le monde byzantin, edited by Jean-Michel Spieser and Elisabeth Yota, 207–19. Paris: De Brouwer, 2012.

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Following its initial publication by Robin Cormack, discussions of the icon have become legion. For a selection of the literature see Cormack in Byzantium 330–1453, no. 57.

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Flood, Finbarr Barry. Objects of Translation: Material Culture and Medieval ‘HinduMuslim’ Encounter. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2009. Kavrus-Hoffmann, Nadezhda, and Yuri Pyatnitsky. “New Perspectives on the Hoffmann Gospels. Introduction and the History of the Study of the Manuscripts,” Codices Manuscripti 76–77 (2011): 21–38. Kazhdan, Alexander, Alice-Mary Talbot, Anthony Cutler, Timothy Gregory, and Nancy Ševčenko, eds. Oxford Dictionary of Byzantium. 3 vols. New York: Oxford University Press, 1991. Leo the Deacon. Leonis diaconi Caloënsis historiae libri decem, edited by Karl Benedikt Hase, 3–178. Bonn: Weber, 1828. Lisini, Alessandro, and Fabio Iacometti, eds. Cronache senesi. Bologna: Zanichelli, 1931. McCormick, Michael. Eternal Victory: Triumphal Rulership in Late Antiquity, Byzantium and the Early Medieval West. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1986. Menna, Maria Raffaella. “La Miniatura con la Vergine Hagiosoritissa nella pergamena della Confraternita di S. Maria la Naupattitissa.” In Nobiles Officinae: Perle, filigrane e trami di seta dal Palazzo Reale di Palermo, edited by Maria Andaloro, 1:546–47. Catania: Maimone, 2006. Mitchell, William J. T. What Do Pictures Want? The Lives and Loves of Images. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2005. Nesbitt, John W., and John Wiita. “A Confraternity of the Comnenian Era.” Byzantinische Zeitschrift 68 (1975): 360–85. Pascal, Blaise. Pensées de M. Pascal sur la religion et sur quelques autres sujets. 3rd ed. Paris: Guillaume Desprez, 1671. Skylitzes, Ioannes. Ioannis Scylitzae Synopsis historiarum. Edited by Ioannes Thurn. Berlin: De Gruyter, 1973. Sophocleous, Sophocles. Icons of Cyprus 7th–20th Century. Nicosia, Museum Publications, 1994. Summers, David. “Iconoclasm and Real Space.” In Idol Anxiety, edited by Josh Ellenbogen and Aaron Tugendhaft, 97–116. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2011. Taft, Robert F. The Great Entrance: A History of the Transfer of Gifts and Other PreAnaphoral Rites of the Liturgies of St. John Chrysostom. Rome: Pontificium Institutum Studiorum Orientalium, 1975. Vassilaki, Maria, and Cormack, Robin. “The Monastery of St. Catherine at Sinai.” In Byzantium 330–1453, edited by Robin Cormack and Maria Vassilaki, 358–75 and no. 177. London: Royal Academy of Arts, 2008. Exhibition catalogue.

Chapter 2

Two Icons of the Virgin and Child Hodegetria from St. Catherine’s Monastery on Mount Sinai Byzantine or Crusader? Jaroslav Folda In 1973 I made my first trip to Beirut to visit my friend and colleague, Erica Cruikshank Dodd, and her family. This professional and family association has been long standing, and I count Erica’s generous assistance with and collaboration on our many research visits to Crusader and Byzantine sites in Lebanon, Syria, and Turkey to be an invaluable benefit in my efforts to study the art of the Crusaders in Syria—Palestine. It is therefore a genuine pleasure to contribute an article to this festschrift in Erica’s honour. I hope that she will find the discussion of these two important icons both relevant to her own scholarly interests in the artistic dynamics of the Near East and a worthwhile contribution to the ongoing discussion of Byzantine and Crusader art at the time of the Crusader states. The great importance of the icon collection at the Monastery of St. Catherine on Mount Sinai was first recognized in modern times by Russian scholars who, because of their heritage of Russian Orthodox icons, became deeply interested in the Byzantine icons at Sinai. Between the mid-nineteenth century and 1925 a series of Russian scholars, starting with Bishop Porphyrios Ouspensky, visited St. Catherine’s Monastery and eventually published information about the icon collection.1 Ouspensky even took a number of valuable icons to Kiev, where they still exist today. It was only after World War II however, when the Sinai became more accessible, that the icons began to be studied more extensively, and the first major publication by George and Maria Sotiriou appeared in 1956.2 In that same year, Kurt Weitzmann made his first visit to Sinai to study manuscripts at the Monastery of St. Catherine. Shortly before he left St. Catherine’s, 1 Kurt Weitzmann, “Thirteenth Century Crusader Icons on Mount Sinai,” Art Bulletin 45, no. 3 (1963): 179–203, introduces his first study on Crusader icon painting with comments on these early Russian scholars. 2 George and Maria Sotiriou, Icones du Mont Sinai (in Greek with French summary), 2 vols. (Athens: Institut français d’Athènes, 1956, 1958). The plate volume appeared first in 1956, then the text volume in 1958.

© Koninklijke Brill NV, Leiden, 2021 | doi:10

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however, a monk had shown him the Old Library where, to his utter amazement, hundreds of icons were stored, a collection for which he could only quickly make a working handlist. When Weitzmann then went to Cairo immediately after his visit to Sinai, to pay his respects and to thank the archbishop, he requested permission to return to St. Catherine’s to study not only the manuscripts, but also the icons. In response, he was shown a copy of the Sotirious’ brand new book and told in effect that the icons had been studied, so there was no need to deal with them any further. Weitzmann sat down on the spot and looked through the new publication. His reply, quoted in his memoir, was as follows: “Sotiriou has published about 150 icons. According to my checklist, there are more than 2,000 icons in the monastery.” Weitzmann reports that this convinced the archbishop and his secretary that there was more work to be done, and he was told, “Go ahead when you come next time.”3 Given the important finds on this preliminary trip, Kurt Weitzmann and George Forsyth subsequently organized and launched the Michigan-Princeton-Alexandria Expedition to the Monastery of St. Catherine starting in April/May 1958 for three months, and then returning in 1960, 1963, and 1965. It was during these years that Weitzmann fully catalogued and began to study the collection of icons in the monastery, and it was during this research that he came to realize the existence of a heretofore unknown phenomenon, western-influenced icon painting, which he interpreted as being commissioned by Crusaders or other westerners and/or painted by Crusader artists. Altogether Weitzmann identified approximately 125 icons in the collection at Sinai which could be interpreted as the work of Crusader artists or having been done for Crusader patrons.4 It was his work, together with the pioneering research of Hugo Buchthal, who published Miniature Painting in the Latin Kingdom of Jerusalem in 1957,5 that inaugurated the modern study of Crusader painting as a major component of the art of the Crusaders in the Holy Land. Weitzmann’s first article on Crusader painting based on his study of the icons at St. Catherine’s monastery was published in 1963.6 In this ground-breaking 3 Kurt Weitzmann, Sailing with Byzantium from Europe to America: The Memoirs of an Art Historian (Munich: Editio Maris, 1994), 259. 4 A full handlist of these western-influenced Crusader icons known as of 2004 is published in Jaroslav Folda, Crusader Art in the Holy Land, from the Third Crusade to the Fall of Acre: 1187–1291 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005), 531–59, “Annotated Handlist of Western-Influenced Icons from the Monastery of St. Catherine at Mount Sinai and Elsewhere.” 5 Hugo Buchthal, Miniature Painting in the Latin Kingdom of Jerusalem, with Liturgical and Palaeographical Chapters by Francis Wormald (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1957), with a catalogue of 21 Crusader manuscripts. 6 Weitzmann, “Thirteenth Century Crusader Icons.”

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article he introduced ten icons which he analyzed in some detail in order to make the case that they were Crusader paintings that showed significant western influence. His criteria for identifying an icon as Crusader basically included three aspects: 1. the icon was produced in the Crusader states, 2. the icon was executed by a western (Crusader) artist, and 3. the icon was done for a western (Crusader) donor/patron.7 His method for analysis and presentation of the material in that article was to take icons which he studied and understood to be western-influenced and compare them with other Crusader painting, for example miniature paintings and/or icons, and other icons which he presented as purely Byzantine, in order to distinguish their western-influenced or non-Byzantine characteristics. On the basis of this evidence he argued his case for understanding certain icons as products of Crusader painting. The Crusader icons he identified by this method include the one we refer to today as the Acre Triptych, especially the central panel with the Virgin and Child Hodegetria enthroned with angels (56.8 × 47.7 cm) (Fig. 2.1) and an icon of the Virgin and Child Hodegetria Dexiokratousa (24.4 × 17.5 cm).8 For this discussion I am substituting for the latter icon a completely comparable but more interesting small Crusader panel with the same iconography, namely the Virgin and Child Hodegetria Dexiokratousa, (38.6 × 29.6 cm) (Fig. 2.2), done probably in the second quarter of the thirteenth century, also from Sinai.9 The substitute icon responds to the three criteria that Weitzmann lays out and also includes evidence that it was painted not by a Crusader artist, but by a local eastern Christian painter. Although still a Crusader work, it exemplifies the changing and expanding criteria now used when characterizing Crusader art 7 Doula Mouriki, one of Kurt Weitzmann’s finest research graduate students, summarized these points in the section entitled “Icons of the Thirteenth Century”, 108–20, esp. 117, in her article, “Icons from the 12th to the 15th Century,” in Sinai: Treasures of the Monastery of Saint Catherine, ed. Konstantinos Manafis (Athens: Ekdotike Athenon, 1990), 102–24. These were the basic criteria, some of which have now become more developed, so that, for example, it is possible to think of Crusader icons as having been done for a Crusader or Western patron by an eastern Christian or even a Byzantine painter in the Crusader states. For a recent discussion of the evolving notion of Crusader icon painting and the art of the Crusaders, see Jaroslav Folda, “East Meets West: The Art and Architecture of the Crusader States,” in A Companion to Medieval Art: Romanesque and Gothic in Northern Europe, ed. Conrad Rudolph, revised 2nd ed. (New York: Wiley, 2019), 705–28. 8 For the Acre triptych, see Weitzmann, “Thirteenth Century Crusader Icons,” 185–86, fig. 7; Folda, Crusader Art in the Holy Land, 310–18, (figs. 155, 156) and Handlist, 541 (no. 66). For the icon of the Virgin and Child Hodegetria Dexiokratousa, see Weitzmann, “Thirteenth Century Crusader Icons,” 196, fig. 22. 9 Kurt Weitzmann, “Icon Painting in the Crusader Kingdom,” Dumbarton Oaks Papers 20 (1966): 49–83, esp. 78, fig. 61; and Folda, Crusader Art in the Holy Land, 140, 222, fig. 76, and handlist, 540 (no. 57).

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Figure 2.1 Crusader icon (The Acre Triptych), central panel with the Virgin and Child Hodegetria enthroned with two standing angels, probably done in Acre, ca. 1250s, (Central panel: 56.8 × 47.7 cm), Monastery of St. Catherine, Mount Sinai Photograph: Folda Handlist (see ch. 2, n. 4): no. 66, p. 541

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(as will be discussed later in this chapter). The Byzantine icons Weitzmann used for comparison included the Sinai panel of the Virgin and Child Hodegetria enthroned on a lyre-backed throne, with angels, (35 × 26 cm) (Fig. 2.3),10 and the mosaic icon of the Virgin and Child Hodegetria Dexiokratousa (34 × 23 cm, without the frame) (Fig. 2.4), also from Sinai.11 It is worth reviewing the main points of Weitzmann’s analysis for why he considered the first two icons to be western-influenced/Crusader and why he characterized the other two as Byzantine. When discussing the central panel of the Acre Triptych (Fig. 2.1), Weitzman pointed first to stylistic characteristics: with regard to the figures he notes the stocky proportions, the exaggeratedly large, rather fleshy heads with a not very spirited expression in the eyes, the softness in the modeling of the drapery, which lacks precision in design but on the other hand emphasizes the massiveness of the body—all these features are characteristic of a Western artist. There is a certain discrepancy between the pearl-and-bead-studded frame of the throne, which obliterates the spatial relationship between its front and back side, and the tiled floor, whose pattern represents a serious attempt to create the impression of foreshortening in a rather forceful manner. Both elements are un-Byzantine, and a parallel for the perspective tiled floor can be found in Arezzo … The compositional balance of the Sinai panel is determined by the flanking angels, each of whom holds a scepter in one hand and trustingly rests the other on the back of the throne … Italian Dugento art also very often shows the Virgin accompanied by angels, although, owing to a preference for taller panels, they are represented in smaller size … If the flanking angels ever existed in Italian Dugento art …, it surely would have to be explained as an adaptation from a Byzantine model. By chance such a Byzantine panel of the thirteenth century has been preserved in the Sinai Collection [Fig. 2.3] …12 Weitzmann introduces the Byzantine icon of the Virgin and Child Hodegetria enthroned with angels (Fig. 2.3) by saying that a comparison between these two Virgin icons shows quite clearly that the Crusader artist [Fig. 2.1] followed a Byzantine model much more 10 11 12

Weitzmann, “Thirteenth Century Crusader Icons,” 186, fig. 8. Weitzmann, 196–97, fig. 23. Weitzmann, 185–86.

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faithfully than a Dugento artist working in Italy would have done. Yet the Western temper asserts itself in many respects in this instance. In [what he calls] the Byzantine panel, [Fig. 2.3] the taller proportions and the almost exaggerated use of sharp and metallic-looking highlights over the entire surface, human figures and furniture alike, create a dematerializing effect which immediately removes the Virgin and the angels to an unearthly realm and which is quite in contrast to the earthly quality of the Italian (sic) panel [Fig. 2.1]. The Byzantine Christ Child [Fig. 2.3] holds the scroll in his left hand and blesses with his right, thus being almost self-contained and more spiritually than physically connected with the Virgin. In the Crusader panel [Fig. 2.1] the Child clings to the Virgin by holding her right hand as if to steady himself; he looks up at her face and tries to reach it with his other hand…. Baby-like behavior such as holding the Virgin’s hand has no place in a Byzantine icon of the Virgin. The fundamental difference of two religious concepts manifests itself here in all clarity, despite the fact that the Western artist [Fig. 2.1] tried to copy a Byzantine model as closely as he could.13 With regard to the two bust-length images of the Virgin and Child Hodegetria now at Sinai, Weitzmann makes equally perceptive comments, which are applicable to the mosaic icon (Fig. 2.4), which he regarded as Byzantine, and to the Crusader panel, for which I am substituting a different but equally comparable icon of the Virgin and Child Hodegetria Dexiokratousa (Fig. 2.2). What makes this substitute Crusader icon especially interesting is that in its artist’s style and certain iconographic details it is more complex. Yet despite the linear strap-fold style of its artist, who might be an eastern Christian, and its distinctive iconographic details, it can still certainly be regarded as a Crusader icon according to Weitzmann’s analysis. Consider the following points of his analysis and commentary applied now to this Crusader icon (Fig. 2.2). He notes that his Crusader icon is a typical example where the artist has attempted to follow his Byzantine model as closely as possible, yet it has the pastiglia technique on its haloes like those on the Acre Triptych wings.14 The “Byzantine” icon (Fig. 2.4) is an equally typical work of the most cultivated style of Constantinople, executed in mosaic rather than in tempera and set against an ornamental background which is a clear imitation of cloisonné enamel patterns. Both 13 14

Weitzmann, 186. Weitzmann, “Thirteenth Century Crusader Icons,” figs. 9–12.

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Virgins represent the type of the Hodegetria, except that the Christ Child is seated on the right arm instead of on the left … Yet, when we analyze the seated pose, we will immediately perceive the fundamental difference between the Crusader icon and the Constantinopolitan one. In the former [Fig. 2.2] the Child sits very firmly and comfortably on the Virgin’s arm with his legs dangling in a natural pose, while in the latter [Fig. 2.4] the Child, if one rationalizes, is almost suspended and only touched but not held by the Virgin, and despite the rather naturalistic effect of the crossed legs and the one foot seen from underneath, such a pose would only be possible if the upper leg were firmly supported. This manner of depicting the Christ Child is a rather standard formula in Byzantine art, which stresses the immateriality of Christ’s body and therewith his divine nature … The Byzantine Virgin, entirely unemotional and devoid of any human quality, not for lack of expressive power but because of the desire to find a pictorial formula for the divine, shows a very slight degree of human sentiment by the lowering of the head, but only to the point where her glance passes over Christ’s head, thus avoiding the direct human contact which is … represented in the Crusader icon,…15 Compared to the Crusader icon Weitzmann includes in his article, our Crusader example (Fig. 2.2) also shows the pastiglia stucco halo with a pearl dot border and a strong human relationship between the Christ Child and his Mother, but perhaps somewhat less powerful than for the icon described in the 1963 article. One difference between those two Crusader icons is that here (Fig. 2.2) the Child does not look up at the Virgin, and the Virgin looks directly at us. Also, Jesus does not bless at all, rather he holds his left hand up in a gesture of preparation for speaking. And the icon has a bright red background, not a gold or ornamental one. Moreover, it is extremely rare to find Jesus holding a kind of tablet book as here, on which are written the words of Luke 4:18, “The Spirit of the Lord is Upon Me,” in Greek. In this case we may agree that the artist was probably not someone of western heritage, but a non-Byzantine eastern Christian who may have been a Syrian Christian working for a Crusader patron.16 Nonetheless, Weitzmann’s conclusions are still relevant, as follows: One must again emphasize that the … artist tried his utmost to copy a Byzantine model as faithfully as possible, but the differences described above, though expressed by pictorial means, are not to be considered as 15 16

Weitzmann, 196–97. Mouriki, “Icons of the Thirteenth Century,” 119–20.

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Figure 2.2 Crusader icon, Virgin and Child Hodegetria Dexiokratousa (bust-length), probably done in Acre or Sinai, ca. 1240s. (38.6 × 26.9 cm), Monastery of St. Catherine, Mount Sinai Photograph: Folda Handlist: no. 57, p. 540

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merely formal, owing to the individuality of the artist, but as the result of fundamentally different religious concepts based on a different understanding of the relationship between the human and the divine.17 These two icons which Weitzmann and others have attributed to “Crusader” painters working for Crusader patrons have not been challenged on that basis since he published them in 1963, over fifty years ago. But quite recently the two Byzantine examples which Weitzmann used as comparanda for these two Crusader icons in his 1963 article (Figs. 2.3 and 2.4) have been further discussed and new attributions proposed. And while the criteria which Weitzmann used in 1963 to evaluate the Crusader icons and the Byzantine icons basically remain valid, these new attributions reflect the knowledge and perspective gained with regard to what constitutes Crusader and Byzantine painting that has developed and become markedly more nuanced in the intervening fifty years. The result is that significant reconsideration has occurred specifically in connection with the Sinai panel of the Virgin and Child Hodegetria enthroned (Fig. 2.3) and the Sinai mosaic icon (Fig. 2.4). 1

The Sinai Icon of the Virgin and Child Hodegetria Enthroned with Angels

In 2004, Elka Bakalova took a fresh look at the Virgin and Child Hodegetria enthroned with angels panel (Fig. 2.3) making the following interesting observations.18 The Holy Virgin sits on a lyre-shaped throne, flanked on either side by an archangel…. While rare in Byzantine icons, the enthroned Hodegetria 17 18

Weitzmann, “Thirteenth Century Crusader Icons,” 197. Elka Bakalova, “208.Icon with the Enthroned Virgin and Child,” in Byzantium: Faith and Power (1261–1557), ed. Helen C. Evans (New York: Metropolitan Museum of Art, 2004), 349–50. Tempera on wooden panel. 35.0 × 26.0 cm. Inscriptions in Greek: “Mother of God,” “O Archangel Michael,” “O Archangel Gabriel,” but there is nothing for Jesus among these nomina sacra. In addition to the bibliography cited by Bakalova, whose authors all accepted the attribution to a Byzantine artist, see Weitzmann, “Thirteenth Century Crusader Icons,” 186; Jaroslav Folda, “Sacred Objects with Holy Light: Byzantine Icons with Chrysography,” in Byzantine Religious Culture: Studies in Honor of Alice-Mary Talbot, ed. Dennis Sullivan, Elizabeth Fisher, and Stratis Papaioannou (Leiden: Brill, 2012), 155–71, esp. 165, 170; and Folda, “Byzantine Chrysography in Crusader Art and Italian Maniera Greca Painting,” in Anathemata Eortika: Studies in Honor of Thomas F. Mathews, ed. Joseph Alchermes, Helen C. Evans, and Thelma K. Thomas (Mainz: Philipp von Zabern, 2009), 161–62, fig. 1.

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Figure 2.3 Crusader icon (formerly attributed to a Byzantine artist), Virgin and Child Hodegetria enthroned on a lyre-backed throne, with angels, probably done in Acre or Sinai, ca. 1260 (?) (35 × 26 cm), Monastery of St. Catherine, Mount Sinai

Two Icons of the Virgin and Child Hodegetria

Figure 2.4 Crusader icon (formerly attributed to a Byzantine artist): Virgin and Child Hodegetria Dexiokratousa, bust-length, in mosaic, possibly done in Acre, Constantinople, or Sinai, early thirteenth century (47 × 34 cm; 34 × 23 cm without the frame), Monastery of St. Catherine, Mount Sinai

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appears in monumental art from the twelfth century, especially in Eastern regions. At the same time the image is widespread in the West, … [and] was one of the most popular iconographic types among Italian masters of the thirteenth century. The stylistic features of the icon, emphasizing plasticity, movement, and a variety of gestures, justify a dating from the thirteenth century. The modeling of the figures, based on a contrast of dark green shades and other highlights, is also typical for Byzantine art from the thirteenth century. The abundance of gold rays on the garments, known as chrysography, also appears in Italian wall paintings from the same period.19 Bakalova also points out that George and Maria Sotiriou had suggested a close parallel between this icon and the Pushkin Madonna done in Pisa at about the start of the last quarter of the century, proposing a ca. 1280 date, but that Panagiotes Vocotopoulos dated the icon in the first half of the thirteenth century. Bakalova herself preferred a late thirteenth-century date and concluded her discussion by stating, “this small icon of great artistic merit was probably painted in the ateliers of the Monastery of Saint Catherine by a master painter working for the Crusaders.”20 Elka Bakalova’s interesting conclusion that the icon could have been made for a Crusader patron is certainly partly based on the use of the “abundance of gold rays” on this image, which has parallels in Italian painting in this period, and the similarity between this icon and the Pisan Pushkin Madonna now in the State Museum of Fine Arts, Moscow. Looking again at this icon and pursuing these issues further, it is evident even from these comments and her references to these scholars that there are several notable and, one might say, unusual features about this icon. First, there is the imagery of the lyre-backed throne with the Virgin and Child Hodegetria enthroned. Second, there is the copious chrysography which covers the figures and the throne and footstool. Third, there is the variable dating: everyone agrees the icon belongs to the thirteenth century, but whether early or mid-century or late is an open question. Let us consider each in turn. The image of the Virgin and Child Hodegetria on a lyre-backed throne was discussed at some length by Anthony Cutler in 1975. He points out that “the lyre-backed throne as a vehicle for the Virgin disappears from Byzantine art

19 20

Bakalova, “208.Icon with the Enthroned Virgin and Child,” 349–50. Bakalova, 350.

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with the Patmos majestas of about 1210–1220.”21 Meanwhile, however, it enjoys a strong renewal in the west where, as he points out, it appears on the Pisan Pushkin Madonna, ascribed by Viktor Lazarev to the second half of the thirteenth century, and on the Madonna del Bordone by Coppo di Marcovaldo in Siena in 1261. With reference to the Pushkin Madonna Cutler says, “the image is … that of the Hodegitria, the type found on Crusader icons but never associated with the lyre-backed throne in medieval Greek art.”22 And the Crusader example he refers to is the Sinai icon we are discussing (Fig. 2.3). He continues as follows: “For the Crusaders a milder type of Hodegitria was created, as on an icon at Sinai [Fig. 2.3], in which Mary gazes past one of the angels while the Christ Child turns toward the other. The complex intersections of lines of sight and angles of movement produce an elegant sacra conversazione that is closer to Coppo di Marcovaldo than to any Eastern prototype.”23 The use of the lyre-backed throne with the Virgin Hodegetria imagery here is then one concrete indication that this icon is unlikely to be Byzantine, but rather that it is a hybrid combining Byzantine elements in an un-Byzantine manner. This means that the artist, probably a Crusader artist working at Sinai, was closely following a Byzantine model or models, as Weitzmann and Bakalova propose, and he produces a result that was designed to satisfy the requirements of a Crusader patron. Reconsideration of the use of chrysography on this icon produces a similar result. Both Weitzmann and Bakalova noted the copious use of the chrysography. And while the presence of chrysography on the figure of the Christ Child and on the angels in Byzantine imagery on icons during the middle Byzantine period is entirely normal, the fact is that chrysography is virtually never used on the image of the Virgin Hodegetria in Byzantine art, with very few exceptions.24 Whereas in middle Byzantine art it is completely appropriate to represent the Christ Child and the angels as holy beings radiant with divine light, the Virgin is consistently represented as the human Mother of God, the Theotokos, or God-bearer as defined by the Council of Ephesus in 431. In this portrait icon, which tradition said was originally painted by the evangelist, St. Luke, Mary’s role in the image of the Virgin and Child Hodegetria is to appear as the human mother of Jesus. As a result, she wears her standard garments, which are typically a dark blue or dark maroon maphorion over a coif on her head, 21 22 23 24

Anthony Cutler, “The Lyre Backed Throne,” in Transfigurations. Studies in the Dynamics of Byzantine Iconography (University Park: The Pennsylvania State University Press, 1975), 5–52, esp. 30. Cutler, 34. Cutler, 28. I exclude here the images of the Virgin rendered in cloisonné enamels for obvious reasons.

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and a dark blue chiton or tunic underneath with red or purple buskins. These garments may have golden ornamentation on them, but in Byzantine icons before 1300, the Virgin is not given chrysography over her garments. The use of chryso­graphy on the Virgin here appears to indicate that the artist was representing the Virgin in a new and different way. Bakalova and Cutler refer to the parallel between this icon and the Pisan Pushkin Madonna of ca. 1260, and the Madonna del Bordone by Coppo di Marcovaldo done in Siena in 1261. Bearing this in mind, we know from the contextual evidence surrounding the production of the Madonna del Bordone in Siena that the Servite Order which commissioned this altarpiece venerated the Virgin as the Queen of Heaven, hence the use of the chrysography we see on that panel. Presumably the chryso­ graphy introduced on the Virgin on this Sinai panel (Fig. 2.3) is also meant to convey the meaning of the Virgin Hodegetria as Queen of Heaven, holding her divine son and enthroned with angels, radiant with divine light.25 As for the dating of this icon in the thirteenth century, the various comments about the style of the figures make it clear that this is an appropriate attribution. But I would submit that the only indication offered so far that can enable us to be more precise about the dating is provided by the chryso­ graphy. The fact that this icon has been compared frequently to the Pushkin Madonna done by a Pisan artist, which is tentatively to be dated ca. 1260, and the Madonna del Bordone by Coppo di Marcovaldo, done in Siena and dated in 1261, and the fact that all three of these images of the Virgin and Child Hodegetria enthroned with angels feature chrysography on the figure of the Virgin suggests that the Sinai icon (Fig. 2.3) may also be dated in a similar time frame. While awaiting further evidence, I am adopting a dating ca. 1260 as my working hypothesis for this icon. Seen from the point of view of Weitzmann’s comments above, I would only add that for this icon the artist, whom we regard as a Crusader rather than Byzantine, has indeed studied a Byzantine model or models very carefully. And his observation that “the almost exaggerated use of sharp and metallic-looking highlights over the entire surface, human figures and furniture alike, create a dematerializing effect”26 is correct. Here the Crusader artist is using the Byzantine cut gold technique in order to do the chrysography, hence the sharp and metallic-looking result. The dematerializing effect of the chrysography is 25

26

The full particulars of this argument with complete documentation appear in my book entitled, Byzantine Art and Italian Panel Painting: The Virgin and Child Hodegetria and the Art of Chrysography, (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2015). For the use of chrysography on Byzantine icons, see Folda, “Sacred Objects with Holy Light.” Weitzmann, “Thirteenth Century Crusader Icons,” 186.

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also true, but to understand the significance of this we must shift our perspective from a Byzantine to a Crusader/Latin religious frame of reference. Seen this way the dematerialization is part of the larger idea of the Virgin as the Queen of Heaven, which relates directly to the widespread popularity of the cult of the Virgin in the second half of the thirteenth century, and especially in the years around 1260–1262, when Crusader painters in the Holy Land and Constantinople, as well as Italian artists in Pisa and Siena produced images that promoted the Virgin as Queen of Heaven. The size of the Sinai panel at 35 × 26 cm (Fig. 2.3) suggests that it was made to be a devotional image, not a large altarpiece, when compared to much larger panels such as the Pushkin Madonna at 173 × 84 cm and the Madonna del Bordone at 220 × 125 cm. But even though it differs in function from its western counterparts, it still appears to be part of the remarkable celebration both east and west of the cult of the Virgin as the Queen of Heaven in the early 1260s. 2

The Sinai Mosaic Icon of the Virgin and Child Hodegetria Dexiokratousa Bust-Length

That brings us to the second important icon about which opinions have been changing since George and Maria Sotiriou first introduced it in their 1956–58 publication about the icons in the collection at Sinai. I refer to the well-known mosaic icon of the Virgin and Child Hodegetria Dexiokratousa now in the collection of the Monastery of St. Catherine on Mount Sinai (Fig. 2.4). Because of its style and the technique of its exquisite miniaturized mosaic work, it has usually been attributed to an artist rooted in Constantinople and dated to ca. 1200 or the first quarter of the thirteenth century.27 But in fact the idea of a possible western connection was referred to early on by Kondakov in the 1920s.28 In any case, shortly after Elka Bakalova published her remarks about the Virgin and Child Hodegetria enthroned icon (Fig. 2.3) in 2004, Bissera Pentcheva, writing

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Otto Demus, Die byzantinischen Mosaikikonen, vol. 1 (Vienna: Verlag der Österreichischen Akademie der Wissenschaften, 1991), 51–55, no. 10, tafel XI; Kurt Weitzmann, “Thirteenth Century Crusader Icons,” 196–97, fig. 23, Weitzmann, “The Icons of Constantinople,” in The Icon (Verona: Arnaldo Mondadori Editore, 1982), 20, 64; and Doula Mouriki, “Variants of the Hodegetria on two Thirteenth-Century Sinai Icons,” Cahiers archéologiques 39 (1991): 165–71. Nikodim Pavlovich Kondakov and Vladimir N. Benesevic, Monumenta Sinaitica, archaeologica et palaeographica, fasc. 1 (St. Petersburg: Tipografiia imperatorskoi akademii nauk, 1925), 28–30, fig. 19.

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in 2006, carefully studied and reconsidered the mosaic icon of the Virgin and Child Hodegetria Dexiokratousa (Fig. 2.4).29 Pentcheva begins her discussion by stating that this icon “displays the quintessential image of prayer.” But although the image represents “the standard Dexiokratousa type (Mary holding the very stately, imperial child in her right arm), several subtle deviations from this [Byzantine] model introduce a totally new meaning in the panel.” First, Christ is barefoot. Second, the sole of his left foot is exposed to the viewer. Third, his blessing gesture, done with a thumb pressing the nameless (ring) finger, is directed away from the faithful toward the Mother of God. “All three elements emerge in compositions that otherwise proleptically evoke Christ’s Crucifixion.”30 As a Byzantine source she points in particular to the twelfth-century fresco of the Virgin Arakiotissa from the church of the Panagia tou Arakou at Lagoudera, on Cyprus.31 As she points out, “the Lagoudhera composition is linked to the Constantinopolitan art of the late Comnenian period, yet it appears to have an avid following in the Crusader production of the thirteenth century” because of what she calls “its fragility, vulnerability and psychological complexity.” According to Pentcheva, the Sinai mosaic icon here as a result “is a hybrid of the stately and emotional modes of representation of the Virgin and Child”; what she calls, “echoes of proleptic suffering and sacrifice ruffle the otherwise calm surface of these imperial figures.”32 Pentcheva goes on to point out certain other details that suggest that the icon was produced in a Crusader workshop. First, the Virgin is prominently identified as “Mother of God” in abbreviated Greek located in red medallions, but Jesus is given no identifying inscription. This discrepancy paired with a 29 Bissera Pentcheva, “8.Mosaic Icon of the Virgin Hodegetria,” in Icons from Sinai: Holy Image + Hallowed Ground, ed. Robert S. Nelson and Kristen M. Collins (Los Angeles: The J. Paul Getty Museum, 2006), 140–43. Glass and ceramic tesserae with gold, on wood panel. 47.3 × 33.7 cm. Condition includes large loss on the left side from lower part of Christ’s halo down to his waist. In addition to the bibliography cited by Pentcheva, whose authors all accepted the attribution of this icon to a Byzantine artist, see Mojmir J. Frinta, “Raised Gilded Adornment of the Cypriot Icons, and the Occurrence of the Technique in the West,” Gesta 20, no. 2 (1981): 333–47 with background discussion for ornament seen on this icon. 30 Pentcheva, “8.Mosaic Icon of the Virgin Hodegetria,” 141. 31 Once again Anthony Cutler appears to have led the way with regard to this point; he apparently supplied the Lagoudhera example as a proleptic model, but there are others Pentcheva could have cited. One example is the Virgin and Child Hodegetria Dexiokratousa done in mosaic in Hosios Loukas during the eleventh century. This latter example is illustrated by Mouriki, “Variants of the Hodegetria on two thirteenth-century Sinai icons,” 163, fig. 14. 32 Pentcheva, “8.Mosaic Icon of the Virgin Hodegetria,” 143.

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second feature, the fact that neither the Virgin nor Jesus looks at the worshipper, would normally not be found in a Byzantine icon from the middle Byzantine period. Third, “the decorative motifs in the background and frame lend further support for a Crusader attribution. They appropriate Byzantine patterns, but modify them; the crenelated design uses only half of the regular Byzantine stepped-cross pattern, and the morphed acanthus rinceaux transform the standard design.” The result of her analysis is contained in the following concluding remarks: “the Sinai mosaic icon is thus most likely the product of a Crusader (Venetian?) artist who was fascinated both with the psychological depth of a few new Byzantine iconographic formulas of the Virgin and Child and with the splendidly adorned Constantinopolitan state icons such as the Hodegetria. He created a Western hybrid, fusing Byzantine imperial art with the emotionally rich images of the liturgical rite.”33 Pentcheva’s penetrating analysis combined with Weitzmann’s very important point, namely, that the difference between a Byzantine and a Crusader icon is “not to be considered as merely formal, owing to the individuality of the artist, but as the result of fundamentally different religious concepts based on a different understanding of the relationship between the human and the divine,”34 lead us to discuss further three important aspects about this handsome mosaic icon. First, Pentcheva’s proposal to see this icon as a hybrid product is an important point. Second, Weitzmann’s idea that a Crusader icon would reflect a different religious understanding of the relationship between the human and the divine as compared to an Orthodox Byzantine icon is fundamental. And third, the artist’s use of elegant chrysography on these figures, both on the Christ Child and the figure of the Virgin, is a significant feature that must be recognized and understood here as the product of Crusader artistic innovation in response to a Crusader patron’s commission. In regard to the first point, Pentcheva is the first to argue for the hybrid nature of this icon. She does this both with regard to the essential religious content of the imagery of Christ and the Virgin, as related to the Virgin Arakiotissa fresco icon in the Panagia tou Arakou at Lagoudera, on Cyprus, and other examples such as the Virgin Hodegetria Dexiokratousa from Hosios Loukas in Greece,35 but also with regard to the sophisticated ornament employed on the background and on the frame. The ornament found on these icons, both Byzantine and Crusader, is also an important aspect that often goes unnoticed, and here Pentcheva has made two very illuminating comments that help us to 33 Pentcheva. 34 Weitzmann, “Thirteenth Century Crusader Icons,” 197. 35 See note 32.

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see how the ornament has been appropriated and changed to serve the purpose of this hybrid icon. One of the essential features of Crusader icons is their hybrid nature, that is, the way they combine the substance of the Byzantine model or models their Crusader artist was studying with an approach to, and an understanding of, religious imagery rooted in the western medieval artistic experience in which the painter was trained, alongside the requirements of a western/Crusader patron when commissioning the production of a devotional or liturgical image such as these. The second point, that a Crusader icon would represent “a different religious understanding of the relationship between the human and the divine”36 from that of a strictly Orthodox Byzantine icon is fundamental to what is going on here. This artist is drawing on one of the most venerable traditional images in the Byzantine iconic repertoire, the Virgin and Child Hodegetria, seen here in this widely found variant, the Dexiokratousa. Nonetheless, presumably at the behest of the western/Crusader patron who commissioned this icon, probably in Constantinople shortly after 1204, the artist has transformed the idea of this icon as a historical portrait, the standard Byzantine conception which he could have readily studied in Constantinople, into a devotional vision of the Virgin and Child symbolically celebrated in heaven, both resplendent in their chrysography as divinely radiant. This of course leads to my third point, the use of chrysography on the Virgin, as a crucial feature of the Crusader artist that a Byzantine artist would not have employed. There are virtually no Byzantine images of the Virgin and Child Hodegetria produced before 1300 that employ chrysography on the figure of the Virgin.37 By introducing elegant chrysography on this Virgin to go with the normal golden ornamentation found on her maphorion and tunic, the artist has transformed this traditional image of the Virgin Hodegetria as Theotokos, the Human Mother of God, into the Virgin as the divinely radiant Regina Coeli. This concept reflects a religious understanding identified and developed in the medieval west, which the Byzantine Orthodox Church did not embrace. Although the cult of the Virgin was equally fervent in the East and the West in the thirteenth century, the Byzantines expressed their veneration of the Virgin in art quite differently from that of the Latin Church in the west. But the unique accomplishment of these Crusader artists when producing the mosaic icon of the Virgin and Child Hodegetria Dexiokratousa (Fig. 2.4) and the painted panel with the Virgin and Child Hodegetria enthroned with angels (Fig. 2.3) is that 36 37

Weitzmann, “Thirteenth Century Icons,” 197. Referred to above. Cf. n. 25.

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the western-inspired idea of the Virgin as Queen of Heaven is depicted using the visual vocabulary of Byzantine icons and employing Byzantine techniques for executing the all-important chrysography. In concluding this discussion there are several points worth making. First, it is clear that all three of the main authors cited and discussed above, that is, Kurt Weitzmann, Elka Bakalova, and Bissera Pentcheva have made substantial contributions not only to our understanding of these two icons in particular, but also to the basic understanding of Crusader and Byzantine icons more generally. Second, I hope that this case study makes clear that in the consideration of Byzantine and Crusader icons, analysis and interpretation of the chrysography is an essential aspect in their study, and that the technique, concept, design, and special characteristics of the chrysography have much to tell us about the meaning and content of these precious holy works. Whereas I have referred to the use of chrysography and its meaning with regard to these two icons, I have had nothing to say about other important aspects such as its design or the formal repertory used in its execution, aspects which I am discussing more fully elsewhere. Finally, given the results of this discussion, I have proposed to see the mosaic icon of the Virgin and Child Hodegetria Dexiokratousa at Sinai (Fig. 2.4) as a Crusader work done in Constantinople shortly after 1204 and the painted panel of the Virgin and Child Hodegetria enthroned with angels (Fig. 2.3) as a Crusader work done in Sinai or Acre about 1260. This means that the latter work belongs to a remarkable outpouring of icons and altarpieces, East and West, which celebrate the Virgin and Child Hodegetria enthroned as Queen of Heaven in the years between 1260 and 1262. Among those the Pisan Pushkin Madonna and the Madonna del Bordone by Coppo di Marcovaldo in Siena, done in 1261, have been mentioned above. As for the mosaic icon, given its high quality and the elegance of its production, it is challenging to consider who its artist was and who its patron may have been. The fact is the remarkably sophisticated miniature mosaic technique certainly might suggest that a Byzantine artist executed this work. But it is also possible that a Crusader artist, especially a skilled mosaic artist from Venice, might have executed it. What we know is that the original Byzantine icon of the Virgin Hodegetria was given special attention by the Crusaders when they established themselves in Constantinople in 1204. At first that icon was taken from the Monastery of the Hodegon and placed in the Palace of the Boukoleon by the Crusaders. Later, on August 20, 1206, at the time of the coronation of the second Latin Emperor of Constantinople, the new Latin patriarch removed the icon from its palace location and brought it to the Haghia Sophia. Shortly thereafter, possibly in

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September 1206, the Venetians forcibly removed the icon from the Haghia Sophia and put it in the Monastery of the Pantokrator which they controlled.38 There the icon remained during the entire time of the Latin occupation until 1261. It is certainly possible that these circumstances at the start of the Latin Empire stimulated a Crusader patron to commission an elegant and distinctive mosaic icon of his own, inspired by the old Byzantine original but transformed into this new image of the Queen of Heaven. While at the moment we have no evidence to suggest who that patron was, other than from the magnificent icon itself, one fact seems clear. The Sinai mosaic icon of the Virgin and Child Hodegetria Dexiokratousa (Fig. 2.4), probably done shortly after 1204 in Constantinople, is the earliest extant Crusader work to depict the Virgin as, in effect, the Queen of Heaven by means of the elegant chrysography on her maphorion. The fact that the Virgin alone is given an identifying inscription clearly reflects the emphasis the artist wishes to place on the image of the Virgin here. Whether this icon and/or others like it could have somehow directly inspired the artist of the Sinai panel done ca. 1260 (Fig. 2.3) and/or Coppo di Marcovaldo in Siena in 1261, or the anonymous Pisan Master of the Pushkin Madonna at about the same time, remains to be discovered. But the Crusader artist of the Sinai mosaic icon appears to have been trained in such a way as to enable him to do Byzantine miniature mosaic technique of the highest quality. And this icon appears to be an important example of how Crusader art was capable of significant innovation, in this instance in the imagery of the cult of the holy Virgin Mary. References Bakalova, Elka. “208. Icon with the Enthroned Virgin and Child.” In Byzantium: Faith and Power (1261–1557), edited by Helen C. Evans, 349–50. New York: Metropolitan Museum of Art, 2004. Buchthal, Hugo. Miniature Painting in the Latin Kingdom of Jerusalem, with Liturgical and Palaeographical Chapters by Francis Wormald. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1957. Cutler, Anthony. “The Lyre Backed Throne.” In Transfigurations. Studies in the Dynamics of Byzantine Iconography, 5–52. University Park: The Pennsylvania State University Press, 1975. Demus, Otto. Die byzantinischen Mosaikikonen. 2 vols. Vienna: Verlag der Österreichischen Akademie der Wissenschaften, 1991. 38 Robert Lee Wolff, “Footnote to an Incident of the Latin Occupation of Constantinople: The Church and the Icon of the Hodegetria,” Traditio 6 (1948): 319–28, esp. 320–21.

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Folda, Jaroslav. Byzantine Art and Italian Panel Painting: The Virgin and Child Hodegetria and the Art of Chrysography. New York: Cambridge University Press, 2015. Folda, Jaroslav. “Byzantine Chrysography in Crusader Art and Italian Maniera Greca Painting.” In Anathemata Eortika: Studies in Honor of Thomas F. Mathews, edited by Joseph Alchermes, Helen C. Evans, and Thelma K. Thomas, 160–66. Mainz: Philipp von Zabern, 2009. Folda, Jaroslav. Crusader Art in the Holy Land, from the Third Crusade to the Fall of Acre: 1187–1291. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005. Folda, Jaroslav. “East Meets West: The Art and Architecture of the Crusader States.” In A Companion to Medieval Art: Romanesque and Gothic in Northern Europe, edited by Conrad Rudolph, revised 2nd ed., 705–28. New York: Wiley, 2019. Folda, Jaroslav. “Sacred Objects with Holy Light: Byzantine Icons with Chrysography.” In Byzantine Religious Culture: Studies in Honor of Alice-Mary Talbot, edited by Dennis Sullivan, Elizabeth Fisher, and Stratis Papaioannou, 155–71. Leiden: Brill, 2012. Frinta, Mojmir J. “Raised Gilded Adornment of the Cypriot Icons, and the Occurrence of the Technique in the West.” Gesta 20 (1981): 333–47. Kondakov, Nikodim Pavlovich, and Vladimir N. Benesevic. Monumenta Sinaitica, archaeologica et palaeographica, fasc. 1. St. Petersburg: Tipografiia imperatorskoi akademii nauk, 1925. Lidov, Alexei. “Icon as Sacred Relic.” In The Miraculous Image: The Icons of Our Lady in the Tretyakov Gallery, edited by Alexei Lidov and Galina V. Sidorenko, 76–77. Moscow: Radunitsa, 1999. Mouriki, Doula. “Icons from the 12th to the 15th Century.” In Sinai: Treasures of the Monastery of Saint Catherine, edited by Konstantinos Manafis, 102–24. Athens, Ekdotike Athenon, 1990. Mouriki, Doula. “Variants of the Hodegetria on two Thirteenth-Century Sinai Icons.” Cahiers archéologiques 39 (1991): 153–82. Pentcheva, Bissera. “8. Mosaic Icon of the Virgin Hodegetria.” In Icons from Sinai: Holy Image and Hallowed Ground, edited by Robert S. Nelson and Kristen M. Collins, 140–43. Los Angeles: The J. Paul Getty Museum, 2006. Ryder, Edmund C. “207. Icon with the Virgin Hodegetria Dexiokratousa.” In Byzantium: Faith and Power (1261–1557), edited by Helen C. Evans, 348–49. New York: Metro­ politan Museum of Art, 2004. Sotiriou, George, and Maria Sotiriou. Icones du Mont Sinai (in Greek). 2 vols. Athens: Institut français d’Athènes, 1956, 1958. Vokotopoulos, Panagiotes. Βυζαντινές Εικόνες. Athens: Ekdotike Athenon, 1995. Weitzmann, Kurt. “Icon Painting in the Crusader Kingdom.” Dumbarton Oaks Papers 20 (1966): 49–83. Weitzmann, Kurt. “The Icons of Constantinople.” In The Icon, 11–83. Verona: Arnaldo Mondadori Editore, 1982.

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Weitzmann, Kurt. Sailing with Byzantium from Europe to America: The Memoirs of an Art Historian. Munich: Editio Maris, 1994. Weitzmann, Kurt. “Thirteenth Century Crusader Icons on Mount Sinai,” Art Bulletin 45 (1963): 179–203. Wolff, Robert Lee. “Footnote to an Incident of the Latin Occupation of Constantinople: The Church and the Icon of the Hodegetria.” Traditio 6 (1948): 319–28.

Chapter 3

The Thirteenth-Century Expansion of the Narthex of San Marco, Venice A Space for Dead Doges? John Osborne In the period of the eleventh, twelfth, and thirteenth centuries, western European contacts with Byzantium and the Islamic world grew rapidly, in large measure the result of two important developments: the burgeoning trade carried by Italian mercantile fleets and the Crusades, which had resulted in the establishment of the Latin kingdom of Jerusalem. Erica Cruikshank Dodd has famously championed the view that the offshoot of this physical contact was increased cultural interchange among these three great communities of the medieval Mediterranean, and in particular the influence exerted on the arts of western Europe by the arts of the Middle East. This paper will explore one possible example of the impact of Byzantium on architecture in Venice, namely the thirteenth-century expansion of the narthex of the Venetian state church of San Marco (Fig. 3.1).1 The general chronology of the church of San Marco, amply studied by Otto Demus and others, poses few significant difficulties.2 Thus it is known that the construction of the original church followed closely on Venice’s acquisition of the relics of St. Mark in 829, and a bequest for this purpose was included in the will of Doge Giustiniano Partecipazio at his death in that same year.3 Damaged by a major fire during the insurrections of 976, the church was rebuilt in its present form in the eleventh century, a project initiated by Doge Domenico Contarini (1043–70) and completed under Doge Vitale Falier (1084–96), 1 This research was first presented at the 39th International Congress on Medieval Studies (Kalamazoo, MI, 2004). More recently, in a study which appeared after this paper had been submitted (2013), Beat Brenk came to a largely similar conclusion; see Beat Brenk, “Zur Funktion des Atriums von San Marco in Venedig,” in The Atrium of San Marco in Venice. The Genesis and Medieval Reality of the Genesis Mosaics, ed. Martin Büchsel, Herbert Kessler, and Rebecca Müller (Berlin: Gebr. Mann Verlag, 2014), 49–72. 2 Otto Demus, The Church of San Marco in Venice (Washington, DC: Dumbarton Oaks, 1960). See also Volker Herzner, “Die Baugeschichte von San Marco und der Aufstieg Venedigs zur Großmacht,” Wiener Jahrbuch für Kunstgeschichte 38 (1985): 1–58. 3 Documenti relativi alla storia di Venezia anteriori al mille, ed. Roberto Cessi (1942; repr. Padua: Deputazione di Storia Patria per le Venezie, 1991), 1:93–99, no. 53.

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Figure 3.1 West façade, Church of San Marco, Venice Photograph: Naya-Böhm, Venice

perhaps incorporating aspects of the original structure.4 The Greek-cross plan with five domes (Fig. 3.2) was prompted by Justinian’s great sixth-century church of the Holy Apostles in Constantinople, an appropriate model given the primary function of the Venetian building as the shrine of the apostle and evangelist Mark.5 The mosaic decorations that grace the interior were largely added over the course of the twelfth century, although scholars remain divided on their precise meaning and chronology and whether they were executed by Byzantine or Venetian craftsmen.6 And in the thirteenth century, in 4 The extent to which this rebuilding incorporated elements of the earlier structure remains the topic of some debate. See John Warren, “The First Church of San Marco in Venice,” The Antiquaries Journal 70 (1990): 327–59; Rowland Mainstone, “The First and Second Churches of San Marco Reconsidered,” The Antiquaries Journal 71 (1991): 123–37; and Arthur H. S. Megaw, “Reflections on the Original Form of St. Mark’s in Venice,” in Architectural Studies in Memory of Richard Krautheimer, ed. Cecil L. Striker (Mainz: Philipp von Zabern, 1996), 107–10. 5 Sergio Bettini, L’architettura di San Marco (Padua: Le Tre Venezie, 1946), 53–84; Demus, Church of San Marco, 88–100. 6 Otto Demus, The Mosaics of San Marco in Venice, 2 vols. (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1984). This fundamental study of the San Marco mosaics has prompted a number of subsequent smaller studies, including Ernst Hawkins and Liz James, “The East Dome of San Marco, Venice: A Reconsideration,” Dumbarton Oaks Papers 48 (1994): 229–42; and John Osborne, “The Hagiographic Programme of the Mosaics in the South Dome of San Marco at Venice,” RACAR 22 (1995): 19–28.

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Figure 3.2 Ground plan, showing locations of ducal tombs, Church of San Marco, Venice By permission of Debra Pincus

the aftermath of the Fourth Crusade that captured Constantinople in 1204, extensive renovations were undertaken to the exterior, including the addition of the marble cladding and sculptures, mostly spoils taken as trophies from Byzantium.7 This was also the moment when the narthex was expanded substantially on the north, west, and possibly south sides, with the north and west wings, which were covered by a series of small domes, also receiving extensive decorations in mosaic.8 For the most part these depict scenes from the 7 For a useful summary of these “trophies,” see Marina Belozerskaya and Kenneth Lapatin, “Antiquity Consumed: Transformations at San Marco, Venice,” in Antiquity and its Interpreters, ed. Alina Payne, Ann Kuttner, and Rebekah Smick (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000), 83–95. 8 The narthex is often referred to erroneously in the San Marco literature as an “atrium.” Megaw, “Reflections,” 109, makes the interesting suggestion that this name may possibly reflect the earlier existence of an atrium in this space, attached to the original ninth-century church, which disappeared in the later rebuilding. Volker Herzner contends that the pre-1204 narthex corresponded only to the width of the existing church, in other words the three central doorways: see Volker Herzner, “Le modifiche della facciata di San Marco dopo la conquista di Costantinopoli,” in Storia dell’arte marciana: l’architettura (Atti del convegno internazionale di studi. Venezia, 11–14 ottobre 1994), ed. Renato Polacco (Venice: Marsilio, 1997), 67–76. He errs, however, in seeing the narthex mosaic program as homogeneous. For the narthex mosaics, see Demus, Mosaics of San Marco, 72–184.

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Old Testament, beginning with the Genesis narratives of the Creation and the history of the patriarchs, and concluding with the story of Moses, with a strong emphasis (three cupolas out of six) on the story of Joseph. In addition, in the north wing of the narthex there is a substantial hagiographic program. More than a century ago it was noted by J. J. Tikkanen that the model for the Genesis scenes was probably an Early Christian manuscript—specifically the Cotton Genesis, the charred remains of which are preserved today in London (British Library, MS Cotton Otho B VI)—and this has provided the focus for much subsequent scholarship.9 In the first half of the fourteenth century, the final major reorganization of San Marco took place with the establishment of a baptistery in what may earlier have been a south wing of the narthex;10 subsequently, the structure of the building has received very few significant changes. But while this basic outline of the building history is now taken more or less for granted, very little attention has been paid to the issue of why the narthex was significantly expanded over the course of the thirteenth century. Was it for liturgical reasons? Can it be explained by the change in Venice’s image and presentation of itself following the events of 1204? Does the apparent model, the church of the Holy Apostles in Constantinople, provide any clues? It will be suggested here that, in the aftermath of 1204 and the consequent aspirations of the Venetian doges to be seen as the successors to the dignity of the Byzantine emperors, the existing narthex was substantially expanded in 9 Johan J. Tikkanen, Die Genesismosaiken von S. Marco in Venedig und ihr Verhältniss zu den Miniaturen der Cottonbibel (Helsinki: Druckerei der Finnischen Litteratur-Gesellschaft, 1889). For a comprehensive overview of the question, see Kurt Weitzmann, “The Genesis Mosaics of San Marco and the Cotton Genesis Miniatures,” in Demus, Mosaics of San Marco, 2:105–42. For a more recent discussion of how the Cotton Genesis was adapted by Venetian artists, see Herbert Kessler, “The Cotton Genesis and Creation in the San Marco Mosaics,” Cahiers archéologiques 53 (2009–10): 17–32; and Kessler, “Thirteenth-century Venetian Revisions of the Cotton Genesis Cycles,” in The Atrium of San Marco in Venice, 75–94. 10 Demus, Church of San Marco, 78–79; Gabriele Horn, Das Baptisterium der Markuskirche in Venedig. Baugeschichte und Ausstattung (Frankfurt: P. Lang, 1991). The existence of the baptistery is first recorded in 1328, on the occasion of the funeral of Doge Giovanni Soranzo, but fragments of an earlier mural cycle, depicting an Ascension, have been discovered beneath the marble revetment, see Otto Demus, “Ein Wandgemälde in San Marco, Venedig,” in “Okeanos: Essays Presented to Ihor Ševčenko on His Sixtieth Birthday by His Colleagues and Students,” ed. Cyril Mango, special issue, Harvard Ukrainian Studies 7 (1983): 125–44. For the fourteenth-century mosaic decorations of the baptistery and other contemporary projects undertaken by Doge Andrea Dandolo, see also Debra Pincus, “Andrea Dandolo (1343–1354) and Visible History: The San Marco Projects,” in Art and Politics in Late Medieval and Early Renaissance Italy, 1250–1500, ed. Charles Rosenberg (Notre Dame, IN: University of Notre Dame Press, 1990), 191–206.

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Figure 3.3 Western arm of narthex, looking south, Church of San Marco, Venice Photograph: Naya-Böhm, Venice

order to constitute a site for the burial and commemoration of the doges, even though this intended function would never be properly fulfilled. Actual documentation for the construction and decoration of the narthex is almost entirely lacking, and the extensive marble covering has hindered modern attempts to examine the underlying brickwork. Opinions differ on the date of the west wing of the narthex (Fig. 3.3), and whether the existing vaulted structure replaced an earlier version, but its mosaic decorations must have been completed in their present form by roughly the middle of the thirteenth century. The most thoughtful analysis of the evidence, by Volker Herzner, envisages an original western narthex comprising three bays, adjoined by a ceremonial entrance facing the lagoon, the Porta del Mar (now the Cappella Zen). In the thirteenth century this was then extended to the north, in conjunction with the construction of the new brick façade and terrace, the latter possibly added specifically for the purpose of displaying the four bronze horses brought from Constantinople. In a subsequent campaign, the narthex was additionally extended along the north flank of the church as far as the transept (Fig. 3.4); and then finally, the west and north façades were covered with marble.11 There is general agreement that the north wing belongs to a separate 11

The pioneering study of the architecture of the narthex and its dating is Giorgio Gombosi, “Il portico della basilica di S. Marco,” in Hommage à Alexis Petrovics, ed. Jolán Balogh and

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Figure 3.4 Northern arm of narthex, looking east, Church of San Marco, Venice Photograph: Naya-Böhm, Venice

and slightly later building campaign, as may also be surmised from the visible difference in the angularity of the pointed arches separating the cupolas. The decorations of this space also support Herzner’s view that the expansion took place in at least two campaigns, not one. In the first stage, the western narthex was extended to the north (Joseph I cupola at the Porta S. Alipio), followed by a second phase, in which it was additionally extended eastwards along the north flank of the church (Joseph II and III, and Moses cupolas). Three separate stages may be discerned in the mosaic decorations. In the first campaign in the western arm (Creation and Abraham cupolas, and the space in between), the subject matter is narrative and drawn exclusively from the Old Testament Book of Genesis. However, this changes in the first of the Joseph cupolas at the northwest corner, where a secondary program is introduced, Giorgio Gombosi (Budapest: les Amis et Fontionnaires de Musée hongrois des beaux arts, 1934), 163–69. See also Demus, Church of San Marco, 76–82; Demus, Mosaics of San Marco, 2:72–4; Herzner, “Die Baugeschichte,” 41; and especially Herzner, “Le modifiche della facciata.”

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comprising images of saints (one of whom, the stylite Alipios, gives his name to this entrance); this concept is then expanded substantially in the remaining three cupolas of the north arm (Joseph II and III, and Moses), with the introduction of numerous images of saints on the arches separating the cupolas and in the pendentives, and shown both as standing figures and in medallions. Furthermore, there is a substantial change in the specific forms of the non-figural mosaic decoration and in the palaeography of the inscriptions.12 The pattern of the floor mosaics also changes, once again in two stages. In the western narthex, the pavement is formed by a pattern of semi-circles whose radial centres correspond to the two main lateral doorways. Presumably this pavement survives from the original narthex of the eleventh century. The floor beneath the corner cupola (Joseph I) reveals an altogether different pattern: a square containing nine circles. This has no exact parallel anywhere else in the building. And again there is a change in the three cupolas of the northern arm, all of which share the same pattern, based on octagons, a design also without parallel elsewhere in the church.13 However, while different stages in construction and decoration can be discerned through visual analysis, precise chronological information is more difficult to obtain. The addition of the north wing has been plausibly linked by Giorgio Gombosi, followed by Demus and Herzner, to the presence of the sarcophagus of Doge Marino Morosini (1249–53), placed under the first cupola of that wing (Fig. 3.5);14 and the decorations of the last two of the narthex cupolas (Joseph III and Moses) have been shown by Demus to be the work of members of the same team of mosaicists responsible for the ciborium at Poreč in Istria, datable to the year 1277.15 Thus a general picture emerges in which the west wing probably received its vaults, and almost certainly received its decoration, in the course of the first half of the century, with the north wing being constructed perhaps ca. 1250, and receiving its decorations between ca. 1250 and ca. 1280. Such a view is consistent with the few other clues that are available. For example, in 1258 the Procuratoria of San Marco, the office responsible 12

For the differences in ornament and palaeography, see Wladimiro Dorigo, Venezia roma­ nica. La formazione della città medioevale fino all’età gotica (Venice: Istituto Veneto di Scienze, Lettere ed Arti, 2003), 200; and Dorigo, “Narrazione e immagine nelle cupole musive del nartece di San Marco,” in Medioevo: immagine e racconto, ed. Arturo C. Quintavalle (Milan: Electa, 2003), 407–12. 13 Xavier Barral i Altet, Les mosaiques de pavement médiévales de Venise, Murano, Torcello (Paris: Picard, 1985), 73–4. 14 Gombosi, “Il portico,” 168; Demus, Church of San Marco, 77; Demus, Mosaics of San Marco, 72; and Herzner, “Die Baugeschichte,” 41. 15 Otto Demus, “The Ciborium Mosaics of Parenzo,” The Burlington Magazine 87 (1945): 238–45; Demus, Mosaics of San Marco, 2:183–84.

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Figure 3.5 Sarcophagus of Doge Marino Morosini, detail, Church of San Marco, Venice Photograph: Naya-Böhm, Venice

for the embellishment and physical upkeep of the structure, decreed that the mosaicists working at San Marco were forbidden to accept any outside commissions until their work for the church was complete, presumably an indication that considerable activity was then in progress.16 The sculpture of the main entrance portal is generally dated ca. 1230–40;17 and the mosaics on the façade must have been in place by ca. 1270, since they are referred to about that time by the Venetian chronicler Martin da Canal, who invites his readers to check the accuracy of his written account of the translation of Mark’s relics against the pictorial version in the mosaics.18 The bronze horses must also have been placed on the façade by this time, since they are clearly visible in the view of San Marco included in the last mosaic of this façade sequence, depicting the 16 Demus, Mosaics of San Marco, 2:164. 17 Guido Tigler, Il portale maggiore di San Marco a Venezia. Aspetti iconografici e stilistici dei rilievi duecenteschi (Venice: Istituto Veneto di Scienze, Lettere ed Arti, 1995). 18 Martin da Canal, Les Estoires de Venise. Cronaca veneziana in lingua francese dalle origini al 1275, ed. Alberto Limentani (Florence: Olschki, 1972), 20. See also Demus, Mosaics of San Marco, 2:205.

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reception of the relics into the church, the only one of the original series not to be replaced in the seventeenth or eighteenth century.19 A convenient terminus ante quem for all work on this part of the building is provided by the bronze doors of the Porta di S. Pietro, which bear the signature of Magister Bertucius aurifex and the date of 1300.20 Despite the considerable interest in the architecture of the narthex and its decorations, the intended function of the space, and consequently the rationale for this thirteenth-century activity, has attracted comparatively little scholarly attention although the subject is not entirely a tabula rasa. The most comprehensive treatment of this topic has come, not surprisingly, from Otto Demus, in his detailed analysis of the mosaic decorations that were added over the course of the thirteenth century. In pondering the possible motives for the extension of the mosaics, he opines that these may have included jealousy and emulation (Sicily, Rome), of “imperial” propaganda coupled with the well-known archaistic tendencies of the Venetian “protoRenaissance”, the influx of riches from occupied Constantinople, in money, material (marble plaques, columns, capitals, mosaic cubes), and models (among them, perhaps, a profusely illustrated Genesis manuscript). To these he also adds the possibility that damage caused by an earthquake known to have rocked the city in 1223 may have necessitated repairs, leading to a complete rethinking of the nature of the west front of the church.21 Some or all of these may indeed have contributed to this not inconsiderable undertaking. But how did the space actually function? Here too Demus has some thoughts, although explicitly for the north wing, in the decorations of which he detects a sub-theme of “Justice.” Consequently, he proposes that this space may have functioned as the seat of a tribunal for an ecclesiastical court.22 This view is not beyond the bounds of possibility, but, apart from the decorations, there is no other record of the existence of such a court. San Marco was not, of course, the cathedral of Venice until the early nineteenth century, following the demise of the Repubblica Serenissima and the Napoleonic occupation. Only in October 1807 did it acquire its present status, replacing S. Pietro di Castello. 19 Demus, Mosaics of San Marco, 2:plate 351. 20 See Julian Gardner, “Magister Bertucius Aurifex et les portes en bronze de Saint-Marc, un programme pour l’année jubilaire,” Revue de l’art 134 (2001): 9–26. 21 Demus, Mosaics of San Marco, 2:72. 22 Demus, 93.

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Thus, in the Middle Ages it had no resident bishop or members of the official ecclesiastical hierarchy, nor did it figure in that structure. In support of Demus’ suggestion, however, it might be noted that its chief religious officer, the primi­ cerius (or “maistre chapelain” in the words of Martin da Canal), did receive a substantial elevation in his honour at this time. Following a petition from Doge Marino Morosini to Pope Innocent IV (1243–54), the primicerius was granted the privilege of wearing a mitre and ring, and carrying a baculum (staff);23 but there is no suggestion in the sources that he exercised any juridical functions, and the theme of Justice could apply equally well to the doges. Indeed, in the fourteenth century it would become the most important theme for the exterior decoration of the adjacent Ducal Palace.24 The only other scholar to have tackled this topic directly is Jacopo Scarpa, who observed that a narthex is an Early Christian architectural feature, and should be understood as such. Consequently, he suggested, the narthex might have been added to San Marco to fulfil a function similar to that of Early Christian nartheces, which he believed to have been a place reserved for penitents.25 This suggestion too is less than fully convincing. Independently, Thomas Mathews and Christine Strube have both demonstrated that the primary original function of nartheces was liturgical rather than penitential,26 and it is also difficult to know who Scarpa’s “penitents” may have been. Once again there is no corroborating evidence of any kind which would indicate that the narthex was actually used in this fashion. In fact, the only solid written evidence for the use of this space comes in the form of two decrees, issued on 8 September 1254 and 2 May 1268 respectively, which prohibit dice and other games of chance in the narthex.27 So presumably such gambling was 23

This important elevation in status is recorded both by Martin da Canal, Estoires de Venise, 126, and in the following century by Andrea Dandolo, Chronica per Extensum Descripta, ed. Ester Pastorello (Bologna: Zanichelli, 1938–42), 304. 24 For the theme of Justice in relation to the Palazzo Ducale and the columns in the Piazzetta, see Fabio Barry, “‘Disiecta membra:’ Ranieri Zeno, the Imitation of Constantinople, the ‘Spolia’ Style, and Justice at San Marco,” in San Marco, Byzantium and the Myth of Venice, ed. Henry Maguire and Robert S. Nelson (Washington, DC: Dumbarton Oaks, 2010), 7–62. 25 Jacopo Scarpa, “I mosaici dell’atrio,” in Renato Polacco, Giulia Rossi Scarpa and Jacopo Scarpa, San Marco. La Basilica d’Oro (Milan: Berenice, 1991), 251–63. 26 Thomas F. Mathews, The Early Churches of Constantinople: Architecture and Liturgy (University Park, PA: Pennsylvania State University Press, 1971), 125–145; and Christine Strube, Die westliche Eingangsseite der Kirchen von Konstantinopel in justinianischer Zeit. Architektonische und quellenkritische Untersuchungen (Wiesbaden: Harrassowitz, 1973), 97–105. For a comprehensive survey of the narthex in Byzantium, see also Lioba Theis, “Narthex,” Reallexikon zur byzantinischen Kunst, 6 (Stuttgart: A. Hiersemann, 2002), 868–932. 27 Storia della Civiltà Veneziana, ed. Vittore Branca, 3 vols. (Florence: Sansoni, 1979), 1:422, 424.

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actually taking place there, although this is unlikely to have been the original motivation. Building on another idea that was first suggested but then rejected by Demus,28 it will be argued here that the San Marco narthex was intended, at least in part, to function as a space for the burial and general post mortem commemoration of the doges. The following discussion is intended to support this contention and will focus on three categories of evidence: parallels for the use of nartheces elsewhere in Italy and in Byzantium, the actual use of the San Marco narthex for ducal burials, and possible parallels to the function of the church of the Holy Apostles in Constantinople. There can be no doubt that nartheces were widely used as places for important burials in contemporary Italian and Byzantine practice. This had not always been the case. Indeed, as Mathews and Strube have shown, their original function was primarily liturgical, as the place where the clergy assembled for ceremonial entrances in the Byzantine liturgy.29 But by the central Middle Ages, if not earlier, to this practice had been added a second, creating a solution to the very difficult problem of finding space within the church precincts for privileged burials.30 The evidence for such practice elsewhere is overwhelming, especially in Italy. In early medieval Rome, for example, the atrium and entrance portico of Old St. Peter’s were used for the burials of popes from the time of Pope Leo I (440–61) onwards.31 Archaeology has revealed the extensive use for burials of the atrium/narthex areas of Roman churches such as S. Maria Antiqua and S. Lorenzo in Lucina,32 and the excavations of the narthex of the lower church of S. Clemente brought to light not only dated eleventh-century tombs, but also mural paintings and even graffiti of a funerary nature.33 The earliest post-antique funerary monument to 28 Demus, Church of San Marco, 45–7. 29 See note 26. 30 See Kerstin Englert, “La fonction des ‘déambulatoires’ dans les églises byzantines des XIII–XIVe siècles,” in Art, Cérémonial et Liturgie au Moyen Âge, ed. Nicolas Bock and Flora Dobay (Rome: Viella, 2002), 89–105. 31 See the extensive analysis in Jean-Charles Picard, “Étude sur l’emplacement des tombes des papes du IIIe au Xe siècle,” Mélanges d’archéologie et d’histoire (École française de Rome), 81 (1969): 725–82. 32 For S. Lorenzo in Lucina: Giovanni De Rossi, “Sepolcri del secolo ottavo scoperti presso la chiesa di S. Lorenzo in Lucina,” Bullettino di Archeologia Cristiana [2nd ser.] 4 (1873): 22–35. For S. Maria Antiqua: Gordon Rushforth, “The Church of S. Maria Antiqua,” Papers of the British School at Rome, 1 (1902): 1–123, esp. 104–6, and Eva Tea, La Basilica di Santa Maria Antiqua, (Milan: Vita e Pensiero, 1937), 115–17. 33 John Osborne, “Proclamations of Power and Presence: The Setting and Function of Two Eleventh-Century Murals in the Lower Church of San Clemente, Rome,” Mediaeval Studies 59 (1997): 155–72.

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survive more or less intact in a Roman church, the tomb of the papal chamberlain Alfanus in S. Maria in Cosmedin (ca. 1123), is similarly located in the narthex of that church.34 A parallel practice can be widely documented in the Byzantine world, for example in the rock-cut churches of Cappadocia,35 as well as in the imperial capital itself. There is better evidence here that the narthex and adjacent areas constituted a privileged space reserved only for the most important patrons and donors.36 In Constantinople, the narthex of the north church (Theotokos) of the Monastery of Constantine Lips (Fenari İsa Camii) was used for burial, presumably from its origins in the early tenth century. The site rose to greater prominence at the end of the thirteenth century with the construction of the south church (John the Baptist), built in the years between 1282 and 1304 by the widowed Empress Theodora, and intended as a family mausoleum for prominent members of the ruling Palaiologan dynasty, including Theodora herself, as well as her son, the Emperor Andronikos II (d. 1332). A number of these burials were placed in the narthex and exonarthex.37 Of roughly contemporary date are the tombs of the Glabas family in the outer areas of St. Mary Pammakaristos (Fethiye Camii).38 In the twelfth century, the important monastery of Christ Pantokrator, founded by Emperor John II Komnenos and Empress Eirene in 1118, appears to have been planned to house arcosolium tombs in its narthex. 34 35 36

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John Osborne, “The Tomb of Alfanus in S. Maria in Cosmedin, Rome, and Its Place in the Roman Tradition of Funerary Monuments,” Papers of the British School at Rome 51 (1983): 240–47. Natalia Teteriatnikov, “Burial Places in Cappadocian Churches,” The Greek Orthodox Theological Review 29 (1984): 141–74. Robert G. Ousterhout, The Architecture of the Kariye Camii in Istanbul (Washington, DC: Dumbarton Oaks, 1987), 96–99; and Florence Bache, “La fonction funéraire du narthex dans les églises byzantines du XIIe au XIV e siècle,” Histoire de l’Art 7 (Oct. 1989): 25–33; Vasileios Marinis, Architecture and Ritual in the Churches of Constantinople: Ninth to Fifteenth Centuries (Cambridge : Cambridge University Press, 2014), 73–76. For a discussion of the effects of funerary requirements on later Byzantine architectural planning, see Robert G. Ousterhout, Master Builders of Byzantium (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1999), 119–27. See Theodore Macridy, “The Monastery of Lips and the Burials of the Palaeologi,” Dumbarton Oaks Papers 18 (1964): 253–77, esp. 269–72; and John Freely and Ahmet Çakmak, Byzantine Monuments of Istanbul (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004), 174–78. Hans Belting, Cyril Mango, and Doula Mouriki, The Mosaics and Frescoes of St. Mary Pammakaristos (Fethiye Camii) at Istanbul (Washington, DC: Dumbarton Oaks, 1978), 20. In an interesting parallel to San Marco, the narthex has a “north aisle”, covered by domical vaults, and constructed with arcosolia on the north walls of each of its bays. Presumably this space was intended as a “mortuary annex”; see Freely and Çakmak, Byzantine Monuments of Istanbul, 166.

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But in a later phase of construction, a more elaborate funerary chapel (dedicated appropriately to St. Michael) was placed between the first church and a second one to the north. It is described in the Pantokrator typikon as a heröon, and, as Robert Ousterhout has suggested, was probably inspired by the imperial mausolea at the Holy Apostles.39 In later Byzantine architecture, the use of the narthex and other subsidiary spaces for funerary purposes would lead to the evolution of separate mortuary chapels, or parekklesia, accessible primarily or exclusively from the narthex, and often running along the north or south flanks of the church proper. In addition to the parekklesion at St. Mary Pammakaristos, perhaps the best-known surviving example of this form may be found at the Chora monastery (Kariye Camii), where the parekklesion was added to the existing church by an important fourteenth-century patron, Theodore Metochites, and was intended to function as the site of Metochites’ own tomb.40 This funerary function was often reflected in the subject matter of narthex and parekklesion decorations, which frequently depicted images of the Last Judgment or of Christ’s Crucifixion and Anastasis (Resurrection), themes related to beliefs about victory over death and the afterlife, and thus highly appropriate to the sepulchral nature of these spaces.41 A similar practice may be observed in the Balkans from the middle of the twelfth century. In the church of St. Panteleimon at Nerezi (dedicated in 1164), the tomb of Alexios Angelos Komnenos, grandson of the Emperor Alexios I, was placed in a funerary chapel entered directly from the narthex.42 And in the 39 Ousterhout, Master Builders of Byzantium, 120–21. The Pantokrator monastery served as the seat of the Venetian administration in Constantinople between 1204 and 1261. For the possible influence of its architecture on alterations to San Marco, see Robert Ousterhout, “The Pantokrator Monastery and Architectural Interchanges in the Thirteenth Century,” in Quarta Crociata: Venezia-Bisanzio-Impero Latino, ed. Gherardo Ortalli, Giorgio Ravegnani, and Peter Schreiner (Venice: Istituto Veneto di Scienze, Lettere ed Arti, 2006), 749–70. 40 Ousterhout, Architecture of the Kariye Camii, 54–61. See also Paul A. Underwood, The Kariye Djami, 3 vols. (New York: Pantheon Books, 1966), 1:269–99; and Freely and Çakmak, Byzantine Monuments of Istanbul, 269–77 (ground plan at fig. 146). For the more general use of added spaces for the tombs of important patrons or donors, see Gordana Babić, Les chapelles annexes des églises byzantines: Fonction liturgique et programmes icono­ graphiques (Paris: Klincksieck, 1969), 47–58. Such burials were considered a right of founders of monasteries, and this was often stated explicitly in the monastery’s typikon: see John P. Thomas, Private Religious Foundations in the Byzantine Empire (Washington, DC: Dumbarton Oaks, 1987), 222, 255. 41 For a survey of subject matter, see Svetlana Tomeković, “Contribution à l’étude du programme du narthex des églises monastiques (XIe–première moitié du XIIIe s.),” Byzantion 58 (1988): 140–54. 42 See Ida Sinkević, The Church of St. Panteleimon at Nerezi. Architecture, Programme, Patronage (Wiesbaden: Reichert, 2000), 15–19.

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thirteenth century, burials of the Serbian kings in the outer areas of monastic churches would become the norm, following the precedent established posthumously for the grand župan of Serbia, Stefan Nemanja (abdicated and retired to Mount Athos in 1196; d. 1199). In 1208 his remains, regarded as saintly relics, were brought from the monastery of Hilandar to the monastery of Studenica, which he had founded during his lifetime, and his tomb was placed just inside the entrance from the narthex, on the south wall of a space that Robert Ousterhout has described as an “extra bay,” perhaps added specifically for this funerary purpose.43 Subsequently, the Serbian kings would usually be buried in the nartheces or entrance areas of monasteries which they had founded, or of which they had been a significant patron, a custom also later emulated for prominent Serbian churchmen.44 For example, Stefan Nemanja’s grandson, King Radoslav I (r. 1227–33), would construct an exonarthex at Studenica for this purpose.45 Perhaps more importantly for a discussion of San Marco is the observation that nartheces, or narthex extensions including parekklesia, were frequently added to existing churches, for example the Chora or Studenica monasteries, often for the specific purpose of providing an appropriate space for the siting of important tombs.46 Helpful in this regard is the tomb of Isaac Komnenos, the second son of the Emperor Alexios I (r. 1081–1118), in a monastery that he founded at Pherrai in Thrace. While the tomb itself is not extant, the foundation document (typikon) does survive, and this contains detailed instructions for its placement, specifying that it was to be placed in the left part of the narthex, where an extension had been constructed specifically for this purpose.47 A parallel situation may be observed in Norman Sicily, where 43 Ousterhout, Master Builders of Byzantium, 125 and fig. 95 (ground plan). For the tomb of Stefan Nemanja, see also Antony Eastmond, “‘Local’ Saints, Art, and Regional Identity in the Orthodox World after the Fourth Crusade,” Speculum 78 (2003): 707–49, esp. 708–17. 44 Bache, “La fonction funéraire,” 27; and Slobodan Ćurčić, “Medieval Royal Tombs in the Balkans: An Aspect of the ‘East’ or ‘West’ Question,” The Greek Orthodox Theological Review 29 (1984): 175–94. It is perhaps worth noting that there were strong connections between the Venetian nobility and the Serbian royal family, witness the marriage of Anna Dandolo, granddaughter of Doge Enrico Dandolo, to Stefan I Nemanjić, the first King of Serbia (and son of Stefan Nemanja). 45 Eastmond, “Local saints,” 709. 46 Athanasios Papageorgiou, “The Narthex of the Churches of the Middle Byzantine Period in Cyprus,” in Rayonnement grec: Hommages à Charles Delvoye, ed. Lydie Hadermann-Misguich, Georges Raepsaet, and Guy Cambier (Brussels: Editions de l’Université de Bruxelles, 1982), 437–48, records 25 churches with nartheces, of which 24 were added to existing structures. 47 See Nancy Ševčenko, “The Tomb of Isaak Comnenos at Pherrai,” The Greek Orthodox Theological Review 29 (1984): 135–39. The full text of the typikon for the monastery of the

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Slobodan Ćurčić has suggested that the twelfth-century narthex may have been added to the church of St. Mary of the Admiral in Palermo for the specific purpose of facilitating the placement of tombs.48 There is a second significant link between the first phase of the western narthex of San Marco and the nartheces of a number of Late Byzantine buildings: both were constructed with small domes or domical vaults at their extremities, presumably as some sort of honorific marker, perhaps related to the tombs which they housed.49 In the context of Byzantine architecture, this development has been viewed as the integration into the narthex of what would in earlier buildings have been separate domed funerary chapels, accessible from the narthex. The earliest extant Byzantine example of a twin-domed narthex occurs at Chilandari monastery on Mount Athos, where the Katholikon was rebuilt ca. 1303 with a six-bay narthex featuring domes at the northwest and southwest corners. However, there may well have been earlier examples which are now lost, and Ćurčić, the first to identify and discuss this phenomenon, cites a number of earlier buildings from which the idea may have developed, concluding that the practice probably originated in Constantinople.50 Domed nartheces are not a characteristic feature of western European churches in the Middle Ages, thus providing further evidence that the San Marco narthex should be thought of primarily in terms of contemporary Byzantine practice, which is to say as a space for important burials. The very fact that the narthex was constructed with domical vaults constitutes strong evidence to support a funerary intention for this space. Mother of God Kosmosoteira is published in Byzantine Monastic Foundation Documents: A complete Translation of the Surviving Founders’ Typika and Testaments, 5 vols., ed. John P. Thomas and Angela Constantinides Hero (Washington, DC: Dumbarton Oaks, 2000), 2:782–858. The instructions for the tomb are contained in ch. 89 (p. 838). Robert Ousterhout, “Where was the Tomb of Isaak Komnenos?” Byzantine Studies Conference Abstracts, 11 (1985): 34, and Master Builders of Byzantium, 122–25, has questioned the use of the word “narthex” in this context, suggesting that at Pherrai, where nothing like a narthex seems to have existed, it may have been used to refer to an elongated entrance bay. Regardless of the precise architectural form implied by the term, the reference is clearly to a space at or near the entrance. Perhaps significantly, a small dome covers the location suggested by Ousterhout. 48 Slobodan Ćurčić, “The Architecture,” in Ernst Kitzinger, The Mosaics of St. Mary’s of the Admiral in Palermo (Washington, DC: Dumbarton Oaks, 1990), 27–67, esp. 43. 49 At San Marco, this changed when the western arm was extended and the north wing added, eventually expanding the number of domes from two to six. However, the narthex as originally conceived, corresponding to the original west front of the church, has only two domes, one at each extremity of the original façade, and connected by a barrel vault. 50 Slobodan Ćurčić, “The Twin-domed Narthex in Palaeologan Architecture,” Zbornik Radova 13 (1971): 333–44.

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Figure 3.6 Tomb of Doge Vitale Falier, Church of San Marco, Venice Photograph: Naya-Böhm, Venice

There can be no doubt that burials did take place in the narthex at San Marco, beginning with the tomb of Doge Domenico Selvo (1071–84), now lost.51 The two earliest tombs to survive are located in niches set in the inner face of the outer façade wall, flanking the central doorway: those of Doge Vitale Falier (d. 1096) (Fig. 3.6) and the dogaressa Felicitas Michiel (d. 1101) (Fig. 3.7).52 But these may not be their original settings, given that some of the sculptural elements appear to be re-used.53 Thus the two tombs may have been 51 Andrea Da Mosto, I Dogi di Venezia con particolare riguardo alle loro tombe (Venice: Ongania, 1939), 47. 52 Da Mosto, I Dogi di Venezia, 47–49, 323–4 (text of inscriptions); Otto Demus, “Zwei Dogengräber in San Marco, Venedig,” Jahrbuch der Österreichischen Byzantinischen Gesellschaft 5 (1956): 41–59; André Grabar, Sculptures byzantines du Moyen Age. 2: XIe– XIV e siècle (Paris: Picard, 1976), 89, cat. no. 74; and Debra Pincus, The Tombs of the Doges of Venice (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000), 56–58. 53 Demus, “Zwei Dogengräber,” suggests that some of the components had originally been carved for use in the iconostasis screens of the two choir chapels (ca. 1100), and were afterwards re-deployed for the new settings of the tombs. While the original form of the western narthex remains unknown (see bibliography in note 11 above), the façade and

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Figure 3.7 Tomb of Dogaressa Felicitas Michiel, Church of San Marco, Venice Photograph: Naya-Böhm, Venice

re-constituted in this location in the thirteenth century, perhaps when the idea of using the space for ducal commemoration was either first conceived or, more likely, significantly revived. While the earliest Venetian doges clearly preferred to be buried in monastic churches, including S. Ilario, S. Zaccaria and S. Giorgio Maggiore, practice seems to have shifted briefly in the late eleventh century, contemporary with the reconstruction of San Marco. In addition to Vitale Falier, his two immediate successors are also recorded as having been buried in the church: Vitale Michiel I (1096–1102) and Ordelaffo Falier (1102– 18).54 However, the locations of their tombs are not known, and it is tempting to suppose that these had already been forgotten by the thirteenth century, with the result that only the remains of Vitale Falier and Felicitas Michiel (wife of Vitale Michiel I) were able to be identified, removed, and re-housed in the newly reconfigured narthex.55 The next doge in the series, Domenico Michiel (1118–30), retired to the monastery of S. Giorgio Maggiore before his death and was subsequently buried there, thus breaking the pattern. His immediate vaulting are both generally assigned to the thirteenth century, suggesting that a substantial alteration to this space took place at that time. 54 Dandolo, Chronica, 224, 231; Da Mosto, I Dogi di Venezia, 47–49. 55 The prominence given to a dogaressa, Felicitas Michiel, is otherwise puzzling, and it must be asked why she would have been given preference over, say, Doge Ordelaffo Falier, also known to have been buried in San Marco and whose portrait appears on the Pala d’Oro.

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successor, Pietro Polani (1130–48), similarly reverted to the earlier preference for burial in a monastery, preferring S. Cipriano at Murano.56 The one mid-thirteenth-century doge who was certainly buried in the narthex was Marino Morosini (1249–53), and it is no coincidence that he is also usually credited with beginning the construction of the north wing, where his tomb is located. Perhaps significantly, he had served as the procurator of San Marco prior to his ducal election, and thus probably had a special interest in the church. Housed in the second of the three bays devoted to the story of Joseph, his sarcophagus (Figure 3.5) recalls Early Christian models, and may have been deliberately intended to do so as part of Venice’s efforts to establish a myth of an historic Early Christian past that it did not genuinely possess.57 Most of Marino Morosini’s contemporaries, however, seem to have been more concerned with the post mortem salvation of their souls than with efforts to create a ducal pantheon, and thus they elected to be buried in one of the newly constructed mendicant churches in the city, with a strong preference in favour of the Dominican church of SS. Giovanni e Paolo (San Zanipolo). It may also have worked against those promoting San Marco that the dogeship was not hereditary, and thus there was no incentive offered by the prospect of being interred with one’s royal or imperial ancestors, and no guarantee that the same space would be available to one’s descendants. In this respect the Venetian rulers were unlike their secular contemporaries in either western Europe or Byzantium, and perhaps closer to ecclesiastical rulers such as the popes. Unlike the latter, however, they were members of a hereditary nobility and also had wives and children, and thus they must surely have felt some degree of conflict between family allegiance and duty to the state. The trend towards burial in mendicant churches was initiated by Doge Jacopo Tiepolo 56 Da Mosto, I Dogi di Venezia, 50–51. 57 Carlo Anti, “La tomba del Doge Marino Morosini nell’atrio di San Marco,” Arte Veneta 8 (1954): 17–21; Otto Demus, “A Renascence of Early Christian Art in Thirteenth-Century Venice,” in Late Classical and Mediaeval Studies in Honor of Albert Mathias Friend Jr., ed. Kurt Weitzmann (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1955), 348–61; and Pincus, Tombs of the Doges, 36–58. It is also interesting to note that the entrance door which gives direct access from the Piazza to the north wing and Morosini’s tomb is flanked on the inside by a mosaic depiction of St. Alipios, a stylite saint, who gives his name to the door: Porta S. Alipio. In a Venetian context this seems an unusual choice, but in Byzantium and the Balkans, stylites were often depicted at entrances, and also in conjunction with tombs: see Ivan Djordević, “Die Säule und die Säulenheiligen als hellenistisches Erbe in der byzantinischen und serbischen Wandmalerei,” Jahrbuch der Österreichischen Byzantinistik 32/5 (1982): 93–100. For example, St. Symeon the Stylite appears next to the entrance to the funerary chapel of Alexios Angelos Komnenos at Nerezi (see Sinkević, Church of St. Panteleimon at Nerezi, 71).

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(1229–49), who in 1234 had given the Dominicans the land to build their church and convent; the sarcophagus used for the burial of the Tiepolo doges, Jacopo and his son Lorenzo (doge 1268–75), may still be seen on the façade of S. Zanipolo.58 Marino Morosini thus stands outside the usual practice, and it is unfortunate that his will has not survived as this might have contained a statement of some interest for this discussion. That of his wife Romenica, dated 11 April 1260, constitutes a form of middle ground between the two positions. She states that she wished to be buried in San Marco (presumably with her husband) or, if that were not possible, then in SS. Giovanni e Paolo.59 Clearly the presence of a large body of friars to say masses for one’s soul was a very powerful attraction, and all subsequent doges through to the end of the century elected burial in a monastic or mendicant church, with a clear preference for either the Dominicans at S. Zanipolo or the Franciscans at their church of S. Maria Gloriosa dei Frari.60 These churches would remain highly popular as places for burial for many centuries thereafter. A short-lived return to San Marco would come in the first half of the fourteenth century, with doges Giovanni Soranzo (1312–28) and Andrea Dandolo (1343–54), both of whom were buried in the baptistery (see Figure 3.2),61 and Doge Bartolomeo Gradenigo (1339–42), who joined Marino Morosini in the north wing of the narthex.62 But after this brief flurry, no doge would again be buried in San Marco.63 If the narthex were planned to function as a site of commemoration for the Venetian doges, and by extension as a place where the office of the dogeship itself was celebrated, this might help explain the unusual choice of subject 58 Pincus, Tombs of the Doges, 14–35. 59 Da Mosto, I Dogi di Venezia, 65–66. 60 The history of the Franciscan church roughly parallels that of the Dominicans. The Franciscan presence was established in Venice in the 1220s, and the earliest recorded Venetian testamentary bequest to this order dates from 1227. Some sort of religious structure, dedicated to Mary, had been built on the site by 1236, but the cornerstone of a permanent church was laid only in April 1250. It was receiving burials by 1254. The present church on the site represents a fourteenth-century rebuilding. See Isidoro Gatti, S. Maria Gloriosa dei Frari. Storia di una presenza francescana a Venezia (Venice: Edizioni delle Grafiche veneziane, 1992). Tom Dale has suggested to me that that Venetian practice may also be seen as emulating that of the contemporary Byzantine emperors, who, from the eleventh century onwards, also preferred burial in monasteries to the traditional site of the Holy Apostles. 61 Pincus, Tombs of the Doges, 88–104 (Soranzo), 134–47 (Dandolo). 62 Pincus, 126–31. 63 The renewed break in the pattern may have been prompted by the fact that Andrea Dandolo’s successor in the dogeship, Marino Falier, was executed for treason in 1355, and burial in San Marco was presumably considered inappropriate in such circumstances. He was buried instead in S. Zanipolo.

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matter for its decorations. As noted above, Byzantine narthex programs ranged across a variety of themes, many reflecting a funerary function, but an extensive narrative drawn from the first books of the Old Testament is not among them. This has prompted Antonio Niero to describe the San Marco program as “rigidly western,”64 although it must be said that comparable western examples are equally difficult to uncover.65 Thomas Dale, building on a suggestion initially voiced by Demus, has attempted to explain this unusual choice on the basis of typological links between the Biblical narrative and the rulers of Venice, drawing attention to the strong emphasis on the Old Testament figure of Joseph, whose story improbably occupies three entire cupolas. Joseph not only served as an exemplum of the wise ruler, but perhaps more significantly he had ruled in Egypt, the “land of St. Mark.” In some ways, then, he can be viewed as a role model with special meaning for a Venetian audience, and Dale suggests that this and other aspects of the Joseph story were intended very deliberately to infer that the Venetians were, like the Israelites in the Old Testament, God’s “chosen people.”66 Thus the program of the narthex mosaics may also be thought of as reinforcing the special links between this space and the doges. One final indication of the possible intention of the narthex may perhaps be adduced from the acknowledged architectural model for San Marco: the church of the Holy Apostles in Constantinople. This building no longer survives. Already severely dilapidated in the Late Byzantine era following despoliation during the Latin occupation, it was demolished entirely in 1461 by the Ottoman sultan, Mehmed the Conqueror, in order that the site could be re-used for a new mosque, the Fatih. A victim of earthquake in May 1766, the mosque was 64 Antonio Niero, “The Cycle of the Atrium,” in Otto Demus, The Patriarchal Basilica in Venice. San Marco, 1: The Mosaics, the History, the Lighting (Milan: Fabbri, 1990), 195–203, esp. 195. For the non-Byzantine nature of the narthex mosaic program see also Wladimiro Dorigo, “I mosaici nel nartece di San Marco nel passaggio fra la cultura figurativa mediobizantina e l’arte musiva veneziana,” in La Basilica di San Marco: Arte e Simbologia, ed. Bruno Bertoli (Venice: Studium Cattolico Veneziano, 1993), 47–71. 65 Demus, Mosaics of San Marco, 2:94–95, also notes that a contemporary Byzantine model is unlikely, although his suggestion that the model was Italian is based more on a process of elimination than on any existing narthex program. 66 For a fuller discussion, see Thomas Dale, “‘Inventing’ a Sacred Past: Pictorial Narratives of St. Mark the Evangelist in Aquileia and Venice, ca. 1000–1300,” Dumbarton Oaks Papers 48 (1994): 53–104, esp. 93ff; and Dale, “Cultural Hybridity in Medieval Venice: Reinventing the East at San Marco after the Fourth Crusade,” in San Marco, Byzantium and the Myth of Venice, ed. Henry Maguire and Robert S. Nelson (Washington, DC: Dumbarton Oaks, 2010), 151–91. For the link between Joseph and the doges, see also Demus, Mosaics of San Marco, 2:97–98.

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re-built in its present form between 1767 and 1771 by Sultan Selim III. Justinian’s project, described by Prokopios in his De aedificiis (I.iv.9), was itself a replacement for an earlier church, constructed in the second quarter of the fourth century. While almost nothing is known of that original structure, in addition to the text of Prokopios there are a number of surviving medieval descriptions of Justinian’s church and its decorations, principally those of Constantine of Rhodes in the tenth century and Nicholas Mesarites ca. 1200.67 The Holy Apostles church is also depicted in Byzantine manuscripts: in the famous Menologion of Basil II (Vatican Library, MS gr. 1613) of the late tenth century, and in two twelfth-century copies of the homilies of James Kokkinobaphos (Vatican Library, MS gr. 1162; Paris, Bibliothèque Nationale, MS gr. 1208). It is significant that the comparison between the Holy Apostles and San Marco is not the product of modern scholarship, but was stated explicitly in a contemporary source, the Translatio Sancti Nicolai, composed ca. 1100 by a monk of S. Nicolo on the Lido.68 Presumably the Venetians chose their model with some care, and it was certainly appropriate. Dating from perhaps the closest moment in the relationship between Venice and Byzantium, it not only signals that San Marco is the shrine of an apostle, but also says much about the fledgling city state’s self-image and political leanings. After all, St. Peter’s in Rome might have provided another possible model in this regard, as it had done prominently across Western Europe in the Carolingian era, but it was not the preferred choice.69

67 The relevant texts are collected in August Heisenberg, Grabeskirche und Apostelkirche, zwei Basiliken Konstantins: Untersuchungen zur Kunst und Literatur des ausgehenden Altertums (Leipzig, 1908). In addition to Bettini and Demus (cf. note 5), see also Théodore Reinach, “Commentaire archéologique sur le poème de Constantin le Rhodien,” Revue des études grecques 9 (1896): 66–103; Glanville Downey, “Nikolaos Mesarites: Description of the Church of the Holy Apostles at Constantinople,” Transactions of the American Philosophical Society 47 (1957): 855–924; Richard Krautheimer, “A Note on Justinian’s Church of the Holy Apostles in Constantinople,” Mélanges Eugène Tisserant, vol. 2, Studi e Testi 232, (Vatican City: Biblioteca Apostolica Vaticana, 1964), 265–70; repr. Krautheimer, Studies in Early Christian, Medieval and Renaissance Art (New York: New York University Press, 1969), 197–201; Ann Wharton Epstein, “The Rebuilding and Redecoration of the Holy Apostles in Constantinople: A Reconsideration,” Greek, Roman and Byzantine Studies 23 (1982): 79–92; Ken Dark and Ferudun Özgümüş, “New Evidence for the Byzantine Church of the Holy Apostles from Fatih Camii, Istanbul,” Oxford Journal of Archaeology 21 (2002): 393–413; and Freely and Çakmak, Byzantine Monuments of Istanbul, 145–46. 68 See discussion in Demus, Church of San Marco, 90. 69 The point is valid regardless of one’s position on the thorny issue of whether the original ninth-century church already copied the Holy Apostles. Whether in the ninth or the eleventh century, the choice of a Byzantine model sent a strong political message.

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The church of the Holy Apostles was more than simply a shrine for the early apostles Timothy, Andrew and Luke, whose relics were translated to the building in 356–57.70 It was also the principal burial place of the Byzantine emperors and their consorts, from Constantine I through to Constantine VIII (r. 1025–28);71 the large porphyry sarcophagi of the early emperors, mostly housed in two annexed domed structures, attracted the attention of numerous medieval visitors, including Venetians.72 In Byzantine thought, these two functions of apostoleion and imperial pantheon were closely linked, in order to stress the priestly nature of the emperorship in which spiritual and secular authority were combined. But a careful distinction was made in the relative placement of the saintly and imperial relics, with the tombs of the emperors occupying peripheral areas of the complex. That this was a conscious, as opposed to accidental, decision is revealed in a homily of John Chrysostom, patriarch of Constantinople (398–404), who writes: “… and in Constantinople those who wear the diadem consider it a source of satisfaction to have their bodies buried not close to the apostles, but outside, along the vestibule, and so emperors have become the doorkeepers of the fishermen.”73 Thus the Holy Apostles provided a model not only for the shrine of an apostle, but also for the idea of combining an apostoleion with rulers’ tombs in subsidiary spaces. Annabel Wharton has suggested that this function may have prompted Prince Bohemond of Antioch (d. 1109 or 1111), a Norman adventurer who harboured significant imperial pretensions, to choose another Italian church copied after the Holy Apostles, the cathedral of Canosa in Apulia, as the site for his domed funerary chapel.74 Also of interest to this discussion is the suggestion by 70

See Cyril Mango, “Constantine’s Mausoleum and the Translation of Relics,” Byzantinische Zeitschrift 83 (1990): 51–62. 71 See Glanville Downey, “The Tombs of the Byzantine Emperors at the Church of the Holy Apostles in Constantinople,” Journal of Hellenic Studies 79 (1959): 27–51; and Philip Grierson, “The Tombs and Obits of the Byzantine Emperors (337–1042),” Dumbarton Oaks Papers 16 (1962): 1–63. 72 Grierson, “Tombs and Obits,” 10ff., discusses the record of the Byzantine emperors and their tombs preserved in the thirteenth-century versions of the Chronicon Altinate, an important Venetian compilation of historical sources. For these sarcophagi, see also Alexander A. Vasiliev, “Imperial Porphyry Sarcophagi in Constantinople,” Dumbarton Oaks Papers 4 (1948): 1–26. 73 John Chrysostom, “Homilia contra Judaeos et Gentiles,” in Patrologia Cursus Completus: Series Graeca, ed. Jacques-P. Migne (Paris: Imprimerie Catholique, 1862), 48: col. 825. English translation and discussion in Francis Dvornik, The Idea of Apostolicity in Byzantium and the Legend of the Apostle Andrew (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1958), 139–40; see also Pincus, Tombs of the Doges, 197. 74 Ann Wharton Epstein, “The Date and Significance of the Cathedral of Canosa in Apulia, South Italy,” Dumbarton Oaks Papers 37 (1983): 79–90.

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Theodore Macridy that the Empress Theodora’s choice after 1282 of the monastery of Constantine Lips in Constantinople for the tombs of the Palaiologan family was based on its close proximity to the Holy Apostles, the latter by then in a state of considerable ruin.75 What changed in the early thirteenth century that might have prompted this new direction in Venetian thinking? The answer may be summed up by a single date: 1204. The Fourth Crusade transformed Venice in ways previously unthinkable, and almost overnight the doge went from being ruler of an increasingly important but somewhat anomalous city state in the northern Adriatic to ruler of what now amounted to a far-flung empire comprising numerous Mediterranean and Aegean ports and islands, including Crete. This is reflected in the new title adopted by doges of the thirteenth century: “Lord of a quarter and a half [of a quarter] of the entire empire of Romania” (Dominus quartae partis et dimidiae totius imperii Romaniae), based on their three-eighths share of the spoils and territory.76 There may even have been some thought of moving the administration of the Republic from Venice to Constantinople.77 The doge who masterminded the Fourth Crusade, Enrico Dandolo (1192–1205), had earlier changed the Venetian coinage to follow the model of Byzantine gold nomismata, depicting the doge being invested with the vexillum by St. Mark.78 He may also have coveted the imperial title itself. Although in 1204 this went to Baldwin of Flanders, Martin da Canal would later boast that it had been offered first to the doge, who had declined.79 Significantly, 75 Macridy, “Monastery of Lips,” 258. 76 Donald Nicol, Byzantium and Venice: A Study in Diplomatic and Cultural Relations (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1988), 153–4. Although adopted in 1205 by the Venetian podestà in Constantinople, Marino Zeno, and then subsequently by Doge Pietro Ziani (1205–1229), the first promissio, or oath taken by the doge at his accession, to contain this title is that of Jacopo Tiepolo in 1229. It is repeated in the oaths of Marino Morosini in 1249 and Ranier Zeno in 1253: see Le promissioni del Doge di Venezia dalle origini alla fine del Duecento, ed. Gisella Graziato (Venice: Comitato per la pubblicazione delle fonti relative alla storia di Venezia, 1986), 11, 24, 41. For the post-1204 Venetian “empire,” and the significant changes to Venetian administrative structures which this prompted, see Roberto Cessi, Venezia nel duecento: tra oriente e occidente (Venice: Deputazione, 1985), 6–18; and Nicol, Byzantium and Venice, 148–65. 77 Nicol, 153; for a contrary view: Thomas F. Madden, Enrico Dandolo & the Rise of Venice (Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2003), 196. 78 Nicolò Papadopoli, “Enrico Dandolo e le sue monete (1192–1205),” Rivista Italiana di Numismatica 3 (1890): 507–19; and Louise B. Robbert, “Reorganization of the Venetian Coinage by Doge Enrico Dandolo,” Speculum 49 (1974): 48–60. 79 Da Canal, Estoires, 60. Was this, one wonders, the Venetian “spin” on the events of 1204, aimed at saving face in the light of their obvious imperial pretensions? Thomas Madden’s study of Dandolo argues that he was not a candidate, largely because it was in Venice’s

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Dandolo did accept the Byzantine title of despot, and alone was accorded the honour of not having to swear allegiance to the new emperor.80 It is perhaps significant that the doge made no attempt to return to Venice, and when he died in Constantinople in late May of 1205, he was buried in the city’s cathedral and arguably most important church, St. Sophia. Although no trace of this important and possibly influential tomb has survived, the Chronicle written in the next century by his kinsman, Andrea Dandolo, locates it “in atrio,” by which he may well have meant the narthex.81 Additional evidence for imperial pretensions abounds during the reigns of his successors in the thirteenth century, and a few examples will suffice to make the point. Perhaps chief among these is the extensive use post-1204 of spolia to decorate the exterior of San Marco, including sculpture with very evident imperial connotations. These include the porphyry “tetrarchs,” installed best interests to maintain the physical presence of the Crusader army, and this was only practical if one of their co-leaders, either Baldwin of Flanders or Boniface of Montferrat, were elected as emperor. However, he does note that Venetian tradition has always maintained that there were a number of votes for the doge on the first ballot: see Madden, Enrico Dandolo, 175–8, 261 note 40. 80 Nicol, Byzantium and Venice, 149. For the subsequent Venetian insistence that their podestà in Constantinople should be regarded as equal in status to the Latin emperors, see Louise B. Robbert, “Rialto businessmen and Constantinople, 1204–61,” Dumbarton Oaks Papers 49 (1995): 43–58, esp. 48. 81 Dandolo, Chronica, 281: “die primo iunii idem in Constantinopolim feliciter obiit, et in atrio ecclesie sancte Sophie sepelitur.” The burial in St. Sophia is also recorded by a contemporary Crusader chronicler, Geoffrey de Villehardouin, although no location is specified: see Joinville and Villehardouin, Chronicles of the Crusades, ed. and trans. Margaret R. B. Shaw (London: Penguin, 1963), 129. Later Venetian chroniclers located it either in the portico, the atrium, or a separate “Chapel of the Venetians.” Although difficult to imagine how it could have survived beyond 1261, by tradition, it was removed from St. Sophia only after 1453. Later in the fifteenth century, Sultan Mohammed II gave Dandolo’s regalia (sword, spurs, etc.) to the Venetian painter, Gentile Bellini, who in turn offered them to the Dandolo family. The inscription “HENRICUS DANDOLO” now visible in the floor of the south gallery of St. Sophia probably dates only from the nineteenth century. For discussions of the tomb: Bartolomeo Cecchetti, “Ricerche sulla tomba del doge Enrico Dandolo a Costantinopoli,” Archivio Veneto 19 (1880): 357–59; Nicolò Barozzi, “Sulla tomba del doge Enrico Dandolo a Costantinopoli,” Nuovo Archivio Veneto 3 (1892): 213; Rodolfo Gallo, “La tomba di Enrico Dandolo in Santa Sofia a Constantinopoli,” Rivista mensile della Città di Venezia 6 (1927): 270–83; Da Mosto, I Dogi di Venezia, 58–59; Nicol, Byzantium and Venice, 152–53; and Madden, Enrico Dandolo, 194. At the 1995 Byzantine Studies Conference in New York, in a paper entitled “The Enigma of Enrico Dandolo’s Tomb in Hagia Sophia,” Thomas Dale proposed the intriguing idea that the well-known Deesis mosaic in the south gallery had been made for the doge’s tomb: see abstract in Byzantine Studies Conference. Abstracts of Papers 21 (1995): 17. However, given the lack of actual evidence, no resolution of this “enigma” seems possible.

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at the corner of the church adjacent to the principal entrance to the Ducal Palace, where they still remain,82 and also the four gilded bronze horses on the west façade.83 Despite Michael Jacoff’s contention that the horses should be interpreted in a theological context, the decision to place them on the façade was perhaps more likely to have been made for political reasons; a telling indication is provided by Petrarch’s letter of August 1364, in which he describes the doge presiding over ceremonies in the Piazza from this spot, acting, as it were, as the living imperial charioteer in command of the quadriga.84 Indeed the very act of paving the Piazza San Marco, undertaken in the decades after 1204, may be understood as an attempt to create an appropriate setting for “imperial” ceremonies of the sort which had previously graced the public spaces of Constantinople.85 Another significant change undertaken at the same time and for similar reasons was the alteration undertaken to the Pala d’Oro gracing San Marco’s high altar. Originally commissioned by Doge Ordelaffo Falier in 1105, from a Byzantine workshop in Constantinople, the 1209 renovation probably removed a portrait of the Emperor Alexios I Komnenos (r. 1081–1118), now lost, while almost certainly adding a halo, an important symbol of imperial dignity, to the surviving image of Doge Falier.86 And yet another imperial attribute, the wearing of ceremonial red slippers, was similarly adopted by the Venetian 82 For the literature on the porphyry “tetrarchs”, see Wolfgang Müller-Wiener, Bildlexikon zur Topographie Istanbuls (Tübingen: Wasmuth, 1977), 267. Their original location in Constantinople, in the rotunda of Bodrum Camii, adjoining the palace of Emperor Romanos I, has been determined by archaeology and the chance discovery of the missing foot: see Rudolf Naumann, “Der antike Rundbau beim Myrelaion und der Palast Romanos I. Lekapenos,” Istanbuler Mitteilungen 16 (1966): 199–216; and Cecil L. Striker, The Myrelaion (Bodrum Camii) in Istanbul (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1981), 14. 83 Guido Perocco, “The Horses of San Marco in Venice,” in The Horses of San Marco, trans. John and Valerie Wilton-Ely (London: Thames and Hudson, 1979), 49–79; Herzner, “Die Baugeschichte,” 50–57. 84 Michael Jacoff, The Horses of San Marco and the Quadriga of the Lord (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1993); for a more “political” view, see Marilyn Perry, “Saint Mark’s Trophies: Superstition and Archaeology in Renaissance Venice,” Journal of the Warburg and Courtauld Institutes 40 (1977): 27–49, and Herzner, “Le modifiche della facciata,” 71–2. For Petrarch’s letter to Pietro Bolognese: F. Petrarca, Prose, ed. Guido Martellotti (Milan: Ricciardi, 1955), Senili IV.3, 1076–88; English translation in F. Petrarch, Letters of Old Age: Rerum senilium libri I–XVIII, trans. Aldo S. Bernardo, Saul Levin, and Reta Bernardo, 2 vols. (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1992), 1:132–36. Needless to say, there may have been multiple interpretations, both intended and actual. 85 Juergen Schulz, “La piazza medievale di San Marco,” Annali di architettura 4–5 (1992–93): 134–56. 86 This explains the odd appearance of the doge, whose head now appears too small for his body: see David Buckton and John Osborne, “The Enamel of Doge Ordelaffo Falier on the Pala d’Oro in Venice,” Gesta 39, no. 1 (2000): 43–49.

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doges about this time.87 Indeed, much of the renovation and decoration of San Marco in the years after 1204 may be plausibly construed as intended to transform the palace chapel of the doge into one worthy of an emperor.88 It is no coincidence that Doge Pietro Ziani was compared to Julius Caesar and Vespasian,89 and it is also probably significant that Doge Marino Morosini, the first to have his tomb in the new north wing of the narthex, was also the first doge to be buried in full ducal regalia, by decision of the Maggior Consiglio, and to have his shield placed on display inside the church.90 In the aftermath of the Fourth Crusade the doge was no longer simply a primus inter pares. Now his position was greatly elevated, emulating the imperial court whose authority Venice had first overthrown and then subsumed—albeit briefly. In sum, over the course of roughly the first three quarters of the thirteenth century, the church of San Marco was significantly enlarged through the extension of the western narthex and the addition of the northern arm—vaulted, with a series of six cupolas, and richly clad in marble and mosaic. The evidence that can be gleaned from the actual usage of this space, from parallels in contemporary architecture elsewhere in Italy, the Balkans, and Byzantium, from the acknowledged Constantinopolitan model for San Marco, and from the other “imperial” practices of the Venetian doges in the years after 1204, combines to suggest that this addition was intended in part to serve as a place for the burial and commemoration of the Venetian doges, with the north wing in particular perhaps thought of as a Venetian variant on the Byzantine parekkle­ sion. But following the 1261 recapture of Constantinople, and the restoration of the Byzantine empire under Michael VIII Palaiologos, the imperial pretensions 87 Demus, Church of San Marco, 52. 88 For a useful summation, see Holger Klein, “Refashioning Byzantium in Venice, ca. 1200– 1400,” in San Marco, Byzantium and the Myth of Venice, ed. Henry Maguire and Robert S. Nelson (Washington, DC: Dumbarton Oaks, 2010), 193–225. 89 In the epitaph on his family tomb in S. Giorgio Maggiore: see Da Mosto, I Dogi di Venezia, 325–26; and Juergen Schulz, “Urbanism in Medieval Venice,” in City States in Classical Antiquity and Medieval Italy, ed. Anthony Molho, Kurt Raaflaub, and Julia Emlen (Stuttgart: Steiner, 1991), 419–45, at 440. 90 Documenti per la storia dell’augusta ducale basilica di San Marco in Venezia dal nono secolo sino alla fine del decimo ottavo, ed. Ferdinando Ongania (Venice: Ongania, 1886), 12 (document 95), 211 (document 826). The practice of hanging shields with the ducal coat of arms continued until 1730, at which time it was abandoned because of possible damage to the structure caused by their excessive weight, see Demus, Church of San Marco, 52. It may also be significant that the left-hand short side of Morosini’s sarcophagus in the San Marco narthex (cf. Pincus, Tombs of the Doges, fig. 43) is decorated with a foliate cross set under an arch. For the imperial connotations of this motif, and its possible use in Venice from the ninth century, see John Osborne, “The ‘Cross-under-arch’ Motif in Ninth-Century Venetian Sculpture: An Imperial Reading,” Thesaurismata 27 (1997): 7–18.

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of the doges withered away. Perhaps the ties of religious devotion and family, and the desire to ensure the salvation of one’s soul after death, channelled through the exploding popularity of the new mendicant orders, proved in the end to be the stronger draw. For whatever reason, with the exception of a brief moment in the second quarter of the fourteenth century, the outer areas of San Marco would never attain what may have been their original purpose, being used instead for games of chance, as a place where the inhabitants of the city might find cool relief from the hot sun of the Piazza, and where today almost all visitors to the basilica pause to purchase postcards and souvenir guidebooks before making their reluctant exit through the Porta S. Alipio. References Anti, Carlo. “La tomba del Doge Marino Morosini nell’atrio di San Marco.” Arte Veneta 8 (1954): 17–21. Babić, Gordana. Les chapelles annexes des églises byzantines: Fonction liturgique et pro­ grammes iconographiques. Paris: Klincksieck, 1969. Bache, Florence. “La fonction funéraire du narthex dans les églises byzantines du XIIe au XIVe siècle.” Histoire de l’Art 7 (1989): 25–33. Barozzi, Nicolò. “Sulla tomba del doge Enrico Dandolo a Costantinopoli.” Nuovo Archivio Veneto 3 (1892): 213. Barral i Altet, Xavier. Les mosaiques de pavement médiévales de Venise, Murano, Torcello. Paris: Picard, 1985. Barry, Fabio. “‘Disiecta membra’: Ranieri Zeno, the Imitation of Constantinople, the ‘Spolia’ Style, and Justice at San Marco.” In San Marco, Byzantium and the Myth of Venice, edited by Henry Maguire and Robert S. Nelson, 7–62. Washington, DC: Dumbarton Oaks, 2010. Belozerskaya, Marina, and Kenneth Lapatin. “Antiquity Consumed: Transformations at San Marco, Venice.” In Antiquity and its Interpreters, edited by Alina Payne, Ann Kuttner, and Rebekah Smick, 83–95. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000. Belting, Hans, Cyril Mango, and Doula Mouriki. The Mosaics and Frescoes of St. Mary Pammakaristos (Fethiye Camii) at Istanbul. Washington, DC: Dumbarton Oaks, 1978. Bettini, Sergio. L’architettura di San Marco. Padua: Le Tre Venezie, 1946. Branca, Vittore, ed. Storia della Civiltà Veneziana. 3 vols. Florence: Sansoni, 1979. Brenk, Beat. “Zur Funktion des Atriums von San Marco in Venedig.” In The Atrium of San Marco in Venice. The Genesis and Medieval Reality of the Genesis Mosaics, edited by Martin Büchsel, Herbert Kessler, and Rebecca Müller, 49–72. Berlin: Gebr. Mann Verlag, 2014.

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Krautheimer, Richard. “A Note on Justinian’s Church of the Holy Apostles in Constantinople.” In Mélanges Eugène Tisserant, vol. 2. Studi e Testi, vol. 232, 265–70. Vatican City: Biblioteca Apostolica Vaticana, 1964. Krautheimer, Richard. Studies in Early Christian, Medieval and Renaissance Art. New York: New York University Press, 1969. Macridy, Theodore. “The Monastery of Lips and the Burials of the Palaeologi.” Dumbarton Oaks Papers 18 (1964): 253–77. Madden, Thomas F. Enrico Dandolo & the Rise of Venice. Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2003. Mainstone, Rowland. “The First and Second Churches of San Marco Reconsidered.” The Antiquaries Journal 71 (1991): 123–37. Mango, Cyril. “Constantine’s Mausoleum and the Translation of Relics.” Byzantinische Zeitschrift 83 (1990): 51–62. Marinis, Vasileios. Architecture and Ritual in the Churches of Constantinople: Ninth to Fifteenth Centuries. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2014. Mathews, Thomas F. The Early Churches of Constantinople: Architecture and Liturgy. University Park, PA: Pennsylvania State University Press, 1971. Megaw, Arthur H. S. “Reflections on the Original Form of St. Mark’s in Venice.” In Architectural Studies in Memory of Richard Krautheimer, edited by Cecil L. Striker, 107–10. Mainz: Philipp von Zabern, 1996. Müller-Wiener, Wolfgang. Bildlexikon zur Topographie Istanbuls. Tübingen: Wasmuth, 1977. Naumann, Rudolf. “Der antike Rundbau beim Myrelaion und der Palast Romanos I. Lekapenos.” Istanbuler Mitteilungen 16 (1966): 199–216. Nicol, Donald. Byzantium and Venice: A Study in Diplomatic and Cultural Relations. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1988. Niero, Antonio. “The Cycle of the Atrium.” In Otto Demus, The Patriarchal Basilica in Venice. San Marco, 1: The Mosaics, the History, the Lighting. Milan: Fabbri, 1990: 195–203. Ongania, Ferdinando, ed. Documenti per la storia dell’augusta ducale basilica di San Marco in Venezia dal nono secolo sino alla fine del decimo ottavo. Venice: Ongania, 1886. Osborne, John. “The ‘Cross-under-arch’ Motif in Ninth-Century Venetian Sculpture: An Imperial Reading.” Thesaurismata 27 (1997): 7–18. Osborne, John. “The Hagiographic Programme of the Mosaics in the South Dome of San Marco at Venice.” RACAR 22 (1995): 19–28. Osborne, John. “Proclamations of Power and Presence: The Setting and Function of Two Eleventh-Century Murals in the Lower Church of San Clemente, Rome.” Mediaeval Studies 59 (1997): 155–72.

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Osborne, John. “The Tomb of Alfanus in S. Maria in Cosmedin, Rome, and Its Place in the Roman Tradition of Funerary Monuments.” Papers of the British School at Rome 51 (1983): 240–47. Ousterhout, Robert G. The Architecture of the Kariye Camii in Istanbul. Washington, DC: Dumbarton Oaks, 1987. Ousterhout, Robert G. Master Builders of Byzantium. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1999. Ousterhout, Robert. “The Pantokrator Monastery and Architectural Interchanges in the Thirteenth Century.” In Quarta Crociata: Venezia-Bisanzio-Impero Latino, edited by Gherardo Ortalli, Giorgio Ravegnani, and Peter Schreiner, 749–70. Venice: Istituto Veneto di Scienze, Lettere ed Arti, 2006. Ousterhout, Robert. “Where Was the Tomb of Isaak Komnenos?” Byzantine Studies Conference Abstracts 11 (1985): 34. Papadopoli, Nicolò. “Enrico Dandolo e le sue monete (1192–1205).” Rivista Italiana di Numismatica 3 (1890): 507–19. Papageorgiou, Athanasios. “The Narthex of the Churches of the Middle Byzantine Period in Cyprus.” In Rayonnement grec: Hommages à Charles Delvoye, edited by Lydie Hadermann-Misguich, Georges Raepsaet, and Guy Cambier, 437–48. Brussels: Editions de l’Université de Bruxelles, 1982. Perocco, Guido. “The Horses of San Marco in Venice.” In The Horses of San Marco, translated by John and Valerie Wilton-Ely, 49–79. London: Thames and Hudson, 1979. Perry, Marilyn. “Saint Mark’s Trophies: Superstition and Archaeology in Renaissance Venice.” Journal of the Warburg and Courtauld Institutes 40 (1977): 27–49. Petrarch, Francesco. Francesco Petrarca: Prose. Edited by Guido Martellotti, P. G. Bianchi, E. Carrara, and E. Bianchi. Milan: Ricciardi, 1955. Petrarch, Francesco. Letters of Old Age: Rerum senilium libri I–XVIII. Translated by Aldo S. Bernardo, Saul Levin, and Reta Bernardo. 2 vols. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1992. Picard, Jean-Charles. “Étude sur l’emplacement des tombes des papes du IIIe au Xe siècle.” Mélanges d’archéologie et d’histoire (École française de Rome) 81 (1969): 725–82. Pincus, Debra. “Andrea Dandolo (1343–1354) and Visible History: The San Marco Projects.” In Art and Politics in Late Medieval and Early Renaissance Italy, 1250–1500, edited by Charles Rosenberg, 191–206. Notre Dame, IN: University of Notre Dame Press, 1990. Pincus, Debra. The Tombs of the Doges of Venice. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000. Reinach, Théodore. “Commentaire archéologique sur le poème de Constantin le Rhodien.” Revue des études grecques 9 (1896): 66–103. Robbert, Louise B. “Reorganization of the Venetian Coinage by Doge Enrico Dandolo.” Speculum 49 (1974): 48–60.

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Robbert, Louise B. “Rialto Businessmen and Constantinople, 1204–61.” Dumbarton Oaks Papers 49 (1995): 43–58. Rushforth, Gordon. “The Church of S. Maria Antiqua.” Papers of the British School at Rome 1 (1902): 1–123. Scarpa, Jacopo. “I mosaici dell’atrio.” In Renato Polacco, Giulia Rossi Scarpa, and Jacopo Scarpa. San Marco. La Basilica d’Oro, 251–63. Milan: Berenice, 1991. Schulz, Juergen. “Urbanism in Medieval Venice.” In City States in Classical Antiquity and Medieval Italy, edited by Anthony Molho, Kurt Raaflaub, and Julia Emlen, 419–45. Stuttgart: Steiner, 1991. Schulz, Juergen. “La piazza medievale di San Marco.” Annali di architettura 4–5 (1992– 93): 134–56. Ševčenko, Nancy. “The Tomb of Isaak Comnenos at Pherrai.” The Greek Orthodox Theological Review 29 (1984): 135–39. Sinkević, Ida. The Church of St. Panteleimon at Nerezi. Architecture, Programme, Patronage. Wiesbaden: Reichert, 2000. Striker, Cecil L. The Myrelaion (Bodrum Camii) in Istanbul. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1981. Strube, Christine. Die westliche Eingangsseite der Kirchen von Konstantinopel in justin­ ianischer Zeit. Architektonische und quellenkritische Untersuchungen. Wiesbaden: Harrassowitz, 1973. Tea, Eva. La Basilica di Santa Maria Antiqua. Milan: Vita e Pensiero, 1937. Teteriatnikov, Natalia. “Burial Places in Cappadocian Churches.” The Greek Orthodox Theological Review 29 (1984): 141–74. Theis, Lioba, “Narthex,” Reallexikon zur byzantinischen Kunst, 6: 868–932. Stuttgart: A. Hiersemann, 2002. Thomas, John P., and Angela Constantinides Hero, eds. Byzantine Monastic Foundation Documents: A Complete Translation of the Surviving Founders’ Typika and Testaments. 5 vols. Washington, DC: Dumbarton Oaks, 2000. Thomas, John P. Private Religious Foundations in the Byzantine Empire. Washington, DC: Dumbarton Oaks, 1987. Tigler, Guido. Il portale maggiore di San Marco a Venezia. Aspetti iconografici e stilistici dei rilievi duecenteschi. Venice: Istituto Veneto di Scienze, Lettere ed arti, 1995. Tikkanen, Johan J. Die Genesismosaiken von S. Marco in Venedig und ihr Verhältniss zu den Miniaturen der Cottonbibel. Helsinki: Druckerei der Finnischen LitteraturGesellschaft, 1889. Tomeković, Svetlana. “Contribution à l’étude du programme du narthex des églises monastiques (XIe–première moitié du XIIIe s.).” Byzantion 58 (1988): 140–54. Underwood, Paul A. The Kariye Djami. 3 vols. New York: Pantheon Books, 1966. Vasiliev, Alexander A. “Imperial Porphyry Sarcophagi in Constantinople.” Dumbarton Oaks Papers 4 (1948): 1–26.

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Warren, John. “The First Church of San Marco in Venice.” The Antiquaries Journal 70 (1990): 327–59. Weitzmann, Kurt. “The Genesis Mosaics of San Marco and the Cotton Genesis Miniatures.” In Otto Demus, The Mosaics of San Marco in Venice, 2:105–42. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1984. Wharton Epstein, Ann. “The Date and Significance of the Cathedral of Canosa in Apulia, South Italy.” Dumbarton Oaks Papers 37 (1983): 79–90. Wharton Epstein, Ann. “The Rebuilding and Redecoration of the Holy Apostles in Constantinople: A Reconsideration.” Greek, Roman and Byzantine Studies 23 (1982): 79–92.

Chapter 4

The Refectory of the Monastery of St. Mary in the Valley of Jehoshaphat, Jerusalem Crusader Painting at Crossroads Glenn Peers Erica Cruikshank Dodd’s thorough, ground-breaking work provides a model for scholarship that we can all of us profitably look to, and it also reveals to us complexities of the medieval worlds of Christians and Muslims in the Middle East. A positive case in point is the discovery in 1999, during a rescue dig, of a fragmentary twelfth-century fresco from the Abbey of the Virgin Mary in the Valley of Jehoshaphat in east Jerusalem, and now on display at the Israel Museum (Fig. 4.1).1 Even a city as carefully and jealously studied as Jerusalem has much to tell scholars still. The fresco speaks from a power centre of the Crusader kingdom and from a position of dominion; it was commissioned by well-connected ecclesiastical figures with close ties to ruling elites of the Kingdom of Jerusalem.2 Its fragmentary state notwithstanding, the fresco can 1 See Jon Seligman, “A Crusader Wall Painting from the Abbey of the Virgin Mary in the Valley of Jehoshaphat, Jerusalem,” in New Studies in the Archaeology of Jerusalem and its Region. Collected Papers, ed. David Amit, Orit Peleg-Barkat and Guy D. Stiebel (Jerusalem: The Hebrew University of Jerusalem, Institute of Archaeology, 2010), 5:141–57 (in Hebrew), and see now Seligman, “A Wall Painting, a Crusader Flood Diversion Facility and Other Archaeological Gleanings from the Abbey of the Virgin Mary in the Valley of Jehoshaphat, Jerusalem,” in Christ is here! Studies in Christian Archaeology in Memory of Father Michele Piccirillo, ed. L. Daniel Chrupcala (Milan: Terra Santa, 2012), 185–220. My thanks to my colleague, Na’ama Pat-El, for help in reading the article in Hebrew. I would also like to thank Evanthia Baboula and Lesley Jessop for helpful and critical readings of an early version of this essay, as well as Na’ama Brosh, Annemarie Weyl Carr, Jen Ebbeler, Haim Goldfuss, Bernard Hamilton, Andrew Jotischky, John Osborne, Denys Pringle, Steven Rapp, Jr., Diane Reilly, Christopher Schabel, and Zaza Skhirtladze. 2 The abbey was remarkably well endowed, later coming into possessions in Constantinople and Thessaloniki; see Chartes de Terre Sainte provenant de l’Abbaye de N.D. de Josaphat, ed. Henri-François Delaborde (Paris: E. Thorin, 1880), 94–5 (XLV), and Charles Kohler, “Chartes de l’abbaye Notre-Dame de la Vallée de Josaphat en Terre Sainte (1108–1291),” Revue de l’Orient Latin 7 (1899): 108–222, esp. 170 (LXI), and 171–72 (LXIII). After 1289, the community moved from the east to Messina and founded a monastery dedicated to Mary Magdalene; it seems to have already had possessions in the region. See Paul Oldfield, “The Medieval Cult of St. Agatha of Catania and the Consolidation of Christian Sicily,” Journal of Ecclesiastical

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Peers Figure 4.1 Deesis, Monastery of St. Mary, Jehoshaphat, Jerusalem By permission of The Israel Museum, Jerusalem

reveal much about identity fashioning among Crusading Franks, and it reveals too an accommodation to regional practices of indigenous Christians on the part of the western monastics who restored the monastery of St. Mary. The monastery was destroyed after the loss of Jerusalem, and much of its fabric was used in the reconstruction of the city walls after 1187. The twelfth-century superstructure of the monastery has long been lost, but excavations have uncovered some significant traces of the complex, which was a major foundation in the Kingdom of Jerusalem.3 At the end of the last century, a large passage of the fresco was uncovered and preserved (9 × 2.7 m), but it only depicted the lower portions of what evidently was a monumental program. The recovery of the fresco is significant, of course, because so little survives of that period’s painting in the city itself, and despite its partial nature, its documentary value for understanding identity in the Crusader kingdom demands careful study. The uppermost portion of the fresco, as it survives, shows the feet of three figures, with the bottom part of a throne framing the middle figure’s feet. The cluster of three figures, one central with the two flanking figures turning toward the centre, indicates that it was most likely the well-known Byzantine and eastern Christian iconographical theme of the Deesis. The original figures were a seated Christ, shown with feet spread apart; the Virgin Mary on his right-hand side, wearing a lightly coloured tunic covered by a dark cloak; and, with his hair-shirt visible, John the Baptist to Christ’s left. In the next register below the Deesis is a two-line inscription in Latin; much of the inscription has been lost, but the beginning of the inscription in the upper line is taken from the fifth-century vita of St. Augustine written by Possidius.4 Between the two lines of Latin, a frieze is decorated with acanthus vines and flowers that wind History 62, no. 3 (2011): 439–71, esp. 447, and Carlo A. Garufi, “Le donazioni del Conte Enrico di Paternò al monastero di S. Maria di valle Giosefat,” Revue de l’Orient Latin 9 (1902): 206–29. 3 See Cedric N. Johns, “The Abbey of St. Mary in the Valley of Jehoshaphat, Jerusalem,” Quarterly of the Department of Antiquities in Palestine 8 (1939): 117–36, and Denys Pringle, The Churches of the Crusader Kingdom of Jerusalem: A Corpus, 4 vols. (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993–2009), 3:287–306, for a full survey. 4 Confirmed by Iris Shagrir, “Latin Inscription in the Wall Painting from the Abbey of the Virgin Mary in the Valley of Jehoshaphat,” in Christ Is Here! Studies in Christian Archaeology

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regularly across that horizontal zone. In the lowest level of the fresco, two types of fabric are represented: at the wings, curtains suspended from a rail, and in the area precisely below the enthroned Christ, another hanging is shown, with a field of purple, and gold, green and white colouring, and with birds and decorative motifs. Finally, two other figures are shown to either lateral end of the fresco; on our left, a figure, in three-quarter profile and in a red-brown tunic, raises his hands to the centre of the composition, while to our right, a second figure, who is dressed similarly to the figure on our left, turns his back to the viewer and raises his hands to the figures in the Deesis above. A damaged inscription can be seen to the second figure’s left-hand side, but all one can read is a nomen sacrum for deus (DS, and bottom parts of the characters for sanctus above?) and below, IENV, perhaps letters from the petitioner’s name. The church of Mary in the Valley of Jehoshaphat has a history that reaches at least as far as the fifth century, and the site was long associated with the death and resurrection of the Virgin. The subterranean tomb is still accessible, while all the buildings that must have comprised a larger complex above ground have disappeared. By the time of the entry of the Franks into Jerusalem, the church and dependent buildings may have been in a state of disrepair, though it still functioned as an important shrine. Early in the history of the Kingdom of Jerusalem, the monastery was newly restored. William of Tyre (ca. 1130–86) stated that Duke Godfrey de Bouillon (1058–1100) was responsible for the foundation and that he gave the monastery to monks who had accompanied him east. A good number of sources mentioned the monastery, but its twelfth-century history is not perfectly clear. For example, Gilduin became the second abbot of Jehoshaphat from 1120 to about 1135, and he was a prior, from 1108 to 1119, of the Cluniac house at Lurcy-le-Bourg.5 The Cluniac connections in Memory of Father Michele Piccirillo, ed. L. Daniel Chrupcala (Milan: Terra Santa, 2012), 245–46. 5 Gilduin was evidently connected with the Crusading elite: Baldwin II’s mother, Melisende, was his aunt, and so Gilduin was the king’s first cousin, and certainly he was then a member of the royal family of Jerusalem. See Pringle, Churches of the Crusader Kingdom of Jerusalem, 3:289; Willelmi Tyrensis Archiepiscopi Chronicon, ed. Robert B. C. Huygens, Corpus Christianorum, Continuatio Mediaevalis, vols. 63, 63A, 2 pts., (Turnhout: Brepols, 1986), 563 (13.29–30); Tractatus de Reliquiis S. Stephani Cluniacum allatis, in Recueil des historiens des croisades, Historiens occidentaux, 5 vols. (Paris: Imprimerie royale, 1844–95), 5:317–18; Jonathan C. S. Riley-Smith, The First Crusaders, 1095–1131 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997), 169; Alan V. Murray, The Crusader Kingdom of Jerusalem: A Dynastic History 1099–1125 (Oxford: Unit for Prosopographical Research, 2000), 129–30; and Giles Constable, The Letters of Peter the Venerable, 2 vols. (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1967), 2:291–92. Forgeries have also been implicated in claims for an early tie to Cluny: see Lynn Townsend White, Jr., “A Forged Letter Concerning the Existence of Latin Monks at St. Mary’s

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with the monastery at Jehoshaphat have been assumed, and the monastery claimed a close connection to Cluny, but documents are silent on its precise relationship with the motherhouse in France. In any case, the monastery was the subject of a large-scale building program in the period 1150–80, and travellers in that period remarked on the beauty of the buildings and its decoration.6 However, no mention was made of a Deesis scene. The Deesis fresco can lend weight to the assertion of Cluniac filiations at St. Mary’s, even if the sources do not make it a certainty that the monastery was recognized officially as a Cluniac house. In the first place, the fresco is certainly the only surviving portion of a large-scale program originally in the monastery’s refectory. The inscription makes clear the placement of the fresco, since it is taken from the dining room of St. Augustine himself, according to his fifth-century biographer Possidius. The legible part of the inscription reads, [QU]IS Q[U]IS AMAT [D]ICTIS ABSENT[UM] [RODE]RE VITAM HANC [ME]NSAM INDI[G]NAM NOVERIT ESSE SUAM (Who injures the name of an absent friend may not at this table as guest attend).7 The inscription then only functions properly in the context of a monastic refectory, and while the Jehoshaphat before the First Crusade,” Speculum 9, no. 4 (1934): 404–7. Other forgeries are in Garufi, “Le donazioni del Conte Enrico”. On Cluny in the Holy Land, see Benjamin Z. Kedar, “Palmarée, abbaye clunisienne du XIIe siècle en Galilée,” Revue Bénédictine 93, nos. 3–4 (1983): 260–69, and Kedar, “Gerard of Nazareth, a Neglected Twelfth-Century Writer in the Latin East: A Contribution to the Intellectual and Monastic History of the Crusader States,” Dumbarton Oaks Papers 37 (1983): 55–77. 6 See Pringle, Churches of the Crusader Kingdom of Jerusalem, 3:290. 7 Continuing? BEA[]S QUI []SVE[]. CIBUM []UI FRATRES. TACITO. RE [] CT IE[]E[] ES SACRA EST[]ANTS. E[]. Sancti Augustini Vita scripta a Possidio Episcopo, ed. and trans. Herbert T. Weiskotten (Princeton: Princeton Universit Press, 1919), 94.7–8, 95. and Possidius, Vita Augustini, ed. Wilhelm Geerlings (Paderborn: Schöningh, 2005), 70.5–6. The lines may originate in Horace (65–8 BC), Sermones book 1, satire 4.81–85, “…. absentem qui rodit, amicum/ qui non defendit alio culpante, solutos/ qui captat risus hominum famamque dicacis,/ fingere qui non visa potest, conmissa tacere/ qui nequit: hic niger est, hunc tu, Romane, caveto.” On Augustine’s couplet, see Irene Kabala, “Medieval Decorated Refectories in France, Italy and England until 1250” (PhD diss., Johns Hopkins University, 2001), 69–71. One can assume that knowledge of the vita was current among Cluniacs. No mention of the vita is in Léopold Delisle, Inventaire des manuscrits de la Bibliothèque Nationale. Fonds de Cluni (Paris: Champion, 1884) and while the letters of Peter Damian (ca. 1007–72) mention Augustine frequently, they do not cite the vita specifically. However, Odo of Cluny (ca. 878–942) cited the lines, see Patrologiae Cursus Completus, Series Latina, ed. J. Migne (Paris: Imprimerie Catholique, 1853) 133:593C. And see Consuetudines cluniacensium antiquiores cum redactionibus derivatis, ed. Kassius Hallinger, Corpus Consuetudinum Monasticarum, vol. 7 in 4 pts. (Siegburg: F. Schmitt, 1983–86), 2:216; and Liber tramitis aevi Odilonis abbatis, ed. Peter Dinter, Corpus Consuetudinum Monasticarum, vol. 10 (Siegburg: Schmitt, 1980), 157.3, for readings of the vita by Possidius on the feast of Augustine in Cluniac customaries.

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full meaning of the citation may emerge clearly with the decipherment of the remainder of the two lines on the wall, an appeal to patristic models of good table manners is unmistakable.8 It was directed at fellow bishops, in particular, in Possidius’ vita, but the patristic weight of the inscription was surely laid on all diners, monks and visitors. The emphatic framing lends strength to its injunction, since the inscription brackets the white field of the acanthus vines, which in turn picks up the white in the curtains in the lower register. The form of the acanthus likewise recalls similar designs from sculpture found at the monastery, and also sculpture produced elsewhere in the Kingdom, like the non-figural lintel formerly over the entrance to the Holy Sepulchre (now in the Rockefeller/Palestine Archaeological Museum).9 Moreover, the Umayyad mosaics at the Dome of the Rock provide another parallel, as do the contemporary mosaics in the apse at San Clemente in Rome.10 The white lettering in a red field makes the inscription emphatic also. The lines from Augustine underline the fact that the fresco came from the now-destroyed refectory of the monastery of St. Mary. They do not have any self-evident connection to the scene above them (though the damaged lines might have helped clarify that relationship). The themes of correction and penitence did have a longstanding presence in the decoration and use of refectories in the west, specifically Cluniac houses. In her 2001 dissertation, Irene Kabala stressed the role of the dining hall in the enforcement of monastic rules, as a place of punishment for their infringement, and in the judging of guilty parties before abbot and God.11 Refectory decoration played an essential role in the performance of these ritual statements of guilt and punishment, particularly on the east wall against which the abbot also sat. The original program at Cluny is lost, but it survives in descriptions and copies. Along with scenes from Hebrew and Christian scriptures on the sidewalls, the major focus was the east wall, where a large-scale figure of Christ sat in the centre of a Last Judgment, a maiestas domini, and an inscription was likewise included, 8 Writing on walls of refectories has a long history, too, beyond Augustine. See Yizhar Hirschfeld, The Judean Desert Monasteries in the Byzantine Period (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1992), 192; and also Paul C. Dilley, “Textual Aesthetics: Dipinti and the Early Byzantine Epigraphic Habit,” in The Red Monastery Church: Beauty and Asceticism in Upper Egypt, ed. Elizabeth S. Bolman (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2016) 175–82. 9 Jaroslav Folda, The Art of the Crusaders in the Holy Land, 1098–1187 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995), 215–29. 10 See Where Heaven and Earth Meet: Jerusalem’s Sacred Esplanade, ed. Oleg Grabar and Benjamin Z. Kedar (Jerusalem-Austin: Yad Ben-Zvi Press-University of Texas Press, 2009), and Stefano Riccioni, Il mosaico absidale di S. Clemente a Roma: “Exemplum” della chiesa riformata (Spoleto: Fondazione Centro italiano di studi sull’alto medioevo, 2006). 11 Kabala, Medieval Decorated Refectories, 167–69, for example.

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Behold the great day on which the Lamb presides as Judge to whom all creatures are subjected whether freely or unwillingly: Unhappy he to whom it is not given to dread this [day] because the fire that is present/ here is the eternal house of evil ones. Thanks be to God.12 As Kabala argued, that inscription and the scene of the Last Judgment took the Day of Judgment and put it into the present where the abbot was the corrector in lieu and in anticipation of Christ’s own pronouncement. Copies of the prestigious refectory at Cluny reveal some of the intensity of the original context and some of its visual details, even if these copies did not literally reproduce every aspect of the original.13 The east wall of the refectory at Charlieu is also destroyed, but watercolours were made of the original decoration that show a large-scale Christ who is enthroned with an almond-shaped mandorla, surrounded by symbols of the evangelists and flanked by the apostles.14 Here also a painted curtain covered the lowest part of the wall. In other versions, the dominance of Christ enthroned is maintained, for example at Lavaudieu and Berzé-la-Ville in France and at Nonantola in Italy.15 The inscription recorded at Cluny is lacking in these copies, and variations occur in the placement and choice of secondary figures in each case. At Cluny, too, important figures for the order were included in the original program, and Kabala includes these donor portraits in the visualization of the carefully prescribed commemorative liturgies and feasts held for past abbots and others who contributed notably to Cluny.16 The head of the king in one of the watercolours of the Charlieu program, made after the lost original, presumably belongs to that group that wished to be included in the public context of ritual feasting long after death. The small donor figures in the fresco from 12

Trans. Kabala, Medieval Decorated Refectories, 151, and see 143–98, for the Last Judgment at Cluny. 13 Cluniac art did not follow a consistent “house style”. See Diane Reilly, “The Cluniac Giant Bible and the Ordo librorum ad legendum: A Reassessment of Monastic Bible Reading and Cluniac Customary Instructions,” in From Dead of Night to End of Day: The Medieval Customs of Cluny, ed. Susan Boynton and Isabelle Cochelin (Turnhout: Brepols, 2005), 163–89. 14 Kabala, Medieval Decorated Refectories, 199–222. 15 Respectively, Kabala; Elizabeth Lapina, “The Mural Paintings of Berzé-la-Ville in the Context of the First Crusade and the Reconquista,” Journal of Medieval History 31 (2005): 309–26; and Costanza Segre Montel and Fulvio Zuliani, “Gli affreschi del refettorio dell’abbazia di Nonantola: bilancio di una ricerca,” in Nonantola nella cultura e nell’arte medievale. Atti della Giornata di Studio, ed. Paolo Golinelli and Giorgio Malaguti (Bologna: Pàtron, 2003), 73–88. 16 Kabala, Medieval Decorated Refectories, 170.

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Jerusalem may derive from a similar convention of including benefactors in representations at the site of public ritual commemoration, namely the refectory. The partial inscription beside the right-hand figure strongly suggests that he is beseeching the protection of the Lord, but the two figures, who may have had more company in the original program, would also have benefited from the prayers that would traditionally have been said at commemorative feasts by monks and dignitaries. Commemorative portraits were displayed in Byzantine refectories, and through such portraits and prayers for deceased benefactors, reminders of death and judgment were also not absent from places of communal eating in monasteries in that religious tradition either.17 But we know less about customs and decorative programs from that world than we do from the west.18 Most surviving examples are later, and many refectories appear not to have been decorated, judging by monastic complexes in Cappadocia, for example.19 In other words, one cannot assert absolutely that the donor figures in the refectory from St. Mary’s are western in origin and derive from Cluniac traditions, but the weight of the evidence points in that direction. The larger part of the program, the Deesis, does have strong filiations with eastern Christian traditions of refectory decoration, if not Byzantine. In terms of the meaning of the iconography, the Deesis fits perfectly well with the donor figures and commemorative feasting. Scholars have often remarked on the flexibility of this iconography, but the scene of Christ flanked by John the Baptist and Mary always had eschatological valences. The intercessory openings provided by the figures and 17

Paul Stephenson, “Images of the Bulgar-Slayer: Three Art Historical Notes,” Byzantine and Modern Greek Studies 25 (2001): 44–68, and Svetlana Popović, “The Trapeza in Cenobitic Monasteries: Architectural and Spiritual Contexts,” Dumbarton Oaks Papers 52 (1998): 281–303, esp. 301 on Lazaros of Mount Galesios (d. 1053). 18 See John J. Yiannias, “The Refectory Paintings of Mount Athos: An Interpretation,” in The Byzantine Tradition after the Fall of Constantinople, ed. John J. Yiannias (Charlottesville: University Press of Virginia, 1991), 269–340; and Popović, “The Trapeza in Cenobitic Monasteries.” Precious, but vague, testimony in Ruy Gonzáles de Clavijo, Embassy to Tamerlane, 1403–1406, trans. Guy Le Strange (London: Routledge, 1928; repr. London: Routledge, 2006), 64, “To this Church of St. John belongs a monastery, where the monks have their refectory in a great gallery. In the centre place thereof stands for their use a table made of white marble, some thirty paces in length, round which are set divers wooden seats. Further there are one and twenty sideboards made of white stone blocks, which may serve as stands on which to put their dishes of meat. Here too are also three other smaller tables, each of a single stone block. Within the monastery walls we saw many orchards and vineyards: with much else that cannot succinctly be described in this place.” 19 Lyn Rodley, Cave Monasteries of Byzantine Cappadocia (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1985), 151–83.

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their interaction were always strongly available to patrons and viewers.20 The refectory of Udabno monastery in the Gareja Desert, in Georgia, was initially painted in the eleventh century, but then repainted in the early thirteenth. The later frescoes followed a similar scheme: the scene of the Deesis in the niche, directly behind the head of the table, where the abbot would presumably have sat, was original to the eleventh century. Important monastic figures were also depicted in that zone, like St. Davit, the founder of the communities of this sacred area.21 Scenes connected with Christ and food were also presented there from the eleventh century, namely, the Last Supper (on the east wall) and the Hospitality of Abraham (on the eastern portion of the north wall).22 The frescoes of the niche of the abbot were repainted in the early thirteenth century, repeating the Deesis composition (with the smaller figures of Christ, the Virgin and John the Baptist), and some images were added, namely figures of archangels on the archway of the niche and the Mandylion with angels above the niche. This complex of monasteries at Udabno was founded by thirteen 20

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Annemarie Weyl Carr, “Gospel Frontispieces from the Comnenian Period,” Gesta 2, no. 1 (1982): 3–20, esp. 6. For other sources on this iconography, see Christopher Walter, “Two Notes on the Deësis,” Revue des études byzantines 26 (1968): 311–36; Walter, “Further Notes on the Deësis,” Revue des études byzantines 28 (1970): 161–87; Anthony Cutler, “Under the Sign of the Deēsis: On the Question of Representativeness in Medieval Art and Literature,” Dumbarton Oaks Papers 41 (1987): 145–54; Helga Neumann, “Überlegungen zur Ikonographie der Deesis in der byzantinischen Kunst,” in Tausend Jahre Taufe Rußlands— Rußland in Europa. Beiträge zum Interdisziplinären und Ökumenischen Symposium in Halle (Saale), 13.–16. April 1988, ed. Hermann Goltz (Leipzig: Evangelische Verlagsanstalt, 1993), 415–22; Apostolos G. Mantas, “Überlegungen zur Deesis in der Hauptapsis mittelbyzantinischer Kirchen Griechenlands,” in Byzantinische Malerei: Bildprogramme, Ikonographie, Stil. Symposion in Marburg vom 25.–29.6.1997, ed. Guntram Koch (Wiesbaden: Reichert, 2000), 165–82; Tania Velmans, “Observations sur quelques peintures murales en Syrie et Palestine et leur composante byzantine et orientale,” Cahiers archéologiques 42 (1994): 123–38, Asnû Bilban Yalçin, “Un affresco con la ‘deesis’ nella Santa Sofia di Iznik (Nicea),” in Milion II. Studi e ricerche d’arte bizantina: Costantinopoli e l’arte delle province orientali, ed. Fernanda de’ Maffei, Claudia Barsanti and Alessandra G. Guidobaldi (Rome: Rari Nantes, 1990), 369–89; and Ioanna Zervou Tognazzi, “Deesis: interpretazione del termine e sua presenza nell’iconografia bizantina,” in Maffei, Barsanti and Guidobaldi, 391–422. See Antony Eastmond and Zaza Skhirtladze, “Udabno Monastery in Georgia: Innovation, Conservation and the Reinterpretation of Medieval Art,” Iconographica 7 (2008): 23–43, esp. 28–9. On the Georgian Deesis, see also Wachtang Z. Djobadze, “Four Deësis Themes in the Church of Oški,” Oriens Christianus 72 (1988): 168–82, and Tania Velmans, “L’image de la Deesis dans les églises de Georgie et dans celles d’autres regions du monde byzantin,” Cahiers archéologiques 29 (1980–81): 47–102; 31 (1983): 129–69. See Lado Mirianashvili, “Non-Traditional Iconography of The Hospitality of Abraham from the Refectory of Udabno Monastery in Davit-Gareja, Georgia,” Ikon 6 (2013): 109–14.

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legendary monks from Syria, and because of that prestigious origin, it not only attracted royal patronage in Georgia, it also retained contact with the Holy Land.23 Related to—though not identical, of course—the maiestas domini iconography, the Deesis scene can bear in a shorthand manner some of the meanings of the Last Judgment. It is not found in western refectory programs, to my knowledge, but Crusader patrons had a preference for this eastern iconography in Holy Land commissions.24 For example, folio 12v of the Melisende Psalter (British Library, MS Egerton 1139), produced in Jerusalem between 1131 and 1149, has an illustration of the Deesis, along with an elusive signature by its painter, Basil. The scene terminates a series of introductory images on the life of Christ and is located before the Psalms proper. That suite of illustrations falls into western conventions of psalter organization and illustration, even while it integrates scenes traditionally found in the east.25 The chapel in the narthex of the church of the Nativity in Bethlehem, painted in the 1130s, has a (very badly restored) three-figured Deesis, accompanied by the Virgin and Child enthroned, Saints Stephen and Peter, the Hetoimasia, and other unidentified male saints.26 The Deesis is also found in Byzantine narthexes, but not organized as the central part of a program with secondary figures around the central figures, like at Bethlehem.27 Another surviving example is at the church at Abu Ghosh, near Jerusalem, painted around the 1170s. The unusual application of Byzantine or eastern Christian scenes at Abu Ghosh was directed not toward slavish imitation, but toward the manipulation of established, 23

See the essays in Samonastro tskhovreba udabnoshi: gareja da kristianuli aghmosavleti = Desert Monasticism: Gareja and the Christian East, Papers from an International Symposium, Tbilisi University, September 2000, ed. Zaza Skhirtladze (Tbilisi: Gareja Studies Center, 2001). 24 Annemarie Weyl Carr, “The Mural Paintings of Abu Ghosh and the Patronage of Manuel Comnenus in the Holy Land,” in Crusader Art in the Twelfth Century, ed. Jaroslav Folda, BAR International Series, vol. 152 (Oxford: British Archaeological Reports, 1982), 215–43, esp. 221. 25 Folda, Art of the Crusaders in the Holy Land, 137–58, and see 233–45, on the mosaic program of the Calvary Chapel, which included a Deesis. 26 Folda, Art of the Crusaders in the Holy Land, 165, pls. 6.15a, 6.15b, and Bellarmino Bagatti, Gli antichi edifici sacri de Betlemme (Jerusalem: Studio Biblicum Franciscanum, 1952), 69–79, pls. 29–33. 27 See Donka Bardzieva-Trajkovska, “New Elements of the Painted Programme in the Narthex at Nerezi,” Zograf 29 (2002–2003): 35–46, and Thomas Steppan, “Die Mosaiken des Athosklosters Vatopaidi. Stilkritische und ikonographische Überlegungen,” Cahiers archéologiques 42 (1994): 87–122.

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prestigious types that could express specifically Crusader concerns and ideas about their mission and faith.28 In other words, the Deesis was a frequently preferred iconography because of its adaptability—the scene made a complex Christian process, intercessory prayer, immediately comprehensible—and because of its eastern origins. The latter carried a certain amount of status, and examples like Udabno reveal that prestigious monasteries, which were in contact with the Holy Land, used this iconography to express similar ideas as the western maiestas domini in that dining context. Moreover, that iconography fit very easily, as far as one can tell, with ritual conventions of western, and specifically Cluniac, foundations. The Deesis in the refectory was an adaptation, an appropriation, and a creative bricolage of an iconography for new purposes, that is for the monks at St. Mary’s at least. In itself, the Deesis in the refectory is not innovatory in the eastern Christian context, but it does show striking openness to conventions of other Christians’ traditions of the east. And that openness gave agency to this eastern Christian scene, in the sense that its penitential and intercessory meanings were always active; but it also revealed to the monks and others that the new assemblage of motifs placed them actively in a space in which eastern and western traditions were in a form of new concert. The painted hangings of the dado reveal a similar look east and west, and point to an overall conception (insofar as the fragment allows one to generalize) of accommodation of Latin and eastern Christian visual traditions. In that sense, borders are clearly being spanned, an action very often performed by textiles and their imitations.29 Ornament and cloth have the ability to create and convey meaning, and to affect the comprehension of a program directly. The two areas of fabric in the lower zone work this way to indicate the reach and range of meaning that the fresco encompassed. And they performed ongoing work of situating the action of the scene above, as well as drawing attention to the other places where textiles were used in such monasteries.30 28 See Weyl Carr, “Mural Paintings of Abu Ghosh.” And see the paintings in Crac des Chevaliers, with eastern artists and iconography, but Latin inscriptions, and the particular case of the Cave of St. Marina at Qalamun near Tripoli is also highly relevant here. See Mat Immerzeel, Identity Puzzles: Medieval Christian Art in Syria and Lebanon (Leuven: Peeters, 2009), 74–5, 82–6. 29 Matthew P. Canepa, “Distant Displays of Power: Understanding Cross-Cultural Interaction among the Elites of Rome, Sasanian Iran, and Sui-Tang China,” Ars Orientalis 38 (2010): 121–54; and Canepa, The Two Eyes of the Earth: Art and Ritual of Kingship between Rome and Sasanian Iran (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2009), 205–23. 30 In the first place, the bracketing sets of curtains have a history in the west that makes meaning in Jerusalem. See John Osborne, “Textiles and Their Painted Imitations in Early Medieval Rome,” Papers of the British School at Rome 60 (1992): 309–51; also Osborne, “The

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The painter was evidently recalling a different form of fabric in the central section of the dado, most likely a more expensive type, like silk.31 The quality of the quasi-silk hanging, as well as its motifs, also bring to mind different origins and meanings than do the curtains suspended to either side. The designs of the circular motifs with pearl studding that enclose facing birds or pairs of birds have many parallels in medieval paintings and fabrics in the Mediterranean and in Central Asia.32 Designs with birds and animals on pearled medallions are well attested in Byzantine and Sasanian-type silks, some of which are found today in western collections and church treasuries.33 This type of textile has origins in the eastern Mediterranean and central Asia, but that knowledge of provenance may not have been a significant part of the process that led to the choice of this particular painted textile at St. Mary’s in Jehoshaphat. As Alicia Walker has pointed out, meanings are formed according to the abilities of

Early Medieval Painting of St. Augustine in the Lateran Palace,” in Marmoribus Vestita: Miscellanea in onore di Federico Guidobaldi, ed. Philippe Pergola and Olof Brandt, Studi di antichità Cristiana 63 (Vatican City: Pontificio istituto di archeologia cristiana, 2011), 2:993–1002. Irene Kabala argues, moreover, for a strong set of associations for painted hangings in refectories (Medieval Decorated Refectories, 220–2). An example of painted curtains in church and refectory is found in the early medieval monastery of S. Vincenzo al Volturno; see San Vincenzo al Volturno 1. The 1980–1986 Excavations. Part 1, ed. Richard Hodges, Archaeological Monographs of the British School at Rome 7 (London: British School at Rome, 1993), 42–8, and San Vincenzo al Volturno 2. The 1980–1986 Excavations. Part 2, ed. Richard Hodges, Archaeological Monographs of the British School at Rome 9 (London: British School at Rome, 1995), 73–4. See also Stefano Coccia, “Abbazia di Fossanova: Indagini archeologiche nel refettorio,” Archeologia medievale 24 (1997): 55–86, and Matthew Moran and John G. Mitchell, “The Painted Plaster from the Excavations,” in Hodges, San Vincenzo al Volturno 2, 87–99. 31 On the translation of silk to another medium, and on the conveyance of meaning, see Jill Caskey, “Stuccoes from the Early Norman Period in Sicily: Figuration, Fabrication and Integration,” Medieval Encounters 17, nos. 1–2 (2011): 110–13, and Die Gumbertusbibel: Goldene Bilderpracht der Romanik, ed. Anna Pawlik and Michele C. Ferrari (Nürnberg: Verlag des Germanischen Nationalmuseums, 2014), 158–60, on sources for the wall plaques from cloister of St. Emmeram, Regensberg, ca. 1175. 32 For example, at Bamiyan in Afghanistan, two birds holding a string of pearls and framed by a medallion of pearls were painted in one of the caves dating to the fifth to ninth centuries. Zemaryalai Tarzi, L’architecture et le décor rupestre des grottes de Bamiyan, 2 vols. (Paris: Imprimerie nationale, 1977), 1:28 and 2:B55. 33 For example, see Splendeur des Sassanides. L’empire perse entre Rome et la Chine [224–642], (Brussels: Musées royaux d’art et d’histoire, 1993), 272 [no. 122] (Coptic silk in Lyons from ca. 600 with pheasants chest to chest), and Anna Muthesius, Byzantine Silk Weaving AD 400 to AD 1200, ed. Ewald Kislinger and Johannes Koder (Vienna: Fassbaender, 1997), 214, Fig. 34a, Aachen, Munster Treasury, Peacock silk [M375], and 199, Fig. 50a (Le Monastier, St. Chaffre, bird silk [M109], eighth/ninth century, Central Asian provenance).

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viewers to differentiate exotic and local productions.34 Like her, I would argue for a conscious arrangement of divergent types and designs, seen in these curtains and hanging fabrics, that led viewers to make their own interpretation of the dissimilar parts arrayed on the wall. The central passage of the dado, insofar as colour, designs and arrangement resemble exotic silks, is in direct contrast to the curtains hanging to either side, which belong to a longstanding tradition in Italy and the rest of western Europe. The exotic inspiration must have been clear, even as its familiarity may have been through prestigious silks in western treasuries. In Jerusalem, such silks took on a different valence, still foreign and still expensive, but in a familiar terrain where such items were less rare and less strange. In all cases, because of longstanding associations of silk with relics and other sacred objects, the power of such expensive and rare silks to signal sanctity was present.35 The particular assemblage of motifs in this fragmentary fresco (provisionally due to its state of preservation) reveals processes working in accord with the cultural logics followed by all agents in the twelfth-century Kingdom of Jerusalem. The material conditions manifested in these remains of the refectory are “central to [colonial] negotiations, material culture being the point at which aesthetic, social and cosmological values met and merged, creating new forms of miraculation.”36 In that way, the components that survive show that merging, where Latin Christians, Muslims and eastern Christians created new, common ground—naturally, we have no information concerning Muslims in the refectory.37 The fresco reveals aspects identifiable from 34 Alicia Walker, “Patterns of Flight: Middle Byzantine Adoption of the Chinese Feng Huang Bird,” Ars Orientalis 38 (2010): 189–216; and Walker, The Emperor and the World: Exotic Elements and the Imaging of Middle Byzantine Imperial Power, Ninth to Thirteenth Centuries C.E., Cambridge University Press, 2012. 35 See Nino Zchomelidse, “The Aura of the Numinous and Its Reproduction: Medieval Paintings of the Savior in Rome and Latium,” Memoirs of the American Academy in Rome 55 (2010): 226–32, on the numinousness of veils and curtains. The use of textiles as currency along the Silk Road and beyond may have added an even greater sense of wealth and prestige. See Helen Wang, “Textiles as Money on the Silk Road?” Journal of the Royal Asiatic Society 23.2 (2013): 165–74, and other articles in that issue of the Journal. 36 See Chris Gosden, Archaeology and Colonialism: Cultural Contact from 5000 BC to the Present (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004), 82–3. 37 On Muslims at the tomb of Mary, see Ora Limor, “Sharing Sacred Space: Holy Places in Jerusalem between Christianity, Judaism and Islam,” in In Laudem Hierosolymitani: Studies in Crusades and Medieval Culture in Honour of Benjamin Z. Kedar, ed. Iris Shagrir, Roni Ellenblum and Jonathan Riley-Smith (Aldershot, 2007), 219–31, esp. 220; and Augustin Arce, “Culte islamique au tombeau de la Vierge,” Atti del Congresso Assunzionistico Orientale: organizzato dalla custodia di terra santa, Gerusalemme 8-11-XII-1950 (Jerusalem: Tipografia dei Patri Francescani, 1951), 181–85.

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both cultures, broadly speaking: decorating a refectory with an epiphany of God, painted curtains in the dado, recalling St. Augustine, acanthus rolls as a central ornamental motif, all these can be claimed for Latin Christian cultural conventions; while the Deesis, particularly in refectories, and the silk hangings recall strongly Byzantine and eastern Christian cultural modes. The “new forms of miraculation” are noteworthy, because the innovatory aspects of the (now-abridged) fresco exist in a “ground” newly formed by the meeting and merging of different forms of Christianity in the Middle East in this period. This “middle ground” belongs to neither Latin nor eastern Christians, but represents a distinct zone of merging of the two. All the while, one must recognize that the example of St. Mary’s is weighted toward Benedictine and Cluniac cultural norms, so the context is never an equal sharing or contribution, but rather each case of a middle-ground expression chooses and extracts (and often misrepresents) elements of the other’s practice, beliefs and forms. The practice of creating a middle ground is not based on symmetry between grounds to form a harmonious middle; dissimilarity and misunderstanding lead productively to a new expression of understanding of the other, if not acculturation or accommodation.38 In the case of St. Mary, any conclusions have to be tentative—the remains are too fragmentary to permit certainty. However, the pieces of material evidence extant can reveal some of the meanings the full program once had. A Cluniac (literal or derivative) refectory transplanted to Jerusalem was clearly not the same as in France. Elements did translate, but meanings naturally shifted from France to Jerusalem, as in the case of the valences attributed to silk hangings in different contexts, as did iconographical choices, in the selection of a Deesis over a maiestas domini. The partial program reveals another cognitive geography that englobed the motherhouse and Rome, Byzantium and the east (e.g., Georgia and regions east of Jerusalem), as well as Crusader sites throughout Jerusalem (the lintel at the Holy Sepulchre and the acanthus band each contain “resurrection sites” this way). It also encompassed temporal modes within that geography, from the paradigmatic dining room of St. Augustine to its reminiscence at Cluny by Odo, from the venerable antiquity of an iconography like the Deesis to the silken decorative motifs of centuries past, motifs and materials that must have recalled precious relics and, consequently, special acts of seeing. These aspects may have been expanded with other scenes on the other walls, now lost, if one can judge by the examples in France and Italy— perhaps scenes from Acts or figures from Cluny’s prestigious past, and others 38

For this model, see Richard White, The Middle Ground: Indians, Empires, and Republics in the Great Lakes Region, 1650–1815, rev. ed. (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2011).

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were possible, too. But in the borderless Christianity exemplified in this project, time and place were potentially spanned in the ritual world of this newly furnished monastery.39 References Arce, Augustin. “Culte islamique au tombeau de la Vierge.” Atti del Congresso Assunzionistico Orientale: organizzato dalla custodia di terra santa, Gerusalemme 8-11-XII-1950, 181–85. Jerusalem: Tipografia dei Patri Francescani, 1951. Bagatti, Bellarmino. Gli antichi edifici sacri de Betlemme. Jerusalem: Studium Biblicum Franciscanum, 1952. Bardzieva-Trajkovska, Donka. “New Elements of the Painted Programme in the Narthex at Nerezi.” Zograf 29 (2002–2003): 35–46. Bilban Yalçin, Asnû. “Un affresco con la ‘deesis’ nella Santa Sofia di Iznik (Nicea).” In Milion II. Studi e ricerche d’arte bizantina: Costantinopoli e l’arte delle province orientali, edited by Fernanda de’ Maffei, Claudia Barsanti and Alessandra G. Guidobaldi, 369–89. Rome: Rari Nantes, 1990. Canepa, Matthew P. “Distant Displays of Power: Understanding Cross-Cultural Interaction among the Elites of Rome, Sasanian Iran, and Sui-Tang China.” Ars Orientalis 38 (2010): 121–54. Canepa, Matthew P. The Two Eyes of the Earth: Art and Ritual of Kingship between Rome and Sasanian Iran. Berkeley: University of California Press, 2009. Carr, Annemarie Weyl. “Gospel Frontispieces from the Comnenian Period.” Gesta 21, no. 1 (1982): 3–20. Carr, Annemarie Weyl. “The Mural Paintings of Abu Ghosh and the Patronage of Manuel Comnenus in the Holy Land.” In Crusader Art in the Twelfth Century, edited by Jaroslav Folda, 215–43. BAR International Series 152, Oxford: B.A.R., 1982. Caskey, Jill. “Stuccoes from the Early Norman Period in Sicily: Figuration, Fabrication and Integration.” Medieval Encounters 17, nos. 1–2 (2011): 80–119. Coccia, Stefano. “Abbazia di Fossanova: Indagini archeologiche nel refettorio.” Archeologia medievale 24 (1997): 55–86. Constable, Giles. The Letters of Peter the Venerable. 2 vols. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1967.

39 On the universalist claims of the order, see, for example, David Nirenberg, “Engaging Order and Exclusion: Reflections on a Recent Book by Dominique Iogna-Prat,” Early Medieval Europe 13, no. 4 (2005): 387–94.

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Cutler, Anthony. “Under the Sign of the Deēsis: On the Question of Representativeness in Medieval Art and Literature.” Dumbarton Oaks Papers 41 (1987): 145–54. Delaborde, Henri-François, ed. Chartes de Terre Sainte provenant de l’Abbaye de N.D. de Josaphat. Paris: E. Thorin, 1880. Delisle, Léopold. Inventaire des manuscrits de la Bibliothèque Nationale. Fonds de Cluni. Paris: H. Champion, 1884. Dilley, Paul C. “Textual Aesthetics: Dipinti and the Early Byzantine Epigraphic Habit.” In The Red Monastery Church: Beauty and Asceticism in Upper Egypt, edited by Elizabeth S. Bolman, 175–82. New Haven: Yale University Press, 2016. Dinter, Peter, ed. Liber tramitis aevi Odilonis abbatis. Corpus Consuetudinum Monasticarum. Vol. 10. Siegburg: Schmitt, 1980. Djobadze, Wachtang Zizischwili. “Four Deësis Themes in the Church of Oški.” Oriens Christianus 72 (1988): 168–82. Eastmond, Antony and Zaza Skhirtladze. “Udabno Monastery in Georgia: Innovation, Conservation and the Reinterpretation of Medieval Art.” Iconographica 7 (2008): 23–43. Folda, Jaroslav. The Art of the Crusaders in the Holy Land, 1098–1187. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995. Garufi, Carlo A. “Le donazioni del Conte Enrico di Paternò al monastero di S. Maria di valle Giosefat.” Revue de l’Orient Latin 9 (1902): 206–29. Gosden, Chris. Archaeology and Colonialism: Cultural Contact from 5000 BC to the Present. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004. Grabar, Oleg, and Benjamin Z. Kedar, eds. Where Heaven and Earth Meet: Jerusalem’s Sacred Esplanade. Jerusalem-Austin: Yad Ben-Zvi Press-University of Texas Press, 2009. Hallinger, Kassius, ed. Consuetudines cluniacensium antiquiores cum redactionibus derivatis. Corpus Consuetudinum Monasticarum. Vol. 7 in 4 pts. Siegburg: F. Schmitt, 1983–86. Hirschfeld, Yizhar. The Judean Desert Monasteries in the Byzantine Period. New Haven: Yale University Press, 1992. Hodges, Richard, ed. San Vincenzo al Volturno. The 1980–1986 Excavations. Parts I and II. Archaeological Monographs of the British School at Rome, nos. 7 and 9. London: British School at Rome, 1993 and 1995. Huygens, Robert B. C., ed. Willelmi Tyrensis Archiepiscopi Chronicon. Corpus Christianorum Continuatio Mediaevalis. Vols. 63 and 63A. Turnhout: Brepols, 1986. Immerzeel, Mat. Identity Puzzles: Medieval Christian Art in Syria and Lebanon. Orientalia Lovaniensia Analecta, 184. Leuven: Peeters, 2009. Johns, Cedric N. “The Abbey of St. Mary in the Valley of Jehoshaphat, Jerusalem.” Quarterly of the Department of Antiquities in Palestine 8 (1939): 117–36.

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Skhirtladze, Zaza, ed. Samonastro tskhovreba udabnoshi: gareja da kristianuli aghmosavleti = Desert Monasticism: Gareja and the Christian East. Papers from an International Symposium, Tbilisi University, September 2000. Tbilisi: Gareja Studies Center, 2001. Splendeur des Sassanides. L’empire perse entre Rome et la Chine [224–642]. Brussels: Musées royaux d’art et d’histoire, 1993. Stephenson, Paul. “Images of the Bulgar-Slayer: Three Art Historical Notes.” Byzantine and Modern Greek Studies 25 (2001): 44–68. Steppan, Thomas. “Die Mosaiken des Athosklosters Vatopaidi. Stilkritische und ikonographische Überlegungen.” Cahiers archéologiques 42 (1994): 87–122. Tarzi, Zemaryalai. L’architecture et le décor rupestre des grottes de Bamiyan. 2 vols. Paris: Imprimerie nationale, 1977. Tractatus de Reliquiis S. Stephani Cluniacum allatis. In Recueil des historiens des croisades, Historiens occidentaux. 5 vols. Paris: Imprimerie royale, 1844–95. Velmans, Tania. “L’image de la Deesis dans les églises de Georgie et dans celles d’autres regions du monde byzantine.” Cahiers archéologiques 29 (1980–81): 47–102. Velmans, Tania. “L’image de la Deesis dans les églises de Georgie et dans celles d’autres regions du monde byzantine,” part 2. Cahiers archéologiques 31 (1983): 129–73. Velmans, Tania. “Observations sur quelques peintures murales en Syrie et Palestine et leur composante byzantine et orientale.” Cahiers archéologiques 42 (1994): 123–38. Walker, Alicia. “Patterns of Flight: Middle Byzantine Adoption of the Chinese Feng Huang Bird.” Ars Orientalis 38 (2010): 189–216. Walker, Alicia. The Emperor and the World: Exotic Elements and the Imaging of Middle Byzantine Imperial Power, Ninth to Thirteenth Centuries C.E. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2012. Walter, Christopher. “Two Notes on the Deësis,” Revue des études byzantines 26 (1968): 311–36. Walter, Christopher. “Further Notes on the Deësis.” Revue des études byzantines 28 (1970): 161–87. Wang, Helen. “Textiles as Money on the Silk Road?” Journal of the Royal Asiatic Society 23, no. 2 (2013): 165–74. Weiskotten, Herbert T., ed. and trans. Sancti Augustini Vita scripta a Possidio Episcopo. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1919. White Jr., Lynn Townsend. “A Forged Letter concerning the Existence of Latin Monks at St. Mary’s Jehoshaphat before the First Crusade.” Speculum 9, no. 4 (1934): 404–7. White, Richard. The Middle Ground: Indians, Empires, and Republics in the Great Lakes Region, 1650–1815. Revised edition. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2011. Yiannias, John J. “The Refectory Paintings of Mount Athos: An Interpretation.” In The Byzantine Tradition after the Fall of Constantinople, edited by John J. Yiannias, 269– 340. Charlottesville: University Press of Virginia, 1991.

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Zchomelidse, Nino. “The Aura of the Numinous and Its Reproduction: Medieval Paintings of the Savior in Rome and Latium.” Memoirs of the American Academy in Rome 55 (2010): 221–63. Zervou Tognazzi, Ioanna. “Deesis: interpretazione del termine e sua presenza nell’iconografia bizantina.” In Milion II. Studi e ricerche d’arte bizantina: Costantinopoli e l’arte delle province orientali, edited by Fernanda de’ Maffei, Claudia Barsanti and Alessandra G. Guidobaldi, 391–422. Rome: Rari Nantes, 1990.

Chapter 5

Orthodox Monasteries under Lusignan Rule Relations with Others, Relations with Their Own Annemarie Weyl Carr Like Erica Cruikshank Dodd, and very much in her footsteps, I have endeavoured to draw the art of local eastern Mediterranean Christians into visibility from behind the broad screen of fascination with the Crusaders’ visual culture in the Levant. My concern has been with the Orthodox Greeks of the island of Cyprus, conquered in 1191 during the Third Crusade and ruled for three centuries (1196–1489) as an independent kingdom by the Lusignans, a French Catholic family of career crusaders,1 before a century under Venetian control (1489– 1570). Like Dodd’s quest, mine has led often to monastic churches. This chapter in her honour probes the climate of patronage for Orthodox monasteries under Lusignan rule. Monasteries had flourished in Cyprus under Byzantium.2 The sequence of richly frescoed aristocratic foundations from the final century and a half of Byzantine rule is well known;3 behind these institutions, however, lay numbers of smaller ones, tiny communities that flickered into visibility around

1 Cyprus fell to Richard I Lion Heart of England, who sold it first to the Templars and then in 1192 to the sometime king of Jerusalem, Guy de Lusignan, whose brother and successor, Aimery, was a granted crown by the Emperor Henry VI von Hohenstaufen in 1196: see Peter W. Edbury, The Kingdom of Cyprus and the Crusades, 1191–1374 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991), 1–12, 31. 2 The fullest history of the Orthodox Church of Cyprus remains John Hackett, A History of the Orthodox Church of Cyprus (London: Methuen, 1901; repr. New York: Burt Franklin, 1972). On the surge of foundations in the Komnenian period see Tassos Papacostas, “Monastic Estates in the Middle Byzantine Period: Evidence from Cyprus for Local and Overseas Landowners,” in Medieval Cyprus. A Place of Cultural Encounter, ed. Sabine Rogge and Michael Grünbart (Münster, New York: Waxman, 2015), 123–48; also Papacostas, “Byzantine Cyprus: The Testimony of Its Churches, 650–1200” 3 vols. (PhD diss., University of Oxford, 1999), 1:106, and passim; Catia Galatariotou, The Making of a Saint: The Life, Times and Sanctification of Neophytos the Recluse (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991), 57–59. 3 Well-preserved examples include especially St. John Chrysostom, Koutsovendis, the Panagia Phorbiotissa, Asinou, the Holy Apostles, Perachorio, the Enkleistra of St. Neophytos near Tala in the Paphos District, and the Panagia tou Arakos, Lagoudera, on which see Andreas Stylianou and Judith A. Stylianou, The Painted Churches of Cyprus. Treasures of Byzantine Art, 2nd ed. (Nicosia: A. G. Leventis Foundation, 1997).

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a founding hermit or troglodyte, taking root as they attracted elite support.4 Exemplary of these is the Enkleistra founded by St. Neophytos (1134–after 1214), whose life spanned the Crusader conquest.5 Neophytos attracted the loyalty of local archontes, who sustained his community and supplied it with books; yet more eminent support came from the bishop of Paphos, a Constantinopolitan aristocrat who underwrote the establishment of Neophytos’ monastery, and may have sponsored the superb frescoes of 1183 that adorned it.6 Neophytos linked the frescoes with the very holiness of the site: “because of the holy and august icons painted in it,” he wrote of his cave hermitage, it “maintains the full measure of a holy place of prayer.”7 The class of people upon whom Neophytos depended were precisely those most severely devastated by the Latin conquest.8 In 1191 their largesse stopped; in large numbers, they either fled the island, or were reduced to poverty. What it meant to a monastic institution to be thus stripped of its wealthy and 4 On the smaller communities, see especially Athanasios Papageorghiou, “Λαξευτὰ ἀσκητήρια καὶ μοναστήρια τῆς Κύπρου,” Επετηρίδα Κέντρου Μελετών Ιεράς Μονής Κύκκου 4 (1999): 33–70; Nikolas Bakirtzis, “Locating Byzantine Monasteries: Spatial Considerations and Strategies in the Rural Landscape,” in Experiencing Byzantium. Papers from the 44th Spring Symposium of Byzantine Studies, Newcastle and Durham, April 2011, ed. Claire Nesbitt and Mark Jackson (Farnham, Surrey: Ashgate, 2013), 113–32, esp. 117–22. 5 Galaratiotou, Making of a Saint; Cyril Mango and Ernest J. W. Hawkins, “The Hermitage of St. Neophytos and Its Wall Paintings,” Dumbarton Oaks Papers 20 (1966): 119–206. 6 Galatariotou, Making of a Saint, 168–75. 7 Catia Galatariotou, trans., “Neophytos: Testamentary Rule of Neophytos for the Hermitage of the Holy Cross near Ktima in Cyprus,” in Byzantine Monastic Foundation Documents: A Complete Translation of the Surviving Founders’ Typika and Testaments, 5 vols., ed. John Thomas and Angela Constantinides Hero (Washington, DC: Dumbarton Oaks, 2000), 4:1338– 73, esp. 1370. 8 On the fate of the archons under the early Lusignans, see Angel Nicolaou-Konnari, “Greeks,” in Cyprus. Society and Culture 1191–1374, ed. Angel Nicolaou-Konnari and Chris Schabel (Leiden: Brill, 2005), 13–62, esp. 41–57. Nicolaou-Konnari’s argument here that some portion of the Greek propertied class retained a degree of prominence under the Lusignans has been reinforced by Alexander Beihammer, Griechische Briefe und Urkunden aus dem Zypern der Kreuzfahrzeit. Die Formularsammlung eines königliches Sekretärs im Vaticanus Palatinus Graecus 367, Zyprisches Forschungszentrum Quellen und Studien zur Geschichte Zyperns 57 (Nicosia: Cyprus Research Centre, 2007), excellently summarized in Beihammer, “Gruppenidentität und Selbstbewahrehmung im zyprischen Griechentum der frühen Frankenzeit,” Jahrbuch der österreichischen Byzantinistik 56 (2006): 205–37, and by her own conclusions in Angel Nicolaou-Konnari and Chris Schabel, “Limassol under Latin Rule,” in Lemessos: A History of Limassol in Cyprus from Antiquity to the Ottoman Conquest, ed. Angel Nicolaou-Konnari and Chris Schabel (Newcastle upon Tyne: Cambridge Scholars Press, 2015), 195–361, esp. 197–98, that the archontes of Limassol had decided already before Richard I The Lionheart landed that they would support him rather than the Byzantine usurper, Isaac Komnenos.

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influential patrons emerges vividly in Neophytos’ writings. The bishop had fled back to Constantinople, the aristocrats had abandoned their estates, and Neophytos was forced to violate the very principles of monastic poverty and non-ownership on which he had built his institution, and acquire land to feed his monks.9 He wrote scathing letters excoriating the Latin invaders and their errant Christianity.10 His acquisition of art did not stop—some six years after the invasion the nave of his cave church was frescoed, but the style is so stark and severe after the paintings of 1183 that it seems to proclaim the advent of hard times.11 For the next three centuries, nothing more was painted there. The message has seemed clear: the advent of the Latins was harrowing for the monasteries of the Greeks. In fact, however, the monasteries did not dwindle. In sharp contrast to the Venetians on Crete, the Lusignans did not curtail the monasteries of the Orthodox in their realm, and there were more Greek houses on Cyprus at the end of their reign than at their arrival.12 Neophytos himself before his death sometime after 1214 had placed his monastery under the trusteeship of the Lusignan king;13 the wealthy monastery of Makhairas had done the same in 1210;14 and as Lusignan rule settled into its long duration, one sees Greek houses like St. Margaret Agros and St. George Mangana functioning easily within the Latin context and even petitioning the pope himself for protection.15 Clearly, for all Neophytos’ acute anxiety, the monasteries of his own Orthodox tradition did well. Yet a question remains of how they actually managed this. If obviously not overtly hostile, the new Lusignan regime was also not especially helpful.16 9 Galatariotou, trans., “Neophytos: Testamentary Rule,” 1344, 1353. 10 See Letter 4 in Paris, BnF, MS gr. 1335, reproduced in Chypre entre Byzance et l’Occident, IVe– XVIe siècle, exhibition catalogue, Paris, Musée du Louvre, 28 October 2012–28 January 2013, ed. Jannic Durand and Dorota Giovannoni (Paris: Musée du Louvre, 2012), 149, no. 41 (entry by Christian Förstel); translated in Claude Delaval Cobham, ed. and trans., Excerpta Cypria. Materials for a History of Cyprus (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1908, repr. New York: Kraus Reprints 1969), 9–13, esp. 10–11. 11 Mango and Hawkins, “Hermitage,” 140–60, figs. 14–49. 12 Chris Schabel, “Religion,” in Nicolaou-Konnari and Schabel, Cyprus. Society and Culture 1191–1374, 157–218, esp. 200–1; Papacostas, “Byzantine Cyprus,” 1:123. 13 Galatariotou, “Neophytos,” 1352, chapter 7. 14 Anastasius Bandy, trans., “Machairas: Rule of Neilos, Bishop of Tamasia, for the Monastery of the Mother of God of Machairas in Cyprus,” in Thomas and Constantinides Hero, Byzantine Monastic Foundation Documents, 3:1107–75, esp. 1164, ¶160, 161. 15 Nicholas Coureas, The Latin Church in Cyprus, 1313–1378, Texts and Studies in the History of Cyprus 65 (Nicosia: Cyprus Research Centre, 2010), 460–65, 466–69. 16 The valuable but sanguine assessment of royal benefactions to the Greek monasteries in Gilles Grivaud, “Les Lusignan patrons d’églises grecques,” Byzantinische Forschungen

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Land tenure was dominated by the crown and granted only in fief to nobility, restricted by definition to Latins. Those of the native aristocracy who had weathered the invasion were thus reduced not only in wealth but in legal status, and neither they nor the monastic houses could easily either grant or acquire land ownership. The Greek bishops in turn were reduced in a turbulent transition from fourteen to four, and while I know of no serious study of its impact, this curtailment can only have diminished their capacity to offer support: Neophytos’ major patron, after all had been the bishop. Especially in the first century and a half of Lusignan rule before a Greek nobility re-emerged, one wonders how the monasteries did manage, particularly small houses like Neophytos’ that were—on principle—land-poor. Dearth of documentary evidence about the monasteries’ internal life has drawn attention instead to visual data. A possible paradigm for their adaptation to Lusignan rule has been offered by Gilles Grivaud’s study of the church of the Panagia Phorbiotissa at Asinou.17 Aligning the evidence preserved in the marginal notations of Asinou’s Synaxarion, Paris, Bibliothèque Nationale (BnF), MS gr. 1590,18 with the imagery of its famous frescoes, Grivaud directed attention from the style of the paintings to their social testimony. Asinou was founded by an aristocrat with Constantinopolitan connections, who had it adorned in 1105/6 by an outstanding painter with Christological scenes and— in the sanctoral cycle—an honour guard of warrior saints in courtly chlamydes like the one he himself wore in his portrait. By 1115, the church was serving a monastery with a titled abbot; at some time in the ensuing decades it acquired a narthex, and it was there two generations later, shortly before the Latin conquest of 1191, that Asinou received its next adornment: the dashing mural icon of St. George (Fig. 5.1). Its donor, identified in the inscription as a healer of horses and thus as a professional man rather than an aristocrat, was perhaps not rich enough to sponsor a full mural cycle, but the painter he retained and 29 (2007): 257–69, has been more deliberately reviewed by Ludivine Voisin, “Francs de Chypre et Monastères Grecs: Le Jus Patronatus en Question,” Cahiers du Centre d’Études Chypriotes 43 (2013): 393–404. 17 Gilles Grivaud, “Fortunes and Misfortunes of a Small Byzantine Foundation,” in Asinou across Time. The Architecture and Murals of the Panagia Phorbiotissa, Cyprus, ed. Annemarie Weyl Carr and Andreas Nicolaïdès, Dumbarton Oaks Studies 43 (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press for Dumbarton Oaks, 2012), 13–36. 18 A Synaxarion for September through January, the manuscript was completed in 1062/63, probably in Palestine, and seems to have become a possession of the monastery at Asinou already in the early twelfth century: see Costas N. Constantinides and Robert Browning, Dated Greek Manuscripts from Cyprus to the Year 1570, Dumbarton Oaks Studies 30, Cyprus Research Centre Texts and Studies of the History of Cyprus 18 (Washington, DC: Dumbarton Oaks, 1993), 49–53, cat. 1.

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Figure 5.1 Narthex, view southward showing the mural icon of St. George, Anastasia Saramalyna to its right, the Latin Lady above it, and around them the paintings of 1332/33 showing the Last Judgment and saints, Panagia Phorbiotissa, Asinou Photograph: Gerald L. Carr

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the pigments used remain superb. His icon remained alone, though. Patronage ceased, damages occurred to the church’s fabric, and artistic activity remained in abeyance for a full century after the conquest. It was resumed around 1290 by a local widow named Anastasia Saramalyna, who memorialized her intervention with a second mural icon, just to St. George’s right, showing her own name saint and a portrait of herself. Neither the pigments employed in her icon nor its painter are as sophisticated as those of the St. George, and she herself wears the garb of a well-to-do local peasant. Though wealthy, she belongs to a new class of supporter. Anastasia’s icon was soon followed by a second, just above the fresco of St. George. It, too, was given by a widow (Fig. 5.1; see also Fig. 6.13).19 She is portrayed in her icon, kneeling at the right of an enthroned Virgin whose Child turns toward two young boys who kneel at her left. The woman’s close-fitting crimson dress and black veil identify her as a noble and a Latin. The conclusive proof of new support for Asinou, however, comes not with her portrait or from the Latin aristocracy. In 1332/33, the entire narthex was frescoed in an engulfing cloak of colour as comprehensive as that of 1105/6 in the church itself. It embraces the earlier icons, including the Latin one. The sponsors of this impressive program are identified in a now-fragmentary inscription as the abbot and fathers of the monastery and ὁ κοινὸς λαός, “the common people.”20 “Common people” can mean “laity,” but above all it means the untitled laity— literally the commoners (on this term see also ch. 6). And indeed, along with the portraits of seven monks, there are portraits of three further lay people, two men and a woman, presumably the leading donors of what must have been a broad roster of smaller lay contributors. The narthex was the space in a monastic church accessible to the laity; the new murals adorn it in a sense as the church of the laity. The style and pigments are local, the saints are locally venerated holy figures, and the iconography addresses lay concerns. The images in the narthex proclaim the emergence of a new class of patron, Orthodox like the founder, but no longer titled. These donors speak not as individuals but together as a group, sharing both the cost and the rewards of their patronage, and claiming the space in which their own engagement with the monastery took place.

19

On this figure, see Sophia Kalopissi-Verti, “The Murals of the Narthex: The Paintings of the Late Thirteenth and Fourteenth Centuries,” in Weyl Carr and Nicolaïdès, Asinou across Time, 122–208, esp. 122–30. 20 Kalopissi-Verti, 176: Ἀνιστ[ορήθη…] ἐν τῆς αὐτῆς μονῆς κ(αὶ) Θεοφίλου […] καὶ κοινοῦ λαοῦ […] στερ[…] καὶ τάχα ἱστοριογράφου ὑπὸ πόνου τρ[ . . ] ἀμὴν, ἔτους ,ςωμα’ ἰνδικτιῶνος α’.

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Such shared patronage by the common people has been found in many Byzantine communities, and at least one instance in Cyprus antedates the Latin occupation.21 Characteristically, however, it occurs in village churches; only rarely is it found in monastic ones.22 Asinou, in sum, shows a renegotiation of the monastery’s relationship with its supporters. The aristocracy is still there, in the person of the Latin lady. But she has not stepped into the place of the old Byzantine archontes. Far more decisive is the institution’s newly forged relationship with the surrounding rural society, both the named and the anonymous.23 Seen as a paradigm, then, Asinou suggests that the survival of the monasteries was not just a matter of aristocratic support, now necessarily Latin, but of the altered relationship of the institutions with their own, Orthodox laity. Asinou’s story invites comparison with other institutions. Scholarly attention to patronage in the Greek monasteries has focused hitherto on the evidence of Latin commissions, because they are unexpected, and because—to the extent that they survive—they are unexpectedly mingled artistically, acknowledging local taste: Latins did not give outspokenly Gothic gifts to the Greek houses. But being mingled, the works are hard to interpret. We don’t know why the Latin lady installed her icon in Asinou, and can only guess whether she intended its “Schutzmantelmadonna” imagery to set her apart as lordly and Latin or expected the visual rhyme of Mary’s and St. George’s capes to merge in a message of mutuality. Nonetheless, her 21 See Kalopissi-Verti, 178–79; Kalopissi-Verti, “Collective Patterns of Patronage in the Late Byzantine Village: The Evidence of Church Inscriptions,” in Donation et donateurs dans le monde byzantin: Actes du colloque international organisé à l’Université de Fribourg (Fribourg 13–15 mars 2008), ed. Jean-Michel Spieser and Elisabeth Yota, Réalités Byzantines 14 (Paris: Desclée de Brouwer, 2012), 125–40; Kalopissi-Verti, “Church Foundations by Entire Villages (13th–16th c.), A Short Note,” Zbornik Radova 44 (2007): 333–40; Kalopissi-Verti, Dedicatory Inscriptions and Donor Portraits in Thirteenth-Century Churches of Greece, Denkschriften, Österreichische Akademie der Wissenschaften, Philosophisch-historische Klasse, Band 226 (Vienna: Österreichische Akademie der Wissenschaften, 1992). The example in Cyprus is in the apse of 1178 at the Holy Cross, Pelendri: see Stylianou and Stylianou, Painted Churches, 507–8, figs. 302–4. Sharon E. J. Gerstel, Rural Lives and Landscape in Late Byzantium. Art, Archaeology, and Ethnography (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2015), gives a wonderfully compelling picture of village life in medieval Greece, though I believe city and village were less separate in Cyprus than in Greece. 22 See in this regard the inventories compiled by Sophia Kalopissi-Verti in note 21 above, and Angeliki E. Laiou, “The Peasant as Donor (13th–14th Centuries),” in Donation et donateurs donateurs dans le monde byzantin, 107–24, esp. 119. 23 “Village society was not egalitarian,” iterates Jacques Lefort, “The Rural Economy, Seventh– Twelfth Centuries,” in The Economic History of Byzantium from the Seventh through the Fifteenth Century, 3 vols., ed. Angeliki E. Laiou (Washington, DC: Dumbarton Oaks, 2002), 1:231–310, esp. 283. There were always the γέροντες, κρείττονες, or μεγάλοι (elders, or the better or great people) as well as the μικροί (the little people), and villagers of great wealth lived alongside impoverished ones.

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patronage was not unique. At much the same date as her icon, Latin images appear in both of the great eleventh-century domed monastery churches of the Troodos mountains, St. Nicholas of the Roof near Kakopetria and St. John Lampadistes in Kalopanagiotis. Intense speculation has eddied around the imposing Vita panel from the narthex at Kakopetria (see Fig. 6.14). A full two metres in height, this shows St. Nicholas—identified with the epithet of the church itself as “St. Nicholas of the Roof”—flanked on either side by scenes of his life. At his feet kneel a Latin lord in chain mail, accompanied by his caparisoned horse, his wife, and his child.24 The panel’s scale, comparable to that of Italian Vita panels used as altarpieces, has prompted some speculation that it, too, was an altarpiece and that the narthex here had been appropriated as a Latin chapel. A second couple identified by their clothing as Latin is, in fact, portrayed in the narthex too, this time in fresco (Fig. 5.2).25 They appear within a campaign of paintings adorning both the narthex and the interior of the church, and attributed to the years just after 1300, very little later than the huge panel with St. Nicholas and the knight.26 They are clearly portrayed as donors. Their inscription, however, says nothing about the paintings; it is written in local Greek, and records the gift of a workshop to the monastery.27 Had the workshop or its proceeds supported the paintings, the couple would surely have said so. They must simply have seized the availability of painters to have their gift memorialized. It is fascinating to find them here, Latins speaking in the local Greek. We know from the north chapel at the Panagia Angeloktistos in Kiti that Latins availed themselves of Greek churches for burial in situations of necessity;28 we know from the complaints of the Latin clergy that their

24 See most recently Michalis Olympios, “Stripped from the Altar, Recycled, Forgotten: The Altarpiece in Lusignan Cyprus,” Gesta 53, no. 1 (2014): 47–72; Cipro e l’Italia al tempo di Bisanzio: L’icona Grande di San Nicola tis Stegis del XIII. secolo restaurata a Roma, Exhibition catalogue, Rome, Palazzo Venezia, 23 June–26 July 2009, ed. Ioannes A. Eliades (Nicosia: Byzantine Museum of the Cultural Foundation of Archbishop Makarios III, 2009). 25 Kalopissi-Verti, “Murals of the Narthex,” 125–26, fig. 5.9. 26 Stylianou and Stylianou, Painted Churches, 65–66. 27 Andreas Stylianou and Judith A. Stylianou, “Ἐπανεξέτασις τῆς ἐν τῷ νάρθηκι τοῦ ναοῦ τοῦ ἁγίου Νικολάου τῆς Στέγης κτητορικῆς ἐπιγραφῆς,” Κυπριακαὶ Σπουδαί 15 (1951): 83–88. The gift of a workshop is recorded frequently in the cartularies of Greek monasteries: see for example Lisa Bénou, Le Codex B du Monastère-Saint-Jean-Prodrome (Serrès), A (XIIIe– XVe siècles) (Paris: Association Pierre Belon, 1998), 136 #68; Paolo Odorico, Le Codex B du Monastère Saint-Jean-Prodrome (Serrès), B (XVe–XIXe siècles) (Paris: Association Pierre Delon, 1998), 21 and 53 #8, 55 #9, 72 #15. 28 Brunehilde Imhaus, ed., Lacrimae Cypriae. Les larmes de Chypre, ou Recueil des insciptions lapidaires pour la plupart funéraires de la période franque et vénitienne de l’île de Chypre, 2 vols. (Nicosia: Department of Antiquities, 2004), 1:142–43.

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Figure 5.2 East wall of narthex showing the Latin donor couple, St. Nicholas of the Roof, Kakopetria Photograph: Annemarie Weyl Carr

co-religionists found the intimacy of the Greek churches appealing;29 and reports of polylingual Latins on Cyprus are unexceptional.30 Nonetheless, the Latins lived largely among themselves in the cities,31 and for all formal purposes, language and creed were definitive social identifiers.32 The big panel, too, for all its chivalric visual language, is labelled throughout in Greek. Both must address not a Latin but a Greek community. Both portraits belong, moreover, 29 Nicholas Coureas and Christopher Schabel, eds., The Cartulary of the Cathedral of Holy Wisdom of Nicosia, Cyprus Research Centre Texts and Studies in the History of Cyprus 25 (Nicosia: Cyprus Research Centre, 1997), 44, 312–13 for a letter of May, 1368, in which Pope Urban V responds to King Peter I de Lusignan’s complaint that many noblewomen in his realm preferred to attend the divine offices in “the churches of Greeks and schismatics.” The Pope ordered that such people be punished. 30 On language in Cyprus see Gilles Grivaud, “Literature,” in Cyprus. Society and Culture 1191–1374, ed. Angel Nicolaou-Konnari and Chris Schabel (Leiden: Brill, 2005), 219–84, esp. 220–25. 31 See Jean Richard, “Le peuplement latin et syrien en Chypre au XIIIe siècle,” Byzantinische Forschungen 7 (1979): 157–73, esp. 162; repr. Richard, Croisés, missionaires et voyageurs (London: Variorum, 1983), article VII, who notes that the very small number of Latin parishes outside the cities speaks for only slight rural Latin settlement. 32 See the significance of language as an ethnic marker in the churches of Famagusta: Michele Bacci, “Patterns of Church Decoration in Famagusta (Fourteenth to Sixteenth Centuries),” in Famagusta. Art and Architecture, ed. Annemarie Weyl Carr, Mediterranean Nexus 1100–1700, 2 (Turnhout: Brepols, 2015), 203–76.

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like that of the Latin lady at Asinou, to a larger project of adornment, which extends in this case beyond the narthex to include the naos, the very heart of the monastery itself. To whatever degree the Latin patrons participated in it, the project must have drawn its initiative and funding from a different source: not a Latin, but a local and Orthodox one. We do not know the source of the funding for the program at Kakopetria. A fuller view is offered by the other ancient domed Troodos monastery, known now as St. John Lampadistes, in Kalopanagiotis. Already a decade or two before the icons of the 1290s at St. Nicholas of the Roof, Kakopetria, and the Panagia Phorbiotissa, Asinou, the cavernous interior of its katholikon was painted. It is the earliest of the Lusignan-era fresco programs. In the scene of the Crucifixion, and again as a repeated pattern on the iconostasis, it displays the motif of a rampant silver lion on a red field.33 This was the heraldic crest of the Lusignans. Why it should recur here in an Orthodox monastery high in the Troodos has tantalized scholars. To Andreas Stylianou, who first proposed an answer, it could only be because the Latins had seized control of the monastery.34 The historiography of Cyprus is dotted with claims that the Latins appropriated Orthodox monasteries, but in fact, aside from the one ambiguous instance of Stavrovouni, the Latins did not appropriate monasteries.35 On the other hand, monasteries did elect the king as their trustee, as we have seen, and by the mid-fourteenth century, one of them—the monastery of Makhairas—had become a place of retreat and recreation for the royal court.36 The Setrachos valley in which Kalopanagiotis lies was a favoured area for the kinds of hunting 33

On the church, see Athanasios Papageorghiou, The Monastery of Saint John Lampadistis in Kalopanayiotis, trans. Richard Gill (Nicosia: Bank of Cyprus Cultural Foundation, Holy Bishopric of Morphou, 2008); Annemarie Weyl Carr, “The ‘Holy Sepulcher’ of St. John Lampadistes in Cyprus,” in Новы Иерусалимы. Иеротолу и Иконография. New Jerusalems. Hierotopy and Iconography, ed. Alexei Lidov (Moscow: Indrik, 2009), 475–88; on the iconostasis see Papageorghiou, The Monastery of Saint John Lampadistis, fig. 57; Grivaud, “Les Lusignans patrons d’églises grecques,” 261; Stylianou and Stylianou, Painted Churches, fig. 182. 34 Andreas Stylianou and Judith A. Stylianou, “Donors and Dedicatory Inscriptions, Supplicant and Supplications in the Painted Churches of Cyprus,” Jahrbuch der österreichischen byzantinischen Gesellschaft 9 (1960): 97–128, esp. 109. 35 See Nicholas Coureas, The Latin Church in Cyprus, 1195–1312 (Aldershot: Ashgate, 1997), 225, on the two cases of Stavrovouni and Episkopi in which this may have occurred. 36 Explicitly attested at the end of the century by a marginal note of 1385 on folio 101v of its Typikon, royal visitation is implied already in the famous story related by Leontios Makhairas of the Tochni relic’s cure of the dumbness imposed upon Queen Alix ca. 1340, when she insisted upon entering the monastery’s katholikon: see Ioannes P. Tsiknopoullos, Ἡ Ἱερὰ καὶ βασιλικὴ καὶ σταυροπηγιακὴ Μovὴ τῆς ὑπεραγίας Θεοτόκου Μαχαιρᾶ (Nicosia: Holy Monastery of Makhairas, 1968), 72–73; Leontios Makhairas, Recital Concerning the Sweet

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enjoyed by the court, and one wonders whether similar royal visitation might account for the precocious emergence of major patronage at its most venerable monastery. Once again, it is remarkably interesting to see the Latin lions here, but difficult to interpret. There was, however, a purely local reason why Kalopanagiotis’ domed church might have attracted patronage. Exceptionally in Byzantine tradition, it had a tomb in its sanctuary; an adjoining chapel allows its veneration (Fig. 5.3).37 It contained the remains of John Lampadistes, identified in legend as a local child whose tomb had phosphoresced and produced miracles, compelling his father to build the great domed church over it. We know absolutely nothing concrete about St. John until the later thirteenth century, when we find two Vita icons of him, both preserved in Kalopanagiotis.38 One, overpainted in the sixteenth century, occupied the big proskynetarion in his chapel until 2004, when it was removed to the museum. The other is smaller, a close replica of the first but with an added final vignette. In the larger icon, the story ends with the construction of the church, portrayed as a big domed building like the church at Kalopanagiotis. The domed building recurs in the smaller icon, but here a painter with an icon stands inside. The Vita of St. John tells how the saint had appeared posthumously in the new church, permitting a painter to produce his wonder-working icon.39 The wonder-working icon of the story must be the one long displayed in the proskynetarion; the smaller icon must have been designed to proclaim its miraculous origin. Together, the two panels suggest that during the thirteenth century the monastery at Kalopanagiotis had begun to capitalize on pilgrimage to the tomb of St. John, embellishing the site with a prominent icon, which itself soon acquired a miraculous legend. No less than the icon of St. Nicholas in Kakopetria, the icon of St. John is a mingled cultural product: the use of the Vita icon to distinguish a pilgrimage tomb is more Franciscan than Byzantine.40 Thus the question of Latin pres-

37 38 39

40

Land of Cyprus Entitled “Chronicle,” ed. and trans. Richard M. Dawkins, 2 vols. (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1932, repr. New York: AMS Press, 1980), 1:¶67–75. Papageorghiou, Monastery of Saint John Lampadistis, 20, 36. I owe thanks to Maria Paschali for drawing my attention to St. John’s tomb in the bema. Ιερά Μητρόπολις Μόρφου, 2000 χρόνια τέχνης και ἁγιότητος, exhibition catalogue, Cultural Foundation of the Bank of Cyprus, Nicosia, 2000 (Nicosia: Holy Bishopric of Morphou, 2000), 250–51, nο. 4, and 252–53, nο. 5 (entries by Christodoulos Hadjichristodoulou). The Vita is in Stavrovouni. MS 4, of 1903, copied from a seventeenth-century text. It is published, both in the original and in modern Greek, by Father Chariton Stavrovounites in Petros Lazarou, ed., Ἅγιος Ἰωάννης ὁ Λαμπαδιστὴς· Βίος–Ἡ Ἱερὰ Μονή του–Παρακλητικὸς Κανὼν (Peristerona: Ekdoseis Theomorphou, 2003), 15–20. See Nancy Patterson Ševčenko, “The Vita Icon and the Painter as Hagiographer,” Dumbarton Oaks Papers 53 (1999): 149–65, esp. 154–55; Klaus Krüger, Der frühe Bildkult des

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Figure 5.3 Northward view across the naos toward the chapel of St. John Lampadistes and the proskynetarion with his icon, St. Herakleidios in the Monastery of St. John Lampadistes, Kalopanagiotis

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ence emblematized by the silver lions remains. Nonetheless, the kings, if they had any role in Kalopanagiotis, have left no trace in local legend; St. John, by contrast, is deeply embedded in it, and his pilgrimage endures. Thus, it seems that in the pilgrimage to the tomb of St. John, the monastery developed a new way of relating to the local, lay populace of the mountains around it. Like Asinou, it renegotiated its relationship with the common people. A heavily annotated Synaxarion, Paris, BnF, MS gr. 1588, may offer a closer view of the kind of relationship between monastery and community implied by Asinou, Kakopetria, and Kalopanagiotis.41 It was produced in ca. 1112 by Klemes, monk and later hegumen of the Monastery of the Priests, known as the Agia Mone (Fig. 5.4). Located high in the western Troodos on a site once occupied by a temple of Hera and then an Early Christian basilica, the Agia Mone may be the only Cypriot monastery for which a continuous history can be postulated from late Antiquity into the modern era.42 Its foundation surely predates Nikephoros II Phokas’ reintegration of Cyprus into the Byzantine empire in 965, for it was visited in 963 by St. Athanasios of Athos, and a manuscript of John Chrysostom’s commentary on the Matthean Gospel—now Paris, BnF, MS gr. 668—was produced there in 954 by the monk Ioannes. Still—or perhaps again—in the early twelfth century the Agia Mone had a library and, in Klemes, an accomplished scribe. Klemes made an annotation in Paris, BnF, MS gr. 668 and copied both BnF, MS gr. 1588 itself and a December Menologion, now Paris, BnF, MS gr. 1531.43 Nothing further is known about the community in the Byzantine period, but its longevity and ample site tempt one to agree with the Russian monk Basil Barsky, who visited it in 1738, that it must have enjoyed significant, even imperial support.44 Klemes’ Synaxarion suggests that the prosperity of Agia Mone persisted in the Lusignan centuries, but that the monastery was sustained by a newly configured pattern of patronage. Franziskus in Italien. Gestalt und Funktionswandel des Tafelbildes im 13. und 14. Jahrhundert (Berlin: Gebr. Mann Verlag, 1992), esp. figs. 1–7, 10–16, 88. 41 Constantinides and Browning, Dated Greek Manuscripts from Cyprus, 74–81 # 7; Jean Darrouzès, “Un obituaire chypriote: Le Parisinus graecus 1588,” Κυπριακαὶ Σπουδαί 15 (1951): 23–62. 42 Papacostas, “Byzantine Cyprus,” 1:128. On the Agia Mone, see Papacostas, 2:6.B.36; Stylianos Perdikes, “Le monastère des Hiereôn (des Prêtres) à Paphos, du paganism au christianisme,” Cahiers du Centre d’Études Chypriotes 43 (2013): 227–42; Kostes Kokkinophtas, Monastery of the Priests or Aghia Mone, trans. Sofronis Sofroniou (Nicosia: Research Centre of Kykkos Monastery, 1999). 43 Constantinides and Browning, Dated Greek Manuscripts, 71–74, #6. 44 Alexander D. Grishin, ed., A Pilgrim’s Account of Cyprus: Bars’kyj’s Travels in Cyprus, Sources for the History of Cyprus 3 (Albany, NY: Greece and Cyprus Research Center, 1996), 50–52.

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Figure 5.4 Agia Mone/Monastery of the Priests, Church of St. Nicholas (seventeenth and nineteenth centuries)

The value of Klemes’ Synaxarion lies in a sequence of over 270 marginal annotations meticulously deciphered and indexed by Father Jean Darrouzès.45 They record a wide range of events—earthquakes, storms, eclipses, avalanches, coronations and deaths of rulers, defeats in battle—entered beside the day of the month on which they occurred. Some provide the year; others do not, including the notice of Klemes’ death on an unspecified November 8.46 The 148 annotations that will engage us here register commemorations and psychika, gifts to the monastery for the sake of the soul (Figs. 5.5, 5.6). Such records of deaths and donations survive from monasteries throughout the Byzantine world;47 on Cyprus, similar notations in Paris, BnF, MS gr. 1590 informed Gilles Grivaud’s history of Asinou,48 and forty notations of 1383–1461 appear in Paris, BnF, MS gr. 280 from the Polyeleotissa monastery.49 In all three Cypriot examples, the entries concentrate in the Lusignan period. With the exception of the one twelfth-century entry commemorating Klemes, those in Paris 1588 cover three and a half centuries, from 1203 to 1570, the latest one recording the loss of Nicosia to the Ottomans in 1570. Their numbers accelerate through the thirteenth century, expand explosively in the fourteenth and early fifteenth centuries, and dwindle to a trickle thereafter. Thus, they coincide precisely with the Lusignan era. For all their generically Byzantine character, the pattern of their ebb and flow binds them to the Lusignan, not the Byzantine period.50 45 46 47

Darrouzès, “Un obituaire chypriote,” 28–62. Darrouzès, 30. For an especially good inventory of surviving examples and a vivid, provocative analysis of the insight they offer into donation—or perhaps more correctly its absence—by peasants, see Laiou, “Peasant as Donor,” 107–24. 48 See above note 16. 49 Jean Darrouzès, “Notes pour servir à l’histoire de Chypre,” Κυπριακαὶ Σπουδαί 22 (1958): 223–51, esp. 223–40. 50 Papacostas, “Monastic Estates in the Middle Byzantine Period,” 136, writes: “There is for example no reason to believe that the numerous acts of donation by both local villagers and the ruling class (including the royal family) to the monastery of Hiereon

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Twenty-four entries come from the thirteenth century (Table 5.1). Each refers to one person only. All but one record that person’s death, and of the twenty-two that are decipherable, nineteen name monastics: seventeen monks and two nuns. Not until 1296 is a lay person, a man, commemorated. Two years later a second memorial for a lay man appears. This one includes for the first time a gift to the monastery.51 The gift may have assured him burial and/or commemoration at the monastery, but the ensuing entry suggests a different or perhaps additional purpose, for it records the intention of his widow Euphemia to spend her remaining days in the monastery. His gift must have obtained an adelphaton for her. A well-attested monastic tool, the adelphaton entailed a donation of goods on the condition that some or all of the income generated by them would be available as a stipend to the giver during his or her life, along with accommodation in the monastery if needed.52 To this point, Paris 1588 had been an in-house memorial register; here it expands to document a lay transaction made in life. Engagement with the lay world accelerates dramatically in the ensuing decades. By comparison with the twenty-four entries of the thirteenth century, forty-one entries referring to forty-eight people belong to the first half of the fourteenth. Once again, monastics are prominent: with twenty entries naming sixteen monks and four nuns, they equal in a half-century the nineteen recorded from the full span of the thirteenth. More significantly, they in turn are outnumbered by lay people. Thirty-three entries record three titled and twenty-nine untitled lay people. Unlike the monastics, who are cited alone in their memorials, many of the lay people also refer in their entries to family members. In twenty-two cases the principal person named is male, though many are joined in giving by a wife, mother, or daughter. But in six cases a woman is the principal figure, presumably a widow in control of her own wealth.53 The heightened presence of lay people is accompanied by the growing number of in the western Troodos during the Lusignan period, recorded in marginal notes from a twelfth-century manuscript (Paris, Bibliothèque nationale, gr. 1588), do not reflect practices inherited from the Byzantine period, when the monastery is known to have been active.” The fact that all surviving records of such benefactions belong to the Lusignan period leads me to believe that they are a product, precisely, of the distinctive conditions of that era. 51 Darrouzès, “Un obituaire chypriote,” 42 (27 April). 52 On this practice see Alice-Mary Talbot, “Old Age in Byzantium,” Byzantinische Zeitschrift 77 (1984): 267–78, esp. 276–77. 53 See Sharon E. J. Gerstel and Sophia Kalopissi-Verti, “Female Church Founders: The Agency of the Village Widow in Late Byzantium,” in Female Founders in Byzantium and Beyond, ed. Lioba Theis, Margaret Mullett, and Michael Grünbart, Wiener Jahrbuch für Kunstgeschichte 60–61 (Vienna: Böhlau Verlag, 2012), 195–212.

 1

 2

Illegible  2

 2

 8

21

33

 2

16

18

41

Royal

Female

Male

Latin titled

 1

1

1

 2

 5

19

24

Female

1

1

Male

 2

 2

 2

Male

Female

Greek titled

 4

 2

Nuns

19

 5

17

Laity

19

Monks

23

 6

14

20

 1

16

17

37

1

2

5

7

1

1

8

 5

 5

10

 1

 2

 3

13

 1

 2

 3

 2

12

22

39

19

48

3

2

2

7

1

1

8

 1

 6

21

28

 1

 5

 6

34

5

6

2

2

8

 6

16

22

 1

 3

 4

26

5

5

2

2

7

 1

19

22

42

11

53

Entries Deaths Gifts Gifts People Syna/ life / death delphoi

Entries Deaths Gifts Gifts People Syna/ life / death delphoi

Entries Deaths Gifts Gifts People Syna/ life / death delphoi

24

1348

First Half of Fourteenth Century

Thirteenth Century

Categorization of the people memorialized or recorded as donors in the thirteenth century, the first half of the fourteenth century, and the year 1348: information from Paris, Bibliothèque Nationale (BnF), MS gr. 1588

Monastic

Sum of gifts

Total

table 5.1

Orthodox Monasteries under Lusignan Rule

123

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principals who are recorded not at death, but for making gifts in life. Already among the monastics, two are not memorialized but recorded for gifts given in life, and gifts accompany three memorials. Indicative here must be the factor shared by the two living monastic donors.54 Neither can have belonged to the Agia Mone: one was the hegumen of another house and the other a nun who asked in return for her gift that she be supplied with food for the rest of her life as a synadelphe of the monastery. The term synadelphos/e, or member, akin to adelphaton, implies entry into a reciprocal relation with a monastery through a gift, in some cases as a constituent of a burial or charitable confraternity.55 The nature of the reciprocity varied. It could be spiritual, in the form of prayers or post-mortem commemoration, but it could also—as here—be material: as with Euphemia twenty-some years earlier, the nun’s gift established a life annuity. One cannot guess the situation of the one monk whose memorial includes a gift, but the other two memorials with gifts come from nuns. One did belong, and the other may well have belonged to a different, female community; their gifts must have assured them memorialization at Agia Mone. The lay people in the entries, in turn, were clearly external to the community. A full half of those recorded at death register gifts, and many more gifts come from the living. All but one entry in which the principal figure is female—living or dead—includes a donation; just half of the men’s memorials register gifts, but every record of a living male is accompanied either by a material gift or by enrolment as a synadelphos. Gift-giving had clearly become significant enough to the monastery that it assumed formal recognition in its Synaxarion. Of four men entered as synadelphoi, two bear the title of Kyr, or Lord, implying some degree of distinction in their community.56 They are the first of a slowly rising number of titled people in Paris 1588, all of whom become synadelphoi. Thus, membership must have implied prestige. How prestige translated into financial commitment is suggested by their gifts, usually an upscale but moderate 54 Darrouzès, “Un obituaire chypriote,” 40, the hieromonk Theodoulos, hegumen of the Euphoretos Monastery (26 March); 30, the nun Martha (26 October). 55 Well laid out by Grivaud, “Fortune and Misfortune,” 26–27. Whether this was the case at the Agia Mone is not specified. The ambiguity of monasteries’ obligation to their peasant donors is among the factors that prompt Laiou, “Peasant as Donor,” 114–16, to be deeply sceptical that peasant donors gave to monasteries uncoerced. It is, indeed, very difficult in Paris 1588 to know how—indeed, whether—there was any genuine reciprocity in the gift relationship here. The ambiguity extends here to all donors, however, not just the little people, and it interests me that rather than differentiating the “mikroi” from the “megaloi,” the entries of Paris, BnF, MS gr. 1588 tend instead to unite them—as I think the inscription at Asinou also amalgamated the named and portrayed donors with “ὁ κοινὸς λαός.” 56 On the term Kyr, see Kalopissi-Verti, Dedicatory Inscriptions, 34; Laiou, “Peasant as Donor,” 110, who calls kyroi “notables of some kind.”

Orthodox Monasteries under Lusignan Rule

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annual pledge: of one nomisma, a candle on a saint’s day, or oil for an icon. Both the sharp rise in the number of lay donors and the appearance of titled supporters document the monastery’s growing attentiveness to lay donation and its profitable potential. The first half of the fourteenth century culminates in 1348, the year of the Black Death. The one year of 1348 alone elicited thirty-four entries involving fifty-three people, more than in the preceding forty-seven years. Remarkable here is not the rate of mortality—just eight deaths are recorded. What is remarkable is the flood of giving. Every one of the thirty-four entries records a gift, twenty-eight from lay people and just six from monastics. Conditions in 1348 clearly provoked exceptional donation. But they did not create the pattern of lay giving. Instead, a practice of pious donation seen already in the first half of the century became in 1348 a pervasive response, as lay people sought the consolation of sacred donation that the monastery offered. If it did not create the practice of lay donation, 1348 did consolidate it. Sustained lay engagement surged throughout the second half of the fourteenth century, with seventy-nine entries representing 116 people, of whom two-thirds were laity (Table 5.2). The social range becomes broader at this point, as titled Latins appear among the donors, in some cases becoming synadelphoi like their Greek counterparts, and there is a substantial royal donation of three priests for the monastery’s staff from King Peter II (r. 1369–82).57 Equally significantly, the entries assume a novel clarity of distribution. Thirty-seven of the entries record monastics; of them, all but four are memorial notices, with two donations among the thirty-three deceased. By contrast, each of the four still-living monastics and all of the thirty-two living lay principals are recorded as making donations, for their own or a family member’s soul. Gifts at death among the laity diminish to five. This inverts the records predating the Black Death. Where gifts at death had predominated before 1348, both they and the number of lay people recorded at death plummet now. No longer dominated by death, donation emerges as a choice performed in life, no doubt more manipulable by monastic solicitation. The records of pious donation continued through the first four decades of the fifteenth century, though at a diminished pace, with fourteen monastics and nineteen lay people. What is striking is their social profile: a full third of the lay donors are now titled,58 including both Greek and Latin families, and a striking sequence of three donations come from the king. Thereafter the records cease. 57 Darrouzès, “Un obituaire chypriote,” 32 (6 December). 58 Thus Grivaud, “Fortune and Misfortune,” 28, surely correctly reads Perre on October 1 (Darrouzès, “Un obituaire chypriote,” 28–29) as the son of the Lady of Lapithos; the “son

Nuns

 1

 1

Female

Royal

 2

Male

 1

  1

  1

  1

  3

  1

  2

 1

 2

 33

  3

 2

1

 77

 35

Female

 1

 3

 5

4

5

2

 39

Latin titled

 1

Greek titled

 3

20

32

 1

 3

7

2

  1

 3

Illegible

 7

10

 3

36

 4

116

 1

 8

Female

Male

27

Male

42

33

 4

Monks

Laity

33

31

34

37

44

Monastic

79

 1

 1

 2

 1

 1

 2

 3

 3

10

10

 3

 1

 2

 2

 3

 3

 1

 2

 7

18

 3

11

14

32

 1

 1

 1

 1

 2

 2

 7

 9

12 20

 3

 1

 1

 2

 2

 2

 7

15

 1

 4

 5

1

1

2

1

1

3

 2

 1

 2

 3

 3

 3

 6

 7

21

 4

13

17

38

2

2

1

2

3

5

Entries Deaths Gifts Gifts People Syna/ life / death delphoi

Entries Deaths Gifts Gifts People Synadel/ life / death phoi

Sum of gifts

Totals

Fifteenth Century

Second Half of Fourteenth Century

 2

 2

 1

 1

 4

15

22

 1

16

17

39

 3

12

15

 1

16

17

32

1

1

1

2

5

6

3

3

1

1

4

 3

 2

 5

 1

 1

 6

17

29

17

45

2

1

3

1

1

4

Entries Deaths Gifts Gifts People Syna/ life / death delphoi

Without A Year

table 5.2 Categorization of the people memorialized or recorded as donors in the second half of the fourteenth century and the first half of the fifteenth century, and those cited by day but not year: information from Paris, BnF, MS gr. 1588

126 Carr

Orthodox Monasteries under Lusignan Rule

127

A more formal method of record-keeping may have been adopted; a major donor may have taken over; the burgeoning of village churches may have drawn lay donations away.59 Over the first two and a half centuries of Lusignan rule, though, the Synaxarion’s margins reveal a coherent and meaningful pattern of the monastery’s escalating interaction with the community around it. Though the forms of donation are Byzantine, they assume no visibility in the Byzantine period. Instead, they emerge slowly in the course of the thirteenth century, gain momentum in the decades before the Black Death, and flourish for a century thereafter. No less than Neophytos’ Enkleistra, but more emphatically, the Agia Mone seems to have found it necessary to reshape its economic relation with the world around it in the Lusignan era. As its patterns of donation shifted into visibility, they moved from the relentless and unpredictable occasion of death to elective options in the course of life, more open to monastic solicitation and peer pressure. As donation gained prestige, so did the number of titled donors. The entries in Paris 1588 reveal an organically evolving program of support responsive to their era. This raises the question of who the Agia Mone’s lay donors actually were. The vast inventory of 320 names in the notations of Paris 1588 has invited searches for evidence of once-prominent archon families or of ascendant families eventually integrated into the Frankish nobility.60 There is indeed a Sir George Synglitikos in 1397;61 John Kappadox, recorded in 1348, may have belonged to another future noble family;62 and four donors over the course of the century identified as Kyr. But no further reliable testimony to class emerges from the names, and it is rather the gifts that are indicative. These are widely diverse in value, ranging from a few small animals for eating to a mill with its adjacent orchard or—in the case of the king—priests to augment the monastery staff. Some artefacts are given—a copper vessel, a pair of shears, a blouse and two rings, and from the Latin lord John Montolif a millstone. One gift may have entailed artistic patronage: a “chapel of the Mother of God” was given by Bertem Bodin. He is a strikingly interesting figure, surely Latin, who entered

59

60 61 62

George Michael Charakouses” of 11 July (Darrouzès, 52–53) must be the son of Kyr Michael Charakouses mentioned just above. The dramatic increase in village church construction in the later fifteenth and sixteenth centuries can be appreciated in Stylianou and Stylianou, Painted Churches, which lists nineteen village and funerary churches from this period and only three monastic churches. See Nicolaou-Konnari, “Greeks,” 45–53. On the plausible prominence already in the thirteenth century of the Synglitiki, see Beihammer, Griechische Briefe und Urkunden, 61–62, and Nicolaou-Konnari, “Greeks,” 50–51. Nicolaou-Konnari, 50.

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his gift in his own hand, in fluent if phonetically spelled Greek.63 Like the donor couple in Kakopetria, he addressed the monastery in its own language. But the vast majority of the gifts fall into one type: they are animals. Of 131 donations, eighty-three include animals and fifty-six are composed entirely of large, load-bearing animals. In stark contrast to the inventories of donations at Athos or Serres, which consist largely of land, those at the Agia Mone abound in livestock.64 The limited number and small size of land donations, and the many animals stand out in Paris 1588.65 While the small tracts must accurately reflect the broken, precipitous terrain of the Troodos, the reticence to give land and the predominance of animals instead imply limited alienable land and point to a predominantly peasant population. Certainly, in the Life of the Cretan holy man John Xenos, the animals given to him came from the villagers, in contrast to the land, money, and liturgical equipment that he received from the gentry.66 Nonetheless, the gifts of animals to the Nea Mone are impressive. By far the most frequently donated animals were oxen, sometimes singly, but often as a team. A total of sixty-two oxen are recorded.67 Oxen were definitive possessions. Peasants were categorized for taxation by the number of oxen they owned—a team, just one ox, or none—and though the ownership varied widely, village communities rarely averaged significantly more than one ox per family.68 Having oxen to spare is remarkable. If the donors to the Agia Mone had little negotiable land, they clearly included families with negotiable 63 Darrouzès, “Un obituaire chypriote,” 49 (9 June). 64 See Bénou, Le Codex B du Monastère-Saint-Jean-Prodrome; Odorico, Le Codex B du Monastère-Saint-Jean-Prodrome. 65 Seventeen vineyards or portions of vineyards, four fields, two orchards, one house and garden, and two mills. In addition, King Janus gave a church and orchard for the metochion of Agiofrodisi (Darrouzès, “Un obituaire chypriote,” 22, on 18 December). The parcels of land range from two to four modioi. The plots of four to eight stremmata (the stremma was approximately equal to the modios) recorded in the 1310s at Xeropotamou on Mt. Athos, though larger, were regarded as small: Jacques Bompaire, Actes de Xéropotamou, Texte, Archives de l’Athos 3 (Paris: P. Lethielleux, 1964), 120–26, while those of 1/3 to eight modioi given to Xenophon on Athos are regarded by Laiou, “Peasant Donor,” 111, as “exiguous.” 66 Nikolaos B. Tomadakis, “Ὁ Ἅγιος Ἰωάννης ὁ Ξένος καὶ ἡ διαθήκη αὐτοῦ,” Kretika Chronika 2 (1948): 47–72. On animal donations see also Michel Kaplan, “The Evergetis Hypotyposis and the Management of Monastic Estates in the Eleventh Century,” in The Theotokos Evergetis and Eleventh-Century Monasticism, ed. Margaret Mullett and Anthony Kirby, Belfast Byzantine Texts and Translations 6.1 (Belfast: Belfast Byzantine Enterprises, 1994), 103–23, esp. 108. 67 In addition, there are fourteen cows, fifteen calves, nine mares, one colt, four donkeys, three pigs, and a great many small animals for consumption. 68 Lefort, “Rural Economy,” 231–310, esp. 245–46; Angeliki Laiou-Thomadakis, Peasant Society in the Late Byzantine Empire: A Social and Demographic Study (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1977), 173–74.

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wealth. What was promised may have been not the beasts themselves, but their labour; nonetheless, the labour was negotiable for spiritual goods. As at Asinou, substantial widows figure among the Agia Mone’s supporters. So does at least one art donor, for Bertem Bodin, like the Latin lady at Asinou, contributed what must have been a work of art; and there were men with substance enough to join both Greek and Latin lords in the status of synadelphos. Often these untitled donors out-gave titled ones: the monk Euthymios the tailor gave not only an ox, a donkey for use in the repair of the church, and a good set of shears, but also the second largest recorded gift of money;69 Euphemia’s husband, Ioannes Romanites, gave both a team of oxen and vineyards;70 Ioannes Xenos was wealthy enough to both own and liberate slaves.71 Angel Nicolaou-Konnari may well be right that members of sometime archon families were among these people.72 But their economic diversity yields no clear native aristocracy. Instead, they must give us a picture of what in Asinou was identified as ὁ κοινὸς λαός (the common people). These were people able to make contributions for their souls’ sake, to see with self-respect to their burial and commemoration, and to lend support to institutions of significance in their lives. In the case of the Agia Mone, we have emphasized the monastery’s exploitation of the common people. But Asinou had also illustrated the common peoples’ appropriation of monastic space: in a way rarely attested in the Byzantine period, the people joined together to renovate and enhance that portion of the monastery building that was important to their lives and deaths. A similar pattern of peasant input may have played a role in the history of Kykkos Monastery.73 Kykkos eventually would become Cyprus’ richest institution, and at its establishment, too, in around 1100 during the Byzantine period, it seems 69

Darrouzès, “Un obituaire chypriote,” 45 (15 May). In fact, tailors seem to have done well: see the gifts donated by the monk Ioannikios for his father, Theodore the tailor (Darrouzès, 45 [17 May]). 70 Darrouzès, 43 (27 April). 71 Darrouzès, 35 (11 January) for the death of the monk Ioannikios, former slave of Ioannes Xenos. Ioannes Xenos figures prominently: he is twice recorded as a donor—Darrouzès, 32 (8 December) and 33 (20 December); his son became a hieromonk at the Agia Mone with the name Theodoritos—Darrouzès, 35 (7 January); and the Ioannes Xenos who became a synadelphos in 1405 may well have been his grandson—Darrouzès, 41 (8 April). 72 Nicolaou-Konnari, “Greeks,” 49. 73 On Kykkos Monastery see Ιερά Μονή Κύκκου· Εικών ανεσπερινού φωτός, ed. Agamemnon Tselikas and Stylianos Perdikes (Athens: Cultural Foundation of the Holy Monastery of Kykkos, 2010); Andreas Paulides, “Kύκκoυ Παvαγίας Μovαστήρι,” Μεγάλη κυπριακή Εγκυκλoπαίδεια, 19 vols. (Nicosia: Philokypros, 1987), 11:350–61; His Very Reverence the Abbot of Kykko Chrysostomos, The Holy, Royal Monastery of Kykko Founded with a Cross, trans. D. W. Phillips and S. A. Sofroniou (Nicosia: Kykko Monastery, 1969).

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to have been a well-endowed imperial foundation. It was adversely affected by the advent of the Lusignans, however, who stripped it of its three dependent villages.74 The institution’s ensuing medieval life has remained largely shrouded by its deep seclusion in the Troodos. When it does become visible, it is because of its icon of the Mother of God, eventually known as the Kykkotissa. The Kykkotissa was just one of three icons in monasteries of the high Troodos that became famous in the Lusignan period as protectors and rain-makers.75 Their emergence, like the pilgrimage site of St. John Lampadistes’ tomb, or the confraternities that supported the monasteries’ burial and charitable work, constitutes once again a concrete, two-way materialization of the relationship between monasteries and laity. For two of these mountain icon cults, we now retain no more than the names. In the case of the Kykkotissa, on the other hand, we still have some tangible evidence that allows insight into the processes at work in the formation of such a cult. Surviving images of Kykkos’ icon become suddenly numerous in the decades around 1300.76 We know that the institution suffered a devastating fire in 1365. Its buildings, archives, and liturgical treasure were destroyed; only the icon survived. The monastery turned to the king for financial help in the crisis, and the queen responded with a gift of money: in the words of the icon’s legend, “the queen, taking money enough to rebuild the church … gave it into the hands of the monks…. The common people, too, seeing this, came together with all their hearts and souls, and rebuilt the church and monastery.”77 Kykkos’ success is generally attributed to its royal subvention. But the dissemination of the icon’s image suggests that an earlier and more sustained form of support must have come from the “common people.” This is the same phrase used as at Asinou. We know almost nothing about Kykkos financially in the fourteenth century, but here the information in Paris 1588 stands out: it attests not only 74

The rationale for this confiscation remains a matter of debate: Voisin, “Francs de Chypre et Monastères Grecs,” 401–2. 75 The Trikoukkiotissa is vividly described by Stefano Lusignano, Description de toute l’isle de Chypre (Paris: Guillaume Chaudiere, 1580; repr. Nicosia: Les Éditions l’Oiseau, 1968), folios 64r–64v, and all three icons, the Kykkotissa, Trikouliotissa, and Trooditissa, are invoked in the lament for Cyprus’ fall to the Ottomans: Theodore Papadopoullos, “H Θρῆνος τῆς Κύπρου,” Kυπριακαὶ Σπουδαί 44 (1980): 1–78. 76 Ten panels replicating Kykkos’ icon fall into the period between about 1280 and 1380, controverting my belief that the cult got underway only after the fire of 1365, as argued in Annemarie Weyl Carr, “Reflections on the Life of an Icon: The Eleousa of Kykkos. Στοχασμοί για τη ζωή μίας εικόνας· η Ελεούσα του Κύκκου,” Επετηρίδα Κέντρου Μελετών Ιεράς Μονής Κύκκου 6 (2004): 103–62. 77 Constantine N. Constantinides, Ἡ Διήγησις τῆς θαυματουργῆς εἰκόνας τῆς Θεοτόκου Ἐλεούσας τοῦ Κύκκου κατὰ τὸν ἑλληνικὸ κώδικα 2313 τοῦ Βατικανοῦ (Nicosia: Research Centre of the Holy Monastery of Kykkos, 2002), 196.

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to the will but also to the financial ability of the common people to play a significant role in sustaining the institutions of importance to them. An icon like the Kykkotissa, venerated by its community, was one more way in which monasteries reached out to their own people for prestige and financial support. But such a cult was also an avenue for the laity to assert its engagement in the activities of the monasteries. Like pilgrimage, burial, and charitable works, venerated icons were a medium for the interaction between the monasteries and the common people. Thinking back over this rapid resume of art in the long-established monastic houses of the Orthodox during the centuries of Lusignan rule, what may stand out most strongly is the steady Latin presence in the monasteries of the Greeks. Be it in the mural icon of the Latin lady at Asinou, the portraits of westerners in the narthex at Kakopetria, the rampant silver lions at St. John Lampadistes, the chapel given to the Agia Mone by Bertem Bodin, or the gifts of the royals to Kykkos and the Agia Mone, the Latin presence is thin but persistent. The Latins are almost always there. Their repeated appearance arouses deep curiosity, about their intentions, their motivations, and their expectations for their patronage. Quantities of speculation have thus eddied around them, and continue to do so, as we seek to decipher their deliberately mingled messages. But for the monasteries to which they contributed, their support was just one piece of a larger puzzle. They never took the place of the lost Byzantine aristocracy, and other avenues of appeal had to be worked out among the Orthodox themselves. Thus, to focus only on the issues of Latins and Greeks, rulers and ruled, is to risk missing the very real reshaping of relationships that was occurring in the Lusignan period within the Orthodox community itself. References Bacci, Michele. “Patterns of Church Decoration in Famagusta (Fourteenth to Sixteenth Centuries).” In Famagusta. Art and Architecture, Mediterranean Nexus 1100–1700, 2, edited by Annemarie Weyl Carr, 203–76. Turnhout: Brepols, 2015. Bakirtzis, Nikolas. “Locating Byzantine Monasteries: Spatial Considerations and Strategies in the Rural Landscape.” In Experiencing Byzantium. Papers from the 44th Spring Symposium of Byzantine Studies, Newcastle and Durham, April 2011, edited by Claire Nesbitt and Mark Jackson, 113–32. Farnham, Surrey: Ashgate, 2013. Bandy, Anastasius, trans. “Machairas: Rule of Neilos, Bishop of Tamasia, for the Monastery of the Mother of God of Machairas in Cyprus.” In Byzantine Monastic Foundation Documents: A Complete Translation of the Surviving Founders’ Typika

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Lefort, Jacques. “The Rural Economy, Seventh–Twelfth Centuries.” In The Economic History of Byzantium from the Seventh through the Fifteenth Century. 3 vols, edited by Angeliki E. Laiou, 1:231–310. Washington, DC: Dumbarton Oaks, 2002. Lusignano, Stefano. Description de toute l’isle de Chypre. Paris: Guillaume Chaudiere, 1580. Reprint, Nicosia: Les Éditions l’Oiseau, 1968. Makhairas, Leontios. Recital Concerning the Sweet Land of Cyprus Entitled ‘Chronicle.’ Edited and translated by Richard M. Dawkins. 2 vols. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1932. Reprint, New York: AMS Press, 1980. Mango, Cyril, and Ernest J. W. Hawkins. “The Hermitage of St. Neophytos and Its Wall Paintings.” Dumbarton Oaks Papers 20 (1966): 119–206. Nicolaou-Konnari, Angel. “Greeks.” In Cyprus. Society and Culture 1191–1374. The Medieval Mediterranean 58, edited by Angel Nicolaou-Konnari and Chris Schabel, 13–62. Leiden: Brill, 2005. Nicolaou-Konnari, Angel, and Chris Schabel. “Limassol under Latin Rule.” In Lemessos: A History of Limassol in Cyprus from Antiquity to the Ottoman Conquest, edited by Angel Nicolaou-Konnari and Chris Schabel, 195–361. Newcastle upon Tyne: Cambridge Scholars Press, 2015. Odorico, Paolo. Le Codex B du Monastère Saint-Jean-Prodrome (Serrès), B (XV e–XIXe siècles). Paris: Association Pierre Delon, 1998. Olympios, Michalis. “Stripped from the Altar, Recycled, Forgotten: The Altarpiece in Lusignan Cyprus.” Gesta 53, no. 2 (2014): 47–72. Papacostas, Tassos. “Monastic Estates in the Middle Byzantine Period: Evidence from Cyprus for Local and Overseas Landowners.” In Medieval Cyprus. A Place of Cultural Encounter, edited by Sabine Rogge and Michael Grünbart, 123–48. Münster, NY: Waxman, 2015. Papacostas, Tassos. “Byzantine Cyprus. The Testimony of Its Churches, 650–1200.” 3 vols. PhD diss., Exeter College, Oxford University, 1999. Papadopoullos, Theodore. “Ὁ Θρῆνος τῆς Κύπρου,” Kυπριακαὶ Σπουδαί 44 (1980): 1–78. Papageorghiou, Athanasios. “Λαξευτὰ ἀσκητήρια καὶ μοναστήρια τῆς Κύπρου.” Επετηρίδα Κέντρου Μελετών Ιεράς Μονής Κύκκου 4 (1999): 33–70. Papageorghiou, Athanasios. The Monastery of Saint John Lampadistis in Kalopanayiotis, translated by Richard Gill. Nicosia: Bank of Cyprus Cultural Foundation, Holy Bishopric of Morphou, 2008. Paulides, Andreas. “Kύκκoυ Παvαγίας Μovαστήρι.” In Μεγάλη κυπριακή Εγκυκλoπαίδεια. 2nd ed., 11:350–61. Nicosia: Philokypros, 1987. Perdikes, Stylianos. “Le monastère des Hiereôn (des Prêtres) à Paphos, du paganism au christianisme.” Cahiers du Centre d’Études Chypriotes 43 (2013): 227–42. Richard, Jean. “Le peuplement latin et syrien en Chypre au XIIIe siècle.” Byzantinische Forschungen 7 (1979): 157–73. Reprint, Croisés, missionnaires et voyageurs (London: Variorum, 1983), article VII.

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Schabel, Chris. “Religion.” In Cyprus. Society and Culture 1191–1374. The Medieval Mediterranean 58, edited by Angel Nicolaou-Konnari and Chris Schabel, 157–218. Leiden: Brill, 2005. Ševčenko, Nancy Patterson. “The Vita Icon and the Painter as Hagiographer.” Dumbarton Oaks Papers 53 (1999): 149–65. Spieser, Jean-Michel, and Elisabeth Yota, eds. Donation et donateurs dans le monde byzantin: Actes du colloque international organisé à l’Université de Fribourg (Fribourg 13–15 mars 2008). Réalités Byzantines 14. Paris: Desclée de Brouwer, 2012. Stylianou, Andreas, and Judith A. Stylianou. “Donors and Dedicatory Inscriptions, Supplicant and Supplications in the Painted Churches of Cyprus.” Jahrbuch der österreichischen byzantinischen Gesellschaft 9 (1960): 97–128. Stylianou, Andreas, and Judith A. Stylianou. “Ἐπανεξέτασις τῆς ἐν τῷ νάρθηκι τοῦ ναοῦ τοῦ ἁγίου Νικολάου τῆς Στέγης κτητορικῆς ἐπιγραφῆς.” Κυπριακαὶ Σπουδαί 15 (1951): 83–88. Stylianou, Andreas, and Judith A. Stylianou. The Painted Churches of Cyprus. Treasures of Byzantine Art, 2nd ed. Nicosia: A. G. Leventis Foundation, 1997. Talbot, Alice-Mary. “Old Age in Byzantium.” Byzantinische Zeitschrift 77 (1984): 267–78. Thomas, John, and Angela Constantinides Hero, eds. Byzantine Monastic Foundation Documents: A Complete Translation of the Surviving Founders’ Typika and Testaments. 5 vols. Washington, DC: Dumbarton Oaks, 2000. Tomadakis, Nikolaos B. “Ὁ Ἅγιος Ἰωάννης ὁ Ξένος καὶ ἡ διαθήκη αὐτοῦ.” Kretika Chronika 2 (1948): 47–72. Tselikas, Agamemnon and Stylianos Perdikes eds. Ιερά Μονή Κύκκου· Εικών ανεσπερινού φωτός. Athens: Cultural Foundation of the Holy Monastery of Kykkos, 2010. Tsiknopoullos, Ioannes P. Ἡ Ἱερὰ καὶ βασιλικὴ καὶ σταυροπεγιακὴ Μovὴ τῆς ὑπεραγίας Θεοτόκου Μαχαιρᾶ. Nicosia: Holy Monastery of Makhairas, 1968. Voisin, Ludivine. “Francs de Chypre et Monastères Grecs: Le Jus Patronatus en Question.” Cahiers du Centre d’Études Chypriotes 43 (2013): 393–404.

Chapter 6

Church Embellishment in Medieval Egypt, Syria, and Cyprus Patronage and Identity

Mat Immerzeel and Bas Snelders 1

Introduction

In her first article on the wall paintings in the churches of indigenous Christians in the Frankish County of Tripoli, published in 1997–1998, Erica Cruikshank Dodd touched briefly on the effigy of a supplicant in the Melkite church of Mar Fauqa (St. Phocas) at Amiun, to the southeast of Tripoli (Figs. 6.1, 1.1).1 This ex voto scene represents St. Philip in the company of a beardless supplicant, whose name is stated in a Greek inscription she interpreted as: “The servant of God, Philip.” Since Amiun was situated within the domain of the Latin lords of Besmedin, present-day Besmezzin to the north of the city, Cruikshank Dodd sought to find a suitable candidate within the ranks of leading figures of the Frankish aristocracy. Eventually she came up with Philip of Ibelin (1180–1227), the regent of Cyprus in the first quarter of the thirteenth century. Cruikshank Dodd justifiably related the murals of this church to stylistically similar paintings in Cyprus from the late twelfth century. However, perhaps not entirely convinced of this daring hypothesis herself, she did not repeat it in her monograph on the wall paintings of medieval Lebanon, published in 2004.2 But her suggestion certainly merits further consideration. Take the attire of this bareheaded figure, which consists of a white tunic, a long, sleeveless red robe with ochre lining, and black boots. In this respect, Philip’s appearance resembles that of supplicating figures in later Cypriot paintings, such as the Cypriot patron John Moutoullas (Fig. 6.2) in the church of the Panagia at Moutoullas (1280), and a beardless supplicant in the church 1 Erica Cruikshank Dodd, “Christian Arab Painters under the Mamluks,” ARAM 9–10 (1997–98), 257–88, esp. 259. 2 Erica Cruikshank Dodd, Medieval Painting in the Lebanon, Sprachen und Kulturen des Christlichen Orients 8, (Wiesbaden: Reichert, 2004), 159, 161, plates V–VI, 1.23–25; Mat Immerzeel, Identity Puzzles. Medieval Christian Art in Syria and Lebanon. Orientalia Lovaniensia Analecta 184 (Leuven: Peeters, 2009), 89–92, plates 52–53.

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Figure 6.1 Donor Philip, Church of Mar Fauqa, Amiun Photograph: Mat Immerzeel

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of the Transfiguration in Sotera.3 Keeping this evident Cypriot connection in mind, the case for her initial candidate, Philip of Ibelin, seems stronger than ever. As the youngest son of Balian of Ibelin and the Byzantine princess Maria Comnena, Philip embodies the fascinating interaction between Latins and Byzantines at the level of the high nobility after the Frankish occupation of Cyprus in 1192. His elder brother John was the lord of Beirut, and is known to have contracted Muslim, Syrian, and Greek—perhaps Cypriot—craftsmen for the embellishment of his palace.4 Philip in turn played a major role in defending the Greek Orthodox Church in the face of Latin pressure, which probably had something to do with his own half-Greek descent.5 This fact would also go some way to explaining our initial impression that the supplicant Philip is dressed according to Byzantine fashion, and beardless in line with the Frankish custom of shaving (see below).6 This instance lays bare the challenges that face art historians who focus on supplicant effigies—that is, portraits of donors or deceased addressing their prayers to saints—in the medieval eastern Mediterranean. While fully realizing that historical written sources do not necessarily answer all of the questions, 3 Doula Mouriki, “The Wall Paintings of the Church of the Panagia at Moutoullas, in Cyprus,” in Byzanz un der Westen. Studien zur Kunst des europäischen Mittelalters, Sitzungsberichte der Österreichischen Akademie der Wissenschaften 432, ed. Imgard Hutter (Vienna: Verlag der Österreichischen Akademie der Wissenschaften, 1984), 181–82, fig. 10; Andreas Stylianou and Judith A. Stylianou, The Painted Churches in Cyprus. Treasures of Byzantine Art (London: Trigraph, 1985), 323–25, fig. 192; Ewald Hein, Andrija Jakovljević, Zypern. Byzantinische Kirchen und Klöster (Rattingen: Melina-Verlag, 1996), 100, plate 94. Sotera: Annemarie Weyl Carr, “Perspectives on Visual Culture in Early Lusignan Cyprus: Balancing Art and Archaeology,” in Archaeology and the Crusades. Proceedings of the Round Table, Nicosia, 1 February 2005, ed. Peter W. Edbury and Sophia Kalopissi-Verti (Athens: Pierides Foundation, 2007), fig. 4; Carr, “Thirteenth-Century Cyprus. Questions of Style,” in Orient et Occident méditerranéens au XIIIe siècle, ed. Jean-Pierre Caillet and Fabienne Joubert (Paris: Picard, 2012), 78, CD 4. 4 Cruikshank Dodd, Medieval Painting in the Lebanon, 16; Jaroslav Folda, Crusader Art in the Holy Land, from the Third Crusade to the Fall of Acre: 1187–1291 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005), 136–37; Bas Snelders and Mat Immerzeel, “From Cyprus to Syria and Back Again: Artistic Interaction in the Medieval Levant,” Eastern Christian Art 9 (2012–13), 79–106. For the palace, see now Lucy-Anne Hunt, “John of Ibelin’s Audience Hall in Beirut: A Crusader Palace Building Between Byzantine and Islamic Art in Its Mediterranean Context,” in The Emperor’s House: Palaces from Augustus to the Age of Absolutism, ed. Michael Featherstone, Jean-Marie Spieser, Gülru Tanman, and Ulrike Wülf-Rheidt (Berlin: De Gruyter, 2015), 257–91. 5 Wipertus-Hugo Rudt de Collenberg, “Les Ibelin aux XIIIe et XIVe siècles. Généalogie compilée principalement selon les registres du Vatican,” Epeteris tou Kentrou Epistemonikon Ereunon 9 (1977–79), 117–265, esp. 203 (repr. Familles de l’orient latin, XIIe–XIVe siècles, London: Variorum Reprints, 1983, no. IV); Steven Runciman, A History of the Crusades, 3 vols. (London: The Folio Society, 2002), 3:179–80. 6 Snelders and Immerzeel, “From Cyprus to Syria and Back Again,” 83.

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Figure 6.2 Donors John and Irene of Moutoullas, Church of the Panagia, Moutoullas SOURCE: Hein, Jakovljević and Kleidt, Zypern. Byzantinische Kirchen (1996), Abb. 94

they have to make the most of the material available, in the expectation that a later generation of scholars will be better equipped. Donor portraits certainly merit further attention. More than any other images, they demand an analysis that does justice to the wider context of patronage, set against the background of historical developments.7 Taking a comparative approach, the present article explores the phenomenon of patronage within the Christian communities of the eastern Mediterranean, which lived dispersed over Muslim and Latin lands throughout the medieval period. Aiming at the broader picture, we will first focus on the position of Levantine Christians in general, before moving on to separate discussions of the situation in Egypt, where Christians lived entirely under Islamic rule, in the Frankish County of Tripoli, and in Latin Cyprus.

7 For recent views on patronage and donor portraits in the Byzantine world, see the articles in Jean-Michel Spieser and Elisabeth Yota, eds., Donation et donateurs dans le monde byzantin (Paris: Desclée de Brouwer, 2012).

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The Position of Middle Eastern Christians

After the Arab conquest of the Middle East in the seventh century, the various Christian communities obtained the well-defined dhimmi status, making them “people under a guarantee of protection,” which allowed them a certain degree of self-support, especially when it came to the building and maintenance of community buildings. An example of this self-supporting status comes to the fore in Syrian Orthodox sources, which furnish abundant information on the input of wealthy notables and groups to initiatives taken by the higher clergy to build or restore churches and monasteries and to reinforce the indispensable local infrastructure.8 To give an example, in 1058/59 the restoration of the church of the monastery of Deir Mar Musa (St. Moses) to the north of Damascus was realized through the efforts of citizens from the nearby city of Nebk, who provided the resources and manpower.9 In the regions of the Syro-Palestinian mainland that fell under Latin rule between 1098 and 1291, the indigenous Christians (Maronites, Melkites, and Syrian Orthodox) had the advantage of the existence of a wealthy Latin elite that, despite the differences in dogmatic positions, constituted a new potential class of financial supporters. Unlike the Muslim authorities in the neighbouring Islamic societies, the Franks did not implement a legally defined, hierarchical societal system that regulated the delineation between religious groups.10 Notwithstanding the occasional harsh oppression at the hands of the Frankish authorities, which mainly affected the Melkites because of their dogmatic affiliations with the Byzantine Orthodox Church, the indigenous Christian communities generally experienced a great deal of tolerance and even support from their new overlords. Within the context of the wide range of day-to-day contacts that existed between the local population and the Frankish residents, any Latin with enough financial means could decide to support his or her Syrian Christian subjects and neighbours. Politics, personal relations, individual experiences, the wish for salvation, and a sense of moral duty were decisive 8 Immerzeel, Identity Puzzles, 158–61; Bas Snelders, Identity and Christian Muslim Interaction. Medieval Art from the Syrian Orthodox in the Mosul Area, Orientalia Lovaniensia Analecta 198 (Leuven: Peeters, 2010), 71–73. 9 Erica Cruikshank Dodd, The Frescoes of Mar Musa al-Habashi. A Study in Medieval Painting in Syria (Toronto: Pontifical Institute of Mediaeval Studies, 2001), 15, 157–59; Immerzeel, Identity Puzzles, 58, 158–160. 10 Christopher MacEvitt, The Crusades and the Christian World of the East. Rough Tolerance (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2008) applies the term “rough tolerance” to describe the opportunistic and at the same time largely indifferent Frankish attitude towards indigenous Christians, but his study concerns the period until the capture of Jerusalem in 1187.

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factors in this matter. As we will see in the following sections, this practice of religious and artistic interaction with local Christians continued in the Frankish Kingdom of Cyprus. 3

Civic Patronage in Christian Egypt

During Fatimid and Ayyubid rule, the elite of literate Coptic and Melkite laymen (shaykhs or archons) was well established within the civic administration of Egypt. Their communities benefited greatly from these dignitaries’ contacts at the highest level, in particular because of their involvement in consolidating Christian properties.11 Our prime sources on the experiences of the archons are the History of the Patriarchs of Egypt and the History of the Churches and Monasteries of Egypt.12 Particularly the latter document, which survives in a fourteenth-century copy, abounds in detailed information on the refurbishment of sanctuaries. The main body of the text should probably be attributed to the Coptic priest Abu al-Makarim Saʿdallah ibn Jirjis ibn Masʿud (henceforth Abu al-Makarim). To judge from the work’s precise digressions on events between about 1160 and 1187, the author lived to see the downfall of the Fatimid dynasty in 1169, the rise of Ayyubid power, and the subsequent large-scale restoration campaigns in the Greater Cairo area.13 Unfortunately, later reconstructions in the churches he mentions have practically wiped out all traces from this period. One exception is the church of St. Mercurius near Old Cairo, currently known as the church of Abu Sefein (Father of the Two Swords), where parts of the medieval architecture and wall paintings still survive. St. Mercurius was not an ordinary church. Granted the status of patriarchal church in the 1070s, it 11

Adeline Jeudy, “Elite civile et ‘mécénat’: le role du commanditaire dans le développement des arts et des lettres en Egypte chex les coptes du Xe au XIV siècle,” Eastern Christian Art 9 (2009), 51–65. 12 Johannes den Heijer, “Coptic Historiography in the Fatimid, Ayyubid and Early Mamluk Periods,” Medieval Encounters 2, no. 1 (1996): 67–98. 13 Basil T. A. Evetts and Alfred J. Butler eds., The Churches and Monasteries of Egypt and Some Neighbouring Countries Attributed to Abû Sâlih, the Armenian (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1895); Samuʾil al-Suryani ed. and trans., History of the Churches and Monasteries in Lower Egypt in the Thirteenth Century (Cairo: Institute of Coptic Studies, 1992); see also den Heijer, “Coptic Historiography”; Mat Immerzeel, “The Renovation of the Churches of Cairo in the Fatimid and Early Ayyubid Periods According to Abu al-Makarim’s Churches and Monasteries of Egypt,” Eastern Christian Art 9 (2012–2013): 27–52; Immerzeel, The Narrow Way to Heaven. Identity and Identities in the Art of Middle Eastern Christianity, Orientalia Lovaniensia Analecta 259 (Leuven: Peeters, 2017), 17–18.

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Figure 6.3 Plan of the upper level of the Church of St. Mercurius (Abu Sefein) SOURCE: Butler, The Ancient Coptic Churches of Egypt (1884, vol. 1), Fig. 7

served as the residence of the Coptic pope when Cyril II transferred the See to Old Cairo after 1084.14 Subsequently, the upper level of the church complex was gradually turned into a patriarchal compound consisting of several churches, one of which served as the papal cell (Fig. 6.3). The church of St. George was probably the first to be erected. The man behind this project was Abu al-Fadl 14

Johannes den Heijer, “Considérations sur les communautés chrétiennes en Egypte fatimide: État et Église sous le vizirat de Badr al-Jamali (1074–94),” in L’Egypte fatimide; son art et son histoire, Actes du colloque organisé à Paris les 28, 29 et 30 mai 1998, ed. Marianne Barrucand (Paris: Presses de l’Université de Paris-Sorbonne, 1999), 573–74.

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ibn Usquf, the most prominent Copt in the Fatimid administration. Today the altar room largely preserves the architectural layout of the original construction. About eight metres high, it consists of a rectangular room and a transitional octagonal zone, with Islamic-style muqarnas niches below the dome (Fig. 6.4). Two abundantly carved wooden sanctuary screens from this church are believed to date from its foundation.15 Abu al-Makarim provides ample information on patrons, one of whom was Abu al-Fadl, whose curriculum vitae offers a distinct example of how a Christian notable functioned within the network of Greater Cairo. The perfect mediator between political and ecclesiastical leadership, he was the son of Bishop Yuhanna of Atrib and a confidant of the most powerful man in the country, Vizier al-Afdal Shahanshah (1094–1121). As an official state representative, he welcomed the patriarch Macarius II on the occasion of his consecration in Old Cairo in 1102. At a young age he already supervised the diwans (offices) of the Gates in Misr (Old Cairo) and of Industry, and in 1102 he had climbed to the rank of the vizier’s personal secretary. The last we hear about him concerns his engagement in the election of a new bishop of Misr in 1118.16 Abu al-Fadl was a diligent contributor to building and renovation activities; his commitments included erecting the church of the Virgin in Deir al-Khandaq (“Monastery of the Moat”), to the north of the Fatimid city, in order to create a proper burial place for himself and his family. He and his son were interred in the church’s sanctuary and were eternalized in a painting in the apse, which showed them dressed in white garments, supplicating Christ in Glory.17 It is obvious that these effigies were meant as funerary portraits rather than donor images. That the Coptic elite was familiar with the custom of representing deceased persons follows from references to several more painted portraits on tombs in Deir al-Khandaq in Abu al-Makarim’s account.18 After the defeat of the Fatimids in 1169, the Ayyubid sultan Salah al-Din gradually strengthened his grip on the country and re-organized the administration. Although they were initially expelled from their offices, Christian notables 15

Bas Snelders and Adeline Jeudy, “Guarding the Entrances: Equestrian Saints in Egypt and North Syria,” Eastern Christian Art 3 (2006): 119–20, plates 12–14. 16 Aziz Suryal Atiyya, Yassa ʿAbd al-Masih, and Oswald H. E. Burmester, eds. and trans., History of the Patriarchs of the Egyptian Church, Known as the History of the Holy Church, vol. 2 part 3, Christodoulus-Michael (AD 1046–1102) (Cairo: Société d’archéologie copte, 1959; [2015, 3rd ed.]), 325–26; Antoine Hkater and Oswald H. E. Burmester, eds. and trans., History of the Patriarchs of the Egyptian Church, Known as the History of the Holy Church, vol. 3, part 1, Macarius II–John V (AD 1102–1167) (Cairo: Société d’archéologie copte, 1968), 32–34. 17 Samuʾil al-Suryani ed., History of the Churches and Monasteries in Lower Egypt, 132, fol. 16b. 18 Al-Suryani ed., 32–33, fol. 16b; 34–35, fol. 17b.

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Figure 6.4 Transitional zone of the altar room, Church of St. George Photograph: Mat Immerzeel

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were soon allowed to resume their duties, and focused their attentions on the churches that had been damaged in the turmoil of war or neglected over a longer period.19 As an eyewitness to these events, Abu al-Makarim extensively digresses on the large-scale refurbishment campaigns in the 1170s and 1180s and lists the names of the craftsmen and the many persons who instigated and financed the works.20 His most detailed description concerns the church of the Virgin in Haret al-Rum within the Fatimid city. The author’s account sketches an intriguing picture of how the church was restored through the commitment of a group of archons and clergymen. The patrons in question included the scribe Shaykh Abu Zakri ibn al-Bishr, his brother, the priest Abu al-Wafa‌ʾ ibn al-Bishr, and the scribe Abu al-Khair. The latter spent 300 dinars on a marble pulpit sculpted by Mansur of Antioch, and provided for the painting of a gilded icon representing the seven principal feasts and the image of a certain Abu al-Sirri. The icon was placed on top of the sanctuary screen of teak inlaid with ivory and ebony, made by the woodworker Ishac. After earlier murals had been whitewashed over, the painter Ibn al-Hufi redecorated the upper levels and the sanctuary.21 The return of stability under Ayyubid rule offered excellent opportunities to repair the damage the patriarchal church of St. Mercurius had sustained as a result of arson in 1168. First the pope’s chapel, dedicated to the Archangel Michael, was restored at the expense of Shaykh Al-Sadid Abu al-Fada‌ʾil and reopened in 1172 (Fig. 6.3). As the scribe of the Kurdish amir ʿAli ibn Ahmad, this shaykh was apparently one of the Coptic functionaries who found employment in the new administration. He was probably the same person as Ibn Abu al-Fada‌ʾil ibn Farruj, who is accredited with whitewashing and paving the church of St. George in 1174/75 and building of an enclosure around it. An inscription under the image of an archangel (Michael?) near the stairway to the upper level states that it was painted in that year at the orders of Abu al-Fada‌ʾil (Figs. 6.3 and 6.5).22 Undoubtedly he was also involved in the embellishment of the churches in the patriarchal compound. The most complete decorative program is found inside the altar room of the church of St. George, 19 Khater and Burmester eds., History of the Patriarchs of the Egyptian Church, 165–66. 20 Immerzeel, “Renovation of the Churches of Cairo”; Immerzeel, Narrow Way to Heaven, 54–63. 21 Samuʾil al-Suryani ed., History of the Churches and Monasteries in Lower Egypt, 10–12, fols. 6a–b; Immerzeel, “Renovation of Cairo’s Churches”; Immerzeel, Narrow Way to Heaven, 57–60. 22 Gertrud J. M. van Loon, The Gate of Heaven: Wall Paintings with Old Testament Scenes in the Altar Room and the Hurus of Coptic Churches, PIHANS 85 (Istanbul: Netherlands Historical-Archaeological Institute in Istanbul, 1999), 29, plates 30–31.

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Figure 6.5 Northern corridor of the upper level: archangel with commemorative inscription, Church of St. Mercurius Photograph: Mat Immerzeel

constructed by Abu al-Fadl. The dilapidated murals include Biblical imagery, Christ Enthroned, the Virgin Enthroned between two angels, and prophets, apostles, monks, and prelates (Fig. 6.4).23 23

Van Loon, Gate of Heaven, 17–30.

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Under Ayyubid rule, the Coptic Church experienced a “golden age.” In Greater Cairo nothing happened without the efforts or assent of the omnipotent archons. This was particularly evident in the election of patriarchs from the ranks of laymen and clergymen of the patriarchal church of al-Muʿallaqa in Old Cairo, which seems to have served as “the Coptic Vatican.”24 Strikingly, a number of eye-catching works of art from the thirteenth century point to the involvement of painters trained in the Byzantine tradition. In the building known as the Little Church, an annex of al-Muʿallaqa, a fragmentary representation has survived showing the Virgin Blachernitissa between two archangels (1 on Figs 6.6 and 6.7).25 Furthermore, three richly embellished and gilded wooden canopies cover the altars of the three sanctuaries in the main church (2–4 on Figs. 6.6 and 6.8).26 The classicizing tendencies in these paintings provisionally allow us to date them to the third quarter of the thirteenth century.27 It was no coincidence that the execution of these prestigious artworks was entrusted to Byzantine artists; a series of Byzantine-style icons from the second half of the thirteenth century in St. Mercurius, al-Muʿallaqa, the church of St. Barbara in Old Cairo, and the church of the Virgin in Haret Zuwayla, which would serve as the papal See from the early fourteenth century, reinforce the impression that their patrons cherished a particular interest in Byzantine painters.28 It is highly possible that the influential laymen were responsible for the contracting of these masters. An illustrated Arabic Gospel book in the library of the Coptic Patriarchate supplies further food for thought in this direction. The manuscript was produced in 1291 for Shaykh al-Amjad ibn

24 Immerzeel, Narrow Way to Heaven, 60–65. 25 Gawdat Gabra and Marianne Eaton-Kraus, The Treasures of Coptic Art in the Coptic Museum and Churches of Old Cairo (Cairo: The American University in Cairo Press, 2006), plate 141; Lucy-Anne Hunt, “Artistic Interchange in Old Cairo in the Thirteenth to Early Fourteenth Century: The Role of Painted and Carved Icons,” in Interactions: Artistic Interchange Between the Eastern and Western Worlds in the Medieval Period, ed. Colum Hourihane, The Index of Christian Art Occasional Papers IX (Princeton: Index of Christian Art, Department of Art and Archaeology, Princeton University, 2007), 64–65, figs. 15a–b. 26 Gabra and Eaton-Kraus, Treasures of Coptic Art, 224, plates 134, 140; Adeline Jeudy, “Icônes et ciboria: relation entre les ateliers coptes de peinture d’icônes et l’iconographie du mobilier liturgique en bois,” Eastern Christian Art 1 (2004): 66–88, esp. 82–86, plates 17–20. 27 Immerzeel, Narrow Way to Heaven, 69–72, plates 17–18. 28 Zuzana Skalova and Gawdat Gabra, The Icons of the Nile Valley, 2nd ed. (Cairo: Egyptian International Publishing-Longman, 2006), 108–10, 175–207.

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Figure 6.6 Plan of the Church of al-Muʿallaqa SOURCE: Alcock and Gabra, The Coptic Museum (1993), Fig. 10

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Figure 6.7 Virgin Blachernitissa, Church of al-Muʿallaqa Photograph: Mat Immerzeel

al-Shaykh al-Taqah, as a present to his son.29 In line with the fashion of those days, the overwhelming ornamentation on the text pages and on a full-page cross, which is composed of geometric, vegetal, and arabesque elements, is closely affiliated to early Mamluk art. As regards craftsmanship, they contrast sharply with the gilded full-page illustrations, elsewhere in the same manuscript, depicting the evangelists John, Mark and Matthew; these are considered exemplary exponents of contemporary Palaiologan art. It seems that al-Amgad had commissioned a local illustrator for the ornamentation of the text pages and a Byzantine master for the figurative representations. Abu al-Makarim also furnishes some fascinating information on the Egyptian Melkites. One of the leading figures in the Melkite community in the first decades of the twelfth century was Shaykh Abu al-Barakat Yuhanna ibn Abu Layth, the supervisor of the Diwan al-Tahqiq, which Vizier al-Afdal had founded to regulate his fiscal reforms and the reallocation of land.30 In Deir al-Qusayr, to the south of Cairo, he and his brother Abu al-Fada‌ʾil restored the church of 29 Library of the Coptic Patriarchate, Bibl. no. 196: Jules Leroy, Les manuscrits coptes et coptes-arabes illustrés (Paris: P. Geuthner, 1974), 178–80, plates 96:1–2, 97:1. 30 Immerzeel, “Renovation of Cairo’s churches,” 40; Immerzeel, Narrow Way to Heaven, 95–97.

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St. Sabas and embellished it with pictures of the Forty Martyrs of Sebaste.31 The brothers also renovated the church of St. Nicholas in Haret Zuwayla, situated within the walls of Fatimid Cairo, which accommodated altars on behalf of Byzantine and Frankish visitors to the nearby residential quarters.32 Another member of the family was Patriarch Anba Sabas ibn al-Layth. He travelled to Constantinople by official invitation to heal the emperor of an illness, and to attend a synod held there in 1117. Sabas spent 10,000 dinars on the purchase of precious liturgical accoutrements and a gilded icon of the Virgin and Child for a church of his community in Alexandria, perhaps the church of St. Sabas.33 Deir al-Qusayr was also one of the privileged monasteries in the vicinity of Greater Cairo that benefited from the generosity of Muslim rulers in recompense for their hospitality. Caliph al-Amir (r. 1101–30) used this monastery and the Coptic monastery of Nahiya near Giza—the church of which was rebuilt at the expense of Abu al-Fadl—for hunting parties, and he rewarded the monks generously.34 The monastery of St. Mercurius at Tamwaih on the fertile western back of the Nile, for that matter, served as the resort of al-Afdal. The vizier contributed to the infrastructure of the monastery, and it in turn paid an annual fee to the public treasury.35 In the first decades after the Mamluk seizure of power in 1250, the situation remained largely unchanged. From the 1290s, however, the Christian functionaries encountered growing dissatisfaction among the Muslim population: the Muslims resented the Christians for what they perceived as their excessive influence and exuberant dress, and this soon erupted into large-scale anti-Christian riots.36 In 1301 the initially neutral attitude of the Mamluks towards this useful elite resulted in the implementation of restrictions on all dhimmis, and the temporary closure of churches and synagogues. Eventually the archons were compelled to convert to Islam, which deprived the churches of their intellectual freedoms and their financial means to renovate and furnish church buildings. 31 Evetts and Butler, Churches and Monasteries of Egypt, 150–51, fols. 50b–51a. 32 Samuʾil al-Suryani, History of the Churches and Monasteries in Lower Egypt, 8–9, fol. 5b. 33 Al-Suriani, 239, fols. 99a–b; Krijne N. Ciggaar, “An Egyptian Doctor at the Comnenian Court,” Nea Rhome 2 (2005): 287–302; Immerzeel, Narrow Way to Heaven, 96–97, 123–24. 34 Evetts and Butler, Churches and Monasteries of Egypt, 152, fol. 51b, and 182–83, fols. 61b– 62a, respectively. 35 Evetts and Butler, 197–98, fols. 67a–b. 36 Donald P. Little, “Coptic Conversion to Islam under the Bahri Mamluks, 692–755/1293– 1354,” Bulletin of the School of Oriental and African Studies 39, no. 3 (1976): 552–69, esp. 557; Seth Ward, “Ibn al-Rifʾa on the Churches and Synagogues of Cairo,” Medieval Encounters 5, no. 1 (1999): 70–84.

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Figure 6.8 Christ Pantocrator, canopy in the southern altar room of the Church of al-Muʿallaqa Photograph: Adeline Jeudy

4

Syria: Christian Minorities under Latin Rule

Let us start by considering why the Franks might have been interested in supporting their fellow believers in the first place. The Latins apparently had strong faith in the miracle-working of oriental saints, as can be seen from the occasional commitment of individuals to the building or restoration of sanctuaries used by indigenous Christians, or the joint celebration of mass.37 An illustrative instance of such interaction is recorded by the Syrian Orthodox chronicler Patriarch Michael the Syrian (1166–99). In desperation, an Antiochene Latin couple whose son had been badly injured sought the help of a monk called Saliba at the monastery of St. Barsauma near Malatya (Melitene). Saliba prayed to St. Barsauma, who appeared to the monk and the mother of the injured boy and instructed them to erect a sanctuary in Barsauma’s honour. After the boy recovered, the church was constructed in the couple’s garden, at their expense,

37 MacEvitt, Crusades and the Christian World of the East, 124–30.

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and inaugurated in the presence of Syrian Orthodox, Armenian, and Latin prelates and civil authorities on 1 December 1156.38 A comparable case of Latin patronage in the Tripoli area is the renovation in 1243 of the church of Mar Charbel (St. Charbel) in the Maronite village of Maʿad. The repair of the roof was carried out on the expense of a Frankish lord, and in return he was allowed to bury his daughter in the narthex.39 The latter story is all the more interesting as this church still exists and, moreover, bears traces of medieval murals, including four donor portraits in the southern annex room, which may have had a funerary function.40 However, there is little evidence to link these effigies to the story of the Frankish lord. The clue in this matter is the appearance of these figures, which serves as an objective marker of their identity. Painted around the mid-thirteenth century, the upper layer of murals depicts two kneeling supplicants (one on the north wall and one on the south wall), whose tonsures, beards, and clerical garb identify them as oriental, very likely Maronite prelates. Gaps in this layer reveal details of earlier paintings, including a kneeling donor couple addressing their prayers to a clerical saint (Fig. 6.9). The male has black hair and a pointed beard. His attire consists of a white undergarment with close-fitting long sleeves, over which he wears a traditional oriental ochre-brown robe; his arms emerge from these openings, leaving the sleeves dangling unused.41 The depiction of this specific garment indicates that this couple is probably of local origin. The only visible details of the lady are her outstretched arms, with decorated cuffs on the white sleeves, but we can also see traces of a red-brown veil covering her head and back. We will come back to this detail shortly. Fashion was evidently determined by socio-geographical factors rather than by ethnicity or religion. The murals of Seljuk Cappadocia commonly depict secular male supplicants as stereotypical orientals, i.e., with a beard, turban, and kaftan.42 Portraits of this kind are not found in Greater Syria, but in the 38 Jean-Baptiste Chabot ed. and trans., Chronique de Michel le Syrien, Patriarche Jacobite d’Antioche (1166–1199) (Paris: Leroux, 1905), 3:300–4. 39 Cruikshank Dodd, Medieval Painting in the Lebanon, 1920; Immerzeel, Identity Puzzles, 105–8. 40 Cruikshank Dodd, 316–36, plates LXIX–LXVII, 18.1–27; Nada Hélou, “La fonction de l’annexe sud de l’église de Maad,” Tempora, 10–11 (1999–2000): 139–62; Immerzeel, Identity Puzzles, 105–8, 162, 166, plates 71–79. 41 Elfriede R. Knauer, “A Quest for the Origin of the Persian Riding-Coats: Sleeved Garments with Underarm Openings,” in Riding Costume in Egypt. Origin and Appearance, ed. Cäcilia Fluck and Gillian Vogelsang-Eastwood (Leiden: Brill, 2004), 7–27. 42 Jennifer L. Ball, Byzantine Dress: Representations of Secular Dress in Eighth–Twelfth Century Painting (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2005), 57–77; Immerzeel, Identity Puzzles, 164–65.

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Figure 6.9 Supplicating donor couple, Church of Mar Charbel, Maʿad Photograph: Mat Immerzeel

case of a thirteenth-century triptych in the Monastery of St. Catherine, the supplicant’s attire betrays his oriental background.43 On the central panel the supplicant kneels to the right of the Virgin; he is bearded, has his head covered with a white turban, and wears a darkish robe. Without any doubt, the patron of the icon was a wealthy eastern Christian, perhaps a Melkite. In a distinctly Frankish context, a supplicant portrait has come to light in the Crusader castle of Crac des Chevaliers, Syria. In a mural representing the Presentation in the Temple (Fig. 6.10) in the hall known as the Room of 120 Metres, a small standing figure, called Simonin in a Latin inscription, can be seen addressing his prayers to the Virgin.44 He is dressed as a Frank. His attire consists of a greyish long tunic with a belt around the waist, and he has short

43 Folda, Crusader Art in the Holy Land, 353–55, 538, Fig. 210; Mahmoud Zibawi, Images chrétiennes du Levant. Les décors peints des églises syro-libanaises au Moyen Age (Paris: CNRS, 2009), fig. on page 154. For the discovery of a turban in a thirteenth-century Christian context in Lebanon, see Fadi Baroudy et al., Asi-l-Hadath Lebanon: History of a Grotto (Kaslik: Publications de l’Université Saint-Esprit de Kaslik, 2011), 98–99, plates 1.1–4. 44 Cruikshank Dodd, Frescoes of Mar Musa al-Habashi, 112, plate 95; Immerzeel, Identity Puzzles, 75, 166, plates 46, 126, fig. 14.

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Figure 6.10 Donor Simonin, Crac des Chevaliers Photograph: Erica Cruikshank Dodd/ archives of the Index of Christian Art, Princeton

dark hair and is clean-shaven.45 Remarkably, three other male supplicants depicted in murals from the County of Tripoli are also beardless, namely the aforementioned Philip in Amiun, and supplicants in the church of Mar Saba (St. Saba) in Eddé al-Batrun and that of Mar Tadros (St. Theodore) in Bahdeidat. In all cases, an association with local Frankish authorities seems obvious. The Maronite church of Mar Saba in Eddé al-Batrun was probably decorated in the early 1260s. The north elevation of the nave displays fragments of a clean-shaven supplicant turning towards St. Mamas on a lion’s back (Fig. 6.11).46 This saint was held in high esteem in northern Lebanon and enjoyed particular popularity in Latin circles. Taking into account the Romanesque architecture

45 For the Frankish custom of shaving as a marker distinguishing them from oriental Christians, see Krijne N. Ciggaar, “Adaptation to Oriental Life by Rulers in and around Antioch. Examples and Exempla,” in East and West in the Medieval Eastern Mediterranean, 1, Antioch from the Byzantine Reconquest until the End of the Crusader Principality, ed. Krijne N. Ciggaar and David M. Metcalf, Orientalia Lovaniensia Analecta 147 (Leuven: Peeters, 2006), 261–82. We should also note here that according to the thirteenth-century Coptic author and archon Safi Ibn Al-ʿAssal, Copts were not allowed to shave; he considered shaving a Frankish custom (William A. Hanna trans., Al Magmou Al-Safawy Ibn Al-Assal (St Louis, MO: St. Mary and St. Abraam Coptic Orthodox Church, 1996), 51, 209, https://www.zeitun-eg.org/ASSAL_AL.pdf). 46 Immerzeel, Identity Puzzles, 109, plates 88–89.

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Figure 6.11

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Head of a donor, Church of Mar Saba, Eddé al-Batrun Photograph: Mat Immerzeel

of the church and the remains of a Crusader fortress just a few kilometres away, the identification of the supplicant as a Frank does not come as a surprise.47 The well-preserved murals in the Maronite church of Mar Tadros in Bahdeidat, with their Syriac inscriptions, constitute an outstanding instance of Syrian Christian art from around the mid-thirteenth century.48 On the southern wall, a small supplicant is featured standing frontally, his hands raised in prayer, below St. George on horseback (Fig. 6.12). Like Simonin in Crac des Chevaliers, he is clean-shaven and shorthaired, and his European-style mi-parti tunic, consisting of a red and a blue half with a brown belt around his waist, further suggests that he is a Frank.49 On the opposite wall a second supplicant is depicted kneeling in front of the mounted St. Theodore. However, the ambiguity of his appearance makes it impossible to determine his origins. His bearded head is covered with a white coif topped with a black skullcap, and he 47 Snelders and Immerzeel, “From Cyprus to Syria and Back Again,” 94–96. 48 Cruikshank Dodd, Medieval Painting in the Lebanon, 383–43, plates LXXVIII–LXXXVI, 19.1–41; Lucy-Anne Hunt, “The Wallpainting Programme at the Church of Mar Tadros, Behdaidat: Art Historical Aspects in the Light of the Current Conservation Project,” Bulletin Archéologique et d’Architecture Libanaises 13 (2011 [2009]): 274–88; Immerzeel, Identity Puzzles, 78–82, 101–05, plates 64–70. 49 Immerzeel, Identity Puzzles, 103, 162, plates 68–69.

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Figure 6.12

Donor near St. George, Church of Mar Tadros, Bahdeidat Photograph: Mat Immerzeel

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seems to wear a sleeveless darkish coat over a white tunic covering his arms and perhaps also his legs. An enigmatic narrow red stripe runs down from his left shoulder to his left knee.50 Although located within Maronite territory, Mar Tadros was (perhaps temporarily) used by a Syrian Orthodox community, possibly refugees seeking to escape the Mongol attacks shortly after the mid-thirteenth-century. In 1256, Maphrian Ignatius IV Saliba, the second-ranking figure in the Syrian Orthodox Church, retired to Tripoli, where he ordained Behnam ibn Khuri Nuʾman as a priest of Mar Tadros. Saliba passed away two years later. He apparently maintained good contacts with the local Frankish authorities; at his death, the Latin Church was one of his beneficiaries, and his funeral mass in the church of Mar Behnam in Tripoli was attended by Latin representatives.51 As for the murals of Mar Tadros, they can be attributed to the artist of the second layer of paintings in the Maronite church of Mar Charbel in Maʿad; they do not contain any specific markers of Maronite or Syrian Orthodox identity. The question of who commissioned the murals remains an open one, but it is certain that the users of the church could count on the support of at least one Frankish benefactor. Let us return to the veil worn by the female supplicant in Mar Charbel (Fig. 6.9). In this respect she is illustrative of a small number of other female supplicants with darkish veils in a Frankish context. One of these was represented in the “External Chapel” outside Crac des Chevaliers,52 while two others were located in a church excavated near the Latin cathedral in Beirut.53 A thirteenth-century icon in the Monastery of St. Catherine shows a similar lady supplicating to St. Sergius, who is depicted on horseback holding a red-crossed white banner. Here, however, the contextual situation has turned out to be more complex. The icon was previously considered an outstanding example of Crusader art, mainly because of the “Crusader” banner, but in fact 50 Hunt, “Wallpainting Programme at the Church of Mar Tadros,” 278–81, figs. 66–73. For thirteenth-century skullcaps found in Lebanon, see Baroudy et al., Asi-l-Hadath Lebanon, 98–99, 178–79, plates 1.1–4, 140. 51 Herman G. B. Teule, “The Crusaders in Barhebraeus’ Syriac and Arabic Secular Chronicles. A Different Approach,” in East and West in the Crusader States, Context—Contacts— Confrontations. Acts of the Congress Held in Hernen Castle in May 1993, ed. Krijna N. Ciggaar, Adelbert Davids, and Herman G. B. Teule, Orientalia Lovaniensia Analecta 75 (Leuven: Peeters, 1996), 40–41; Dorothea Weltecke, “The Syriac Orthodox in the Principality of Antioch during the Crusader Period,” in Ciggaar and Metcalf eds., East and West in the Medieval Eastern Mediterranean, 1. Antioch, 122. 52 Jaroslav Folda, “Crusader Frescoes at Crac des Chevaliers and Marqab Castle,” Dumbarton Oaks Papers 36 (1982): 177–210, esp. 190, 195, figs. 12, 14. 53 Cruikshank Dodd, Medieval Painting in the Lebanon, 374–76, plates 21.1–3; Immerzeel, Identity Puzzles, 121, 157, 167, fig. 14.

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the icon’s style and subject are fully in line with similar representations of mounted banner-carriers in Maronite, Melkite and Syrian Orthodox churches in Lebanon and to the north of Damascus, a region that was never occupied by the Latins.54 All in all, the denominational background of the supplicating lady remains open to debate. It would seem that the use of veils was not the exclusive prerogative of Frankish ladies, but a widely practised expression of devotion or mourning.55 We will return to this matter in the discussion on Cyprus, where the custom of representing female supplicants with a veil continued. 5

Frankish Cyprus: Greek Orthodox Christians under Latin Rule

In the late eleventh and twelfth centuries, when Cyprus was a Byzantine outpost, most of the foundation, endowment, and decoration of churches and monasteries had involved patronage by members of the local ruling class, as well as the Byzantine emperor and officials posted from Constantinople.56 With the replacement of the Byzantine aristocracy by a new ruling class of Frankish knights in 1192 and the introduction of the Latin ecclesiastical hierarchy, the Greek Orthodox Church lost most of its traditional financial support base. Although the Greek Church was deprived of its largest benefactors, its economic status never reached a level that might have jeopardized its continuance or dynamism.57 To be sure, the socio-political transformation of Cyprus had a devastating effect on the old aristocracy, but especially in the less affected rural areas, the remaining Greek nobles were able to adapt themselves to the new situation (also see chapter 5). Moreover, the pragmatic political and social system implanted by the Franks permitted other Greeks to climb the social ladder and to achieve economic prominence as well. This resulted in the emergence of a new elite of wealthy and prominent Greeks that largely consisted of educated bureaucrats.58 Their participation in the civic and rural 54 Immerzeel, Identity Puzzles, 147–49, with further references. 55 Immerzeel, 166–67; Lucy-Anne Hunt, “A Woman’s Prayer to St. Sergios in Latin Syria: Interpreting a Thirteenth-Century Icon at Mount Sinai,” in Byzantium, Eastern Christendom and Islam. Art at the Crossroads of the Medieval Mediterranean (London: Pindar Press, 2000), 2:78–126 (repr. from Byzantine and Modern Greek Studies 15 [1991]: 96–145). 56 Catia Galatariotou, The Making of a Saint: The Life, Times and Sanctification of Neophytos the Recluse (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991), 57–59, 172–74. 57 Chris Schabel, “Religion,” in Cyprus. Society and Culture, 1191–1374, ed. Angel NicolaouKonnari and Chris Schabel, The Medieval Mediterranean 58 (Leiden: Brill, 2005), 157–218, esp. 184–94. 58 Nicolaou-Konnari, “Greeks,” in Nicolaou-Konnari and Schabel, Cyprus. Society and Culture, 13–62, esp. 13–14, 41–57.

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administration was somewhat similar to that of the Christian notables serving in the Ayyubid bureaucracy in Egypt. Like the Greek landowners, these dignitaries supported the Orthodox Church by making donations.59 What is more, affluent Greeks were also actively engaged in funding programs to construct and refurbish churches and monasteries, commissioning murals as well as icons and manuscripts.60 The church of the Panagia Arakiotissa at Lagoudera shows that Greek aristocratic sponsorship and the production of murals did not stop abruptly with the Frankish takeover.61 Completed in 1192, the redecoration of the church was initiated and funded by Leo tou Authentou, who may have been a local governor or a Byzantine official. Whereas this decoration campaign must already have been planned before the conquest, churches like that of the Blessed Themionos near Lysi, which was painted around 1200 at the expense of the monk and abbot Laurentios,62 further attest to the continuity of Greek patronage. After a noticeable surge during the first three decades of Lusignan rule mural production dwindled, but was slowly resumed in the late thirteenth century with fresco cycles in small churches like that of the Panagia at Moutoullas, founded and decorated by John Moutoullas and his wife Irene in 1280 (Fig. 6.2).63 The fact that this hiatus coincided with a remarkable increase in the production of icons suggests that the Greeks turned to more affordable types of media to 59 Angel Nicolaou-Konnari, “The Encounter of Greeks and Franks in Cyprus in the Late Twelfth and Thirteenth Centuries: Phenomena of Acculturation and Ethnic Awareness” (PhD diss., University of Wales, Cardiff, 1999), 201–3. 60 Nicolaou-Konnari, “Encounter of Greeks and Franks,” 83, 200–2, 309; Nicolaou-Konnari, “Greeks,” 13–14, 44–46. 61 David Winfield and June Winfield, The Church of the Panaghia tou Arakos at Lagoudhera, Cyprus: The Paintings and Their Painterly Significance, Dumbarton Oaks Studies 37 (Washington, DC: Dumbarton Oaks, 2003); James G. Schryver, “Spheres of Contact and Instances of Interaction in the Art and Archaeology of Frankish Cyprus, 1197–1359” (PhD diss. Cornell University, 2005), 117–19. 62 Stylianou and Stylianou, Painted Churches of Cyprus, 493; Annemarie Weyl Carr and Laurence J. Morrocco, A Byzantine Masterpiece Recovered: The Thirteenth-Century Murals of Lysi, Cyprus (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1991), 40–41 (here dated to the mid-thirteenth century); Weyl Carr, “Perspectives on Visual Culture in Early Lusignan Cyprus,” 87; Tassos Papacostas, “The Crusader States and Cyprus in a Thirteenth-Century Byzantine Prosopography,” in Identities and Allegiances in the Eastern Mediterranean after 1204, ed. Judith Herrin and Guillaume Saint-Guillain (Farnham: Ashgate, 2011), 215–41, esp. 222. 63 Mouriki, “Wall Paintings of the Church of the Panagia at Moutoullas”; Carr, “Art,” in Nicolaou-Konnari and Schabel, Cyprus. Society and Culture, 296–97.

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serve their devotional needs.64 In comparison with the preceding Byzantine period, the number of potential Greek donors was much smaller, and they had fewer possessions. Now that it had become much more difficult for an individual person or family to pay for a new foundation or the renovation of an already existing institution, the church authorities started to rely more heavily on collective patronage, and simultaneously switched to other segments of the population for support. The reliance on alternative forms of patronage and the shift towards new patron groups is perhaps best illustrated by the church of the Panagia Phorbiotissa of Asinou near Nikitari, which was originally founded and decorated at the expense of Nikephoros Magistros in 1105/06. According to a dedicatory inscription, the narthex was repainted in 1332/33, when the costs were borne by a certain Theophilos and the “common people.” We are left in the dark about the actual size of this group of sponsors, evidently members of the local Greek community, but it seems that at least some of them were given a face in the particularly rich collection of supplicants portrayed in the new series of paintings. In addition to a number of monks, these supplicants include numerous lay men and women, each accompanied by a short prayer mentioning his or her name.65 Although the main financial support appears to have come from the “common people,” the famous panel in the southern apse of the narthex depicting a Latin lady and two male supplicants (ca. 1300) at the feet of the misericordia Virgin is telling evidence of the participation of the Frankish nobles in this process (Fig. 6.13; see also Fig. 5.1). Indeed, the Frankish community, not least the members of the royal Lusignan dynasty, contributed towards the survival and liveliness of the Cypriot Orthodox Church. In this respect, it is important to bear in mind that in the Frankish Kingdom of Cyprus there was a separation of church and state, with the king functioning as the political leader of all the Cypriots, but not as the head of the Latin Church. To maintain a state of peace, Frankish royals commonly patronized Orthodox churches and monasteries, especially from

64

Carr, “Art,” 297–99; Carr, “Thirteenth-Century Cyprus;” Carr, “Entre deux traditions: l’icône en Chypre à lépoque de la domination latine (1191–1571),” in Chypre entre Byzance et l’Occident, IVe–XVe siècle, ed. Jannic Durrand and Dorota Giovannoni (Paris: Musée du Louvre, 2012), 276–83. 65 Sophia Kalopissi-Verti, “Aspects of Byzantine Art after the Recapture of Constantinople (1261–ca. 1300): Reflections of Imperial Policy, Reactions, Confrontation with the Latins,” in Caillet and Joubert eds., Orient et Occident méditerranéens, 133–34.

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Figure 6.13

Female donor, Church of the Panagia Phorbiotissa, Asinou Source: Hein, Jakovljević and Kleidt, Zypern. Byzantinische Kirchen (1996), Abb. 5

around the mid-fourteenth century.66 While the Latin ecclesiastical authorities tried to uphold the boundaries between the communities, Frankish nobles and burgesses, like the royals, frequented Greek churches, venerated Greek saints and sanctuaries, donated to Orthodox monasteries, bequeathed money or property to Orthodox ecclesiastical foundations, and sought to enhance their social prestige by commissioning icons or mural paintings to decorate 66

Schabel, “Religion,” 181–82.

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Greek churches, parochial and monastic alike.67 One well-known example is the panel of St. Nicholas (ca. 1291) commissioned by a Frankish knight of the Ravendel family to be hung in the narthex of the church of St. Nicholas of the Roof near Kakopetria (Fig. 6.14).68 The decision of Franks to turn to Greek churches must in part have been purely pragmatic, as Latin parish churches were few and were mostly situated in cities.69 When it comes to frescoes, the Cypriot chronicler Leontios Makhairas mentions the foundation and painting of the Orthodox Monastery of Stavros o Phaneromenos by Queen Alice of Ibelin shortly after 1340.70 Frankish royals were especially involved in the upkeep of Greek sanctuaries situated on their own estates. In addition to recorded instances, this is suggested by a number of village churches in royal domains whose decoration features Lusignan heraldic devices, although one cannot exclude the possibility that these were added at the instigation of the Orthodox communities themselves to ensure the protection of the king.71 One interesting example is the church of St. Herakleidios at the monastery of St. John Lampadistis, where the rampant lion of the Lusignans adorns the shield of Longinus in the late thirteenth-century wall painting of the Crucifixion. It is also featured in the iconostasis, where the Lusignan lion is accompanied by the crest of the Kingdom of Jerusalem, as well as the emblems of the Montfort, Dampierre, and Ibelin families. The impression that non-religious considerations played a leading role in the choice of this decoration is strengthened by the fact that the lion is directly juxtaposed with a double-headed eagle, the political symbol of the Byzantines (although admittedly this image was not uncommon in the west at the time). While it seems to have been quite common for Frankish believers to make daily use of Greek churches, it has been suggested that in this particular case the Lusignans may actually have adopted the monastery as a kind of pied à terre, as they are known to have done later at the Makhairas Monastery.72 The considerable convergence between Franks and Greeks in terms of religion and culture comes to light not only in the possibility of Frankish patrons 67 Nicolaou-Konnari, Encounter of Greeks and Franks, 309, 344–52, 357–36; Schabel, “Religion,” 182. 68 Durand and Giovannoni, Chypre entre Byzance et l’Occident, no. 124 (I. Eliades), with further references. 69 Carr, “Art,” 302. 70 Gilles Grivaud, “Literature,” in Nicolaou-Konnari and Schabel, Cyprus. Society and Culture, 228. 71 Grivaud, “Les Lusignans patrons d’églises grecques,” Byzantinische Forschungen 29 (2007), 257–69. 72 Carr, “Art,” 302.

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Figure 6.14

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Icon of St. Nicholas, Byzantine Museum of the Archbishop Makarios III Foundation, inv. no. BMIAM. 007; Frankish donor and his family SOURCE: Durand and Jovannoni, Chypre entre Byzance et l’Occident, no. 124

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having their portraits painted on the walls of Greek churches, but also in the donor portraits themselves: it is evident in the way in which both Frankish and Greek sponsors are represented, more specifically in their general appearance and dress. From the late thirteenth century onwards, concurrently with the noticeable increase in donor portraiture, Cyprus witnessed the introduction of European fashion. To judge from the Greek names stated in donor portraits, Greek patrons commonly mirrored the Frankish elite in donning Western-style vestments and headdresses, while historical sources from the same period suggest that Frankish nobles sometimes adopted local styles of dress. This subject has already received considerable attention,73 so here it will suffice to emphasize that the reciprocal exchange of fashion between the different religious and social groups on Cyprus makes it impossible to identify the religious, ethnic or social background of anonymous donors on the basis of their dress. One example that conveniently illustrates the complexities is the pair of supplicants included in a Doubting Thomas scene in the north aisle in the church of the Holy Cross at Pelendri (Fig. 6.15). The mural was painted as part of refurbishment activities carried out in the second half of the fourteenth century, probably under communal patronage (as is indicated by the plural form of the dedicatory inscription).74 The male is bearded and wears a coiffe and a long tunic with tight-fitting, buttoned sleeves; his wife is dressed in a gown with a long scarlet veil over her head that extends to the same length as her dress. In the absence of accompanying inscriptions, attention has focused on the Lusignan coat of arms painted nearby on the arch that leads into the nave. It is unclear whether it was added at the wish of a member of the royal family, or in their honour by the local community, since the fief of Pelendri was owned by John of Lusignan, a brother of King Peter. Unsurprisingly, there is no agreement about the identity of the couple. Whereas some believe they represent a third Lusignan brother, Thomas, and his wife, rather than the fief-holders themselves, others suggest that the couple depicted were members of local 73 Ioanna Christoforaki, “Female Dress in Cyprus during the Medieval Period,” in Female Costume in Cyprus from Antiquity to Present Day, ed. Vassos Karageorghis and Loukia Loizou (Nicosia: A. G. Leventis Foundation, 1999), 13–19; Pares Kalamara, “Le vêtement byzantine ou syrien en Chypre d’après les pierres tombales,” in Lacrimae Cypriae: Les larmes de Chypre ou Recueil des inscriptions lapidaires pour la plupart funéraires de la période franque et vénitienne de l’île de Chypre, vol. 2, Études et commentaires; Planches des dessins, ed. Brünehilde Imhaus (Nicosia: Department of Antiquities, 2004), 107–37; Maria Parani, “Encounters in the Realm of Dress: Attitudes towards Western Styles in the Greek East,” in Renaissance Encounters: Greek East–Latin West, ed. Marina S. Brownlee and Dimitri H. Gondicas (Leiden: Brill, 2013). 74 Ioanna Christoforaki, “An Unusual Representation of the Incredulity of Thomas from Lusignan Cyprus,” Cahiers archéologiques 48 (2000), 71–87, esp. 71.

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Figure 6.15

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Doubting Thomas with donors, Church of the Holy Cross, Pelendri Photograph: Annemarie Weyl Carr

society who cherished ties with the royal family.75 However, the first question still remains open: are they Latins or Greeks? Greek inscriptions beside the funerary portraits of a second couple, depicted in the nave of the church, label them as priest Basil, son of lord Olimites Madellos, and Nengomia. As far as their dress is concerned, Basil’s attire is identical to that of the first male figure, whereas Nengomia is well covered in comparison with the scantily clad first lady. Her attire consists of a blue gown, a striped wimple covering her neck and forehead, and a red-brown, cloak-like veil. Although also influenced by Frankish fashion, this type of dress seems to have enjoyed particular popularity among local Cypriot ladies, since it returns in virtually all ascertained female Greek donor portraits. Considering that the low-cut gown and long veil of the first woman are much more similar 75 Stylianou and Stylianou, Painted Churches of Cyprus, 223–24, 231–32; Annemarie Weyl Carr, “Art in the Court of the Lusignan Kings,” in Cyprus and the Crusades. Proceedings of the International Conference (Nicosia, 6–9 September 1994), ed. Nicholas Coureas and Jonathan Riley-Smith (Nicosia: Cyprus Research Centre, 1995), 239–74, esp. 245–46, Fig. 12; Christoforaki, “An Unusual Representation of the Incredulity of Thomas,” 71, 83, figs. 1–2, 22–23; Jens T. Wollesen, Painters and Patrons on Cyprus. The Frescoes in the Royal Chapel at Pyrga, Studies and Texts 169 (Toronto: Pontifical Institute of Mediaeval Studies, 2010), 37–38.

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to the revealing outfits worn by the Latin lady in Asinou, one might be inclined to conclude that the unidentified lady in Pelendri is a Latin noblewoman as well. On the other hand, there is one striking difference: unlike the lady at Asinou, whose hair is uncovered at the top and whose veil is suspended from her forehead by means of a circlet, she wears a veil that completely covers her head. Should we then perhaps assume that she was more progressive, or more attuned to recent fashion developments than Nengomia and other Greek ladies of her time? Our only source on the custom of wearing veils in Cyprus is Jacopo da Verona (1335), according to whom the women of Famagusta covered their heads with a black veil as a sign of mourning after the loss of Acre in 1291.76 Jacopo’s statement is not helpful in our attempts to distinguish between Latin and Greek supplicants; nor does it tell the whole story, for the effigies of black-veiled ladies on the Syrian mainland discussed above were painted when the Franks were still in control of the area. Actually, in Cyprus we find veils of various colours and models, and rather than marking denominational identity, they seem to have been differentiated according to the function of the veil and the bearer’s social status.77 The bearded facial features of the husband of the anonymous lady at Pelendri might at first be taken as an indicator of a Greek background, but this is again far from certain as Franks are sometimes known to have grown beards as well.78 His clothing is not helpful either, since it represents the standard fourteenth-century male fashion, whatever the precise religious affiliation of its wearer. If we turn, finally, to other aspects of the couple’s appearance, we may find another indication of Greek identity in the standing manner of prayer, with hands slightly apart in keeping with Byzantine devout supplicant fashion, as opposed to the western mode of kneeling in prayer with the hands firmly clasped together.79 On the other hand, bearing in mind the contemporary social reality of mixed marriages, we cannot entirely exclude the possibility that we are dealing with a mixed Greek and Latin couple. Moreover, the fact that the Latin supplicant Simonin at Crac des Chevaliers is also represented standing, and the Oriental donor on the triptych in the Monastery of St. Catherine is depicted kneeling, shows that the postures of donors are not 76 Hunt, “A Woman’s Prayer,” 81–86. 77 Hunt, “A Woman’s Prayer.” 78 Krijne N. Ciggaar, “Adaptation to Oriental Life by Rulers in and around Antioch. Examples and Exempla,” in Ciggaar and Metcalf eds., East and West in the Medieval Eastern Mediterranean, I. Antioch, 261–82. 79 Wollesen, Patrons and Painters of Cyprus, 47–48.

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entirely secure markers of denominational identity either, and that once again caution is called for. 6

Conclusions

In the eastern Mediterranean area in the Middle Ages, the presence of a wealthy, influential upper class with the willingness to take initiatives and invest was indispensable in the erection, restoration, and embellishment of church buildings and monasteries. Where the indigenous Christian laity took on this task in the territories under Islamic rule, in particular in Egypt, in the Latin-ruled countries Frankish lords voluntarily paid their share in the maintenance and renewal of the churches used by their local subjects. Although principally driven by self-interest, these benefactors undoubtedly also felt the motivation to contribute to the ecclesiastical infrastructure for the benefit of their communities or, in the case of Egypt, to provide fitting accommodation for the Church leader. In the countries under Frankish authority, the lively interaction between the Latin leadership and local subjects must have been a preponderant factor in Frankish investment in churches of other denominations. In Cyprus, Frankish lords gradually took over the patronage responsibilities of the ousted Byzantine aristocracy, a situation that can perhaps best be summarized as “noblesse oblige.” Royal patronage was certainly also prompted by a political motivation to secure a state of civic and social stability in the face of religious differences. Though donor portraits furnish substantial indications for the denominational, ethnic, and “national” identity of benefactors, they do not always give definite answers. Rather than interpreting the appearance of such effigies as a sum of separate identity markers, such as dress and beard growth, one must always also be aware of social status, possible personal preferences, and fashions shared by the different communities. In the case of the veil worn by ladies in several depictions, for instance, this item of dress should be seen in the context of functionality (such as devotion, mourning, and matrimony) rather than as a distinctive marker of denominational adherence. Clearly, the divisions between the members of the diverse communities were sometimes easily overridden by social and political considerations. In their attempts to enhance their social status and prestige, while at the same time not turning their back on their religious background, the donors balanced on a tightrope between fitting in and standing out.80 80

This research was funded by the Netherlands Organization for Scientific Research (NWO), Leiden University, and the Laboratoire d’excellence ‘Religions et sociétés dans le monde

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Chapter 7

The Tale of the Shared Church in Diyarbakir Narrative Traditions of the Co-use of Places of Prayer by Muslims and Christians Angela Andersen The Ulu Cami is the congregational or Great Mosque of the city of Diyarbakir (also known as Amid and Amida) in what is now southeastern Turkey.1 The mosque is a complex made up of phases of worship and study buildings constructed around a central courtyard, dated primarily between the eleventh and sixteenth centuries. Developed over centuries, the form and decorative program of the Diyarbakir Ulu Cami embody sacred and political meanings, including the long-held belief that the structure was once a church. The mosque has also become associated with a tale of co-use at the site by Muslims and Christians at the time of the Arab conquest of the city in 639. It is interesting to consider the creation and perpetuation of multi-denominational conquest narratives in relation to the built environment in the Islamic and Byzantine worlds. The two associations of the mosque as part of a shared site and then as a converted church do not fully intersect with the physical history of the architecture, its site, and its sculptural programs. Nonetheless, this association of the Diyarbakir Ulu Cami with the local Christian community is the result of visual references made through the floor plan and decorative details of the mosque’s buildings, the local Christian architectural idiom, and the systematic maintenance of links to Sunni ideologies during all phases of construction.2 Much of the lore associated with the mosque may derive from the collective, and sometimes conflated, history of other congregational mosques in the greater Mesopotamian region and the wider Islamic world. There is a particular connection to the Umayyad Mosque of Damascus, completed under Caliph 1 Erica Cruikshank Dodd took an active interest in my research in Diyarbakir. She has enriched my scholarship and that of the field as a whole. I thank the editors of this volume, as well as Parvaneh Pourshariati and Elisabeth Langford, for their comments on drafts of this chapter. 2 Armenian, Greek Orthodox, and Syrian Orthodox communities were present in Diyarbakir in the seventh century. Andrew Palmer argues for a Chalcedonian cathedral, without regard to local architectural history. “Amid in the Seventh-Century Syriac Life of Theodotus,” in The Encounter of Eastern Christianity with Early Islam, ed. Emmanouela Grypeou, Mark Swanson, and David Thomas (Leiden: Brill, 2006), 126–36.

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al-Walid I (r. 705–15) in ca. 715, as a structure that has also been commonly linked to the Christian community and a church that once occupied the platform on which the mosque now stands. A basilica built in the late 620s by Emperor Heraclius (r. 610–41) and dedicated to Saint Thomas may have stood at the Ulu Cami site. The epigraphic record at the Ulu Cami begins with the Great Seljuks of Persia (1037–1194), who annexed Diyarbakir in 1085, and continues with the subsequent dynasties that ruled the city independently and under the suzerainty of larger powers.3 The origins and purpose of the “shared church” narrative are related to the topoi employed by Muslim writers recounting the seventh-century period of Islamic conquest. Several centuries removed from actual events, writers of the eighth and ninth centuries, and even the eleventh and twelfth-century Crusader era, made use of literary structures and a conventionalized sequence of events employed in Arabic and Persian-language histories, frequently expounding upon previously verified and compiled sources.4 These chronicles describe the just, righteous, and divinely willed victories of the early Muslim armies spreading from the Hijaz into Syria, Mesopotamia, and Persia, but analysis of details also reveals some of the socio-economic and demographic realities of the age.5 Subsequent Muslim settlement, commercial development, and the arguable large-scale conversion to Islam by the conquered population are common themes in this literary tradition; it presents early Muslim occupation and adaptation of cities and Christian religious sites for congregational Muslim prayer, and dispute resolution for architectural ownership and access, all according to laws established for this purpose.6 Christian chroniclers have different aims and tropes, and temper panegyrical accounts with other perspectives. Islamic architectural scholarship frequently utilizes such chronicles to trace and assert the development of an Islamic architectural paradigm.7 The brief passage that relates how the Muslims partitioned the Diyarbakir cathedral is 3 These included the Inalids, Nisanids and Artukids (1183–1232, 1302–1394), the Akkoyuns (1401–1507), and the Ottomans (1515–1923). 4 See Fred McGraw Donner, Narratives of Islamic Origins: The Beginnings of Islamic Historical Writing (Princeton: The Darwin Press, 1998); Albrecht Noth, The Early Arabic Historical Tradition: A Source Critical Study, Studies in Late Antiquity and Early Islam 3, trans. Michael Bonner (Princeton: Darwin Press, 1994). 5 See Parvaneh Pourshariati, Decline and Fall of the Sasanian Empire: The Sasanian-Parthian Confederacy and the Arab Conquest of Iran (London: I.B. Tauris, 2008). 6 See Parvaneh Pourshariati, “Local Historiography in Early Medieval Iran and the Tarikh-i Bayhaq,” Iranian Studies 33, nos. 1–2 (2000), 133–64, esp. 162; Thomas Sizgorich, “Narrative and Community in Islamic Late Antiquity,” Past and Present 185 (2004): 9–42. 7 K. A. C. Creswell consults a wide range of histories and chronicles in Early Muslim Architecture, 2nd ed., 2 vols. (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1969).

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recorded in a history of the Arab campaigns in northern Mesopotamia attributed to the historian and chronicler Abu ʿAbdallah Muhammad b. ʿUmar ibn Waqid al-Aslami, widely known as al-Waqidi (d. 823); this text is exceptional in that it emphasizes a shared church site. The current chapter will examine the tale of the shared church in Diyarbakir via connections between the visual imagery of the mosque and the narratives attached to the complex. The discussion will begin with a description of the structural and decorative characteristics of the Diyarbakir Ulu Cami in order to set the stage for an exploration of the complex’s relationships to antecedent churches and to mosques with similar architectural features and early narratives. The formal architectural details, Christian and Muslim chronicles, and comparisons that form this chapter comment upon the trajectory of places of worship and Muslim conquest tropes, and contextualize the text attributed to al-Waqidi, which has left a lasting mark upon both the popular stories and academic understandings of the Diyarbakir Ulu Cami and the Muslim-Christian relations in the region. 1

Description of the Ulu Cami of Diyarbakir

The ancient, walled city of Diyarbakir sits on the banks of the Tigris River. Just north of the intersection of the surviving cardo and decumanus of the Roman street plan, the mosque’s site has constituted a focal point for educational, religious, and commercial purposes throughout the city’s history. The visual acknowledgement of Diyarbakir’s Christian architecture in the design and decoration of the mosque complex and its arcaded courtyard is closely tied to the continued tradition of classicising sculptural work carried out in the churches of the city and the surrounding region. The main prayer hall, situated on the southern edge of the courtyard (Fig. 7.1), is the largest structure of the Ulu Cami complex. This hall displays the oldest dated epigraphy at the site in the form of a dedication from 1091–92 under Persian Seljuk Sultan Malik Shah (r. 1072–92). The façade is covered by extensive inscription panels on the masonry flanking the entry portals and a band of Kufic placed high upon the walls, while a series of gently pointed arches forms fenestration bays.8 All is built from the porous, black volcanic basalt that is the main construction material used throughout the city. On the 8 For the inscriptions, see Max van Berchem, “Matériaux pour l’épigraphie et l’histoire Musulmanes du Diyar-Bekr,” in Max van Berchem, Josef Strzygowski, and Gertrude Bell, Amida (Heidelberg: Carl Winter, 1910), 3–128; Albert Gabriel and Jean Sauvaget, Voyages archéologiques dans la Turquie Orientale (Paris: E. de Boccard, 1940).

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Figure 7.1 Ulu Cami of Diyarbakir, main prayer hall façade Photograph: Angela Andersen

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Figure 7.2 Ulu Cami of Diyarbakir, main prayer hall interior Photograph: Angela Andersen

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interior, three long aisles created by double-tiered arches resting on piers run parallel to the qibla (direction of prayer) (Fig. 7.2). A gabled transept intersects the centre of the basilica. The main mihrab (niche indicating the direction of prayer) is situated in the transept; a secondary mihrab is located in the eastern half of the nave. The minaret, a square tower affixed to the south of the prayer hall, is inscribed with the date 1141.9 The northern boundary of the courtyard is formed by an undated arcade of thick, white columns with Corinthian capitals. This forms a screen in front of the adjacent Mesudiye Medrese, built between 1198 and 1223. Across an entrance passage, a second, smaller prayer hall was likely constructed following the Ottoman conquest of the city from the Safavids in 1515; it is dated to 1528–29 by an Ottoman inscription band. The structures that enclose the courtyard to the west and east are the product of construction during the reigns of the Inalids and the Nisanids, two regional dynastic powers under Seljuk suzerainty. Both riwaqs are executed in basalt blocks, arcaded at ground level, and enclosed to create rooms with windows on the second storey; epigraphic friezes, decorative columns, and carved spolia are affixed to this masonry structure. Two elaborate Kufic inscriptions run across the façade of the western riwaq: a frieze, broken at the points where it runs behind the column capitals on the lower storey, is dated 1117–18; a similar course, broken by impost blocks on the upper storey, is dated 1124–25 and notes the son and grandsons of Malik Shah. Elaborate, framing friezes feature repeating, grape-laden vines, which stretch around the impost blocks, and stylized vegetal scrolling (Fig. 7.3). Composite columns on the ground level are formed from repurposed shaft segments (Fig. 7.4). The second-storey columns showcase foliated Corinthian capitals and ten different limestone shafts with linear interlace, netted web, and interposed geometric carvings that contrast with the organic motifs used on the rest of the façade. The cohesive spolial material used on the western riwaq suggests that most of the applied sculpture, with the exception of the Arabic inscription friezes, came from a single source. Recent geological analysis confirms that both the full and composite columns used to complete the decoration in both the east and west riwaqs were carved from regional stone deposits, but the presence

9 1155–56, the time of the Inalid riwaq construction, is given by Oktay Aslanapa, Turkish Art and Architecture (London: Faber and Faber, 1971), 94; Metin Sözen, Diyarbakir’da Turk Mimarisi (Istanbul: Diyarbakır’ı Tanıtma ve Turizm Derneği Yayınları, 1971), 30. Albert Gabriel suggests that the upper section is Ottoman. Gabriel, Voyages archéologiques, 187, 194.

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Figure 7.3 Ulu Cami of Diyarbakir, west riwaq, detail of sculptural program Photograph: Angela Andersen

of wedges to adjust shaft heights is evidence that some columns were re-used from previous building programs.10 The eastern riwaq, which functions as the main portal to the mosque courtyard, was completed under the Nisanid state in 1163–64. The Corinthian capitals of the composite, ground-storey columns do not reach to the architrave as they do in the western riwaq, allowing the epigraphic course to run completely across the façade in Kufic script (Fig. 7.5). A course of stylized, limestone vegetal moulding and grape vines is divided from a further course of leafy vines and dentil work by a band of strip moulding in the contrasting darker basalt stone (Fig. 7.6). The cornice consists of a band of grapes and leaves on a repeat-pattern of circular, swivelled vine segments. The façade design and relief carvings of the east riwaq reflect the organizational and stylistic qualities of the structure and decoration of the older, western version. A large amount of new sculptural material was likely executed under the Nisanid patrons, and the dedicatory epigraphy and a Qurʾanic frieze were given more prominent roles than on the western version. The western program’s vegetal forms are carved in a lush and spreading style, with organic 10

Four types of stone, primarily limestone and basalt from the area immediately surrounding the city, were identified in the Ulu Cami’s columns. Orhan Kavak, Neslihan Dalkılıç, Vedat Toprak, “Geological and Architectural Investigation of Reused Rock Columns in the Great Mosque in Diyarbakir Old City (Turkey),” Mediterranean Archaeology & Archaeometry 11, no. 2 (2011): 9–22.

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Figure 7.4 Ulu Cami of Diyarbakir, west riwaq façade Photograph: Angela Andersen

Figure 7.5 Ulu Cami of Diyarbakir, east riwaq façade Photograph: Angela Andersen

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Figure 7.6 Ulu Cami of Diyarbakir, east riwaq detail of sculptural program Photograph: Angela Andersen

leaves that seem to overhang each architrave level. In contrast, the repeating leaves of the friezes of the eastern program are reticulated, flattened, and stylized; the spacers that separate each band heighten this effect and increase the visibility of the dentil work and plain masonry blocks. The greatest effort at matching the work of the earlier façade is in the grapevine reliefs, which are executed to capture the appearance of the vessels from which the vines sprout at spaced intervals. The twelfth-century carvings were consciously historicizing and maintained stylistic continuity with the facing western façade while integrating new sculptural work into a program executed under the only architect named at the site, Hibatallah of Gurgan.11 11

Van Berchem, “Matériaux,” 61, with clarification from Mahmut Akok, “Diyarbakır Ulucami Mimari Manzumesi,” Vakıflar Dergisi 8 (1969): 113–39, esp. 135. Gurgani also completed a restoration of the main prayer hall façade in 1155. Julian Raby, “Nur Al-Din, the Qastal al-Shuʾaybiyya, and the ‘Classical Revival’,” Muqarnas 21 (2004): 289–310, esp. 305.

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Perceptions of a Christian History at the Diyarbakir Ulu Cami

Istanbul-educated Ottoman official and writer Evliya Çelebi (ca. 1684) visited the Diyarbakir Ulu Cami in 1655, when he observed: “In its architectural elements are thousands of clear proofs that the mosque was previously a church.”12 Near Eastern and European chroniclers between the seventh and seventeenth centuries and architectural historians of the past two centuries have frequently described the Diyarbakir Ulu Cami as the converted Diyarbakir cathedral. The “converted church” story, like the “shared church” narrative, functions as a literary topos, designed to integrate the earlier, sacred histories of the site into the architecture of the Islamic period. An eighth-century Syriac chronicle written in the monastery of Zuqnin in the vicinity of Diyarbakir records that Emperor Heraclius began constructing the great church of Diyarbakir in 628–29.13 A subsequent entry for the year 769–70 describes the repair of this same church, again identified with its construction under Emperor Heraclius: Since its initial construction, the church had not been restored. As it was deteriorated and on the verge of collapse, they busied themselves with its restoration. Father Mar Aba, Bishop of the city, the Honourable Mar George, Visitor, and Thomas the Archdeacon took great care and there made great expense; they changed everything that was rotten inside [and] remade it as new.14 While the possibility that the church was partially or fully converted into a mosque remains, this chronicle suggests that the church was under Christian stewardship in the eighth century.15 This is significant for the argument that 12

Evliya Çelebi, Seyahatname, in Martin van Bruinessen and Hendrik Boeschoten, eds. and trans. Evliya Çelebi in Diyarbekir: The Relevant Section of the Seyahatname (Leiden: Brill, 1988), passage I.9.1, 135. 13 The Chronicle of Zuqnin Parts III and IV A.D. 488–775, trans. Amir Harrak (Toronto: Pontifical Institute of Mediaeval Studies, 1999), 142; Chronique de Denys de Tell-Mahré Quatrième Partie, trans. Jean-Baptiste Chabot (Paris, 1895), 5. These are sometimes falsely attributed to Dionysius of Tel-Mahre Patriarch of Antioch (d. 845), known only through quotation of his writings by other authors. 14 Chronique de Denys de Tell-Mahré, 115; see also Chronicle of Zuqnin, 228. 15 Mattia Guidetti examines the building phases of the Diyarbakir Ulu Cami via historical documents. The Futuh al-Sham version widely attributed to al-Waqidi also contains a familiar reference to the Muslim’s full transformation of the cathedral. Guidetti notes the difference between these textual references to a transformed church and a partitioned church but perplexingly presents it as originating from two versions of the same Syrian

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it was the cathedral platform and not the structure itself that was partitioned for the conquest-era Muslims. A description of a Great Mosque in Diyarbakir in Persian traveller Nasir-i Khusraw’s (1004–88) Safarnama (Book of Travels) is based upon his visit to the city in 1046, forty-five years before the Seljuk date of the main prayer hall. Khusraw’s description suggests a hypostyle mosque with over 200 monolithic columns and a large, adjacent church of the same stone, with a marble floor.16 Such glimpses into the history of the Ulu Cami building and its precinct beg the question of whether the main prayer hall is the original Islamic-period structure on the site and for how long a mosque and a cathedral may have faced each other between the seventh and the eleventh or twelfth centuries. Structural evidence has been used to support the hypothesis of a co-used site, with distinct structures for Muslims and Christians.17 Historical events, combined with epigraphy, present possible interpretations for the development of the Ulu Cami and the application of the spolia. Armenian chronicler Matthew of Edessa (1062–1136) recorded a major, destructive fire at the mosque in 1115, caused by lightning.18 This was only two years prior to the first epigraphic date of 1117–18, and the second of 1124–25, on the western riwaq; the fire damage may be at least partly responsible for this new construction.19 Although the chronicle does not speak of a church being damaged at the site, a futuh manuscript. Mattia Guidetti, “The Contiguity between Churches and Mosques in the Early Islamic Bilad al-Sham,” Bulletin of the School of Oriental and African Studies 76, no. 2 (2013): 229–58, esp. 242. 16 Naser-e Khosraw, Naser-e Khosraw’s Book of Travels (Safarnama), trans. Wheeler M. Thackston Jr. (Albany, NY: Persian Heritage Foundation, 1986), 9. 17 The Corinthian columns of the northern arcade may have remained in situ. Angela Andersen, “The Diyarbakir Ulu Cami: Social History and Interaction at the Great Mosque” (MA Thesis, University of Victoria, 2004), 143. Terry Allen asserts that the northern courtyard arches resulted from an intended rebuild of the arcade around the entire courtyard, based on the spring of an arch fused with the northernmost pier of the west riwaq, A Classical Revival in Islamic Architecture (Wiesbaden: Reichert, 1986), 39–40. Creswell proposes that this arcade fragment was itself a remnant of the mosque described by Nasir-i Khusraw. He did not support the notion that the Ulu Cami had once been a church, citing the narthex bisecting the Ulu Cami’s main prayer hall and the pointed arches of the hall’s façade in “Mardin and Diyarbekr,” Muqarnas 15 (1998): 1–8, esp. 7–8. The elongated form of the main prayer hall, which measures 72 m by 16 m, does not conform to the proportional traditions of ecclesiastical architecture in the greater Syrian region through the sixth century. See Howard Crosby Butler, Early Churches in Syria Fourth to Eleventh Centuries (Amsterdam: Adolf M. Hakkert, 1969), 183. 18 Matthew of Edessa, Armenia and the Crusades Tenth to Twelfth Centuries: The Chronicle of Matthew of Edessa, trans. Ara Edmond Dostourian, (Lanham: National Association for Armenian Studies and Research, 1993), 218. 19 Van Berchem, “Matériaux,” 58; Allen, Classical Revival, 38.

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large fire may have likewise engulfed an extant cathedral, allowing for the use of its sculptural program in the new section of the Ulu Cami. These accounts suggest that the Ulu Cami is a purpose-built mosque, albeit with cathedral-like features; the relief sculpture of the western riwaq likely comes from the cathedral.20 Although knowledge of the pre- and early Islamic layers of religious architecture at the site is incomplete, textual sources, particularly between the seventh and eleventh centuries are scarce, and the understanding of the extant structure continues to develop. The visual cues provided by the basilical prayer hall, the square minaret, and the relief decoration emphasize and engage with a supposed Christian origin for the mosque. In 1867 Robert J. Garden wrote for the Royal Geographical Society remarking that he “visited the Ulu-jami, or Great Mosque, which they say was originally a Christian church.”21 Eminent Turkish architectural historian Aptulah Kuran asserted in 1980 that “the oldest mosque within the borders of Turkey is the Ulu Cami (Great Mosque) of Diyarbakir, which is dated to the seventh century,” thereby referencing an antecedent Byzantine church with the early date.22 The people who pray, study, and rest at the mosque in the twenty-first century are still quick to mention that it was once a cathedral and that the city converted to Islam from Christianity. A similar pattern of visual references to pre-Islamic classical and Christian forms and motifs is conveyed by other mosques of the region. Great Seljuk 20

Van Berchem, Strzygowski, and Bell accept the Christian heritage of the spolia in Amida. Josef Strzygowski argues for cathedral spolia and creates a context for the Islamic use of Classical and Early Christian spolia and motifs, “Beiträge zur Kunstgeschichte des Mittelalters von Nordmesopotamien, Hellas und dem Abendlande,” in van Berchem, Strzygowski, and Bell, Amida, 131–380, esp. 148–49, 153–63, as do Allen, Classical Revival; Creswell, Early Muslim Architecture; and Estelle J. Whelan, “The Public Figure: Political Iconography in Medieval Mesopotamia” (PhD diss., New York University, 1979). Marlia Mundell Mango calls the source “an unknown building of the fifth to seventh century,” in “The Continuity of the Classical Tradition in the Art and Architecture of Northern Mesopotamia,” in East of Byzantium: Syria and Armenia in the Formative Period, Dumbarton Oaks Symposium 1980, ed. Nina G. Garsoïan, Thomas F. Mathews, and Robert W. Thomson (Washington, DC: Dumbarton Oaks, 1982), 115–34, esp. 128. Richard Phené Spiers follows the previous scholarship of James Fergusson to state that the Armenian “Palace of Tigranes at Diyarbekr” (286–342) is “now the mosque of that town,” suggesting that two facing buildings provided the riwaq spolia. See Architecture East and West (London: B. T. Batsford, 1905), 66, 67. Oktay Aslanapa suggests the spolia came from “an old Roman theatre,” Turkish Art, 93. 21 Robert J. Garden, “Description of Diarbekr,” Journal of the Royal Geographical Society 37 (1867), 182–93, esp. 188. 22 Aptulah Kuran, “Anatolian-Seljuk Architecture,” in The Art and Architecture of Turkey, ed. Ekrem Akurgal (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1980), 80–110, esp. 83.

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Figure 7.7 Ulu Cami of Diyarbakir, floorplan Created by Angela Andersen

ruler Malik Shah and his brother, the Damascene viceroy Tutush, restored the transept dome, the Qubbat al-Nasr of al-Walid, at the Umayyad Great Mosque of Damascus in 1082–83, just nine years before Malik Shah’s work on the Diyarbakir Ulu Cami. Damascus was a suitable model for the Seljuk’s new mosque in Diyarbakir, particularly given their ongoing efforts to expand Sunni suzerainty in the eastern Mediterranean.23 Both mosques feature large prayer halls with three aisles and prominent transepts, a square minaret, and buildings designed around a central courtyard (Fig. 7.7). The Great Mosque of Damascus became associated with the myth that the building had been converted from the church of St. John the Baptist following the Arab conquest of the city in 634, which likely furthered the connection between the Ulu Cami and the antecedent Heraclian basilica in Diyarbakir. Finbarr Barry Flood’s examination of the visual culture of the Umayyads parses the imagery of the famous Byzantine courtyard and prayer hall façade mosaics in Damascus that depict lamps, vines, foliage, and palatial buildings, as well as the less-studied vine scroll relief, the karma, of the prayer hall interior.24 The horizontal gilded relief of the karma ran above the mihrabs of the qibla wall at a height of three to four metres and depicted a composite vine scroll with acanthus leaves, hung heavy with grapes and pomegranates. Such vine friezes were popular in the Syrian and Armenian church-building 23

Their goal was to overthrow the Ismaili Shia Fatimids (909–1171). See Yasser Tabbaa, The Transformation of Islamic Art during the Sunni Revival (Seattle: University of Washington Press, 2001), 18. 24 Finbarr Barry Flood, The Great Mosque of Damascus: Studies on the Makings of an Umayyad Visual Culture (Leiden: Brill, 2001), 15–56; 57–113.

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Figure 7.8 Ulu Cami of Diyarbakir, western riwaq vase detail Photograph: Angela Andersen

traditions of the Byzantine period, and examples of vine scrolling were also found in Jewish iconography.25 The vine motif’s pre-Islamic associations with sacramental wine are subsumed by Qurʾanic presentations of the gardens of paradise. The placement of ecclesiastical spolia on Diyarbakir’s western courtyard cornice, including vines emerging from vases (Fig. 7.8), a lower frieze with fruited vines, and new relief carvings on the eastern façade depicting the vessel and vine motif, is a visual response to the Damascene foliate imagery as well as to Diyarbakir’s own classical and Christian heritage. The question of Christian-Muslim relations is central to the discussion of the Ulu Cami presented in this chapter. Massive, monumental, and central, the Diyarbakir Ulu Cami is a clear marker of Islamic authority in the city and the province around it, yet Diyarbakir’s heterogeneous architectural and ethno-religious make-up makes it difficult to see the mosque solely as the assertion of the imperial and dynastic power of a succession of Sunni rulers over the centuries. Julian Raby argues that the use of Christian spolia on the Ulu Cami’s western riwaq was part of an “anti-Christian polemic” in Diyarbakir, citing the assistance provided by the metropolitan of Diyarbakir to the Crusaders in Antioch in 1115 as a justification of the appropriation of the cathedral’s relief decoration.26 While it is certain that the Crusades created new tensions in Muslim-Christian relations, an “anti-Christian polemic” is not in keeping with a city that supported the Syrian Orthodox patriarchs during that same period. The use and placement of spolia in Islamic settings speaks

25 It evokes the Temples of Herod and Solomon, and the Divine Throne. Flood, 68–77, 86, 92. 26 Raby, “Nur Al-Din,” 303. It is also significant that the western façade does not include anti-Christian Quranic passages and other epigraphy.

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to domination as well as to other more nuanced relationships.27 However, the extremely careful integration, not just of parts of the cathedral’s relief carvings but, according to Terry Allen, of a compositional program “in its proper sense, in its original vertical order” exhibits a clear sense of historicity and a look to the region’s Christian architectural heritage, without obscuring its origins.28 Skilled craftspeople mounted spolia on specially designed arcade structures at the Ulu Cami, expanding the program with inscription bands but never obfuscating the design. Likewise, literary narratives and topoi associated with the mosque show a nuanced, interdependent, expanding relationship between Muslim rulers and local Christians. To verify that the cathedral remained in use by a Christian community, an alternative Muslim prayer site must be sought. There is no extant mosque or epigraphic evidence within Diyarbakir’s walls that can be dated to the period between the conquest and supposed partitioning of the cathedral in 639 and the Ulu Cami’s Seljuk construction phase of 1091–92.29 The church of St. George, tentatively dated to before 518, was a likely site for Muslim prayer within the citadel, the Iç Kale, where the military forces that governed and secured the city were ensconced.30 A seventh-century reference to a citadel mosque occurs in an episode recorded in (a twelfth-century copy of) the Life of the Syrian Orthodox monk named Theodotus (d. 698), who briefly served as bishop of Diyarbakir. Theodotus was dragged to the mosque and interrogated for corresponding with the Byzantine garrison at Anzitene.31 It cannot be determined which mosque is being referenced, but an unnamed Muslim ruler was acting as judge within, with a detachment of soldiers at hand, as would be the case in the citadel.

27

See Finbarr Barry Flood, “Appropriation as Inscription: Making History in the First Friday Mosque of Delhi,” in Reuse Value: Spolia and Appropriation in Art and Architecture from Constantine to Sherrie Levine, ed. Richard Brilliant and Dale Kinney (New York: Routledge, 2016), 121–47. 28 Allen, Classical Revival, 39. 29 Orhan Cezmi Tuncer, Diyarbakır Camileri: Mukarnas, Geometri, Orantı (Diyarbakır: Diyarbakır Büyükşehir Belediyesi Kültür ve Sanat Yayınları, 1996), 11. The minaret of the Hazreti Süleyman Cami, next to the Iç Kale’s walls, is inscribed with the late date 1160. 30 Orhan Cezmi Tuncer, Diyarbakır Kiliseleri (Diyarbakır: Diyarbakır Büyükşehir Belediyesi Kültür ve Sanat Yayınları, 2002), 134–41. 31 Palmer, “Amid,” 124–25. He includes his translation from the Life of Theodute, twelfth century, now in the collection of the Syrian Orthodox Patriarchate, Damascus, Syriac MS, no. 12/17.

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The Futuhat al-ʿIraq: Diyarbakir in the Copenhagen Codex

A brief commentary on a shared church in Diyarbakir, partitioned following the conquest of the city in 639, appears in the Futuhat al-ʿIraq (Conquest of Iraq), a manuscript in the National Library of Denmark in Copenhagen (Cod. Arab. 137). During a stop in Cairo in 1761 and 1762, a Danish scientific expedition to Yemen acquired a number of manuscripts, including the Copenhagen codex. The Arabic text has been attributed, perhaps incorrectly, to al-Waqidi. While an accurate date for the codex and its potential relationship to the work of al-Waqidi requires further analysis, the text’s reference to Istanbul (rather than Constantinople) suggests a date no earlier than the mid-fifteenth century, while the purchase provides an absolute terminus ante quem of 1762.32 The text states that ʿIyad ibn Ghanm commanded the conquering Muslim forces and that “From the main church of the city, which was dedicated to Saint Thomas, he took two thirds for a mosque.”33 As will be discussed, this is often interpreted to mean that a third remained for the continued use of the Christian congregation, although it is not explicitly stated as such. In spite of the fact that the purpose of the narrative was to recount the righteous victories of early Caliphal Islam, the author does not describe a full seizure and occupation of the city’s main church. 32

For the known history of the manuscript, see Justus Olshausen and August F. M. Mehren, Codices Orientales Bibliothecae Regiae Hafniensis, Part 2, Codices Hebraicos et Arabicos Enumerati et Descripti Continens (Copenhagen, 1851), CXXXVII, 91; thank you to National Library of Denmark Research Librarian Eva-Maria Jansson for this source. The manuscript was published in Arabic as Kitab Futuḥ Miṣr wa‌ʾl-Iskandariyya, ed. Hendrik A. Hamaker (Leiden: Luchtmans, 1825). Another Arabic copy of the text was published in the twentieth century under the title Tarikh Futuh al-Jazira wa‌ʾl-Khabur wa-Diyar Bakr wa‌ʾlʿIrak, ed. ʿAbd al-ʿAziz Fiyad Harfush (Damascus: Dar al-Bashair lil-Tibʿah wa-al-Nashr wa-al-Tawziʿ, 1996). A Latin translation is listed in the bibliography of Heinrich Ewald, in Thomas Witton Davies, Heinrich Ewald, Orientalist and Theologian, 1803–1903: A Centenary Appreciation (London: T. Fisher Unwin, 1903), 134: Heinrich Ewald, Wakedii Libri Mesopotamiae expugnatae historia pars de codice Bibliothecae Gottingensis Arabico edita et annotatione illustrata (Göttingen: Sumtibus Dieterichianis, 1827). This is apparently an excerpt, listed in Olshausen and Mehren, Codices Orientales as Liber Vakedu de Mesopotamiae expugnatae historia, 91. The most recent edition was published as part of a compilation of works attributed to al-Waqidi which were previously translated into German. Abâ ʿAbdallâh Muhammad b. ʿUmar al-Wâqidî (d. 207/ 823), Geschichtsschreibung [Islamic Historiography] 10. Collected by Fuat Sezgin (Frankfurt am Main: Goethe Universität, Institut für Geschichte der Arabisch-Islamischen Wissenschaften, 2014). 33 Andreas David Mordtmann and Barthol Niebuhr, Jr., eds. and trans., Geschichte der Eroberung von Mesopotamien und Armenien von Mohammed ben Omar el Wakedi (Hamburg, 1847), 108: “Von der Hauptkirche der Stadt, die dem heiligen Thomas gewidmet war, nahm er zwei Drittheile zur Dschamea, …”

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The authenticity of writings attributed to al-Waqidi and the origins and transmission of his histories are a subject of scholarly scrutiny.34 The only work with which he is definitively associated is the Kitab al-Maghazi, which recounts the history and campaigns of the Prophet Muhammad.35 Al-Waqidi is also frequently credited with writing a version of Futuh al-Sham, a history of the Islamic conquest of Syria, and is believed to have composed more than twenty volumes on early Muslim conquest history. However, most of these have been lost and are known only through quotations by later authors.36 The Copenhagen codex was translated into German by Barthol Georg Niebuhr in the early nineteenth century and later edited and published by Andreas David Mordtmann in 1847. The title page (Geschichte der Eroberung von Mesopotamien und Arménien von Mohammed ben Omar el Wakedi) states that the volume is the History of the Conquest of Mesopotamia and Armenia “of Mohammad ben Omar al-Wakidi.” While attribution to al-Waqidi lent authenticity to the contents of the codex by placing it within his highly regarded historical corpus and granting the text a firm ninth-century date of composition, it may at best be a compilation of his writings with additional material from several centuries later. Both Niebuhr and Mordtmann felt the narrative to be an authentic history in its own right and worthy of translation and publication, even though Mordtmann did not consider the codex to be an original work by al-Waqidi, determining that an early manuscript of that type was no longer in existence. Almost nothing was known of some of the events represented, meaning that no historical comparison could be made with other sources.37 Mordtmann also pointed out anachronisms, such as the use of “Istanbul”, the 34

Rizwi Faizer explores the issue of authenticity in Kitab al-Maghazi in The Life of Muhammad: Al-Waqidi’s Kitab al-Maghazi, ed. Rizwi Faizer, trans., Rizwi Faizer, Amal Ismail and AbdulKader Tayob (London: Routledge, 2011); and “The Issue of Authenticity Regarding the Traditions of al-Waqidi as Established in His Kitab al-Maghazi,” Journal of Near Eastern Studies 58, no. 2 (April 1999): 97–106. See also S. Leder, “al-Waḳidi.” Encyclopaedia of Islam, 2nd Edition, ed. Peri Bearman, Thierry Bianquis, C. Edmund Bosworth, E. J. van Donzel, and Wolfhart P. Heinrichs (Brill Online, 2013). 35 Rizwi Faizer, “Muhammad and the Medinan Jews: A Comparison of the Texts of Ibn Ishaq’s Kitab Sirat Rasul Allah with Al-Waqidi’s Kitab Al-Maghazi,” International Journal of Middle East Studies 28, no. 4 (1996): 463–89, esp. 464. 36 See Suleiman Mourad, “On Early Islamic Historiography: Abu Ismail Al-Azdi and His Futuh Al-Sham,” Journal of the American Oriental Society 120, no. 4 (2000): 577–93. Abu Ismail al-Azdi (eighth century) and historian Abu Mikhnaf al-Azdi (d. 774), who also composed a version of the Futuh al-Sham, accessed the same informants in the eighth century. An Arabic copy of 1664 refers to the text as “A Synopsis of the Conquests of Syria by Wakidi” by Abu Ismail al-Azdi. Mourad, “On Early Islamic Historiography,” 578. 37 Mordtmann and Niebuhr, Geschichte der Eroberung, vi.

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Turkish name for the city that was not in use until after the fifteenth century, well after al-Waqidi’s time.38 Over the years, the anecdote regarding the partitioned cathedral was copied and re-translated by a number of authors interested in Diyarbakir’s architectural past. The passage initially entered into the architectural and epigraphic historiography of Diyarbakir in Max van Berchem’s seminal essay on the city, published in 1910, in which he translated and elaborated the German text into French: “The principal church of this city, dedicated to St. Thomas, was shared. Iyad took two thirds to make a mosque and left the other third for the Christians for the practice of their worship.”39 This passage emphasizes that the mosque was a shared space and notes ongoing Christian practices, an elaboration that was not part of the German text. Architectural historian K. A. C. Creswell paraphrased van Berchem: “The historical work attributed to Waqidi relates that after the capture of Diyarbekr by the Arabs in 18 H. (639) the principal church, dedicated to Saint Thomas, was divided between them and the Christians; two-thirds were taken by them and a third left to the Christians.”40 In 1999 Turkish historian Şevket Beysanoğlu wrote, without attributing his source, that after the Arab army breached the city walls “The first task was to apportion and later fully convert the church of Saint Thomas at the centre of the city (the Ulu Cami of today) for Muslim worship.”41 This engages the additional notion that the church was fully converted into the Ulu Cami following the partitioned phase. As these examples show, historians have repeatedly taken an interest in a single line in the Copenhagen codex. Word choices made during translations emphasize the shared church topos and present meanings and associations for subsequent audiences. With the exception of the German translation of the Copenhagen codex, the shared church anecdote was not placed within its proper narrative context within a longer passage in which Iyad’s actions were made analogous with stories of the prophets, and where it was explained that the conquered city of Diyarbakir and its large, unconverted Christian population were left in the hands of a Muslim cavalry force. 38 39

Mordtmann and Niebuhr, viii. The references to Istanbul occur on pages 93 and 94. Van Berchem, “Matériaux,” 51: “L’église principale de cette ville, dédiée à Saint-Thomas, fut partagée. Ij’âd en prit les deux tiers pour en faire une mosquée et laisse l’autre tiers aux chrétiens pour l’exercice de leur culte.” 40 Creswell, “Mardin and Diyarbekr,” 7. 41 Şevket Beysanoğlu, “Kuruluşundan Günümüze Kadar Diyarbakır Tarihi,” in Diyarbakır: Müze Şehir, ed. Şevket Beysanoğlu, Sabri M. Koz and Emin Nedret Işli (İstanbul: Yapı Kredi Yayınları, 1999), 39–79, esp. 49. “İlk iş olarak şehrin ortasındaki Mar-Toma (Saint-Thoma) kilisesinin bir kısmı (sonradan tamamı) camiye (bügünkü Ulu Cami) çevrilerek müsülmanların ibadetlerine ayrıidı.”

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The text explains that Iyad remained in Diyarbakir for twelve days, after which he appointed Szasza ben Masen Abditen as the commander of the city, and “allowed him five hundred Arab horsemen.”42 This cavalry force was left to oversee the city and to extract the head tax (jizya) from the residents who did not convert to Islam (dhimmis), although, according to the codex, by the following year the greater part of the population was Muslim and the poll tax was therefore removed.43 This information is important both for the history of the Diyarbakir church-mosque site and for the context of the passage, as there is a clear interest in suggesting that the people of Diyarbakir were fairly treated and were willing converts to Islam, after sharing a partitioned space within which the prayers of their Muslim conquerors were also held. The preceding passage in the text integrates the example of the repentance and obedience of the Prophet (King) David into the historical narrative of the conquest of Diyarbakir, of which Iyad’s subservience to God is both a reflection of and an example to the city’s new converts. This analogy ultimately implies that it is God’s will that the Muslims have successfully taken Diyarbakir, an important intra-textual message that emphasizes some of the intended meaning of the shared church anecdote. While Muslims and Christians may well have been engaged in the partitioned co-use of the city’s central place of worship, Iyad was tasked with employing the rules of conquest supposedly set out by Caliph ʿUmar in the covenant he drew up for Jerusalem. Although the Copenhagen codex mentions the mass conversion of the people of Diyarbakir, the city maintained its large Christian population from a mixture of denominational affiliations until the nineteenth century. When possible, these Christians, who at times outnumbered Muslims, engaged in the ongoing repair of older Christian sites and even in the construction of new churches, particularly within the Armenian community.44 The head tax was an important and constant source of income for the governors of Diyarbakir, and the talented,

42 Mordtman and Niebuhr, 108: “… und liess ihm fünfhundert arabische Reiter.” 43 Mordtman and Niebuhr, 108. 44 The Syrian Orthodox Church located its patriarchate in nearby Edessa and often maintained a seat in Diyarbakir. See: Judah B. Segal, Edessa ‘The Blessed City’ (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1970), 238–43. Under the Artukids (ruling from Hasankeyf 1102–1231 and from Mardin starting in 1106), Monophysite patriarchs periodically held elections in Diyarbakir and alternated between their residences in Mar Barswana, Mardin, and Diyarbakir. Claude Cahen, “Artukids,” Encyclopaedia of Islam (Leiden: Brill, 1960), 1:666. Demographic information shows non-Muslims constituted over fifty per cent of the urban population of Diyarbakir during several periods; in 1564, there were 10,000 Muslims and 13,000 non-Muslims. See Nejat Göyünç, “On altıncı yüzyılın ilk yarısında Diyarbakır,” Belgelerle Türk Tarihi Dergisi 7 (1968): 76–80; cadastral information in TKUM Mufassal TTD No. 155; Şevket Beysanoğlu, Diyarbakır Coğrafyası (Istanbul: Şehir Matbaası,

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local masons of Christian backgrounds were sought to practice their trade in Diyarbakir’s multi-faith setting. Ultimately, urban Diyarbakir was seen as a safe place for Christians in the region, who periodically sought shelter from a less hospitable countryside. The Copenhagen text creates a very specific image of the city, its new rulers, and its religious architecture, which is grounded in an overall tendency to elevate the achievements of the conquest forces. If the church was truly a shared space, it was in a time of great upheaval in the city, which found itself mired in new laws and taxation practices, restrictions, and behavioural expectations for Christians. Iyad’s forces, the newest in a long line of invaders to have arrived in Diyarbakir, were bolstered by military success and the prerogative brought by a religious cause, but the conquest was neither immediate nor decisive. Muslim forces sat outside the city gates for as much as five months before they were able to breach Diyarbakir’s walls, and Christian writer Elias Bar Shinaya of Nisibis remarks upon the extent of the carnage in Syria, of which Diyarbakir should be considered a part in this context.45 Diyarbakir’s populace remained largely Christian, and many Muslims adopted practices outside the mainstream Sunni paradigm, thus requiring calculated presentations, and even fabricated narratives, of just leadership over a mixed populace. The role of a converted structure in the visual polemics of the newly conquered city was the product of the cumulative risks and advantages of appropriating the largest Christian site and its central location. Diyarbakir’s central commercial area, in which bakers and metalsmiths, merchants and traders maintained their Christian and Jewish identities, continued to surround the mosque. The quarters of the city were named for Muslim, Jewish, Armenian, Syrian, and Greek Orthodox places of worship. With such a narrative as the background, the ongoing and systematic development of the Ulu Cami transmitted a message of co-use, via a shared church, a shared architectural vocabulary, a shared decorative program, and a shared urban space. 4

Narratives of Co-use and Islamic Architectural Scholarship

Historical narratives suggest that a single place of worship may simultaneously serve the congregational needs of both Muslims and Christians through shared

45

1962); and Martin van Bruinessen, “The Population of Diyarbekir: Ethnic Composition and Other Demographic Data,” in Bruinessen and Boeschoten, Evliya Çelebi in Diyarbekir, 29–35, esp. 33. Beysanoğlu, “Diyarbakır Tarihi,” 49. Elias Bar Shinaya, La Chronographie d’Elie bar-Sinaya, métropolitain de Nisibe, trans. Louis Joseph Delaporte (Paris: H. Champion, 1910), 83.

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space, partitioning, or the utilization of different buildings on the same site.46 Yet, scholars must parse the apocryphal narratives, fabricated histories, and literary topoi disseminated by chroniclers, all used to extend the presence of religious sites into an imagined past or to show just governance by conquering forces. For example, four accounts of Caliph ʿUmar’s entrance into Jerusalem after its surrender in 638 show how popular stories and conquest chronicles of co-use at places of worship differ in their details. It is often recounted that Patriarch Sophronius invited ʿUmar to pray in the church of the Holy Sepulchre, where Muslims used the porch and Christians the interior of the church.47 However, chronicler and monastic Theophanes (d. 818) and Syrian Orthodox Patriarch Michael the Syrian (d. 1199) do not mention the episode and instead recount Sophronius’ gesture of presenting ʿUmar with a new cloak.48 Elias Bar Shinaya, Metropolitan Archbishop of Nisibis (d. 1046) records that ʿUmar “built a mosque to replace the Temple of Solomon,” but does not mention the Holy Sepulchre.49 An account attributed to Eutychius, Patriarch of Alexandria (d. 940), narrates that ʿUmar refused Sophronius’ invitation to pray within the church of the Resurrection, eventually selecting the east steps at the entrance to Constantine’s basilica, after which he requested parchment on which to write out the terms of the conquest treaty for Jerusalem.50 This pact, which became known as the Covenant of ʿUmar, gave rights to Muslim converts, protection (with taxation) for church buildings, monks, clergymen, and those who maintained their faith but did not resist, and a crushing blow to enemies. These Christian chroniclers present Jerusalem’s agreement for the shared spaces of the city itself, which is distinct from the complete appropriation of religious sites by conquering Muslims.51 46 See Mattia Guidetti, “Churches Attracting Mosques: Religious Architecture in Early Islamic Syria,” in Sacred Precincts: The Religious Architecture of Non-Muslim Communities across the Islamic World, ed. Mohammad Gharipour (Leiden: Brill, 2015), 11–27; “The Byzantine Heritage in the Dar Al-Islam: Churches and Mosques in Al-Ruha between the Sixth and Twelfth Centuries,” Muqarnas 26 (2009): 1–36, esp. 4, 5. 47 For example, Steven Runciman, A History of The Crusades, vol. 1: The First Crusade and the Foundation of the Kingdom of Jerusalem (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1951), 3. 48 Michael the Syrian, Chronique de Michel Le Syrien, trans. Jean-Baptiste Chabot (Paris: Ernest Leroux, 1910), 425, 426; The Chronicle of Theophanes Anni Mundi 6095–6305 (A.D. 602–813), ed. and trans. Harry Turtledove, (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1982), 39. 49 Elias Bar Shinaya, Chronographie, 83. 50 Eutychius, Annales Book II, in Extracts from Aristeas, Hecataeus, Origen and Other Early Writers, trans. Aubrey Stewart (London: Palestine Pilgrims’ Text Society, 1895), 35–68, esp. 65, 66. 51 Caliph Hisham (r. 724–743) constructed a mosque adjoining the courtyard of the shrine and basilica (ca. 520) of St. Sergius in Rusafa. See Elizabeth Key Fowden, The Barbarian Plain: Saint Sergius between Rome and Iran (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1999).

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It is possible that the Copenhagen codex’s account of the co-use of prayer space in Diyarbakir was integrated into the narrative of early post-conquest Damascus, a theory put forth by scholars including Carl Watzinger and Karl Wulzinger.52 This adds an interesting layer to the visual dialogue between the two mosque structures. According to Ibn Jubayr (d. 1217), writing in the thirteenth century, the Christians were given the western half of the Umayyad Mosque of Damascus, while the Muslims prayed in the eastern section, in front of the location later occupied by the Mihrab of the Companions of the Prophet.53 A monastic named Adomnán described both a church dedicated to St. John the Baptist and a place of worship for the Muslims in Damascus c. 670.54 It is generally accepted that two separate buildings were designated for congregational prayer in the seventh century, but that the temenos remaining from the temple of Jupiter Damascenus was shared. Indeed, Al-Baladhuri (d. 892) wrote of al-Walid’s growing frustration over his inability to obtain the church of St. John the Baptist and his enraged demolition of the basilica; a successor negotiated recompense for the Christians via the return of other confiscated churches in Muslim hands.55 This points to ongoing, covenant-dictated protections. Furthermore, there was a clear historical awareness of layers of architecture at the site, as indicated by geographer and historian al-Masʿudi’s (d. 957) writings from 943. He explained that “the Mosque of Damascus was a great temple … dedicated to Jupiter…. The Christians converted it into

52 53

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Khalid ibn ʿAbd Allah al-Qasri is thought to have constructed a church adjacent to the qibla wall of the Great Mosque in Kufa in the eighth century for his mother. Baladhuri, Futuh 286, cited in Gerald R. Hawting, “Khalid b. ʿAbd Allah al-Kasri,” in Encyclopaedia of Islam, 2nd Edition, ed. Peri Bearman, Thierry Bianquis, C. Edmund Bosworth, E. J. van Donzel, Wolfhart P. Heinrichs (Brill Online, 2013). Carl Watzinger and Karl Wulzinger, Damaskus die Islamische Stadt, 2 vols. (Berlin: De Gruyter, 1921–1924), 152–4. They inspired Creswell to offer his discussion and disputation in Early Muslim Architecture, 180. Ibn Jubayr, Travels of Ibn Jubayr, ed. William Wright (1852), 263–64. K. A. C. Creswell disputed both the partitioned church theory and the theory of the converted church in Damascus. Early Muslim Architecture, 1:187–91. Flood references the history of the shared temenos as part of his discussion of the mosque’s gates. Flood, Great Mosque of Damascus, 123. This writer is often referenced as Gallic traveller and monk Arculf (seventh century). Robert Hoyland and Sarah Waidler, “Adomnán’s De Locis Sanctis and the Seventh-Century Near East,” The English Historical Review 129 (2014), 787–807, esp. 790; Titus Tobler and Augustus Molinier, eds., Itinera hierosolymitana et descriptiones terra sanctae bellis sacris anteriora (Geneva: J. G. Fick, 1877), 1:186. See Abu al-Abbas Ahmad Bin Jabir al-Baladhuri, The Origins of the Islamic State (Kitab Futuh al-Buldan) trans. Philip K. Hitti (New York: Columbia University Press, 1916), 191–92.

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a church; following the Islamic conquest, it was made into a mosque and repaired by al-Walid.”56 Al-Walid I was notoriously intolerant of the Damascene Christians and would not have benefitted from perpetuating a story of a prayer space shared by Muslims and Christians as ʿUmar arguably did in Jerusalem and Iyad did in Diyarbakir, but the later image of Damascus and the shared church topos was sufficient for Eutychius to remark in the tenth century that the governors of Christian cities began to refer to the Covenant of ʿUmar as, “the same conditions whereon [Muslim rulers] made peace with the Damascenes.”57 In 785 Spanish Umayyad ruler ʿAbd al-Rahman I (d. 788) began construction on the Great Mosque of Cordoba, on a site associated with the church of St. Vincent. Chronicler ʿIsa ibn Ahmad al-Razi (d. 975) highlighted the conscious relationship with other mosques, stating that the ruler was, “following the example of Abu ʿUbayda and Khalid [ibn al-Walid], and the judgment of Caliph ʿUmar in partitioning Christian churches like that of Damascus and other [cities] that were taken by peaceful accord.”58 This ostensible adherence to the conditions for Christian architecture established by the Covenant of ʿUmar even appears in Evliya Çelebi’s observation that they are still in place in Diyarbakir in 1655: “Churches within the city walls were not to be destroyed” and “infidels living within the city walls at the present time [had] in their hands letters of privilege, well-phrased treaties decreed by previous sultans.”59 5

Conclusion

Historical accounts of the Muslim conquests are a significant source of information for the history of architecture. Two topoi, that of the shared church and that of the converted church, are layered over the architectural evidence 56 Al-Masʿudi, Les Prairies d’Or, text and trans. Barbier de Meynard and Pavet de Courteille (Paris: Imprimerie Impériale, 1865), 4:90: “La mosquée de Damas était, …, un vaste temple …; il était consacré à Jupiter…. Les chrétiens le convertirent en église; après la conquête musulmane, cette église fut changée en mosquée et réparée par Walid, …” 57 Eutychius, Annales, 64–65. 58 Al-Razi, as quoted by Ibn ʿIdhari al-Marrakushi (d. early fourteenth century), Kitab al-Bayan al-Mughrib fi akhbar muluk al-andalus wa‌ʾl-maghrib [Book of the Amazing Story of the History of the Kings of al-Andalus and the Maghreb], (Beirut: Dar al-Thaqafah, 1985), 2:341; Ahmed al-Maqqari, Nafh al-Tib min Ghusn al-andalus al-Ratib (Cairo, A.H. 1302), 1:262, as cited by Nuha N. Khoury, “The Meaning of the Great Mosque of Cordoba in the Tenth Century,” Muqarnas 13 (1996), 84, and 95, note 17. 59 Evliya Çelebi, Seyahatname, in Bruinessen and Boeschoten trans., Evliya Çelebi in Diyarbekir, 117.

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at several mosque sites in order to support the early Islamic narrative in which Muslim warriors establish places of prayer immediately following successful conquests. The reality is likely a far slower progression from military victory to the establishment of religious architectural sites.60 Part of this formula is reflected in the imagery of the Ulu Cami of Diyarbakir as a supposedly partitioned and converted Christian structure, occupied and adapted to serve the Muslim cavalry and the needs of the new converts, and later rebuilt and expanded to serve as an important congregational mosque and powerful symbol. The tale of the shared, partitioned church functioned as a shorthand for the effective Muslim occupation of predominantly Christian cities, as outlined in the Covenant of ʿUmar. The Muslim armies seeking a place of prayer immediately following the conquest of these cities selected prominent, centrally located urban churches. The degree to which the armies held themselves accountable to the covenant of occupation is difficult to determine based on the combined evidence of the Christian and Arab chronicles, yet the continued existence of many churches operating in the hands of Christian communities in Diyarbakir, Damascus, Cordoba, and other cities is evidence of evolving, if not also immediate, agreements to protect the rights of Christians and other non-Muslim subjects. Topos or not, the promotion of a tale of a partitioned church suggests that the Muslim governors desired the historical record to show their qualities of restraint and mercy. This message, for future generations of Muslims who could look to the mythologized conquest period as a guiding example of righteous conduct in triumph, was also reflected in the design, decoration, and stewardship of religious architecture. For the Christians forced to withstand ongoing Muslim governorship and the sight of Heraclean church spolia on the Ulu Cami, it was an insistent history lesson and a reminder of their position. Diyarbakir’s extant architecture tells a rich and multivalent story of a frontier city, with all the inherent complexities of a multi-faith community adapting to new requirements of governance through changing dynasties. The Ulu Cami’s central role in the city’s geography and urban life necessitated the careful presentation of appropriately impressive visuals and decoration, without alienating the large Christian population. There is no evidence of surviving models, drawings, or written descriptions used in the trans-dynastic execution of the Diyarbakir Ulu Cami. Therefore, the Ulu Cami complex and its decoration are the primary documents for the process of architectural expansion 60 See Parvaneh Pourshariati, “Local Histories of Khurasan and the Pattern of Arab Settlement,” Studia Iranica 27 (1998): 41–81.

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and development in this environment. Popular stories, fragmentary and full texts of Muslim and Christian chronicles, and visually cultivated parallels with structures such as the Umayyad Mosque of Damascus merged into a strong symbol in the centre of urban Diyarbakir. By placing the Diyarbakir Ulu Cami on ground consecrated by other religious traditions, the patrons gained the prominence and accrued meaning of pre-Islamic basilicas and a convenient and immediate source of attractive architectural spolia for their new structure. This sculptural material was carefully utilized in designs from at least two periods to support the heritage of the site and the city. The visual expression of the narrative of co-use in the Diyarbakir cathedral did not emerge at once, but materialized during several periods of construction. While an accurate chronology of the Ulu Cami complex is difficult to establish, and some of the texts that discuss the mosque site are themselves problematic, there are a number of details and decisions that point to an unusually consistent trajectory of architectural fashioning that simultaneously looked to local masonry styles and the floorplan and iconography at the Umayyad Mosque in Damascus. The tale of the shared church fused the structural record with aspects of literary topoi employed in early Islamic texts and later narrative compilations. It is difficult to determine whether the tale of the shared church in Diyarbakir attributed to al-Waqidi in the Copenhagen codex has played a continuous role in the understanding of the mosque, or if the German translation and its subsequent quotation and dissemination in the scholarship re-introduced the anecdote to the historiography of the Ulu Cami. The tale is now part of the discussion of the Diyarbakir Ulu Cami, but Evliya Çelebi, who assembled other noteworthy tales about the mosque during two visits in 1655, did not include it in his notes. While the date and authorship of the Copenhagen codex remains uncertain, it is nonetheless a record of a particular and fascinating notion of conquest history, and its relationship to the fashioning of a tradition of architecture and literature in Diyarbakir. References Akok, Mahmut. “Diyarbakır Ulucami Mimari Manzumesi,” Vakıflar Dergisi 8 (1969): 113–39. Allen, Terry. A Classical Revival in Islamic Architecture. Wiesbaden: Reichert, 1986. Andersen, Angela. “The Diyarbakir Ulu Cami: Social History and Interaction at the Great Mosque.” MA thesis, University of Victoria, 2004. Aslanapa, Oktay. Turkish Art and Architecture. London: Faber and Faber, 1971.

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Olshausen, Justus and August F. M. Mehren. Codices Orientales Bibliothecae Regiae Hafniensis. Part 2, Codices Hebraicos et Arabicos Enumerati et Descripti Continens. Copenhagen, 1851. Palmer, Andrew. “Amid in the Seventh-Century Syriac Life of Theodotus.” In The Encounter of Eastern Christianity with Early Islam, edited by Emmanouela Grypeou, Mark Swanson, and David Thomas, 126–36. Leiden: Brill, 2006. Palmer, Andrew. Monk and Mason on the Tigris Frontier: The Early History of Tur Abdin. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1990. Pourshariati, Parvaneh. Decline and Fall of the Sasanian Empire: The Sasanian-Parthian Confederacy and the Arab Conquest of Iran. London: I.B. Tauris, 2008. Pourshariati, Parvaneh. “Local Histories of Khurasan and the Pattern of Arab Settlement.” Studia Iranica 27 (1998): 41–81. Pourshariati, Parvaneh. “Local Historiography in Early Medieval Iran and the Tarikh-i Bayhaq.” Iranian Studies 33, nos. 1–2 (2000): 133–64. Raby, Julian. “Nur Al-Din, the Qastal al-Shuʾaybiyya, and the ‘Classical Revival’.” Muqarnas 21 (2004): 289–310. Rosenthal, Franz. A History of Muslim Historiography. Leiden: Brill, 1968. Runciman, Steven. A History of the Crusades. Vol. 1. The First Crusade and the Foundation of the Kingdom of Jerusalem. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1951. Segal, Judah B. Edessa ‘The Blessed City.’ Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1970. Sizgorich, Thomas. “Narrative and Community in Islamic Late Antiquity.” Past and Present 185 (2004): 9–42. Sözen, Metin. Diyarbakır’da Turk Mimarisi. Istanbul: Diyarbakır’ı Tanıtma ve Turizm Derneği Yayınları, 1971. Spiers, Richard Phené. Architecture East and West. London: B. T. Batsford, 1905. Strzygowski, Josef. “Beiträge zur Kunstgeschichte des Mittelalters von Nordmesopotamien, Hellas und dem Abendlande.” In Max van Berchem, Josef Strzygowski, and Gertrude Bell, Amida, 131–380. Heidelberg: Carl Winter, 1910. Tabbaa, Yasser. The Transformation of Islamic Art during the Sunni Revival. Seattle: University of Washington Press, 2001. Tapu ve Kadastro Umum Müdürlüğü (TKUM). Mufassal Tapu Tahrir Defteri (TTD) [Tax Register] No. 155. Ankara, 1564. Theophanes. The Chronicle of Theophanes Anni Mundi 6095–6305 (A.D. 602–813). Edited and translated by Harry Turtledove. Philadelphia; University of Pennsylvania Press, 1982. Tobler, Titus and Augustus Molinier, eds. Itinera Hierosolymitana et Descriptiones Terra Sanctae bellis sacris anteriora. Vol. 1. Geneva: J. G. Fick, 1877. Tuncer, Orhan Cezmi. Diyarbakır Camileri: Mukarnas, Geometri, Orantı. Diyarbakır: Diyarbakır Büyükşehir Belediyesi Kültür ve Sanat Yayınları, 1996.

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Tuncer, Orhan Cezmi. Diyarbakır Kiliseleri. Diyarbakır: Diyarbakır Büyükşehir Beledi­ yesi Kültür ve Sanat Yayınları, 2002. Waqidi, Muhammad ibn ʿUmar al-. Aba ʿAbdallah Muhammad b. ʿUmar al-Waqidi (d. 207/823), Geschichtsschreibung [Islamic Historiography] 10. Collected by Fuat Sezgin. Frankfurt am Main: Goethe Universitat, Institut für Geschichte der Arabisch-Islamischen Wissenschaften, 2014. Waqidi, Muhammad ibn ʿUmar al-. The Life of Muhammad: al-Waqidi’s Kitab alMaghazi. Edited by Rizwi Faizer. Translated by Rizwi Faizer, Amal Ismail and Abdulkader Tayob. London: Routledge, 2011. Watzinger, Carl, and Karl Wulzinger. Damaskus die Islamische Stadt. 2 vols. Berlin: De Gruyter, 1921–24. Whelan, Estelle J. “The Public Figure: Political Iconography in Medieval Mesopotamia.” PhD diss., New York University, 1979.

Chapter 8

Beirut’s Great ʿUmari Mosque

History, Memory, and Post-war Reconstruction May Farhat On a weekday, I found myself in the expansive entry porch of the Great ʿUmari mosque in Beirut’s central district. It was the time of the noon prayer, so I sat quietly on the side, duly covered with the black cloak available at the entrance for women visitors, waiting for the end of the prayer. I observed a few men rushing in to remove their shoes, head to the ablution area, and then into the prayer hall. Once the prayer finished, they quietly retrieved their shoes and headed back to their daily occupations. Save for the period of the Lebanese civil war (1975–90), when the centre of Beirut was a contested battle zone, these collective rituals of prayer and devotion have been performed in this place since the end of the thirteenth century, when the Mamluk army recaptured Beirut from the Franks and converted its Crusader cathedral into a mosque. Until the inauguration of the monumental Neo-Ottoman Mosque of Muhammad al-Amin on Martyrs’ Square in 2008, this mosque remained the principal mosque for Beirut’s Muslim Sunni community. The name ʿUmari—in honour of the second caliph, ʿUmar b. al-Khattab (13– 23/634–44), responsible for the Islamic conquest of Syria—became associated with the mosque only in the nineteenth century. A palimpsest of additions and renovations, it was rehabilitated and inaugurated in 2004.1 This heterogeneous heritage is visible today in the mosque’s external façades that display different architectural styles (Fig. 8.1). Along its western façade (on Maarad Street), a deep Neo-Islamic portico, built during the French Mandate (1919– 43), marks its principal entrance (Fig. 8.2). A modernist mashrabiyya screen— part of the 2004 refurbishment—shields its courtyard on Weygand Street, one of the main commercial arteries of the district. The eastern and southern façades reveal the triple-apsed choir and the vaulted nave of the converted twelfth-century Crusader cathedral that forms the core of the mosque. Two tall square minarets—a sixteenth-century Mamluk minaret and a contemporary

1 The rehabilitation (2000–2004) was overseen by the Directorate of Islamic Waqfs and designed by Lebanese architect Youssef Haidar.

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Figure 8.1 ʿUmari Mosque and its surroundings, Beirut

one—project the sanctuary’s religious identity into the central district’s multi-confessional townscape. A hybrid structure that falls outside taxonomic categories, the Great ʿUmari mosque deserves to be studied in greater detail than has hitherto been done.2 This paucity of studies extends to all of Beirut’s historical mosques. Often non-monumental and of a hybrid regional architectural style, they have not generated much scholarly interest.3 The wholesale disappearance of the medieval town during the modernization drive of the late Ottoman and French Mandate periods, compounded by the devastation wreaked by the recent civil war, makes the task all the more difficult. This chapter constructs a broad historical narrative of the Great ʿUmari mosque that accounts for its post-Crusader formal and semantic transformations. In this wide-sweeping trajectory, three moments in the history of the sanctuary stand out, marked by political and cultural ruptures. The recapture of Beirut by the Mamluks in 691/1291 initiated the Islamization of the Crusader sanctuary into the medieval town’s principal Friday mosque, a process that continued during the Ottoman 2 Taha al-Wali, Tarikh al-masajid wa‌ʾl-jawamiʿ al-sharifa fi bayrut (Beirut: Matabiʾ Dar al-Kutub, 1973), 43–46; Mustafa Saleh Lamei, Masajid bayrut (Beirut: Beirut Arab University, 1978), 6–27. 3 This scholarly oversight extends to all of Beirut’s Islamic history. See Rana Mikati, “The Creation of Islamic Beirut. The Sea, Scholars, Jihad, and the Sacred” (PhD diss., University of Chicago, 2013).

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Figure 8.2 West façade and principal entrance, ʿUmari Mosque, Beirut Photograph: May Farhat

period (1571–1918). The later Ottoman period and the French Mandate (1923– 46) introduced modernizing reforms to Beirut that radically transformed the urban fabric of the old city, first as the capital of an Ottoman province (1888), and later as the capital of a new Lebanese state (1920). Sheared from its centuries-old network of small markets (suq) and waqf properties, and dressed with a neo-Islamic façade, the Great ʿUmari mosque emerged as the official Friday mosque of Beirut’s Sunni community in a modern, multi-functional central district. The outbreak of the civil war in 1975 transformed the vibrant commercial and financial centre into a contested territory, creating for fifteen years a no man’s land dividing the Christian and predominately Muslim parts of the city. The post-war rehabilitation of the Great ʿUmari mosque, under the aegis of the Mufti of the Republic, the highest Muslim authority, was seized as an opportunity to refashion the historical monument within the regenerated townscape. The outcome today is the result of contest and negotiation over the Great ʿUmari mosque’s visual identity, its historical significance, and its role in the urban memory of the city. 1

The Cathedral of St. John/ʿUmari Mosque: Thirteenth–Eighteenth Centuries

An ancient foundation with a history dating back to the Bronze Age, Beirut in the early Middle Ages was a small harbour town on the margins of the great

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Islamic empires that ruled the region.4 In 14/635, the Arab-Muslim armies conquered a city that had not fully recovered from the earthquake of 551 CE that destroyed the Romano-Byzantine city’s imposing public spaces and reputed Roman Law School.5 The Islamic town grew over the ruins. A fortified harbour town on the Syrian maritime frontier, it acquired the reputation of a ribat in early Islamic tradition, attracting pious Muslims wishing to wage holy war ( jihad) against the Byzantines.6 It was also an important maritime outlet for imports and exports.7 The move of ʿAbd al-Rahman b. ʿAmr al-Awzaʿi (d. 157/774), a prominent jurisprudent and hadith transmitter, to Beirut, and his burial on the outskirts of the town, secured a place for Beirut in the sacred landscape of Bilad al-Sham and the Islamic world.8 Of the mosques built to serve the needs of Muslim soldiers and settlers, none have survived that pre-date the Crusader period.9 Beirut fell to the Frankish army after a three-month siege on May 13, 1110.10 Following the conquest, Baldwin of Boulogne I (r. 1100–18) started the building of a church in the centre of town. The French medieval art historian Camille Enlart surveyed it at the beginning of the twentieth century.11 He established that construction started in the first quarter of the twelfth century with the east end, followed by the first two bays. The last three bays were built well into 4

For general histories of Beirut, see Nina Jidejian, Beirut through the Ages (Beirut: Librairie Orientale, 1997); Samir Kassir, Histoire de Beyrouth (Paris: Fayard, 2003); see also Salih b. Yahya (died after 1436), Tarikh Bayrut. Récits des anciens de la famille de Buhtur b. Ali, Emir du Gharb de Beyrouth, ed. Francis Hours and Kamal Salibi (Beirut: Dar el-Machreq, 1969). 5 For Byzantine Beirut, see Rana Mikati and Dominic Perring, “From Metropolis to Ribat: Some Recent Work on Beirut at the End of Antiquity,” Archaeology and History in the Lebanon 23, no. 1 (2006): 42–55. 6 Mikati, “Creation of Islamic Beirut,” 63–111. 7 Paul Wheatley, The Places Where Men Pray Together: Cities in Islamic Lands, Seventh through the Tenth Centuries (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2001), 410, note 33. 8 Mikati, “Creation of Islamic Beirut,” 229–46. 9 According to Mikati, a hall-like structure, recently excavated in the “zone des églises” (in the proximity of the Greek Orthodox and Catholic churches) has been interpreted as a mosque. Mikati, 34. 10 For Frankish Beirut, see Denys Pringle, The Churches of the Crusader Kingdom of Jerusalem: A Corpus, vol. 1, A–K (excluding Acre and Jerusalem) (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993), 111–18; Patricia Antaki, “Le château croisé de Beyrouth. Étude préliminaire,” ARAM 13–14 (2000–2001): 323–53. 11 Camille Enlart, Les monuments des croisés dans le royaume de Jérusalem. Architecture réligieuse et civile, 2 vols. (Paris: P. Geuthner, 1925–1928); Enlart, “La cathédrale Saint-Jean de Beyrouth en Syrie,” in Recueil des mémoires publiés par la Société nationale des antiquaires de France à l’occasion de son centenaire, 1804–1904, ed. Paul Durrieu (Paris: C. Klincksieck, 1904): 121–33. See also Pringle, Churches of the Crusader Kingdom.

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Figure 8.3 Plan, ʿUmari Mosque, Beirut Photograph: Salih Mostafa Lamei

the third quarter of the twelfth century (Fig. 8.3).12 In 583/1187, the Ayyubid ruler Salah al-Din conquered Beirut, and the city remained in Ayyubid hands for ten years. In 593/1197 the Crusaders captured the city again, and it remained under Frankish control until the city capitulated to the Mamluks in 691/1291. Enlart describes the cathedral as a pretty and small colonial church (église de colonie), solid, elegant, and practical.13 It resembles other Crusader churches and evokes the Romanesque churches of central and southern France, in particular the Limousin and Languedoc regions.14 Built throughout of soft and porous limestone, it has a simple basilical plan, with a high nave composed of five bays, flanked by slightly lower cross-vaulted aisles, and a triple-apsed east end. An open porch extends the nave to the west. The arcades of the nave are composed of square piers, with four engaged half-columns. A slightly pointed barrel vault covers the nave, articulated with plain transverse arches springing from the arcades’ engaged columns. On the exterior, two smaller apses

12 Enlart, Monuments des croisés, 2:71–78. 13 Enlart, “Cathédrale Saint-Jean,” 124. 14 Enlart, 132–33.

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frame the central apse; all are articulated with rounded pilasters. They hold a projecting cornice composed of sculpted corbels and metopes, covered with vegetal, animal, and figural motifs. Each apse is pierced with an arched window, decorated with hood-moulds. A large number of Byzantine Corinthian capitals were recycled in the church; they date to the fourth and fifth centuries and were produced in Constantinople for export.15 Whether these capitals belonged to an earlier fifth-century Byzantine church in Beirut or were imported before the construction of the Crusader church remains however an open question.16 Enlart advanced the hypothesis that the Crusader church was built over an earlier Byzantine church,17 but the evidence has been considered fragmentary and inconclusive.18 Following the capture of Beirut, the Mamluks dismantled the walls of its harbour and destroyed its castle. It was a matter of policy applied in all the cities of the Syro-Palestinian coast to avoid their recapture by the Franks.19 The Latin population was either killed or relocated to Cyprus.20 For the duration of Mamluk rule, the defence of Beirut and its harbour fell to the Buhturid amirs of the Gharb, a South Arabian tribal clan settled in the region south of Beirut in the twelfth century.21 By the middle of the fourteenth century, the Mamluks started restoring the walls to protect the port as commerce with European powers resumed, and Beirut regained its role as the port of Damascus.22 Unlike Tripoli to the north, which became an important administrative centre and

15

Annie Pralong, “Les chapiteaux de la mosquée El Omari de Beyrouth: remploi et fabrication,” in Utilis est lapis in structura: mélanges offerts à Léon Pressouyre (Paris: Comité des travaux historiques et scientifiques, 2000), 313–27. The Crusader architectural elements are still extant. 16 Pralong, 327. 17 Enlart, Monuments des croisés, 2:72; the Christian topography of Beirut and the location of its five Byzantine churches remain unclear, despite archaeologists’ efforts. 18 Mikati and Perring, “From Metropolis to Ribat,” 46. 19 Albrecht Fuess, “Rotting Ships and Razed Harbors: The Naval Policy of the Mamluks,” Mamluk Studies Review 5 (2001): 45–71; Fuess, “Beirut in Mamluk Times,” ARAM 9–10 (1997–1998): 85–101. 20 Salih b. Yahya, Tarikh Bayrut, 23–24. 21 Kamal Salibi, “The Buhturids of the Garb. Mediaeval Lords of Beirut and of Southern Lebanon,” Arabica 8 (1961): 74–97. 22 The Mamluks built two towers over the ruined Crusader castle for the protection of the port. See Ellen V. Kenney, Power and Patronage in Medieval Syria. The Architecture and Urban Works of Tankiz al-Nasiri (Chicago: Middle East Documentation Center, 2009), 182–84. See also Pierre Moukarzel, La ville de Beyrouth sous la domination mamelouke (1291–1516) et son commerce avec l’Europe (Beirut: Éditions de l’Université Antonine, 2010).

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received significant Mamluk architectural patronage, Beirut did not expand under the Mamluks.23 Wide-scale destruction of churches followed the Mamluk conquests of the Latin Kingdom. Many were converted into mosques.24 In Beirut, the Buhturid amir Salih b. Yahya mentions that his ancestors transformed the large Franciscan church into a stable, and eventually deserted it and sold it to the Banu (sons of) al-Hamra clan.25 His ancestor, Nasir al-Din Husayn Tanukhi, moved to another part of town, closer to the sea, where he built a house and a mosque.26 He describes the conversion of Beirut’s Crusader cathedral—which he attributes to Prophet Yihya (St. John the Baptist)27—into a mosque as a divine act that ennobled the structure: Under the Franks, Beirut had a group of Muslims (jamaʿa). When, by the will of God, it was wrestled away from them, the church became a mosque. It was known for the Franks as the Church of Saint John, and was honored by God to become a mosque. It had images that the Muslims covered with plaster. This [the images] remained until the time of my ancestor (jidd), who had them whitened, removing the “filth” (wadar) from the effect of these images. Muslims used to gather for the Friday prayer, their numbers not reaching forty, and the preacher (khatib) would lead the noon prayer certain times, and on other times, a group coming from the outskirts of the town would join in, enabling the preacher to lead the Friday prayer, until the number of Muslims increased, and God made her [Beirut] the abode of Islam and Faith, until the Day of Judgment.28 The concealing of religious images and the reorientation of the direction of prayer toward the southern wall transformed the Crusader church into a mosque. A mihrab niche must have been added in the central bay of the 23 Helen Sader, “Ancient Beirut: Urban Growth in the Light of Recent Excavations,” in Projecting Beirut. Episodes in the Construction and Reconstruction of a Modern City, ed. Peter G. Rowe and Hashim Sarkis (Munich: Prestel, 1998), 23–40, esp. 35. 24 In Lebanon, the mosques of Saida and Tripoli incorporated parts of the Crusader churches. The Crusader cathedral of Jubayl remained intact. 25 Salih b. Yahya, Tarikh Bayrut, 106. For the history of this church, see Ray Jabre Mouawad, “La mosquée du Sérail à Beyrouth: histoire d’un lieu de culte,” Tempora: Annales d’histoire et d’archéologie 14–15 (2003–2004): 153–73. 26 Salih b. Yahya, Tarikh Bayrut, 107. 27 According to Pringle, no twelfth- or thirteenth-century source refers to the church in that name. Pringle, Churches of the Crusader Kingdom, 113. 28 Salih b. Yahya, Tarikh Bayrut, 34–35.

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southern wall, where a doorway—part of the original church—was walled up.29 In the aisles across from the mihrab, a long, wooden mezzanine, traditionally dated to the Mamluk period, is supported on wooden columns. Known as siddah, it was originally used by the muezzin for the call of prayer in the presence of the preacher (khatib).30 Historical information from the Mamluk period is limited to scant epigraphic evidence left on the church’s walls. The first recorded change is a window opened into the western wall, which provided visual access to the prayer hall from outside. An inscription located above it is dated Ramadan 737/April 3–May 2, 1337. It states that Mughultay al-Husni commissioned this “blessed window.”31 The opening was later enlarged into a door and is today part of a domed room added in the seventeenth century. At the other end of the church a door was cut in the middle of the eastern apse, providing another entry into the mosque. A carefully cut incision above the door carries a white inscribed marble slab. The text is heavily eroded. Saleh Lamei speculates that the text was a decree (marsum) identifying amir Baydumur, the Mamluk governor of Damascus, and dated 10 Dhuʿl Hijja 775/ May 23, 1374.32 Two columns framing the main entry door under the western porch carry carved texts. A decree, dated to 806/1403–04 and issued by the governor of Damascus, annuls a tax imposed on bakers by the market regulators.33 It is only in the early sixteenth century that a square minaret was added to the southwestern corner of the mosque, modelled after the square minaret of the Umayyad mosque of Damascus. A text inscribed on a marble slab, dated Muharram 1, 914/May 2, 1508, states that the minaret was ordered by Musa, son of the late al-Zayni Musallam, the chancellor (dawadar) of Nasir al-Din Muhammad b. al-Hanash, “in seeking proximity to God, and asking for his rewards.”34 Muhammad ibn al-Hanash (1499–1518)—a Bedouin chief (muqaddam) from the Biqaʿ region—was an ambitious man who challenged the authority of the Mamluks and of the Buhtur amirs by expanding his power in the region. In 1505, he was in open rebellion against the Buhturid

29 30 31 32 33 34

Lamei published the photo of a mihrab, a niche framed by two columns, and covered with white marble and sandstone, Masajid bayrut, 22. A recent movable marble mihrab hides what lies behind it. Al-Wali, Tarikh al-masajid wa‌ʾl-jawamiʿ, 122–123. Lamei, Masajid bayrut, 23. The identity of Mughultay al-Husni remains unknown. Lamei, 23. He is Amir Baydumur al-Khawarizmi (d. 789/1387), governor of Damascus between 761/1359 and 789/1387. He restored the sea walls of Beirut and installed a chain to block the port entry to small ships. Salih b. Yahya, Tarikh Bayrut, 30 note 1, and 35–36. Lamei, Masajid bayrut, 23. Lamei, 23.

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governor of Beirut, with the support of the Mamluk governor of Damascus.35 Ibn al-Hanash’s rebellion was eventually quelled by the Ottomans, who defeated the Mamluks in Syria in 1517, killing the Bedouin chief in 1518.36 As Salibi observed, Ibn al-Hanash did not commission any building, bridge, or road during his twenty years of control in the Biqaʿ.37 The minaret commissioned by his chancellor seems to be an individual act of piety, so far exceptional since the conversion of the Crusader church. The early Ottoman period ushered in a time of chronic political instability caused by unruly overlords in the hinterland of Beirut. Local clans—such as the Turcoman amirs of northern Lebanon, the Assafs, and the Druze Maʿans of the Shouf mountains—competed over the control of Beirut and its port.38 None of the khans, baths, and palaces built during this period in Beirut have survived. Architectural production that shows a new regional architectural style, blending Ottoman and local practices, survives outside of Beirut in Sidon, the most important port town throughout the seventeenth century,39 and in the great eighteenth-century palaces built by feudal chieftains in Mount-Lebanon, such as the Druze amirs’ residences in the Shouf,40 and the palaces of the Abillama clan in the Metn.41 The Great ʿUmari mosque remained the religious locus of the Sunni Muslim community of Beirut, whereas two mosques were built that show the ascendency of the two powerful families that governed Beirut during the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. The mosque of amir Mansur Assaf (1552–80), governor of Beirut in the late sixteenth century, was built over the church of the Saviour and convent of the Franciscans, who fled Beirut in 1571 following the Ottoman conquest of Cyprus.42 Another mosque was built by amir Munzir b. 35 Kamal Salibi, “Muhammad Ibn al-Hanas. Muqaddam de la Biqaʿ, 1499–1518: un épisode peu connu de l’histoire Libanaise,” Mélanges de l’Université Saint-Joseph 43 (1967): 9. 36 Salibi, 21. 37 Salibi, 23. 38 Abdul-Rahim Abu Husayn, “Problems in the Ottoman Administration in Syria during the 16th and 17th centuries: The Case of the Sanjak of Sidon-Beirut,” International Journal of Middle East Studies 24, no. 4 (1992): 665–75. 39 Stefan Weber, “The Making of an Ottoman Harbor Town: Sidon/Saida from the Sixteenth to the Eighteenth Centuries,” in Syria and Bilad al-Sham under Ottoman Rule. Essays in Honour of Abdul-Karim Rafeq, ed. Peter Sluglett and Stefan Weber (Leiden: Brill, 2010), 179–239. 40 Stefan Weber, “L’architecture libanaise au temps des Ottoman,” in Liban. L’autre rive: exposition présentée à l’Institut du monde arabe du 27 octobre au 2 mai 1999, ed. Valérie Matoïan (Paris: Flammarion, 1998) 273–75. 41 Ray Jabre Mouawad and Lévon Nordiguian, Les Abillama, émirs du Metn. Histoire et palais XIIIe–XIXe siècles (Beirut: Éditions Dar an-Nahar, 2013). 42 Jabre Mouawad, “La mosquée du Sérail à Beyrouth,” 166.

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Sulayman al-Tanukhi (1043/1633–1056/1646), the uncle of Fakhr al-Din Maʿn (1585–1635), the colourful and rebellious Druze Amir, executed in Istanbul at the order of Sultan Murad IV. Epigraphic evidence from the Ottoman period underscores the role of local notables as patrons of the mosque. A text inscribed on a marble plaque in the main entrance mentions ʿAbd Allah b. Shaykh Ibrahim al-Khatib, the prayer leader (imam) of Jamiʿ Futuh al-Islam, who established this place (makan) in Ramadan 1067/July 1657.43 Jamiʿ Futuh al-Islam—the Mosque of the Conquests—referring back to the early Islamic conquests, is the first textual evidence of the historical “rebranding” of the mosque. “Place” most likely refers to the domed room located in the southwestern corner of the mosque. Spacious, with a mihrab on its southern wall and a door giving access to the prayer hall, the room was for the use of the mosque’s imam. An inscription inside the domed room indicates that it was renovated in 1077/1666 by al-Sayyid Ahmad b. ʿIzz al-Din,44 possibly the local notable who hosted the famous Damascene Sufi scholar ʿAbd al-Ghani al-Nabulsi during his first visit to Beirut in 1105/1693.45 On his second visit on Rabi I 1112/September 20, 1700, al-Nabulsi made brief references to Beirut’s mosques in his rihla,46 listing four Friday mosques: Al-Jamiʿ al-Kabir (the Great Mosque, i.e., ʿUmari mosque), Jamiʿ Amir Munzir, Jamiʿ Amir Assaf, and Jamiʿ al-Bahr (the Sea Mosque), about which he says: “it was named al-Jamiʿ al-ʿUmari, because it was known from the time of al-Sayyid ʿUmar b. al-Khattab, and it is the smallest of Beirut’s mosques. It is elevated and overlooks the sea. We access its space (fana‌ʾ) by a staircase of about fifteen steps, and then we ascend [to the mosque] with another flight of eight steps.”47 Of the Great Mosque he says, “The mosque contains twelve supports, and each support is surrounded by columns (rijal). It is a great building, said to have been originally a church. There is a large and long water pool to its side, and has two great doors, facing each other.”48 Hence, the memory of the mosque’s origin as a church was still active in the late seventeenth century. The attribution (nisba) al-ʿUmari was attached then to the Sea mosque, which suggests that it was older than the Great ʿUmari mosque, which acquired the

43 44 45 46

Lamei, Masajid bayrut, 23. Lamei, 23. Mikati, Creation of Islamic Beirut, 228. ʿAbd al-Ghani al-Nabulsi, al-Tuhfah al-nabulsiya fi al-rihla al-tarabulsiya, ed. Heribert Busse (Würzburg: Ergon, 2003), 28. 47 ʿAbd al-Ghani al-Nabulsi, 28. 48 ʿAbd al-Ghani al-Nabulsi, 28.

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attribution at a much later date.49 Built on high grounds facing the sea, it was a good location to keep watch over the sea and the city’s surroundings, and may have functioned as a ribat.50 As mentioned by al-Nabulsi, an ablution pool and presumably a courtyard must have existed along the northern façade of the mosque. This part was refashioned in the later part of the eighteenth century during the rule of the powerful magnate Ahmad Pasha al-Jazzar (ca. 1730–1804), the soldier-adventurer of Bosnian origin who controlled the port-city of Acre and the Syrian coast between 1775 and 1804.51 The circumstances of al-Jazzar’s presence in Beirut are so extraordinary that they deserve to be presented briefly. Al-Jazzar arrived in Beirut around 1184/1770, via Istanbul, Aleppo, and Damascus, after escaping from Cairo, where he had fallen afoul of Egypt’s Mamluk governor.52 Opportunist and mercenary, he sought the help of Mount-Lebanon’s amir Yusuf Shihab (r. 1770–90), who entrusted him with the protection of the port of Beirut against the attacks of Russian warships, sent by Catherine II to the Mediterranean Sea during the first Ottoman-Russian war (1768–74).53 After rebuilding the city’s fortifications, he turned against Yusuf Shihab and barricaded himself in the city. In a reversal of political alignments, common during this period, Yusuf Shihab appealed to the Russian squadron to help dislodge al-Jazzar from Beirut, in exchange for tribute. Following a four-month siege and the massive bombardment of Beirut in July–August 1773, al-Jazzar negotiated his surrender and departed in the direction of Acre, whence he would soon emerge as the Ottomans’ appointee as governor of Sidon in 1775, and sometimes as governor of Damascus, until his death in 1804. Al-Jazzar reportedly had great engineering skills and designed and supervised the construction of his buildings in Acre as well as the fortifications of Beirut.54 Although no textual evidence has surfaced so far to reference al-Jazzar’s patronage of al-ʿUmari 49 This mosque became known as the mosque of al-Dabbagha (Tanners’ mosque) for its proximity to the Tanners’ Gate. It had a squarish minaret topped with a small dome and is visible on old photographs and paintings of Beirut’s port. It was destroyed in 1932 during the urban rehabilitation of Beirut. See ʿAbd al-Latif Fakhuri, Zawaya bayrut (Beirut: Dar al-Katani, 2018), 35–39. 50 Beirut’s pre-Crusader mosques may have had a similar location, as suggested by ʿAbd al-Latif Fakhuri. 51 Ahmad Pasha al-Jazzar famously defeated Napoleon Bonaparte at the battle of Acre in 1799. For a biography of al-Jazzar and the politics of the period, see Thomas Philipp, Acre. The Rise and Fall of a Palestinian City, 1730–1831 (New York: Columbia University Press, 2001), 49–78. 52 Haydar Ahmad Shihab, Tarikh Ahmad Basha al-Jazzar (Beirut: Librairie Antoine, 1955), 47. 53 Philipp, Acre, 42, 51. 54 Philipp, 58.

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mosque, the striking visual similarities between the work done in Beirut and Acre confirm his involvement.55 The late-eighteenth century additions on the northern side of al-ʿUmari mosque comprised a covered portico composed of three vaulted bays, a monumental door cut into the second bay of the Crusader church, and a mihrab placed to its left. The portico’s central bay carries a dome, elevated on a short drum pierced by small windows, punctuating the carefully centred door below it. Two other doors were cut into the third and fourth bays of the church wall but were not aligned with the external portico. The door was clearly conceived as a ceremonial entrance into the mosque and may have been opened only on special occasions (Fig. 8.4).56 The overall composition and the use of alternating bands of white and yellow marble imitate gate designs of princely palaces in Mount-Lebanon (such as Dayr al-Qamar, Salima, Mtein).57 The door frame, built of alternating bands of white and yellow marble, is topped by a segmental arch composed of seven interlocking voussoirs of white, black, and yellow stones. Above it, a decorative marble slab fills the triangular tympanum, framed by an undulating baroque carved moulding. A black cypress tree stands in the middle. It is framed on either side by a palm tree and a circular relief, in sandstone, projecting from the white marble slab, and framed by an undulating band of stylized leaves.58 The cypress and palm tree motifs appear in the visual culture of eighteenth-century Istanbul and Cairo,59 but they are translated here through local carving techniques. The date 1183/1769–70, inscribed in small numbers above the cypress tree, is one year short of the arrival of Ahmad Pasha al-Jazzar to Beirut, as reported in historical chronicles. It probably indicates the date of the marble slab, independently of the door, the manufacture of which is, like the mihrab installed to its left, dated 1193/1779. By then,

55 Al-Jazzar built also a public fountain in Beirut, like the one in Acre, according to the French traveller Volney. See Constantin-François Volney, Voyages en Syrie et en Egypte, pendant les années 1783, 1784 et 1785 (Paris, 1787), 2:171. 56 A photograph of the ʿUmari Mosque’s courtyard taken by Gertrude Bell in 1905 shows the ceremonial door closed. The door to its right, covered by a piece of fabric, is open, and could be reserved for daily use. Bell’s photographic archive is preserved at Newcastle University, UK. 57 Jabre Mouawad and Nordiguian, Les Abillama, émirs du Metn, 229–247. 58 A similar motif is carved on the Abillama palace gate in Falougha. It seems to copy a European coat of arms or insignia, or possibly an ancient relief. See Jabre Mouawad and Nordiguian, 240. 59 The Gate of the Barbers (Bab al-Muzayyinin) of al-Azhar mosque, built in 1753 in Cairo, displays palm and cypress trees.

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Figure 8.4 Door on northern wall, ʿUmari Mosque, Beirut Photograph: May Farhat

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al-Jazzar had consolidated his power in Acre, where he designed and supervised the construction of a monumental Friday mosque, finished in 1194/1780.60 The tall mihrab has a highly stylized profile, which is a replica of the external mihrab of al-Jazzar’s mosque in Acre.61 It is composed of a sequence of convex and concave curves, which is expertly translated three-dimensionally into interlocking voussoirs of white and yellow marble. Over the mihrab, there is further decoration consisting of one large disk of white marble, framed by two half-disks, with each motif encircled further by bands of grey and yellow marble. Similar designs were used in the Acre mosque. On either side of the mihrab, framed by circles painted in black, are listed the names of the Prophet and nine of his companions known as the “Ten Promised Paradise” following a Sunni Prophetic tradition (hadith), the use of which became very popular in eighteenth-century Ottoman religious culture.62 By the early nineteenth century, Beirut was already competing with Acre over the export trade with Europe.63 A French consul, residing in Acre at the time, visited Beirut in 1813 and described the city as “a republic of merchants who have their power and their laws.”64 From that year, an inscribed marble slab has survived at the ʿUmari mosque, attached on the pier of the central domed bay of its portico. Five verses, written by Shaykh ʿAbd al-Latif Fathallah (d. 1260/1844), a Beiruti judge, mufti, and a prolific poet, celebrate the construction of a wooden dome above the mosque’s ablution fountain.65 In another poem, written in praise of his Damascene teacher Shaykh ʿAbd al-Rahman Kuzbari who visited Beirut in Rabi II 1228/April 1813, ʿAbd al-Latif Fathallah mentions all the holy sites visited by the shaykh.66 Among them, he lists the relic (left hand) of Nabi Yahya in the Great ʿUmari mosque. Al-Nabulsi, who was particularly devoted to the Shrine of St. John the Baptist (Yahya b. Zakariya) at the Umayyad mosque in Damascus, and visited sites associated

60 61 62

63 64 65 66

Moshe Sharon, Corpus Inscriptionum Arabicarum Palaestinae (CIAP) (Leiden: Brill, 1997), 1:47–54. Sharon, Fig. P2. On the right side, Muhammad, the Prophet of God, Abu Bakr, and ʿUthman [b. Affan], and ʿAli [b. Abi Talib] and Talha [b. ʿUbayd Allah]; al-Zubayr [b. al-Awwam] and Saʿd [b. Abi Waqqas], and Saʿid [b. Zayd], and ʿAbd al-Rahman b. ʿAwf, and Abu ʿUbayda Amir b. al-Jarrah in the left roundel. Philipp, Acre, 128–29. Philipp, 130. Lamei, Masajid bayrut, 116. See also Zuhair Fathallah, ed., Diwan Al-Mufti ʿAbd Al-Latif Fathallah (Beirut: Steiner, 1984), 1:390–92. ʿAbd al-Latif Fakhuri, “al-Jamiʿ al-ʿUmari al-Kabir, wa mashhad sayyidna Yahya,” al-Afkar, no. 389 (Jan 1, 1990), 47; Fathallah, 414.

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with the prophet during his travels in Bilad al-Sham,67 did not refer to this relic in his description of the mosque. It is not clear when the cult of St. John/ Nabi Yahya was revived or re-invented in Beirut,68 but it persisted into the early twentieth century, when the mosque was commonly referred to as the Mosque of Nabi Yahya. Today, local oral tradition preserves nothing of this cult, and the small aedicule marking the shrine of Nabi Yahya in the mosque’s prayer hall stands empty of any relic.69 Maps and a rich archival record contribute to a better knowledge of old Beirut in the nineteenth century.70 Beirut intra-muros was a small rectangular site, its medieval walls punctuated by seven gates (Fig. 8.5). The Great ʿUmari mosque was ensconced into the narrow streets and crowded bazaars of the old Ottoman town, its walls obscured by structures abutting its walls. An extension of Suq al-ʿAttarin (The Perfumers’ Market) runs along the western entrance. Suq al-Fashkha (The Step’s Market, due to its narrowness), the commercial street that crosses the walled city from east to west, bordered the mosque to the north. Suq al-Sakkafin (The Shoemakers’ Market) runs along its southern walls, while Suq al-Najjarin (The Woolworkers’ market) bordered it to the east. The study of a register of Sunni waqf, dated 1278/1862, that established the spatial distribution of waqf properties within the walled city, sheds light on the mosque’s urban and social context.71 The ʿUmari mosque held the largest share of waqf revenue (42%) among Beirut’s six Friday mosques. Its highly diversified

67

Elizabeth Sirriyeh, Sufi Visionary of Ottoman Damascus. ʿAbd al-Ghani al-Nabulsi, 1641–1731 (London: RoutledgeCurzon, 2005), 86. 68 Reportedly, al-Jazzar renovated the “presumed” tomb of Nabi Yahya located on the outskirts of Sidon. Al-Nabulsi visited this tomb during his travels. 69 According to a story, related to me by a caretaker of the ʿUmari mosque and whose source cannot yet be ascertained, the discovery of the relic of St. John took place during a period of extreme drought in Beirut. A group of Beirut’s denizens, composed of Jews, Christians, and Muslims went outside the city to perform the “rain prayer” (salat al-istisqa‌ʾ). The Jews brought out the relic of a hand and said that if this was the real hand of Nabi Yahya, let it be rain. It rained like it never rained before hence authenticating the relic. 70 Michael Davie, “Bayrout al-Qadimat: une ville arabe et sa banlieue à la fin du XVIII ème siècle,” National Museum News 3 (1996): 26–33; Davie, “Trois cartes inédites de Beyrouth. Eléments cartographiques pour une histoire urbaine de la ville,” Annales de géographie de l’Université Saint-Joseph 5 (1984): 37–82; Najwa al-Qattan, “The Sijills of Beirut al-mahrusa,” MESA Bulletin 37, no. 1 (2003): 58–66; Joseph Rustom, “L’espace urbain de Bayrut al-Qadima et ses habitants vers 1860 à travers un registre du waqf sunnite,” Chronos 25 (2012): 143–91. Hassan Hallaq, Awqaf al-muslimin fi Bayrut fi al-ʾahd al-ʿuthmani (Beirut: al-Markaz al-Islami lil-Iʿlam wa-al-Inma, 1985). Sylvia Agémian, Regards sur Beyrouth. 160 ans d’images, 1800–1960 (Beirut, Musée Sursock, 2013). 71 Rustom, “L’espace urbain,” 144–45.

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Figure 8.5 City plan, Beirut By permission of Michael Davie

waqf properties concentrated around it and within the larger perimeter of the walled city. A marble plaque, placed on the qibla wall and dated to 1261/1845, carries a poetic text celebrating the renovation of the mosque.72 The end of the ten-year long Egyptian occupation in 1840 and the resumption of Ottoman rule may have occasioned the renovation. From 1850 onwards, Beirut witnessed a phenomenal growth that culminated with its establishment as the capital of an expanded Ottoman province in 1888.73 A combination of factors—demographic and economic growth, and an increase in international exchange—turned it into a bustling commercial entrepôt and the most populous port city in the eastern Mediterranean.74 By the middle of the nineteenth century, sections of the medieval walls were being dismantled, and the city 72 Lamei, Masajid bayrut, 24. 73 Nineteenth-century Beirut has been studied extensively. See Leila Tarazi Fawaz, Merchants and Migrants in Nineteenth Century Beirut (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1983); May Davie, Beyrouth et ses faubourgs (1840–1940): Une integration inachevée (Beirut: Presses de l’Ifpo, 1996); Jens Hanssen, Fin de Siècle Beirut. Making of an Ottoman Provincial Capital (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 2005); Malek Sharif, Imperial Norms and Local Realities: The Ottoman Municipal Laws and the Municipality of Beirut (1860–1908) (Beirut: Orient Institut, 2014). 74 Y. Eyup Ozveren, “Beirut,” Review (Fernand Braudel Center) 16, no. 4 (1993), 467–97.

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expanded into its hinterland.75 Under the impetus of Tanzimat reforms emanating from Istanbul, the creation of a municipal council in 1863 and the introduction of municipal laws and regulations fundamentally transformed the urban space of the old city, ushering it into the modern age. By the end of the nineteenth century, Beirut was expanding in a frenzy of construction, as the old Ottoman town’s narrow streets and insalubrious spaces became the target of municipal projects of urban renewal. Direct rule from Istanbul intensified with the rise of Beirut’s economic stature. The Great ʿUmari mosque finally came to the attention of the Ottoman sultans, eager to patronize Beirut’s Sunni notables and strengthen their hold over the Arab provinces. Following the building of the Damascus Road in 1862, Sultan Abdul Aziz (1861–76) donated “three hairs from the beard of the Prophet” in recognition of the city’s position as one of the gateways to the Kaʿba. They were received with great pomp and ceremony, with the military marching with music and banners.76 Placed in a small box in the mosque’s southwestern room, they were displayed to visitors on the twenty-seventh of Ramadan.77 A later inscription marking this event and dated to Ramadan 1338/ May 19–June 18 1920, states that ʿAbd al-Hamid Khan had donated a relic (athar sharif ) in 1276/1859–60, entrusted to the Fakhuri family.78 In July 1886, the Beirut press reported that the governor general of Beirut ʿAbd al-Khaliq Nassuhi Bek visited the Great ʿUmari mosque and, having observed the narrowness of the shrine (maqam) of Prophet Yahya, directed his efforts toward having it enlarged. Expanding the mosque and adding a minaret was also considered.79 A few months later, an imperial decree by Sultan Abdul-Hamid II, dated Jamadi I 1304/January 26–February 25 1887, authorized the rehabilitation of the tomb.80 A metal-grilled aedicule was designed and inserted into the qibla wall,81 and the old wooden screen was removed to the tomb of Imam al-Awzaʿi, where it remains to this day. The maqam had its own caretaker (turbatdar), assigned to the Bekdash family.82

75

Robert du Mesnil du Buisson, “Les anciennes défenses de Beyrouth,” Syria 2, nos. 3 and 4 (1921): 235–57 and 317–27. 76 Michael Johnson, Class and Client in Beirut. The Sunni Muslim Community and the Lebanese State 1840–1985 (London: Ithaca Press, 1986), 53–55. 77 The box was looted and the relics stolen in 1976 following the outbreak of the civil war. 78 The text is wrong since it was Sultan ʿAbd al-Majid. The Fakhuris were a notable family of shaykhs and politicians. Johnson, Class and Client, 54–55. 79 Fakhuri, al-Jamiʿ al-ʿUmari al-Kabir, 49. 80 See Sawsan Agha Kassab and Khaled Omar Tadmori, Beirut and the Sultan: 200 Photographs from the Albums of Abdul Hamid II (1876–1909) (Beirut: Éditions Terre du Liban, 2002), 75. 81 A preliminary drawing of the aedicule, signed by Omar Adel, a drawing instructor at the Imperial School of Beirut, has survived. Agha Kassab and Tadmori, 76. 82 Fakhuri, al-Jamiʿ al-ʿUmari al-Kabir, 49.

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In 1894, the narrow Suq al-Fashkha was enlarged and renamed “the new street” (al-shariʿ al-jadid).83 A new entrance to the mosque was inaugurated that same year by the governor during the Feast of Sacrifice.84 The governor arrived from his palace by a horse-drawn cart to meet the bureaucrats and local dignitaries gathered at the entrance.85 An official document, listing the salaries of the religious officials assigned to the ʿUmari mosque, drawn from the mosque’s endowments, survives in the Yildiz Palace archives.86 The staff, whose appointment needed the approval of the sultan, included a principal and an assistant imam, a teacher of Hanafi Law, a preacher (khatib), muezzins, Qurʾan readers, the caretakers of the turba, i.e., Nabi Yahya’s shrine, and a time keeper.87 In March 1899, a host of Beiruti officials and notables donated money to buy floor covering. In 1908, a committee was formed to look into the restoration and the expansion of the mosque. Finally, in 1909, the Administration of Religious Endowments in Istanbul authorized the lighting of the three big mosques of Beirut with gas.88 The rapidly changing urban landscape and the construction of monumental churches of different creeds along the edges of the old city undoubtedly exerted pressure upon the Sunni community to maintain the upkeep of the Great ʿUmari mosque. The need for a more prominent place of worship outside the confines of the old city manifested itself in the establishment of a fund by a group of Sunni notables to build a mosque on the site of a zawiya located near Martyrs’ Square.89 Deferred for a century, this aspiration of the Sunni community materialized with the construction of the grandiose Muhammad al-Amin mosque in 2008.90 With the French military occupation of Beirut in October 1918, Ottoman rule ended. Beirut became the capital of Greater Lebanon, a new territorial entity under French Mandate. A large-scale Ottoman urban project, initiated 83 Weygand Street today. 84 A drawing of the commemorative plaque marking Sultan Abdul-Hamid’s restoration of the ʿUmari mosque survives in the Yildiz Palace archives. Agha Kassab and Tadmori, Beirut and the Sultan, 200. 85 According to Taha al-Wali, a maqsura for the use of the Ottoman governor was in the southwestern corner of the prayer hall. 86 Minutes of the Council of States meeting on 18 Sha’ban 1315. Agha Kassab and Tadmori, Beirut and the Sultan, 75. 87 Positions were held by the most prominent Beiruti Sunni notables, and were hereditary. Appointments were regulated by Ottoman law. See al-Wali, Tarikh al-masajid, 137–39. 88 Fakhuri, al-Jamiʿ al-ʿUmari al-Kabir, 49. 89 Ward Vloeberghs, “A Building of Might and Faith: Rafiq Hariri and the Muhammad al-Amin Mosque. On the Political Dimensions of Religious Architecture in Contemporary Beirut” (PhD diss., Université catholique de Louvain, 2010), 282–83. 90 The history of Muhammad al-Amin’s mosque is beyond the scope of this article. See Vloeberghs’s thesis and his book, Architecture, Power and Religion in Lebanon. Rafiq Hariri and the Politics of Sacred Space in Beirut (Leiden: Brill, 2016).

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in 1915 and aiming to cut large avenues to facilitate movement between the port and the town centre, had left a large swath of Beirut’s central neighbourhoods in ruins.91 The Mandate Land Services moved quickly to reform the system of land tenure and property laws inherited from the Ottomans, and to expedite and finalize the process of expropriation. The intention was to create a cosmopolitan space and transform the city into a showcase of French colonial power.92 Waqf property, protected from sale or seizure, presented French Mandate authorities with intractable problems. Perceived as an obstacle to the emerging market of real-estate speculation, it gave rise to conflicts between the municipality and Muslim and Christian religious authorities, who felt their presence in the city threatened by French urban designs.93 Mechanisms were put in place to resolve them, but the status of waqf property remained outside the new legal code regulating land tenure and became a potential source of contention and resistance.94 Between 1927 and 1930, the city was gutted by French Mandate engineers and army officers, and the old urban fabric was transformed with the overlaying of a star-shaped pattern, following the Haussmannian model of the Etoile in Paris. Five avenues radiating from a central space marked by a clock became the heart of the capital city, with the new Parliament building (1932) marking one corner of the square.95 The new urban configuration placed the Great ʿUmari mosque at the intersection of two large avenues named after two British and French generals: Allenby and Weygand Streets. Structures abutting the mosque were cleared in 1929 to emphasize its historical character,96 and the width of Allenby Street was set to ten metres to preserve the mosque’s western façade,97 gestures that betray French concerns with the preservation of the Crusader church more than the mosque itself.98 The new western façade 91 Marlene Ghorayeb, Beyrouth sous mandate français. Construction d’une ville moderne (Paris: Karthala, 2014), 21. May Davie, “Beirut and the Etoile Area: An Exclusively French Project,” in Urbanism: Imported or Exported, ed. Joe Nasr and Mercedes Volait (London: Wiley, 2003), 206–29; Robert Saliba, Beirut City Center Recovery: The Foch-Allenby and Etoile Conservation Area (Göttingen: Steidl, 2003). 92 Ghorayeb, Beyrouth sous mandat français, 2–71. 93 Davie, “Beirut and the Etoile Area,” 219. 94 Ghorayeb, Beyrouth sous mandat français, 71–77. 95 Davie, “Beirut and the Etoile Area,” 214–217. 96 Saliba, Beirut City Center Recovery, 80. 97 Saliba, 80. 98 See Astrid Swenson, “Crusader Heritages and Imperial Preservation,” Past and Present, Supplement 10, 2015, 1–26. As Swenson mentions, Camille Enlart was invited by the High Commissioner General Gouraud to conduct a study of the Crusader architecture of Syria and Lebanon. In his study of Beirut’s Crusader church, he expressed total disregard for the Islamic history of the structure.

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of the mosque consisted of a monumental Neo-Islamic portico integrated in the arcades that lined Allenby and Maarad Streets.99 This invented “Oriental” style, favoured by the French, was already in use in Cairo and Istanbul and highlighted by World exhibitions.100 Ironically, the Crusader church, which had remained unchanged since its conversion into a mosque, only acquired an “Islamic” façade under colonial rule. The establishment of a Service of Antiquities in Beirut under the Mandate introduced regulations for the preservation of historic monuments. In 1936, the Great ʿUmari mosque was placed on a list of classified monuments approved by presidential decree.101 The Service of Antiquities also regulated the archaeological investigation that accompanied the extensive construction work in the town centre. French archaeologists’ concerns with the Roman topography set the agenda for future archaeological research that overlooked Mamluk and Ottoman heritage.102 Jean Lauffray identified the city’s cardo maximus (north–south artery) to the east of the ʿUmari mosque and the decumanus (east–west) that roughly shadowed Weygand Street. Across from the mosque, he located large Roman thermae (baths), confirmed by recent archaeological investigation of the site. An ancient wall was identified below the Crusader church’s southern wall, but its function remained elusive. Like Enlart, Lauffray maintained the possibility of an older Byzantine church below the Crusader church.103 In September 1953, while undertaking major repair work in the mosque under the sponsorship of the Mufti, workers uncovered an opening in the northern courtyard leading into underground vaults submerged with water. The discovery was reported in the English-language daily newspaper the Daily Star and its sister Arabic-language newspaper Al-Hayat.104 The Directorate of Islamic Waqfs immediately requested the help of the Directorate of Antiquities, which brought in experienced workers from Baalbek to help in its exploration. It consisted of three barrel-vaulted aisles, supported by Greco-Roman granite columns. No capitals were used between the arches and the granite columns, 99

Maarad Street (Exhibition Street) is the extension of Allenby Street towards the center of the Etoile Square. It refers to a French trade exhibition organized there in 1920. 100 Davie, “Beirut and the Etoile area,” 216. 101 Ghorayeb, Beyrouth sous mandat français, 94–99. 102 Jean Lauffray, “Forums et monuments de Béryte,” Bulletin du Musée de Beyrouth 2 (1945): 13–81. Mikati, Creation of Islamic Beirut, 9. 103 Lauffray, 33–35. 104 Bruce Condé, “Uncovering Beirut’s Last Cathedral,” Daily Star (Sept. 13, 1953), 2; “The ‘Affair of the Crypt’,” Daily Star (Sept. 20, 1953), 2. Both articles were republished in Bruce Condé, See Lebanon. Over 100 Selected Trips with History and Pictures (Beirut: Harb Bijjani Press, 1960), 2–10.

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suggesting a utilitarian structure, possibly a crypt or water cisterns. The discovery generated enormous public interest and speculations were rife about the dating and use of the underground vaults. The resemblance between the crypt’s aisles and the colonnades of Baalbek’s Umayyad mosque raised the possibility that this may be remnants of an early mosque. The presence of an old well, remembered by an old Beiruti, raised the possibility that these were simply water cisterns. The article in al-Hayat presented the expert opinion of an unnamed archaeologist who speculated that the area was occupied during the Roman period by temples.105 During the Byzantine period, the temple was converted into a basilical church, which in turn was transformed into a mosque following the Islamic conquests.106 Bruce Condé, who had excitedly reported on the “archaeological find of the century,” tersely wrote in his book that the mystery of the subterranean vaults remained unsolved, concluding that the “results of inquiries into the nature of the crypt were inconclusive, while no Frankish inscriptions or traces of the Crusader lords burial places were found anywhere in the area. The crypt was resealed.”107 Considering the public commotion generated by the discovery, Dar al-Fatwa must have decided to put an end to speculations and closed the vaults.108 2

The Post-war Mosque: Un Lieu de Mémoire?

The rehabilitation of the Great ʿUmari Mosque on the brink of the twenty-first century was caught in the heated debate that erupted over the post-war reconstruction of Beirut’s devastated central district.109 With the end of the Civil War in 1990, planning for the reconstruction of the war-ravaged central district soon followed. The regeneration of Beirut and its global repositioning were seen as essential steps towards rebuilding the fractured country. By 1994 the Lebanese government had created Solidere (Lebanese Company for the Development and Reconstruction of Beirut Central District), a giant real-estate holding company 105 This was not confirmed by recent excavations. The temples were further south, under the Etoile area. 106 “Tarmim al-jamiʿ al-ʿumari yakshuf tarikh bayrut,” al-Hayat no. 2259 (Sept. 16, 1953), 1. 107 Condé, See Lebanon, 10. 108 Jidejian presented the cisterns as the crypt of a Byzantine church. Jidejian, Beirut through the Ages, 185. 109 See Peter G. Rowe and Hashim Sarkis, eds., Projecting Beirut. Episodes in the Construction and Reconstruction of a modern City (Munich: Prestel, 1998); for Solidere’s Master Plan see Angus Gavin, Framework for postwar renewal: http://www.worldviewcities.org/beirut/ city.html.

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that expropriated the area and compensated owners and right-holders with shares in the company. The de facto expropriation of private properties and Solidere’s monopoly over the reconstruction of the historic centre provoked strong opposition from civil society and former property owners. Public debates centred on questions of architectural heritage, urban space, and their connection to memory.110 This, however, did not stall Solidere’s tabula rasa approach. Partially funding the massive archaeological salvage operation that preceded construction, Solidere integrated a “heritage trail” into the revised Master Plan composed of a selection of archaeological parks, landmarks, and historic buildings representative of Beirut’s “layered” history. These historical layers would become the embodiment of the city’s memory, the combination and interfacing of which encapsulated Beirut’s new identity, “an ancient city for the future,” Solidere’s slogan.111 The Great ʿUmari mosque became one such heritage site, mediating between the past and the future of the city. Restoring the damaged religious sanctuaries of Beirut assumed a symbolic importance in an urban space perceived as a space of reconciliation in the segregated city. Protected from expropriation,112 the restoration of the ʿUmari mosque devolved to the office of the Mufti of the Republic, and the Directorate General of Islamic Waqfs. The process brought together different groups and urban actors with diverging and conflicting interests. Solidere was responsible for the management of the construction site and provided expertise in terms of procurement. It was also responsible for redefining the urban context of the rehabilitated mosque and was concerned in limiting the mosque’s impact on the upscale retail spaces conceived along Weygand Street. A green open space, named the Municipality Garden, was created between the mosque’s eastern end, the neighbouring Amir Assaf mosque, and Beirut’s Municipality building.113 110 Jad Thabet, “Arab Architectural Heritage: Between Mirrors and Idols,” al-Jadid 4–5 (1998– 99): 1–16; Saree Makdisi, “Laying Claim to Beirut: Urban Narrative and Spatial Identity in the Age of Solidere,” Critical Inquiry 23, no. 3 (1997): 661–705. 111 Angus Gavin, “Heart of Beirut: Making the Master Plan for the Renewal of the Central District,” in Rowe and Sarkis, Projecting Beirut, 222–23. 112 All mosques are waqfs, therefore inalienable according to Islamic law. During negotiations between Solidere and the Directorate General of Islamic Waqfs, the non-religious and income-producing waqf properties, such as stores, buildings associated with mosques, were expropriated despite their supposed inalienability. See Nada Mumtaz, “The Knotted Politics of Value: Beirut’s Islamic Charitable Endowments between Islam and Capital” (unpublished manuscript). 113 This lot was originally occupied by a tall, triangular building, known as the Automatic or Idriss building. It was built in stages during the 1950s. It was part of the mosque’s endowment and must have been relinquished and exchanged by Dar al-Fatwa in return for another property.

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Inexplicably, an underground garage ramp was located at the eastern edge of the mosque and could only be understood as a way to hinder the expansion of the mosque in that direction. The second group, the Mufti of the Republic,114 Shaykh Muhammad Rashid Qabbani, and the Directorate General of Islamic Waqfs, saw an opportunity to expand the mosque and redefine its architectural identity into a recognizably Islamic one. Although this is a designated monument, religious authorities in Lebanon have the power to ignore or sidestep state law. These plans in turn impinged on the prerogatives of the Directorate General of Antiquities (DGA), the mandate of which covers the preservation of the historic monument and the overseeing of construction on its site. Although preliminary restoration work began in 1992, and many deliberations over the mosque’s restoration took place, full rehabilitation of the mosque was delayed for lack of funds until 2000. This was initiated by the Lebanese banker and prominent art collector, Raymond Audi, who convinced one of his shareholders, the Kuwaiti businesswoman Shaikha Suad al-Humaidi, to cover the expenses of the restoration. He suggested also Youssef Haidar, a French-trained architect who had undertaken many rehabilitation works in Lebanon.115 As Rustom puts it, this was a remarkable turn of events, for “the oldest Sunni mosque of Beirut was to be rehabilitated at the initiative of a Catholic businessman by a Shiʿa architect with Kuwaiti funding.”116 The contest that ensued between Shaykh Muhammad Qabbani, who assumed the supervision of the project, and the DGA was vented out on the pages of the Beirut press.117 With the site boarded up and access denied to members of the DGA, construction proceeded without state supervision. Neither Solidere nor the Mufti saw a need for such oversight, which could delay construction for at least a year if significant finds were uncovered. Attacks, directed at Dar al-Fatwa in newspaper articles published by Beirut’s most important Arabic language daily Annahar, called out against a massacre of the monument’s historical character and criticized the methods used in the restoration, such as the aggressive removal of the white paint layer or the use of 114 For the office of the Mufti in Lebanon see Jakob Skovgaard-Petersen, “Levantine State Muftis-An Ottoman Legacy,” in Elisabeth Özdalga, Late Ottoman Society: The Intellectual Legacy (London: RoutlegeCurzon, 2005), 274–88. 115 Joseph Rustom (2011), Conceiving Places of Worship in Postwar Beirut. The Cases of al-Omari and al-Amin Mosques. Global Payers. Redemption and Liberation in the City. Retrieved from: https://globalprayers.info/about/fellows/joseph-rustom/conceiving-places-of-wor ship-in-postwar-beirut/index.html. 116 Rustom, 3. 117 Articles by May Abboud Abi Akl in Annahar newspaper, 10 July 2001; 13 July 2001; 23 January 2002.

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heavy earth-moving equipment to excavate the site. These methods compromised the archaeological integrity of the site. Eventually, the attacks stopped at the request of Ghassan Tueini, Annahar’s owner, who personally intervened to end a potentially combustible situation.118 The first task undertaken by the architect, with the help of Solidere, was to open the space around the mosque, which has been encroached upon by additions and buildings by the early 1970s that completely obscured it from view. This allowed for the expansion of the mosque’s courtyard and dependencies, at the Mufti’s request, but also exposed the historic building to full view and transformed it into an urban landmark. Youssef Haidar chose a modernist architectural language, eschewing a communitarian rationale (une logique communautaire) that would have dictated a traditional or historicist style.119 Following Solidere’s design guidelines, the objective was to breathe new life into the historic monument, using contemporary forms and materials, while preserving the older layers. As he puts it: In addition to the restoration work required, we undertook to create a living monument using the language and methods of our time. Reflecting the city, nourished by centuries of history but resolutely turned towards the future, this renovated heritage time capsule represents a primary element, a new beginning … The original courtyard was expanded and enclosed on two sides by domed porticoes supported by tall granite columns, many of which were retrieved from the site. The concrete domes of the porticoes and the mosque’s vaults were covered with zinc, allusively reminiscent of Ottoman mosque architecture. The courtyard walls were made permeable with perforated panels, reproducing repetitive abstract patterns. Historical layers, however, were not left undisturbed or treated equally. The white paint that had covered the interior vaults of the mosque since the Mamluk period was removed to reveal the original sandstone, a decision justified by aesthetic considerations. Also, the eighteenth-century external mihrab was removed from its original location and installed in the newly created women’s prayer hall, a large room located on the western side of the courtyard. The underground cisterns were renovated and repurposed to accommodate an auditorium and a display area for Islamic art objects. Finally, a tall square minaret was built in the mosque’s northwest corner on Weygand Street. This minaret was the focus of contention between 118 Interview with May Abboud Abi Akl (June, 2015). 119 Vloeberghs, “Building of Might and Faith,” 417.

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Youssef Haidar, Solidere, and Mufti Qabbani, and was one of many negotiated design decisions that beleaguered the rehabilitation project.120 Originally, the Muslim cleric wanted to add three minarets to enhance the visual presence of the mosque. When he reluctantly agreed to one minaret, he insisted that its height supersede the height of the Capuchin church tower further down the street. This drive to enhance the mosque’s visual presence was part of a larger political program to reaffirm Sunni precedence and identity in Beirut’s central district. The inauguration of the grandiose Neo-Ottoman mosque of Muhammad al-Amin in 2008 on Beirut’s main public space, Martyrs’ Square, marks the culmination of these politics.121 After the inauguration of the mosque, a new narrative, propounded by the mosque’s administration, was presented in pamphlets distributed at the mosque’s entrance.122 The short historical aperçu starts with the statement: “The Great Umari mosque dates to the Islamic conquests, to the beginning of the 1st century of the Hijra, the year of the conquest of Beirut in year 14 AH/635 AD. Undoubtedly, it is one of the oldest, largest, and most important mosques of the city.” Then, brushing over the mosque’s hybrid architectural identity, it proceeds to state that “during the Crusader period, the mosque was converted into a church. In the year 853 AH/1187 AD, Sultan Salah al-Din al-Ayyubi liberated Beirut, restoring the Great Umari Mosque to its former function as a mosque; after 10 years, the Crusaders reconquered it again, converting it into a cathedral; the Muslims retook it again during the Mamluk period on Rajab 22, 690/21 July 1291, and introduced some changes and additions to it.” This new narrative, which denies the presence of a purpose-built Crusader church altogether and traces back the foundation of the ʿUmari mosque to the Islamic conquests, takes roots in the work of Sunni historian Hassan Hallaq, who has written extensively on Ottoman Beirut and Beirut’s Sunni denizens. His published work has recently been the subject of critiques in academic studies of Lebanese historiography.123 Lebanese history writing has been characterized as mostly “a field of communalist contentions.”124 Hallaq’s 120 121 122 123

Interview with Youssef Haidar (2015). See Vloeberghs, Architecture, Power. I collected this pamphlet in 2015 while researching the history of the mosque. James A. Reilly, “Ottoman Beirut: Crisis, History, and Sectarian Memory,” Comparative Studies of South Asia, Africa and the Middle East 31, no. 1 (2011), 164–71; Reilly, The Ottoman Cities of Lebanon. Historical Legacy and Identity in the Modern Middle East (London: I.B. Tauris, 2016), 101–108. Candice Raymond, “Réécrire l’histoire au Liban. Une génération d’historiens face à la période ottomane de la fin des années 1960 à nos jours” (PhD diss., École des Hautes Études en Sciences Sociales, Paris, 2013), 633–37. 124 Reilly, Ottoman Cities of Lebanon, 19.

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writing falls into the category of confessional historiography that promotes a self-consciously sectarian (Sunni) history of Beirut. His prodigious output seems to be propelled by a sense of mission to save Beirut’s Islamic heritage.125 As Candice Raymond puts it, Hallaq’s networks, audience, sources of legitimacy, and centres of interests are all completely circumscribed by his belonging to Beiruti Sunnism.126 Drawing his evidence from Islamic law-court registers and endowment records of the late Ottoman period—the use of which he has popularized—he constructs the image of a “timeless Muslim and Arab space.”127 In his book on Ottoman Beirut, a short chapter on Beirut’s mosques—which like the rest of the book is not footnoted—is replete with names of religious scholars, preachers, and imams from the early Islamic period, on which Beirut’s piety is founded. Based on unspecified historic sources, he refers to a “Ward mosque,” which existed during the Umayyad period in Beirut, and then jumps to the history of the ʿUmari mosque, which he establishes as the oldest extant mosque of Beirut, converted into a church by the Crusaders.128 Hallaq’s narrative departs from previous, “islamocentric” historiography of Beirut such as Shaykh Taha al-Wali’s (1921–96) history of Beirut’s mosques, published in 1973. Commissioned by Dar al-Fatwa, it was an initiative to preserve Beirut’s Islamic heritage, and presented Beirut’s history and its Muslim religious architecture in a sectarian historical framework.129 However, notwithstanding al-Wali’s communalist bias, he grounded his account of the ʿUmari mosque in historical chronicles and Orientalist scholarship available to him.130 In his second book on the history of Beirut, published twenty years later, al-Wali engaged in a long disquisition on what lies underneath the Crusader church.131 Clearly responding to the spate of speculations that followed the discovery of the subterranean chamber in 1953, he constructed a highly speculative narrative—as he readily admits in his text—to, firstly, refute that a Byzantine church was built in this area and, secondly, to argue that the ancient vaults were part of a Roman temple, which was transformed for military usage 125 Reilly, 104. 126 Raymond, Réécrire l’histoire au Liban, 651. 127 Reilly, Ottoman Cities of Lebanon, 102. 128 Hassan Hallaq, Bayrut al-mahrusa fi al-ʾahd al-ʿuthmani (Beirut: al-Dar al-Jamiʿiyya, 1987), 49–51. 129 For Taha al-Wali, see Reilly, Ottoman Cities of Lebanon, 90–95. 130 Al-Wali’s treatment of the ʿUmari mosque was short because he was planning to publish a separate monograph on its history, but the manuscript remained unpublished by the time of his death. I was informed of the existence of a typewritten manuscript, which remains missing. 131 Taha al-Wali, Bayrut fiʾl-tarikh wa al-hadara wa al-ʿumran (Beirut: Dar al-ʿilm lil-malayin, 1993), 168–77.

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during the Byzantine period. In his conclusion, he alluded to the possible existence of a mosque preceding the construction of the Crusader Church: there is no doubt that the actual building of the mosque does not go back to a time prior to its construction by the Crusaders, and as we had demonstrated before, those Crusaders had built the church on the remains of a Roman temple, to which it is possible that the Arabs had preceded them to it, when they constructed their mosque, which in all likelihood, the Crusaders had destroyed following their conquest of Beirut.132 Al-Wali’s argument against the presence of an older Byzantine church underneath the mosque, seems to foreshadow Mufti Qabbani’s refusal, many years later, to allow archaeological excavations to take place during the mosque’s rehabilitation. Did this stem from a deep-seated anxiety of having to confront further complexity in the genealogy of the ʿUmari mosque in a society that remains polarized by sectarian divisions? Or is it simply the fiat of a religious authority bolstered by political power? Whatever the reasons may be, Hallaq’s contentious and unsubstantiated claims and the mosque administration’s tacit acceptance of those claims, did lead to a conflict on the meaning of the ʿUmari mosque in Beirut’s urban memory. 3

Conclusion

In early May 2019, Solidere decided to install, after a long delay, the panels of Beirut’s Heritage Trail. The panel placed in front of the Great ʿUmari mosque immediately provoked a public outcry.133 Let’s begin by quoting the text in full: The al-Omari Grand mosque was the old Crusader Church of Saint John built in 1150 over the site of the Roman imperial baths. Similar Romanesque-style churches with triple apses were built in Tyre and Tartus using recuperated materials such as Roman columns and capitals. In 1291, the Mamluks captured Beirut and converted the Church into a mosque. Named al-Omari Mosque in memory of Caliph Omar ibn al-Khattab, it soon became known as Jamiʿ al-Kabir (the Great Mosque). Its Mamluk-style entrance and minaret were added in 1350. During the 132 al-Wali, Bayrut fiʾl tarikh, 176. 133 Ayoub News. “Jamal Itani: Ana ma khasni,” May 15, 2019, http://www.ayoubnews.com (accessed July 15, 2019).

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French Mandate the façade was redesigned by adding a riwaq, or portico, and integrating the mosque’s main entrance into the new colonnade of Maarad street. Badly damaged during the Civil war (1975–90), the mosque’s refurbishment was completed in 2004 in a way that reveals the building’s origins and history. A second minaret was built on the northwest corner of a new colonnaded courtyard. Beneath it, an ancient cistern with Roman columns and stone vaults has been preserved. The text drew the ire of Hassan Hallaq who, in a letter directed to Beirut’s mayor (by tradition, an elected Sunni official), declaimed that no such falsification of the ʿUmari Mosque’s history has ever occurred before, for it abolishes the history of Arabs and Muslims in Beirut since the Arab conquests.134 It is inconceivable, he emphasized, that Muslims did not build mosques following the conquest of Beirut. Rather, they converted a pagan temple into a mosque, which caliphs and governors subsequently expanded during the Umayyad, Abbasid, Fatimid, Zenguid, and Ayyubid periods. Hence, the ʿUmari mosque was used for prayer throughout, to be transformed into a church by the Crusaders. The Mamluks returned the building to its original function. He ends his letter by placing responsibility for the falsification of history and its consequences upon governmental institutions, and concludes that such an act is unjustified at a time when “we are striving to consecrate the principle of co-existence [between Muslims and Christians] (al-ʾaysh al-mushtarak).” Within a few days, the panel was removed by the municipality. Solidere’s text and Hallaq’s response frame the history of the ʿUmari mosque into two divergent and irreconcilable narratives of Beirut’s identity, the timeless Arab-Islamic city versus the “layered” city. Considering the historical narrative that this chapter has tried to construct, Hallaq’s claims about the ʿUmari mosque are contentious. However, as Reilly astutely observed, his ideas cannot easily be dismissed. Hallaq “appears to be a kind of tribune for the historical self-image of Beirut’s Sunni communal leaders.”135 Within Beirut’s highly contentious political climate, where sectarian balance between political actors is constantly negotiated, the loudest voice wins the day. As for Solidere’s “text,” it highlights Beirut’s archeological layers, in this case the Roman, Crusader, Mamluk, French Mandate, and post-war layers, while inexplicably omitting the Ottoman layer, a significant period in the shaping of 134 Hallaq’s letter published in on May 18, 2019. Aliwaa News. “Izalat al-lawhat al-Iʾlaniyah al-mutadaminah maʿlumat muzawwara,” http://aliwaa.com.lb (accessed July 15, 2019). 135 Reilly, 191.

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Lebanese history. Its writers consulted widely with historians and other experts, and did request information both from Hassan Hallaq and Dar al-Fatwa, but the information was never sent.136 Solidere’s text relied on expert knowledge— such as the presence of an Imperial Roman bathing establishment in the vicinity of the ʿUmari mosque uncovered during the recent excavations—which has yet to reach the general public, leaving ordinary individuals either unconcerned about the debate, or unable to form an opinion.137 Furthermore, the focus on “archeological layers,” and the constraints of writing a collective story that speaks to all Lebanese, overlooked the living memory of older Beirutis who still remembered the pre-war mosque, as well as the mosque’s actual users, who may have a lot to contribute to a collective memory of the ʿUmari mosque. As this chapter has demonstrated, the ʿUmari mosque’s complex history still raises so many unanswered questions and deserves more than one presentation. For the time being, it will probably stay outside Solidere’s heritage trail, and its meaning(s) and place in Beirut’s memory contested by Beirut’s social actors and defined by communalist discursive practices.138 References Abboud Abi Akl, May. In Annahar, 10 July 2001; 13 July 2001; 23 January 2002. Abu Husayn, Abdul-Rahim. “Problems in the Ottoman Administration in Syria during the 16th and 17th centuries: The Case of the Sanjak of Sidon-Beirut.” International Journal of Middle East Studies 24, no. 4 (1992): 665–75. Agémian, Sylvia. Regards sur Beyrouth. 160 ans d’images, 1800–1960. Beirut, Musée Sursock, 2013. Agha Kassab, Sawsan, and Khaled Omar Tadmori. Beirut and the Sultan: 200 Photographs from the Albums of Abdul Hamid II (1876–1909). Beirut: Éditions Terre du Liban, 2002. Antaki, Patricia. “Le chateau croisé de Beyrouth. Étude préliminaire.” ARAM 13–14 (2000–2001): 323–53. Condé, Bruce. “Uncovering Beirut’s Last Cathedral.” Daily Star (Sept. 13, 1953). 136 Personal communication from Amira el Solh, an urban planner who managed the Beirut Heritage Trail team at Solidere. 137 The inauguration of the Beirut Heritage Trail was planned along with the Renzo Piano designed Beirut City Museum, where the results of the archaeological salvage operation will be displayed. The building of the museum has been delayed by the DGA due to the archaeological examination of its own site! 138 For a similar case see Howayda al-Harithy, “Weaving Historical Narratives: Beirut’s Last Mamluk Monument,” Muqarnas 25 (2008): 215–30.

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Thabet, Jad. “Arab Architectural Heritage: Between Mirrors and Idols.” Al-Jadid 4–5 (1998–99): 1–16. Vloeberghs, Ward. “A Building of Might and Faith: Rafiq Hariri and the Muhammad al-Amin Mosque. On the Political Dimensions of Religious Architecture in Contemporary Beirut.” PhD diss., Université catholique de Louvain, 2010. Vloeberghs, Ward. Architecture, Power and Religion in Lebanon. Rafiq Hariri and the Politics of Sacred Space in Beirut. Leiden: Brill, 2016. Volney, Constantin-François. Voyages en Syrie et en Egypte, pendant les années 1783, 1784 et 1785. Vol. 2. Paris: Desenne, 1787. Wali, Taha, al-. Tarikh al-masajid wa‌ʾl-jawamiʿ al-sharifa fi Bayrut. Beirut: Matabiʿ Dar al-Kutub, 1973. Wali, Taha, al-. Bayrut fiʾl tarikh wa al-hadara wa al ʿumran. Beirut: Dar al-ʿilm lil-malayin, 1993. Weber, Stefan. “L’architecture libanaise au temps des Ottomans.” In Liban. L’autre rive: exposition présentée à l’Institut du monde arabe du 27 octobre au 2 mai 1999, edited by Valérie Matoïan, 273–75. Paris: Flammarion, 1998. Weber, Stefan. “The Making of an Ottoman Harbor Town: Sidon/Saida from the Sixteenth to the Eighteenth Centuries.” In Syria and Bilad al-Sham under Ottoman Rule. Essays in Honour of Abdul-Karim Rafeq, edited by Peter Sluglett and Stefan Weber, 179–239. Leiden: Brill, 2010. Wheatley, Paul. The Places where Men Pray Together: Cities in Islamic Lands, Seventh through the Tenth Centuries. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2001. Yahya, Salih B. Tarikh Bayrut. Récits des anciens de la famille de Buhtur b. ʿAli, Émir du Gharb de Beyrouth, edited by Francis Hours and Kamal Salibi. Beirut: Dar el-Machreq, 1969.

Chapter 9

The Traditional Crafts of the Middle East and Central Asia in the Writings of European and North American Travellers Marcus Milwright The medley of things seen and half understood has left patterns damascened upon my memory with intricate clearness: immense droves of camels coming up from the wilderness to be sold in the market; factories of inlaid woodwork and wrought brasswork in which hundreds of young children, with beautiful and seeming-merry faces, are hammering and filling and cutting out the designs traced by the draughtsmen who sit at their desks like schoolmasters; vast mosques with rows of marble columns, and floors covered with bright-coloured rugs, and files of men, sometimes two hundred in a line, with a leader in front of them, making their concerted genuflections toward Mecca; costly interiors of private houses which outwardly show bare white-washed walls, but within welcome the stranger to hospitality of fruits, coffee, and sweetmeats, in stately rooms ornamented in rich tiles and precious marbles, looking upon arcaded courtyards fragrant with blossoming orange-trees and musical with tinkling fountains; …1

∵ These words appear in Henry van Dyke’s (d. 1933) Out-of-Doors in the Holy Land, published in 1908. The quoted sentence actually continues for another page of printed text listing many more characteristics of the city of Damascus that struck the author’s attention. This passage of somewhat overblown prose illustrates well the potential difficulties of employing travel literature as a source for the study of the social and cultural history of the Middle East. Travel 1 Henry van Dyke, Out-of-Doors in the Holy Land: Impressions of Travel in Body and Spirit (Toronto: The Copp, Clark Co., 1908), 320–21.

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writing is generally valued for the personal engagement that exists (or appears to exist, for even apparently spontaneous records of arduous treks are usually reconstructed after the fact)2 between the observer and the things, people, or events being observed; the reader can expect a fine piece of travel writing to have some literary merit, perhaps incorporating humour or pathos into the recollections of the individuals and places encountered during the journey itself. As the quote from van Dyke’s book demonstrates, sober and scientific descriptive passages are not a consistent, or even necessary component of a satisfactory travel account. One could go further and state that a text might be thoroughly untrustworthy as a source of factual data about a given locality and still qualify as a successful piece of literature; accuracy does not have to be the only yardstick by which this genre is measured. Should we then ignore travel writing in our search for information about socio-cultural practices in the Islamic Middle East? Does the nature of this genre render the information within it unreliable? I approach these questions from the perspective of the crafts of the Middle East, and particularly the use of primary textual sources in the reconstruction of the technological dimensions of crafts, the organization of workshops, the economics of traditional manufacturing, and the everyday lives of skilled artisans. I have chosen to focus specifically on travellers’ accounts dating from the nineteenth and first half of the twentieth centuries. While the writings of medieval European travellers might well be employed by modern historians, archaeologists, and art historians because of the relative paucity of other contemporary source material, those involved in the study of more recent periods cannot be said to lack for primary texts. To take the example of Greater Syria in the later Ottoman period there are numerous archival sources (most importantly in Arabic, Ottoman Turkish, and French) dealing with the economy of the region, as well as chronicles, legal texts, detailed geographical surveys by the likes of Sir John Bowring (d. 1872), Vital Cuinet (d. 1900), and Muhammad Kurd ʿAli (d. 1953), and descriptions 2 For example, see comments in Geoffrey Moorhouse’s introduction to Robert Byron, The Road to Oxiana (London: Macmillan and Co. Ltd., 1937. Reprinted with an introduction by Geoffrey Moorhouse. London: Folio Society, 2000), 15. Moorhouse remarks: “Byron referred to The Road to Oxiana as his diary, wishing to give the impression that the published text consisted of nothing but what he had set down at the end of each day. Dates and names arranged chronologically as section headings heighten the effect: and the typography of each edition since the first one in 1937, with double spacing at random between certain paragraphs (which are sometimes no more than a single disconnected sentence), has carefully added to the illusion. For illusion it is. We have Christopher Sykes’s word for it that this is far from a collection of jottings, which is what it is supposed to read like, but a very carefully contrived and painstaking piece of writing, which went through many drafts before Byron was satisfied with the effect it produced. The work occupied three full years of his life, and only ten months of them were spent on his genuine diary in the field.”

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of individual cities. From documents like these it is possible to reconstruct a nuanced picture of the changing balance of trade between Syria and Europe, and to track how this affected different aspects of the agricultural base and the manufacturing sector. Lastly, the late nineteenth century witnessed the growth of a new type of scientific analysis of craft practices, that of ethnography. Good examples of this scholarly genre are Georg Gatt’s meticulous study of the potters of Gaza and Elias Qudsi’s examination of the rituals of the guilds of Damascus, both published in 1885.3 Seen from these perspectives an account like van Dyke’s seems of nugatory value as an historical source (unless one is concerned with surveying the evolution of European/North American representations of the Middle East in art and literature). Certainly, there is no reason to suppose that travel writing of this sort could compete with other types of primary written sources in scholarly reconstructions of the Islamic past, but it does represent an additional viewpoint, and one that occasionally brings up fresh perspectives. Note, for example, van Dyke’s reference to child labour in workshops producing brass objects and inlaid woodwork. He also describes the practice of working from templates drawn by the masters of the workshops, adding the insight that these men “sit at their desks like schoolmasters.” A similar observation appears in a later account by Edith Louisa Butcher (d. 1933). She writes: “In all the native bazaars quite tiny boys may be seen hard at work and very proud of themselves. They are brought up to their fathers’ trades at a very early age in their tiny raised open shops along the different bazaars.”4 Child labour was therefore a feature of the Damascene craft sector at this time, and is one that appears in contemporary photographs (Figs. 9.1 and 9.2).5 This crucial social dimension of traditional manufacturing receives scant attention, however, in economic surveys such as those of Bowring and Cuinet. Before engaging in this survey, however, it is necessary to make some brief comments about the backgrounds of those men and women who are classified here as travellers to the region. Prior to the advent of modern airlines travel to the Middle East and Central Asia was a time-consuming and costly activity. This tended to restrict travel to certain categories: those who either had the independent wealth to make such journeys or who were sponsored by other 3 Georg Gatt, “Industrielles aus Gaza,” Zeitschrift des Deutschen Palästina-Vereins 8 (1885): 69–79; Elias Qudsi, “Notice sur les corporations de Damas,” Actes du sixième Congres International des Orientalistes (Leiden: Brill, 1885), 2:7–34. 4 Edith Butcher, Things Seen in Egypt (London: Sheeley, Service and Co., 1926), 87–88. 5 The sources for these images are: http://www.loc.gov/pictures/resource/cph.3b21226/ http://www.loc.gov/pictures/item/2006681010/ (last consulted: 12 September 2013).

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Figure 9.1 Stereoscopic photograph published by Underwood and Underwood in 1900 entitled “Crude makers of beautiful goods; making the famous inlaid pearl work, Damascus, Syria” By permission of Library of Congress Prints and Photographs Division Washington: LC-DIG-ppmsca-10710

Figure 9.2 Stereoscopic photograph dated 1903 by William H. Rau entitled “Making the beautiful pearlwork of the Orient, Damascus, Syria” By permission of Library of Congress Prints and Photographs Division Washington: LC-USZ62-73947

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individuals or groups to do so. The former all come from the privileged and literate elite of European and North American society. The latter are the more diverse group of individuals, including but not limited to scholars, museum curators, soldiers, spies, missionaries, and diplomats. While many of these people were perceptive in their descriptions of the crafts, very few would have possessed training in the activities they observed. Thus, the extracts given below often lack the technical know-how that would have been essential for pursuing the crafts themselves. The principal exception comes in the discussion of mining and the extraction of metals; some of the more technical descriptions found in nineteenth- and early twentieth-century sources derive their accuracy from the fact that the authors were trained as engineers. Lastly, European and North American travellers came to the Islamic world with biases and prejudices (positive or negative), and these are manifested in their descriptions of people and activities. These biases can be broadly classified as “Orientalist” but spring from different sources: religious, political, economic, and academic. In the remainder of this chapter I address some themes that recur in the travel accounts of this period. These can be defined as: biographies and information about groups responsible for crafts; craft techniques and adaptation to circumstance; and rituals associated with crafts and craft associations. I have chosen the first theme precisely because we have so little information about the identities of artisans from pre-modern sources in the Middle East. While there are numerous biographies in Arabic and Persian of figures from the political and economic elite and of scholars, the men and women engaged in the manual crafts receive little attention. The finest calligraphers and painters are a partial exception, particularly in the Persian-speaking regions,6 but for the practitioners of most crafts we have to rely on occasional references in chronicles and archival documents and the information provided by the personal names on objects and buildings.7 Low levels of literacy among artisans meant that they were seldom in a position to record anything about their own lives, and only a few, such as the fourteenth-century Persian Abu al-Qasim, composed practical manuals or other written works.8 In this context, it is easy to see how the mentions of artisans given by travellers could have a value as social documents. 6 See examples collected in: Wheeler Thackston, trans. and ed., Album Prefaces and other Documents on the History of Calligraphers and Painters, Studies and Sources in Islamic Art and Architecture, Supplements to Muqarnas 10 (Leiden: Brill, 2001). 7 For a discussion of this topic, see: Sheila Blair and Jonathan Bloom, “Signatures on Works of Islamic Art and Architecture,” Damaszener Mitteilungen 11 (1999 [2001]): 49–66. 8 James Allan, “Abuʾl-Qasim’s Treatise on Ceramics,” Iran 11 (1973): 111–20.

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Accounts containing biographical information vary considerably in their approach and degree of detail. Few provide psychological insights into the artisans themselves or furnish the reader with much information about backgrounds and family lives, but there are valuable data concerning social attitudes toward different craft activities and the ways in which men and women learned their skills. For example, T. E. Lawrence (d. 1935) provides the following brief footnote in The Seven Pillars of Wisdom: The most famous sword-smith of my time was ibn Bani, a craftsman of the Ibn Rashid dynasty of Hail. He rode once on a foray with the Shammar against the Rualla, and was captured. When Nuri recognized him, he shut up with him in prison ibn Zari, his own sword-smith, swearing they should not come out till their work was indistinguishable. So, ibn Zari improved greatly in the skill of his craft, while remaining in design the better artist.9 While we learn little about the actual lives of the two craftsmen, the passage is revealing both for the connoisseurship that clearly existed among the patrons of weapons in Arabia and for the willingness of tribal leaders to mistreat artisans in order to achieve a desired result. In this respect Lawrence’s account tallies well with a long tradition of treating craftspeople as royal possessions. The presence of “signatures” on objects is another indication that from the earliest phases of Islamic history there existed a discerning market for the works of the best craftsmen. The works of the finest calligraphers, most notably Ibn al-Bawwab (d. c. 1022), were evidently much sought after in the medieval period, and even single pages attributed to master scribes would fetch high prices.10 Gertrude Bell’s (d. 1926) description of a visit to the house of the Damascene scribe Mustafa al-Asbaʿi suggests that the traditions of connoisseurship and collecting were very much alive in the Middle East in the early years of the twentieth century. She writes: We were taken through the reception rooms into a little chamber on an upper floor where Mustafa was wont to sit and write those texts that are the pictures of the Moslem East. It was hung round with examples 9 Thomas E. Lawrence, Seven Pillars of Wisdom, a Triumph (Garden City NY: Doubleday, Doran and Company 1937), 267. 10 For example, see the anecdote translated in: David S. Rice, The unique Ibn al-Bawwab Manuscript in the Chester Beatty Library (Dublin: Emery Walker, 1955), 9, from: ʿAbd Allah al-Hamawi Yaqut, Irshad al-arib ila maʿrifat al-adib, ed. David S. Margoliouth (London: Luzak and Co., 1929), 6:365–67.

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from celebrated hands ancient and modern, among which I recognised my friend Muhammad ʿAli, son of Beha Ullah the Persian prophet, to my mind the most skilful penman of our day, though Oriental preference goes out to another Persian of the same religious sect, Mushkin Kalam, and him also I count among my friends. We sat on cushions and drank coffee, turning over the while exquisite manuscripts of all dates and countries, some written on gold and some on silver, some on brocade and some on supple parchment (several of these last being pages of Kufic texts, abstracted from the Kubbet el Khazneh before it was closed), and when we rose to go Mustafa presented me with three examples of his own art, and I carried them off rejoicing.11 Bell expresses admiration for the elegance of the man’s house, and it would appear that his skill in calligraphy brought Mustafa al-Asbaʿi some status and wealth. Generally, this does not seem to have been the case, however, and most of the craftspeople encountered in these sources were relatively poor, some having to supplement their work with other forms of paid employment. Charles Doughty (d. 1926) mentions a case like this in his discussion of the hajj caravan making its way from Syria to the Hijaz. He notes that the porters (sing. ʿakkam) received the equivalent of £8 Sterling for the outward journey from Damascus to Mecca. Of the head (rayyis) of the porters he writes: Their rayîs or head received double money, or £16 English: this was a wayworn man, one Abu Rashîd a patten-maker, lean as a rake. Two-thirds part of the year he sat at home in their sûk, under the great cathedral mosque at Damascus: but the haj month come about (whereto their lent month last before, filling the body with crude humours, is but an evil preparation) he forsook all, and trudging four months revisited the blissful Harameyn and brought again of that purgatory of fatigues a little money, to the sustenance of his honest family.12 This observation is borne out in other writings of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Describing the situation in Iraq in 1913, the Russian writer L. N. Kotlov notes that the practitioners of manual crafts could only survive in face of competition from industrially manufactured goods from Europe by 11 Gertrude L. Bell, Syria, the Desert and the Sown (London: William Heinemann, 1907), 148 (slightly adapted from original). A photo of the scribe, Mushqin Kalam, appears on p. 149. 12 Charles Doughty, Travels in Arabia Deserta, new edition (New York: Random House, 1936) 1:101–2.

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“extraordinary intensification” of their labour. He continues: “The town worker, even if highly skilled, usually works ten to eleven hours a day and sometimes more. One bookbinder, for example, starts work in the winter at 7 am and, having had dinner, does not leave his house until 7 or 8 pm.”13 The humble circumstances of artisans are noted in the works of many authors. Doughty describes a meeting with a young Arabian blacksmith who had walked as a boy from his native Ha‌ʾil to settle in Tayma. Doughty saw him beat out a steel in his simple workshop. The account continues: “We may not all day labour,” said the young smith, “in Ramathán;” and rising, with a damp clout he wiped his honest smutched face, and as he shut up the shop he invited me home to drink coffee in his dàr…. The smith’s home was the last going out of the town beyond Khálaf’s, small, but well built of clay bricks. The former year he and his brother had made it with their own hands upon a waste plot next the wilderness, and in Hâyil wise; they thought but meanly of the Teyma architecture.14 Ironworkers are often assigned a low status in traditional Islamic societies, although this is not a universal phenomenon.15 As a result it is not uncommon for such “demeaning” crafts to be concentrated in the hands of particular tribal, ethnic, or confessional groups.16 For example, the tinning and the engraving of copper vessels in Damascus were both done primarily by the Jewish community of the city; an Arabic description of the former craft (the tinner, or samkari) makes this point explicitly stating: “… since it is not one of the noble 13 Lev N. Kotlov, Natsionalno-osvoboditelnoe Vosstanie 1920 goda v Irake (Moscow: Izd-vo Akademii nauk SSSR, 1958), 49–56. Translated in: Charles Issawi, The Fertile Crescent, 1800–1914: A Documentary Economic History, Studies in Middle Eastern History (New York: Oxford University Press, 1988), 397–98. 14 Doughty, Travels, 1:580. 15 In southern Arabia, the craft of the blacksmith was often seen in a more positive light. See: Robert Serjeant, “Social Stratification in Arabia,” in Robert Serjeant, ed., The Islamic City: Selected Papers from a Colloquium held at the Middle East Centre. Faculty of Oriental Studies, Cambridge, United Kingdom, from 19 to 23 July 1976 (Paris: UNESCO, 1980), 126– 47. On the relative status of different crafts in pre-modern Islamic societies, see: Ignaz Goldziher, “Die Handwerke bei den Arabern,” Globus 46 (1894): 203–205. Translated by Gwendolyn Goldbloom as “The Crafts among the Arabs,” in Manufacturing and Labor, The Transformation of the Classical Islamic World 12, ed. Michael Morony (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2003), 145–50; ʿAssem Mohammed Rezq, “Crafts and Industries in Mediaeval Egypt and their Rank in Building the Social Structure of its main urban Centres: An Introduction,” Islamic Archaeological Studies 4 (1991): 57–74. 16 On the ritually “unclean” crafts, see: Serjeant, “Social Stratification,” 130–31.

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(sharif ) [crafts] most of the masters of it are Jews.”17 John Lewis Burckhardt (d. 1817) reflects on the low status conferred on those who made their living as blacksmiths and leather workers. Discussing the craftsmen associated with the “Aenezes” (i.e., ʿAnaza) he writes: These workmen are called szona: they are never of Aeneze origin, because their occupations are regarded as degrading to a free-born Aeneze. Most of them are found in the villages of Djof, which are wholly peopled by workmen, some of whom in spring disperse themselves among the Bedouins, and return in winter to their families. An Aeneze never marries his daughter to a szona, or any descendant of a szona family; the latter intermarry among themselves, or take the daughters of Aeneze slaves.18 Not all craftspeople in this part of Arabia were so stigmatized, and some specialists were viewed in a more favourable light. Harry St John Philby (d. 1965) gives a detailed account of an architect/builder who evidently enjoyed some renown in his region over his long career. His description of this man and his work is worth quoting in full: We went to call on Ahmad ibn Suwaiʾar, recently returned from Mecca, in his dingy, smoky parlour, twelve feet by ten with a pent roof. There entered an old man of seventy, a connection by marriage (rahim) of our host, seeking of Dr. ʿAbdullah some remedy for his failing eyesight—a sore hindrance to his work during the past two years. He was Ibrahim ibn Salih, the leading architect and builder of the city. Starting life as an apprentice to a builder without education than what he gathered through his eyes, he rose rapidly to fame and had built the tall minaret of the Jamiʿ Masjid 28 years before—it was 50 dhra‌ʾ, he said, or nearly 80 feet in height. He also built the Amir’s present residence, that of Muhammad al Sulaiman in which we were lodged, and in fact all the best houses in 17 Muhammad Saʿid al-Qasimi, Jamal al-Din al-Qasimi and Khalil al-ʿAzm, Dictionnaire des métiers damascains, ed. Zafer al-Qasimi. Le Monde d’Outre-Mer passé et présent. Deuxième série. Documents III. Paris: Mouton, 1960: 239 (chapter 162). See also discussion in Marcus Milwright, “Metalworking in Damascus at the End of the Ottoman Period: An Analysis of the Qamus al-Sinaʿat al-Shamiyya,” in Metalwork and Material Culture in the Islamic World: Art, Crafts and Text. Essays presented to James W. Allan, ed. Venetia Porter and Mariam Rosser-Owen (London: I.B. Tauris, 2012), 272. 18 John Lewis Burckhardt, Notes on the Bedouins and Wahábys, collected during his Travels in the East, by the late John Lewis Burckhardt, vol. 1 (London: Henry Colburn and Richard Bentley, 1831), 65; repr. New York: Johnson Reprint Company, 1967.

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ʾAnaiza. None of his monuments, he asserted proudly, had ever collapsed, and yet all had been built without any kind of design or plan, without line or plummet, in fact with nothing to guide him but his eye and his experience. “Look,” he said, “at the Rafiʾ sangar which I built round and compare it with the square of the Ibn Sallum one, mine has lasted better and will stand yet for many a day.” For building the great minaret, for which earth and mortar were delivered to him on the spot, he received the sum of forty dollars. He would readily undertake to build one twice as high, but would of course build it on a wider base. I asked him how the curved facades of the ʾAnaiza houses came to be developed—a very conspicuous and beautiful feature of the local architecture, though not apparently to be found elsewhere in Arabia. He claimed it as his own creation, easier to build and more enduring. A few days before I had noticed a tall minaret in the Qa‌ʾ quarter. “Who built that?” I asked. “It leans southward,” was his curt reply. Latterly he had taken to well-steyning without previous experience of such work, but he was now an acknowledged authority, though his failing eyes interfered seriously with a task requiring more than ordinary precision.19 Philby’s account of the architect’s training is one that could doubtless stand for many other (undocumented) skilled workers in the Islamic world at that time and in previous centuries. In part Ibrahim ibn Salih learned his skills through the apprenticeship system and for the remainder he was an autodidact. He was evidently able to gain new skills later in life such as the facing of the interior surfaces of wells with stones. Knowledge was gained through practical application rather than through theoretical learning. Also notable is the emphasis on what is done by eye; the precision of the man’s eyesight renders unnecessary everything from drawn plans to the use of a plummet. In addition, one gets the sense of the tension between traditional practices and personal innovation; Ibrahim ibn Salih clearly works within an established set of architectural practices, governed to some extent by the available building materials, but he also seeks to create (or at least take credit for) novel architectural forms and to build on an ever more ambitious scale. Familiarity with the load-bearing properties of materials and structural forms was an essential quality of architectural practice. Joseph Philippe Ferrier (d. 1886) provides an example of the importance of this knowledge in an anecdote relating to the construction of a dome over a reservoir in Herat during the reign of Shah ʿAbbas (r. 1587–1629). An architect was commanded to design and 19 Harry St John Philby, Arabia of the Wahhabis (London: Constable and Co., 1928), 253–54.

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construct this feature by a haughty local governor. Fearing for his life, the architect fled leaving the job unfinished. He returned to the city a year later when no other builder had been found to complete the project. Ferrier continues: … the governor, finding himself in a difficulty and anxious to have the edifice finished, consented, though unwillingly, to remit the sentence of death, but ordered him to be bastinadoed. Before, however, the punishment was inflicted, the governor, at his earnest request, accompanied him to the reservoir, and the architect, directed his attention to the walls, which were a considerable height above the earth, said, “Do you not see that the foundations of this building have sunk at least a foot in the ground since I left the city? If at that period I had refused to erect the cupola you would have cut my head off, or the same fate would probably have awaited me had it fallen down after it was finished. You refused to hear me, and I ran away to save my life. The time has arrived when I can successfully terminate my labours, and I have returned to do so.” A free pardon followed this explanation, and the architect, filling the reservoir with chopped straw pressed in sacks, and heaping them up to the requisite height and form to make his centre, constructed over them one of the most elegant cupolas ever built.20 The story recounted by Ferrier has the quality of local folklore, and should not be accepted uncritically in its depiction of the events. Nevertheless, it points out well the precarious position of the architect who worked for powerful clients: the rewards could be considerable but the punishments for failure were correspondingly severe. Travellers provide valuable descriptions of craft techniques from different regions of the Islamic world. These accounts encompass everything from the processing of raw materials to the manufacture of finished artefacts, and also derive from observations in both urban and rural contexts. Given the interest of nineteenth-century Europeans in the economic geography of other regions, it is predictable that the extraction of natural resources should be given considerable attention. There are numerous accounts of mining, both for metals and for precious and semi-precious stones. Some of these descriptions are rather disparaging about the effectiveness of the methods employed in the 20 Joseph Philippe Ferrier, Caravan Journeys and Wanderings in Persia, Afghanistan, Turkistan, and Beloochistan, with Historical Notices of the Countries Lying between Russia and India, trans. William Jesse and ed. H. D. Seymour (London: John Murray, 1857), 174; repr. in the Oxford in Asia Historical Reprints (Karachi: Oxford University Press, 1976).

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mining. James Fraser notes this problem in his long account of the collection of turquoise near to Nishapur, though his most pointed criticism is of the corrupt administration that was impeding the profitable collection of the stones.21 Other travellers note the personal dangers faced by those engaged in mining. A moving account of the lead mines of Nakhlak in Iran is given by Alfons and Agnes Gabriel. They write: Here lead is mined and smelted from the ore in a primitive way and transported on camel back to Anarak in ingots of 30 kg weight. About 100 people work in the nearby mines. They are all without their families, come from Anarak, Čupanan, Jandaq and other places and usually stay until they become victims of lead poisoning and are thus forced to give up their work. Young and old find work in Nakhlak, the wages are four to seven qiran a day [$.70 to $1.12]. They start work at daybreak. In the afternoon you can see the tired people coming out of the mine with their heavy picks and an oil lamp.22 There can be little doubt that similar health risks and other privations were suffered by workmen in other parts of the Islamic world. The raw materials from mining usually had to go through stages of processing, and some descriptions are remarkable for the technical detail they provide; for example, Henry Bellew (d. 1892) gives a step-by-step account of the processing of gold from mines in the Baba Wali range above Kandahar plain in Afghanistan. Several steps were needed to extract the metal from quartz stones; he notes that the first stage involved crushing the gold-rich quartz in a handmill. He continues: The powder is next placed on a reed winnowing tray, and shaken so as to separate the particles of gold and the finer dust from the grit. From the latter the larger bits of gold are picked out and thrown into a crucible, and melted with the aid of a few grains of borax flua. When melted it is poured into an iron trough, previously greased, or rather smeared, with oil, and at once cools into an ingot of bright gold. The fine dust left on the 21 22

James Baillie Fraser, Narrative of a Journey into Khorasan in the Years 1821 and 1822 (London: Longman, Hurst, Rees, Orme Brown and Green, 1825; repr. Delhi: Oxford University Press, 1984), 414–15. Alfons and Agnes Gabriel, Durch Persiens Wüsten: neue Wanderung in den Trockenräumen Innerirans (Stuttgart: Strecker und Shröder, 1935), 61. Translated in Hans Wulff, The Traditional Crafts of Persia: Their Development, Technology, and Influence on Eastern and Western Civilizations (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1966), 16 (slightly adapted from the original).

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winnow is thrown into an earthen jar furnished with a wide mouth. The jar is then filled with water and shaken about a little while. The whole is then stirred with the hand and the turbid water poured off. This process is repeated four or five times, till the water ceases to become turbid. A small quantity of quicksilver is next added to the residue of sand, some fresh water is poured on, and the whole is stirred with the hand. The water and particles of sand suspended in it are then poured off, and the quicksilver amalgam left at the bottom of the vessel is removed to a strong piece of cloth, and twisted tightly till the quicksilver is expressed as much as it thus can be. The mass of gold alloy is then put into a crucible with a few grains of borax, and melted over a charcoal fire. The molten mass is finally poured into the iron trough mentioned, and at once solidifies into a small bar of bright gold. Such was the process gone through in our presence. Even in this there was a good deal of waste, owing to the rejection of the coarser grit. With the proper crushing machinery there is no doubt the yield would be considerably increased.23 The description given by Bellew correlates closely with earlier accounts of the process by al-Biruni (d. 1048) and the tenth-century geographer, Ibn al-Faqih al-Hamadhani.24 Evidently this process of amalgamation was already an ancient one when it was encountered by Bellew in nineteenth-century Afghanistan. In contrast to Bellew, al-Hamadhani specifies that the amalgam was squeezed through leather rather than cloth. His description also makes clear that one of the purposes of heating the gold was to drive off the remaining mercury as vapour. Other travellers also came across ancient industrial processes. One of the most common was the burning of limestone or gypsum in order to make plaster: Lime-burning.—Lime, or “Chunam,” as it is usually called, is manufactured in Aden for house-building purposes by Arabs, who work fifteen kilns. Lumps of coral, found on the opposite coast of the harbour, are placed in a circular oven, which is heated to a red heat; salt-water is then thrown in, when the coral crumbles to a dry powder; wood from the interior and dry cinders from furnaces of condensers, are used as fuel. Lime 23 24

Henry Bellew, From the Indus to the Tigris, a Narrative of a Journey through the Countries of Balochistan, Afghanistan, Khorassan and Iran, in 1872 (London: Trübner and Co., 1874), 141–42. The descriptions of al-Biruni and al-Hamadhani are discussed in detail in: James Allan, Persian Metal Technology, 700–1300 AD (London: Ithaca Press, 1979), 7–9.

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is sold by a cubic measure, 1 ¾ feet square and 1 foot deep; this is called a “Farah.” Four or five of these measures are sold for one dollar (equal to 2 rupees and 2 annas), exclusive of carriage. Each owner of a limekiln pays to the municipal fund a fee of Rs. 3 per quarter.25 This account of the manufacture of lime in Aden was written by the British army captain Frederick Mercer Hunter (d. 1898). He goes on to record the practices involved in making charcoal and potash, paying careful attention to the materials employed and the prices fetched for the finished products. The potash was exported as far as Bombay where it was used for washing. There are numerous descriptions of lime and gypsum burning from other parts of the Middle East that echo the details provided by Hunter. The principal challenge was the acquisition of sufficient fuel; in most cases this took the form of timber or brush wood, but James Wellsted (d. 1842), a lieutenant in the Indian navy, reports that in the region of Hit in Iraq it was the waste from the processing of asphalt that was used for making lime. The asphalt itself was employed across Iraq as a building material and as a water sealant.26 Hunter also makes interesting observations about simple crafts involving the use of organic materials. He gives the following account of mat and string making in Aden: … Dry leaves of the doom and date palms are imported from the ports on the Dankali coast and Massowah; they are manufactured into mats. String is also made by twisting the leaves together with the hand; this is called “Aden string.” To make mats the leaves are divided into small strips, which are plaited into a ribbon three or four inches wide and of great length. This ribbon is stitched or spliced spirally into a cylindrical shape, the diameter representing the required breadth, and the axis the necessary length; this hollow cylinder is then cut down with a knife parallel to the axis and the broken edges are bound. Somali women are exceedingly expert in the manufacture of these mats, which are in great request for sleeping purposes amongst the Somalis themselves. The coarser kinds 25 Captain F. M. Hunter, An Account of the British Settlement of Aden in Arabia (London: Trübner, 1877; repr. London: Frank Cass, 1968), 81–82. 26 James R. Wellsted, Travels to the City of the Caliphs along the Shores of the Persian Gulf and the Mediterranean. Including a Voyage to the Coast of Arabia and a Tour of the Island of Socotra, vol. 1 (London: Henry Coburn, 1840; repr. Farnborough: Gregg International, 1968), 315.

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are used for the construction of sheds and roofing of houses. Plates, baskets, sacks, and many other articles are made of these strips of matting.27 Similar industries are recorded in other parts of the Middle East using other fibrous plant materials. Edith Butcher describes the use of palm leaves in Egypt to make storage crates (known as “affass”), serving trays, divans, and other items. She criticizes this activity for spoiling “the appearance of the country” by denuding the palm trees, but acknowledges that the craft is too valuable to the people of Egypt for them to abandon it.28 The Marsh Arabs of Iraq have utilized reeds to fashion everything from dwellings to baskets. Their traditional crafts have been the subject of several ethnographic studies, and other evidence is preserved in travel literature. Gavin Maxwell (d. 1969) reflects on some of the human dimensions of working with reeds. He writes, “The first stage, after the reeds have been cut and brought home to the villages, is to split each stem with a short curved knife. This is done with extraordinary speed, but, I noticed, an amount of blood unexpected among people so practised.”29 This is a useful reminder of the minor injuries and longer-term illnesses and deformations that result from the repetitive practices involved in many crafts. Maxwell continues with an accurate description of the beating of the reed fibres with a wooden mallet and the processes involved in weaving the thin strips in herring-bone patterns to create mats. Trading boats would come to collect these mats and the merchants would then sell them across Iraq. These floor coverings were, according to Maxwell, even sold in London for £2 a yard (by comparison the makers themselves only received the equivalent of ten pence for a sheet measuring eight feet by four feet). Activities such as mat-making and basketry were generally poorly paid (or simply done to make artefacts needed in the home of the maker). An Arabic dictionary of the crafts of Damascus written in the last decade of the nineteenth and the first years of the twentieth century describes the activities of the basket-maker (sallal). The chapter devoted to this craft records that the masters of it generated low profits and came from the urban poor. The dictionary notes, however, that it offered a means of financial support for many people.30 This point is of some significance in the present context because it highlights the role of such activities in the broader economy of the Middle 27 28 29 30

Hunter, British Settlement of Aden, 80–81. Butcher, Things Seen in Egypt, 89–90. Gavin Maxwell, A Reed Shaken by the Wind (London: Longmans, 1957), 128–29. Qasimi, Qasimi and al-ʿAzm, Dictionnaire, 238 (chapter 160). This issue is discussed further in: Marcus Milwright, “Wood and Woodworking in Late Ottoman Damascus: An Analysis of the Qamus al-Sinaʿat al-Šamiyya,” Bulletin d’Études Orientales 61 (2012): 557–58.

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East; basket-making does not register as a meaningful generator of external revenue for this region in the late Ottoman period (unlike high profile industries such as silk spinning and textile manufacture), but it was essential as an everyday source of income for substantial populations in urban centres. This is also where the travel accounts come into their own as sources on the economic history of the Islamic world. Often travellers choose to record traditional manufacturing practices that receive little attention in most other types of primary source. A good example is the leather industry that existed both in rural areas and urban centres across the Islamic world. Some towns became noted for their leather, exporting it to other regions and even as far as Europe,31 but more commonly animal skins were prepared for a local market or even for personal use. Burckhardt gives an account of the leather crafts of nomadic groups in Arabia. He writes: The chief specimens of Bedouin industry are the tanning of leather; the preparing of water-skins, the weaving of tents, sacks, cloaks, and abbas. The leather is tanned by means of pomegranate juice, or (as more commonly over the whole Desert) with the gharad or fruit of the Sant, or else with the bark of the Seyale, or other mimosa species. The women sew the water-skins which the men have tanned. They work in the Hedjaz very neat neck-leathers for the camels, upon which their husbands ride; these are a kind of net-work, adorned with shells and leather tassels, called dawíreh. The distaff is frequently seen in the hands of men all over the Hedjaz; and it seems strange that they should not regard this as derogating from their masculine dignity, while they disdainfully spurn at every other domestic employment.32 Burckhardt describes a ubiquitous craft, but one which was largely practiced for personal use (although now such objects are avidly collected). His description is valuable for its reference to the tanning agents and ornaments, but also for the evidence it provides about gender divisions in craft activities. This quote gives little indication that the bedouin sold leather goods to others, though there is evidence elsewhere that they traded or bartered foodstuffs and 31 For example, see: Heidemarie Doğanalp-Votzi, “Histories and Economics of a Small Anatolian Town: Safranbolu and its Leather Handicrafts,” in Crafts and Craftsmen of the Middle East: Fashioning the Individual in the Muslim Mediterranean, The Islamic Mediterranean, ed. Suraiya Faroqhi and Randi Deguilhem (London: I.B. Tauris, 2005), 308–37. 32 Burckhardt, Bedouins and Wahábys, 1:243.

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manufactured items with town dwellers. Charles Thomas Wilson (b. 1851 or 1852), a priest who travelled in Palestine in the late nineteenth and early years of the twentieth century, records several rural crafts. His text is laced with allusions to the Old and New Testaments, and there is a tendency to conflate the practices of the contemporary rural craftsmen he observed with those of the ancient past. Nevertheless, he exhibits a keen awareness of technique, materials, and the practical challenges that faced artisans. For example, his description of the use of ground looms for the weaving of traditional tents compares favourably with modern ethnographic studies of this activity.33 He also turns his attention to the producers of jewellery for rural communities: There are a few jewellers among the Fellahîn who either live in a village or wander about from place to place, making the rings, bracelets, chains, and other ornaments, of which the peasant women are so fond. Silver is the metal chiefly used, and that largely mixed with alloy; gold is rarely seen. The jeweller’s apparatus is very primitive. It consists of a rough pair of scales for weighing the metal; a plain portable hearth of clay, shaped like a large centre-dish of fruit, about 15 inches high; a rude oil-lamp, with a wick for blowpipe work, a curved metal blowpipe, and one or two forceps. With these simple tools they sometimes turn out very neat work. They seem to work entirely by rule of thumb, following traditional patterns and devices.34 Wilson conveys powerfully the simple tools used by these itinerant jewellers, and it is clear from other accounts and photographs that smiths were able to operate in a similar manner setting up a simple forge wherever it was needed (Fig. 9.3).35 The same author provides an account of the carpenters of rural Palestine. Aside from the variety of tasks such men were called upon 33 Charles Wilson, Peasant Life in the Holy Land (New York: Dutton, 1906), 257–59. 34 Wilson, 253–54. 35 For example, the gypsy blacksmiths of Iran are described in: Wulff, Traditional Crafts of Persia, 49–50. A vivid account of similar techniques is given by the fifteenth-century traveller, Arnold von Harff, during his visit to Modon in the southwestern Peloponnese. He writes: “It was strange to see the anvil on the ground at which a man sat like a tailor in our country. By him, also on the ground, sat his housewife spinning, so that the fire was between them. Beside them were two small leather sacks like a bagpipe which were half buried in the ground by the fire. As the woman sat spinning she raised one of the sacks from the ground from time to time and pressed it down again. This forced the wind through the earth into the fire so that the smith could work.” See: The Pilgrimage of Arnold von Harff, trans. Malcolm Letts, Works issued by the Hakluyt Society Second Series 94 (London: Hakluyt Society, 1946), 81.

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to perform, the description is also significant for the insights it gives into the economic dimensions of carpentry; the references to payment in kind and the pursuit of other jobs indicate that, despite its vital role in village life, carpentry was not a profitable pursuit. Wilson writes: … Most villages have their own carpenter, who makes and mends the ploughs and other agricultural implements, does whatever wood-work, such as doors and windows (wherever there are the latter), is required in the houses, and manufactures the rough boxes in which women keep their clothes. His tools are of the most primitive description: a few tiny saws, with teeth set the reverse way to those of our saws, a small plane, two or three chisels of various sizes, a drill worked by a bow, and a narrow, much-curved adze, in the use of which he is as skilful as a shipwright. He does not use a carpenter’s bench, but squats on the ground to work and, where he has to use both hands, holds the thing he is working at with his feet. Payment is frequently made in kind, the peasant giving the carpenter so many measures of wheat per annum, in return for which the other undertakes to keep his ploughs, etc., in repair. It is rarely a remunerative employment, and to make a living a carpenter must either have land of his own or must combine some other occupation with it. I knew one who was also village schoolmaster, and used to make and mend his ploughs, etc., in the courtyard of the little village mosque, with his scholars around him learning their tasks …36 Many writers of the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, both travellers and those conducting archaeological and anthropological research, reflect on the apparently unchanging nature of cultural and technological practices in the Islamic world. This is particularly the case in observations of the rural environment. An example of this phenomenon is Grace Crowfoot’s (d. 1957) analysis of the production of handmade pottery in early twentieth-century Palestine; she sees direct connections between these and the handmade wares of the same region during the Iron Age (Fig. 9.4.a and b).37 Crowfoot’s study has the merit of her precise observations of contemporary practices, but much cruder representations of “primitive” Middle Eastern craft practices abound in this period. These attempts to link the ancient and contemporary worlds 36 Wilson, Peasant Life, 242–43. 37 Grace Crowfoot, “Pots, ancient and modern,” Palestine Exploration Fund Quarterly Statement (1932), 179–87.

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Figure 9.3 Stereoscopic photograph published by Underwood and Underwood in 1900 entitled “There’s no place like home!; Dwelling and shop of a Gypsy blacksmith, Syria” By permission of Library of Congress Prints and Photographs Division Washington: LC-DIG-ppmsca-10712

are informed by Orientalist perceptions of stagnation within the economies and cultures of the Middle East and North Africa and the tendency to elevate the cultural achievements of the pre-Islamic past. In addition, these accounts tend to ignore the dynamic qualities of cultural practices and the willingness to adapt to new circumstances. Craft activities are a fine demonstration of this point; the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries were a challenging period for the practitioners of manual crafts as they sought to compete with industrially manufactured goods imported from Europe. Some crafts were unable to match the prices and consistent quality of imported items and disappeared from urban or rural areas. For others there was the opportunity to make use of new materials. An interesting example of this phenomenon is given by the curator at the British Museum and prolific scholar, Sir E. A. Wallis Budge (d. 1934). In his account of a visit to the village of Tal Qif, north of Mosul, he writes: During my visit they took me to the house of a good scribe, and I was fortunate enough to find him actually engaged in copying a work of Bar Hebraeus. I greatly admired the ease and quickness with which he made his bold, well-formed letters, and the unerring way in which he added the vowel points and other diacritical marks. In answer to my questions he told me that he bought his paper from the grocers in the bazâr who used

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it for wrapping up sugar. It was good, stout, rag-made paper manufactured in Russia, very rough on both sides, and in size small folio. Before use each sheet was laid on a smooth board and well rubbed and rolled with a small round bottle, like a whisky bottle, and under this treatment the paper became so beautifully smooth and shiny that the reed pen rarely spluttered. The scribe took a sheet of the paper and ruled dry lines on it with a metal stilus to mark the margins and the number of lines in the column of text to be written upon it, and having rubbed it with his bottle he sat down and wrote whilst we looked on. He wrote a few lines in the usual way from right to left, and then he turned his sheet of paper half round so that the lines already written became perpendicular instead of horizontal, and then proceeded to write his text perpendicularly with the greatest ease. He had much to say about the selection of reeds for pens, and he explained how to cut them, and how he made his thick inks, both red and black.38 One of the most notable aspects of this description is the reference to the preparation of packing paper imported from Russia. Through most of Islamic history paper has been a precious commodity and scribes often struggled to acquire regular supplies. In some regions of the Islamic world these difficulties persist to the present day; for example, Qurʾanic scribes in Nigeria sometimes make use of coloured card when adequate writing paper is unavailable.39 Budge’s observations can also be placed into a wider context; the reuse of materials was indeed commonplace among the craftspeople of the Middle East in the early part of the twentieth century and resulted in part from the challenging economic situation.40 The opportunistic reuse of materials is seen 38 Sir E. A. Wallis Budge, By Nile and Tigris: A Narrative of Journeys in Egypt and Mesopotamia on Behalf of the British Museum between the Years 1886 and 1913 (London: John Murray, 1920), 2:72–73. 39 Jimoh Ismaheel Akinade, “The Art of Qurʾanic Penmanship and Illumination among Muslim Scholars in Southwestern Nigeria,” in Word of God, Art of Man: The Qurʾan and Its Creative Expressions, The Institute of Ismaili Studies, Qurʾanic Studies Series 4, ed. Fahmida Suleman (Oxford: Oxford University Press in association with the Institute of Ismaili Studies, 2007), 178. The author discusses the two main types of paper used by scribes for the Qurʾan and other religious documents, and observes: “Regrettably, these types of paper are no longer on the market, so scholars have resorted to using cardboard in various colours. However, it has been observed that the quality of the cardboard is not encouraging.” 40 For example, see: Roger Owen, The Middle East in the World Economy, 1800–1914 (London: Methuen, 1981), 153–88, 244–72; Haim Gerber, Ottoman Rule in Jerusalem, 1890–1914, Islamkundiche Untersuchungen 101 (Berlin: Klaus Schwarz, 1985), 62–67.

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Figure 9.4 a and b Examples of handmade village pottery produced in Jordan, early to mid-twentieth century. Private collection, Amman, Jordan Photographs: Marcus Milwright

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Figure 9.5 a and b Views of a German artillery shell (dated February 1911) decorated with chasing and silver and copper inlay in Damascus in c. 1918. Private collection, Victoria, Canada Photograph: Marcus Milwright

in metalworking. Discarded benzine cans were employed in cities like Antioch and Mosul to make a wide variety of objects including jugs, lanterns and lamps, while Jewish coppersmiths in Damascus and Jerusalem even took to decorating spent artillery shells gathered from the battlefields of World War I (Fig. 9.5.a and b).41 The organization of artisans into guilds is one aspect of the Islamic crafts that received extensive attention from European and North American academics during the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. As such the relatively brief observations made on this topic by travellers are of limited value. Knowledge about the internal governance of guilds would have been difficult for most outsiders to obtain, but these organizations also had a public face in the towns and cities of the Middle East. For example, Stanley Lane-Poole (d. 1931) recounts the list of guilds that would be represented in the parade for the wedding of a member of the Egyptian elite. It seems probable, however, that this is largely drawn from the chronicles of al-Jabarti (d. 1825) rather than from first-hand observation.42 Some sources reflect on the rights and responsibilities of the masters of given guilds. Edward Wilbur Rice (d. 1935) writes about 41 This issue is discussed in greater detail in: Marcus Milwright and Evanthia Baboula, “Damascene ‘Trench Art’: A Note on Mamluk Revival Metalwork in early Twentieth-Century Syria,” Levant 46 no. 3 (2014): 382–98. On the tinners of Antioch, see: Pierre Bazantay, Enquête sur l’artisanat à Antioche, Les états du Levant sous Mandat Français (Beirut: Imprimerie Catholique, 1936), 37–38. 42 Stanley Lane-Poole, Social Life in Egypt: A Description of the Country and Its People, A Supplement to “Picturesque Palestine” (London: J. S. Virtue, 1884), 34.

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the heads of the silversmith guilds in Syria. These men would assess the purity of precious metals and stamp vessels by members of the guild. They could also arbitrate disputes and represent their members in legal matters.43 Similar observations are made by James McCoan (d. 1904) writing about Egypt; he also records that the heads of guilds would collect taxes on behalf of the state.44 Travellers’ accounts are more useful in recording the rituals that attended the everyday activities of craftspeople. Philip Baldensperger (b. 1856) documents the song of the workers at a Palestinian lime kiln. When the brushwood fuel was first lit they would first say the basmala, and as they loaded further fuel onto the fire they would alternate lines of song. In his translation they appear as: “1st Singer: In it goes. / 2nd Singer: At the fiercest moment. / 1st Singer: Where are we? / 2nd Singer: At the henna road. / 1st Singer: The way of briars. / 2nd Singer: Trefoil plant.” Baldensperger also gives the repeated lines sung by the men carrying lime and stones to building sites in Jerusalem: “1st Gang: Master! Give us freedom. / 2nd Gang: Else we shall run away. / 1st Gang: Master! Give us baksheesh. / 2nd Gang: Else we’ll not come again.”45 Builders employed simple and repetitive songs in other parts of the Islamic world. The mid-nineteenth-century traveller Lady Mary Sheil records a striking example from Iran that highlights the presence of religious polemic in the organization and practice of the crafts. She writes: To relieve his monotonous labour the oostad had recourse to a chant, full as monotonous as his work, but sweet in tone. In general he combines a little polemical casuistry and devotion with his psalmody, by directing a vast quantity of abuse against Omar, the second caliph after Mahommed, whom the Persians regard with bitter enmity, as being the leader in the exclusion of Ali from the caliphate. He sings the words in this style: Khishtee bideh mara janum Laamat illahee ber Oma-a-ar. (Give me a brick then my life, And the curse of God light on Omar.) Yekee deeger bideh binum azeezum Inshaallah kheir neh beened Oma-a-r. 43 Edwin Wilbur Rice, Orientalisms in Bible Lands: Giving Light from Customs, Habits, Manners, Imagery, Thought and Life in the East for Bible Students, 3rd ed. (Philadelphia: The American Sunday School Union, 1929), 213–14. 44 James C. McCoan, Egypt (New York: P. F. Collier and Son, 1902), 316–18. 45 Philip Baldensperger, The Immovable East: Studies in the People and Customs of Palestine (London: Pitman, 1913), 267–69.

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(Give me another, now, my darling, Please God, Omar will not have any luck.) On the day on which Omar was assassinated, the powers of the bricklayers in poetical and melodious imprecations wax stronger. It is a strange circumstance that a man should daily suffer maledictions twelve hundred years after his death. Judas Iscariot is better off.46 This brief survey has only touched on some aspects of the primary sources available from this period, but it has perhaps illustrated their potential areas of strength. As noted in the introduction, travellers’ accounts often betray the biases of the authors but it is precisely this personal dimension that can also invest their observations with insights not found in other types of text. Travellers are particularly revealing in their remarks about the everyday lives and practices of craftspeople, and some of the most interesting quotes included in the previous paragraphs are about rather lowly areas of traditional manufacturing. This information complements modern ethnographic surveys of the crafts. Travellers also record significant information about the range of crafts practised in a given city or region. They frequently mention the pay and conditions of skilled artisans, and it is probable that these data could form part of a more systematic survey for the Islamic Middle East and Central Asia in nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. This was a period in which traditional manufacturing came under considerable economic pressure from the industries of Europe, and elements of this long-term struggle can be detected in the sources. Craftspeople had to adapt to new markets and new materials during this time, and travellers often captured in their observations single moments in a longer, more complex narrative of craft evolution leading from the medieval world to the present day.47 References Allan, James. “Abuʾl-Qasim’s Treatise on Ceramics.” Iran 11 (1973): 111–20. Allan, James. Persian Metal Technology, 700–1300 AD. London: Ithaca Press, 1979.

46 Lady Mary Leonora Woulfe Sheil, Glimpses of Life and Manners in Persia (London: John Murray, 1856), 139. Repr. David Blow, Persia through Writers’ Eyes (London: Eland, 2007), 258–59. 47 It is a pleasure to have the chance to contribute to this tribute volume for Erica. I hope that this essay will go some way to repaying the debt for the umbrella that I borrowed during our first meeting in Beirut and subsequently forgot to return!

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Baldensperger, Philip. The Immovable East: Studies in the People and Customs of Palestine. London: Pitman, 1913. Bazantay, Pierre. Enquête sur l’artisanat à Antioche. Les états du Levant sous Mandat Français. Beirut: Imprimerie Catholique, 1936. Bell, Gertrude Lowthian. Syria, the Desert and the Sown. London: William Heinemann, 1907. Bellew, Henry. From the Indus to the Tigris, a Narrative of a Journey through the Countries of Balochistan, Afghanistan, Khorassan and Iran, in 1872. London: Trübner and Co., 1874. Blair, Sheila, and Jonathan Bloom. “Signatures on Works of Islamic Art and Architecture.” Damaszener Mitteilungen 11 (1999 [2001]): 49–66. Blow, David. Persia through Writers’ Eyes. London: Eland, 2007. Budge, Sir E. A. Wallis. By Nile and Tigris: A Narrative of Journeys in Egypt and Mesopotamia on Behalf of the British Museum between the Years 1886 and 1913. Vol. 2. London: John Murray, 1920. Burckhardt, John Lewis. Notes on the Bedouins and Wahábys, Collected during His Travels in the East, by the Late John Lewis Burckhardt. Vol. 1. London: Henry Colburn and Richard Bentley, 1831. Butcher, Edith. Things Seen in Egypt. London: Sheeley, Service and Co., 1926. Byron, Robert. The Road to Oxiana. London: Macmillan and Co. Ltd., 1937. Reprinted with an introduction by Geoffrey Moorhouse. London: Folio Society, 2000. Crowfoot, Grace. “Pots, Ancient and Modern.” Palestine Exploration Fund Quarterly Statement (1932): 179–87. Doğanalp-Votzi, Heidemarie. “Histories and Economics of a Small Anatolian Town: Safranbolu and Its Leather Handicrafts.” In Crafts and Craftsmen of the Middle East: Fashioning the Individual in the Muslim Mediterranean, edited by Suraiya Faroqhi and Randi Deguilhem, 308–37. London: I.B. Tauris, 2005. Doughty, Charles. Travels in Arabia Deserta. New edition. Vol. 1. New York: Random House, 1936. Dyke, Henry van. Out-of-Doors in the Holy Land: Impressions of Travel in Body and Spirit. Toronto: The Copp, Clark Co., 1908. Ferrier, Joseph Philippe. Caravan Journeys and Wanderings in Persia, Afghanistan, Turkistan, and Beloochistan, with Historical Notices of the Countries Lying between Russia and India. Translated by William Jesse and edited by H. D. Seymour. London: John Murray, 1857. Reprinted in the Oxford in Asia Historical Reprints. Karachi: Oxford University Press, 1976. Fraser, James Baillie. Narrative of a Journey into Khorasan in the Years 1821 and 1822. London: Longman, Hurst, Rees, Orme Brown and Green, 1825. Reprint, Delhi: Oxford University Press, 1984.

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Gabriel, Alfons, and Agnes Gabriel. Durch Persiens Wüsten: neue Wanderung in den Trockenräumen Innerirans. Stuttgart: Strecker und Shröder, 1935. Gatt, Georg. “Industrielles aus Gaza.” Zeitschrift des Deutschen Palästina-Vereins 8 (1885): 69–79. Gerber, Haim. Ottoman Rule in Jerusalem, 1890–1914. Islamkundiche Untersuchungen 10. Berlin: Klaus Schwarz, 1985. Goldbloom, Gwendolyn. “The Crafts among the Arabs.” In Manufacturing and Labor. The Transformation of the Classical Islamic World 12, edited by Michael Morony, 145–50. Aldershot: Ashgate, 2003. Goldziher, Ignaz. “Die Handwerke bei den Arabern.” Globus 46, 1894: 203–205. Harff, Arnold von. The Pilgrimage of Arnold von Harff. Works issued by the Hakluyt Society Second Series 94, translated by Malcolm Letts. London: Hakluyt Society, 1946. Hunter, Captain F. M. An Account of the British Settlement of Aden in Arabia. London: Trübner, 1877. Reprint, London: Frank Cass, 1968. Ismaheel Akinade, Jimoh. “The Art of Qurʾanic Penmanship and Illumination among Muslim Scholars in Southwestern Nigeria.” In Word of God, Art of Man: The Qurʾan and Its Creative Expressions. The Institute of Ismaili Studies. Qurʾanic Studies Series, 4, edited by Fahmida Suleman, 175–90. Oxford: Oxford University Press in association with the Institute of Ismaili Studies, 2007. Issawi, Charles. The Fertile Crescent, 1800–1914: A Documentary Economic History. Studies in Middle Eastern History. New York: Oxford University Press, 1988. Kotlov, Lev N. Natsionalno-osvoboditelnoe Vosstanie 1920 goda v Irake. Moscow: Izd-vo Akademii nauk SSSR, 1958. Lane-Poole, Stanley. Social Life in Egypt: A Description of the Country and Its People. A Supplement to “Picturesque Palestine.” London: J. S. Virtue, 1884. Lawrence, Thomas E. Seven Pillars of Wisdom, a Triumph. Garden City NY: Doubleday, Doran and Company 1937. Maxwell, Gavin. A Reed Shaken by the Wind. London: Longmans, 1957. McCoan, James C. Egypt. New York: P. F. Collier and Son, 1902. Milwright, Marcus. “Metalworking in Damascus at the End of the Ottoman Period: An Analysis of the Qamus al-Sinaʿat al-Shamiyya.” In Metalwork and Material Culture in the Islamic World: Art, Crafts and Text. Essays presented to James W. Allan, edited by Venetia Porter and Mariam Rosser-Owen, 265–80. London: I.B. Tauris, 2012. Milwright, Marcus. “Wood and Woodworking in Late Ottoman Damascus: An Analysis of the Qamus al-Sinaʿat al-Šamiyya.” Bulletin d’Études Orientales 61 (2012): 557–58. Milwright, Marcus, and Evanthia Baboula, “Damascene ‘Trench Art’: A Note on Mamluk Revival Metalwork in Early Twentieth-Century Syria.” Levant 46 no. 3 (2014): 382–98.

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Mohammed Rezq, ʿAssem. “Crafts and Industries in Mediaeval Egypt and Their Rank in Building the Social Structure of Its Main Urban Centres: An Introduction.” Islamic Archaeological Studies 4 (1991): 57–74. Owen, Roger. The Middle East in the World Economy, 1800–1914. London: Methuen, 1981. Qasimi, Muhammad Saʿid al-, Jamal al-Din al-Qasimi and Khalil al-ʿAzm. Dictionnaire des métiers damascains, edited by Zafer al-Qasimi. Le Monde d’Outre-Mer passé et présent. Deuxième série. Documents III. Paris: Mouton, 1960. Qudsi, Elias. “Notice sur les corporations de Damas.” Actes du sixième Congrès International des Orientalistes, 2:7–34. Leiden: Brill, 1885. Rice, David S. The Unique Ibn al-Bawwab Manuscript in the Chester Beatty Library. Dublin: Emery Walker, 1955. Rice, Edwin Wilbur. Orientalisms in Bible Lands: Giving Light from Customs, Habits, Manners, Imagery, Thought and Life in the East for Bible Students. 3rd ed. Philadelphia: The American Sunday School Union, 1929. Serjeant, Robert. “Social Stratification in Arabia.” In The Islamic City: Selected Papers from a Colloquium held at the Middle East Centre, Faculty of Oriental Studies, Cambridge, United Kingdom, from 19 to 23 July 1976, edited by Robert Serjeant, 126– 47. Paris: UNESCO, 1980. Sheil, Lady Mary Leonora Woulfe. Glimpses of Life and Manners in Persia, London: John Murray, 1856. St John Philby, Harry. Arabia of the Wahhabis. London: Constable and Co., 1928. Thackston, Wheeler, trans. and ed. Album Prefaces and Other Documents on the History of Calligraphers and Painters. Studies and Sources in Islamic Art and Architecture. Supplements to Muqarnas 10. Leiden: Brill, 2001. Wellsted, James R. Travels to the City of the Caliphs along the Shores of the Persian Gulf and the Mediterranean. Including a Voyage to the Coast of Arabia and a Tour of the Island of Socotra. Vol 1. London: Henry Coburn, 1840. Reprint, Farnborough: Gregg International, 1968. Wilson, Charles. Peasant Life in the Holy Land. New York: Dutton, 1906. Wulff, Hans. The Traditional Crafts of Persia: Their Development, Technology, and Influence on Eastern and Western Civilizations. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1966.

Chapter 10

To Not Know God

Geometrical Abstraction and Visual Theology in Islamic Art Rico Franses Even though I have only met Erica Cruikshank Dodd once, I consider her as a mentor who earlier walked the same path that I later followed. Both of us trained in Byzantine art history, and we have both spent a long time teaching at the American University of Beirut. In Beirut, we also both turned our attention to Islamic art. Most important for me, however, is her approach to that subject, perfectly captured in the title of her book, The Image of the Word. In that work, she examined the carved inscriptions appearing on many Islamic buildings from a unique perspective. Whereas most other scholars studied the content and meaning of those inscriptions, Erica performed an art historical analysis on them, inquiring what their visual form might signify as well. In this chapter, I follow Erica closely in this regard, believing, too, that a close, visual reading of Islamic art is essential in order to do justice to its many subtle complexities. I dedicate the following essay to her in admiration not only of that approach, but of all her work carried out in the Levant, now more important than ever, since so much of what she examined has subsequently suffered such degradation. The subject of this article is the geometrical interlace pattern, also known as girih, that occurs in many different settings within the Islamic world.1 It features prominently in architectural settings in mosques and frequently appears on minbars and in mihrabs. Two examples that will be used in this paper are the minbar of the mosque in the funerary complex of Sultan Faraj ibn Barquq (r. 1399–1412) in Cairo, built in the early fifteenth century, and a nearby dome from the funerary complex of Sultan Al-Ashraf Barsbay (r. 1422–38), from the early 1430s (Figs. 10.1 and 10.2).2 1 The most detailed technical and historical study of the motif is that of Gülru Necipoğlu, The Topkapı Scroll: Geometry and Ornament in Islamic Architecture. Topkapı Palace Museum Library Ms H. 1956 (Santa Monica: Getty Center for the History of Art and the Humanities, 1995). 2 For the Sultan al-Ashraf Barsbay complex, see Doris Behrens-Abouseif, Islamic Architecture in Cairo: An Introduction (Leiden: Brill, 1989), 22–23 and 140–42. The minbar has not been published, however, see the general remarks on wooden minbars in Cairo from this time period

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Minbar, mosque in the funerary complex of Sultan Faraj ibn Barquq, Cairo, early fifteenth century Photograph: Rico Franses

The non-figurative aspect of Islamic art has elicited much discussion in art historical literature.3 It is often referred to as being ornamental or decorative, in Sheila Blair and Jonathan M. Bloom, Art and Architecture of Islam, 1250–1800 (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1994), 109–110. See also Jonathan M. Bloom et al., eds., The Minbar from the Kutubiyya Mosque (New York: Metropolitan Museum of Art, 1998). For a recent study on Mamluk minbars, with additional bibliography, see Miriam Kühn, “Two Mamluk Minbars in Cairo: Approaching Material Culture through Narrative Sources” in Material Evidence and Narrative Sources: Interdisciplinary Studies of the History of the Muslim Middle East, ed. Daniella Talmon-Heller and Katia Cytryn-Silverman (Leiden: Brill, 2015), 216–35. 3 In addition to the specific studies mentioned in this paper, amongst a large literature see also Eva Baer, Islamic Ornament (New York: New York University Press, 1998); Oliver

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Dome at the funerary complex of Sultan al-Ashraf Barsbay, Cairo, early 1430s Photograph: Rico Franses

both terms implying a pleasing, surface effect of aesthetic enjoyment. There has, however, also been considerable controversy over whether any deeper meaning inheres in these visual forms. Many commentators find in them profound connections to Islamic spirituality and theology, while several others— amongst them some of the most senior scholars of Islamic art within American academia—deny that any such connections exist. This paper situates itself firmly on the spiritualist side of the debate, and proposes an expanded understanding of the abstract forms and their relation to specific religious and spiritual concepts. It also examines the controversy in general, and mounts arguments against both the objections of the anti-spiritualists and the way in which the spiritualists conventionally make their case. The paper attempts to demonstrate that the pattern, if “read” very closely, operates in two key ways. In the first place, the pattern itself supports a series of arguments that may be Leaman, Islamic Aesthetics: An Introduction (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2004); Mohammed Hamdouni Alami, Art and Architecture in the Islamic Tradition: Aesthetics, Politics and Desire in Early Islam (London: I.B. Tauris, 2011); Jamal J. Elias, Aisha’s Cushion: Religious Art, Perception, and Practice in Islam (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2012).

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loosely termed theological, concerning the nature of God and his involvement with the universe. In the second place, it structures a very intense and specific experience for the viewer that becomes profoundly spiritual in its connection with the theological content; furthermore, that experience itself inflects and modifies the way in which the theology is understood, or perhaps better phrased, apperceived. Much attention is therefore paid in this paper to the subjective viewer experience when beholding the pattern. Amongst the many authors who have made the case for the theological reading are Titus Burkhardt, Seyyed Hossein Nasr, Yasser Tabbaa, and Laura Marks.4 Of the kind of motif we are concerned with here, Burkhardt has written, “geometric interlace doubtless represents the most intellectually satisfying form for it is an extremely direct expression of the ideas of the Divine Unity underlying the inexhaustible variety of the world.”5 Tabbaa, in an influential study, has drawn a connection between the geometrical forms found in much Islamic architecture and a strand of mystical theology that develops during the phase known as the eleventh-century Sunni revival.6 Against these arguments stand some of the giants of contemporary scholarship, including Oleg Grabar, who writes that “There does not exist, to my knowledge, a single instance justifying the view that the Muslim community, the ummah, as opposed to individual thinkers, understood mathematical forms as symbolizing or illustrating a Muslim cosmology.”7 Similarly, Blair and Bloom write, “Despite the great quantities of Islamic art that fill museums and galleries around the world, medieval Muslims had surprisingly little to say about the visual arts. The ‘chattering classes’ in medieval society seem to have been far less concerned with writing about the visual arts than with religion, literature, and the responsible acts of individuals.”8 A brief review of the works of the proponents of the theological hypothesis reveals certain constant themes. Tabbaa, writing in relation to the extremely elaborate muqarnas domes that frequently occur in Islamic architecture, says that the ensemble “is intended to reflect the fragmented, perishable,

4 Titus Burckhardt, Art of Islam: Language and Meaning (London: World of Islam Festival, 1976); Seyyed Hossein Nasr, Islamic Art and Spirituality (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1987); Yasser Tabbaa, The Transformation of Islamic Art during the Sunni Revival (Seattle: University of Washington Press, 2001); Laura Marks, Enfoldment and Infinity: An Islamic Genealogy of New Media Art (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2010). 5 Burckhardt, Art of Islam, 76. 6 Tabbaa, Transformation of Islamic Art, 133. 7 Oleg Grabar, The Mediation of Ornament (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1992), 151. 8 Sheila Blair and Jonathan Bloom eds., Cosmophilia. Islamic Art from the David Collection, Copenhagen (Chicago: McMullen Museum of Art, 2006), 26.

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and transient nature of the universe while alluding to the omnipotence and eternity of God, who can keep this dome from collapsing, just as he can keep the universe from destruction.”9 Necipoğlu, considering a famous series of ninth-century wall panels bearing intricate geometric motifs from Samarra, Iraq, concludes that “the vision of a continually fluctuating atomistic world open to endless permutation by incessant accidents may well have informed the Samarran beveled aesthetic.” She also asks if other, more precise geometric patterns could not “have been intended as abstract visual analogues for the rhythmic order of a divinely created atomistic universe, constantly kept in check by an all-powerful God whose wisdom was manifested in the wonders of creation?”10 If, for a moment, we strip the theology out of these comments, we find that all the writers discover similar stylistic qualities in the geometrical forms. All remark on the great complexity of the patterns that makes them very difficult to understand, yet within which there is also perceivable great order. The analysis of these stylistic features is then overlaid with a theological interpretation. In summing up that interpretation, we can do no better here than to echo Burkhardt’s formulation quoted earlier: the order and unity relate to the hand of God, holding together the infinite variety and centripetal forces of material creation.11 In the following discussion, I will follow a similar methodology, basing a spiritualist argument upon a detailed visual analysis. Let us begin by examining the pattern as it occurs in the Sultan Barquq mosque minbar (Fig. 10.1). In the first place, the pattern is one that manifestly repeats itself infinitely. Clearly, the cut-off points at the edges are arbitrary, and the design could continue indefinitely. Yet, the pattern is also about much more than, simply, endless replicability. At first sight, one might be tempted to describe the overall form as consisting of specific motifs, often referred to as star patterns or rosettes. This, however, is clearly a case where the verbal description comes nowhere close to capturing the visual complexity of the motif itself. Stars or rosettes can indeed be discerned, but perhaps even more significant is the network or web of other forms and lines which radiate around them. Two basic methods exist for laying in or carving the strips of wood that go to make up these lines, and the minbar in the mosque of the Sultan Barsbay complex (Fig. 10.3) serves as a convenient counterexample to the one in the Sultan Barquq mosque (Fig. 10.1). Even though the patterns in both appear in shallow relief, the Barsbay piece is fundamentally two-dimensional in its conception, 9 Tabbaa, Transformation of Islamic Art, 132–33. 10 Necipoğlu, Topkapı Scroll, 95 and 103. 11 Burckhardt, Art of Islam, 76.

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Minbar in the mosque of the Sultan Barsbay funerary complex, Cairo, early 1430s Photograph: Rico Franses

whereas the Barquq carving has a further, illusionistic component to it. In the Barsbay minbar, the lines that form the patterns are composed of short pieces of wood that abut each other at the crossing points. In the Barquq example, however, a break or continuity within the meeting point between lines indicates whether one is to be understood as passing over or under the other. This in turn means that the pattern seems to be constituted of long skeins of lines (or straps) that are interwoven with each other (hence another term by which these patterns are known, strapwork). One can thus trace the trajectory of individual lines, something that cannot be done so clearly or consistently in the simpler form of the Barsbay piece. If one follows the pathway of a single line, some surprising results appear. Let us start with the horizontal line of the lowest, left-most rosette, tracking it as it moves out towards the right (see Fig. 10.4 for a graphic overlay illustrating the following description). As it meets the next line, one would expect it to turn acutely back to the left and resume its journey back to the hub. However, rather than doing this, it continues moving to the right and upwards in a series of steps. After a few movements in this general direction, however, it suddenly

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Figure 10.1 with graphic overlay Photograph: Rico Franses

dives down to the right to form the side of one of the triangles of the next rosette. Having then reached the centre of that rosette, it turns acutely up to the left, as expected. Then, instead of moving down to the right to create another segment of the star, as perception demands, it moves horizontally right, then vertically left again, continuing on its meandering path. One can appreciate now the full difference between this true form of interlace and what might be called the pseudo-interlace of the Barsbay minbar. The true interlace is inherently disorienting in that it mostly works in conflict with the pattern of perception established by the overall form of the interlace itself. In the pseudo-interlace example, however, the eye is not prevented as forcefully from completing its tour of each individual rosette, something that is not allowed in the wandering line of the Barquq piece.

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If, on the one hand, this movement of the line in the true interlace contributes greatly to the bewildering effect that these patterns have on the observer, on the other, it also produces an extraordinary enmeshment of forms. The full impact of this effect can best be appreciated by comparison with a marriage chest from Catalonia, in the period following the expulsion of the Moors from Spain, (c. 1500, Kunstgewerbe Museum, Berlin, fig. 10.5). The chest itself is a mixture of several different styles, including Renaissance, Gothic, and in the front panel, Moorish.12 Despite the fact that the star-like pattern on the front is instantly recognisable in relation to our interlace examples, the differences between them in terms of their fundamental principles of construction can hardly be exaggerated. In the chest each form is isolated, segmented off. By contrast, in the case of the interlace, a border never surrounds a form and says: “the shape ends here.” Shapes are always open, their borders perpetually transgressed in a continuous play with other lines and shapes, leading to a remarkable integration of forms. It is difficult not to interpret the differences in these forms in philosophical terms. The concern in the pattern on the marriage chest is to establish a defined shape that appears as an independent object. In the Barquq minbar, although shapes can be discerned, nothing exists as an object having freestanding, independent status. Indeed, as the multiplicity of lines seem to converge momentarily in now this, now that configuration, the forms seem to exist rather as temporary, conditional objects. What is more, these objects appear to be just now in the process of coming into or fading out of being. If we take the next short step to a theological interpretation, it is again difficult not to read this aspect as being a meditation on creation in the Biblical sense, where matter is brought into existence. Furthermore, the pattern figures this creation in a very distinctive manner. It is not a single, decisive act, where things suddenly, instantaneously, appear ex nihilo, as in the account in Genesis; rather, it is creation as a slow process. In a sense, we feel as though we are present at the very beginning, before the universe has fully come into existence. Matter is still being formed, struggling to emerge from the multiplicity of possibilities that predate the “being” of any object. In the pattern on the chest, by contrast, process is in the past, the thing has been made; now it “is” as itself. Further, although the first impression that comes to mind may indeed be the reference to an Old Testament-like narrative of the first moments of time 12

For more on this chest, see Franz Windisch-Graetz, Möbel Europas (Munich: Klinkhardt & Biermann, 1983), vol. 2, no. 159, and the guide to the collection published by the museum, Sabine Thümmler ed., Kunstgewerbemuseum Berlin am Kulturforum (Munich: Prestel, 2014), no. 17.

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Marriage chest, Catalonia, Kunstgewerbemuseum, Berlin, c. 1500 By permission of the Kunstgewerbemuseum, SMB/ Karen Bartsch

and creation, the pattern implies something more. In that the forms within it never quite arrive at that definitive state where process comes to a halt, the forms seem to be in a permanent state of coming into being. The implication is thus that this is all happening right now. Creation, these patterns imply, is an ongoing event, never coming to a halt. Once brought forth, the universe does not simply continue in that existence in and of itself, as though by momentum. Rather, the work of creation never ends, and God is constantly involved in the ongoing labour of sustaining creation. For every moment that an object “is”, it is simultaneously being brought into existence.

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Figure 10.2 with graphic overlay Photograph: Rico Franses

If each individual motif takes on this aspect of tentative, transient objecthood— insofar as it is embedded in the mesh of lines—that quality of impermanence is further compounded by a second aspect. Each segment of any one form or motif can, with a slight realignment of one’s perception, be seen as a constitutive part of another form. This effect can be well observed in the Barsbay dome, where elements that go to make up the lowest half-rosette can also be seen as belonging to other complex patterns that run upwards, at oblique angles, away from the rosette (see Fig. 10.6). Once again, the object lacks completed, individualized status, since each motif is but one of many possible configurations amongst others. Translating this phenomenon into a slightly different vocabulary, we may say that if the pattern on the chest can be characterized as a perfect example of a dominant figure standing out against a neutral ground, the girih example is entirely different in its fundamental conception. It is not simply a question of a less dominant figure against a “noisier” ground. Rather, it seems to do away with the whole notion of ground altogether. It thus poses the much more difficult, complex question of figure with figure. To rephrase this slightly, if the chest example is an instance of One (the single, independent form stands

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out triumphantly in its void), the interlace example deals with the issue of “(not-quite) one with many (not-quite-ones).” If one of the distinctive features of the girih pattern is thus the interconnectedness of all its forms, it can also be seen that this property is posed as a problematic of opposing forces. On the one hand, there is the question of the degree to which differentiation must be deployed in order that a “something” (no matter how tentative it is) be yielded up as a “thing” amongst other “things” that are also just coming into existence. On the other hand, however, there is the question of when it should stop being brought into being. The pattern is thus also an investigation into the minimal forces required for being, because too much being will result in isolation and separation. The question articulated here is thus: how to be, but not be divided from; how to be, but still be integrated? If this is the statement of the problem as seen from the starting point of being, the pattern also reads from the reverse perspective, one that takes integration as its starting point. Here the problematic stands as “what is the maximal limit to the forces of assimilation that can be deployed?” because too many of those forces result in the annihilation of being. We may therefore say that the pattern articulates two converse but converging problematics. How much can being exist, yet also be “part of?” And how much can integration exist, yet being not be lost? Yet, even though it demonstrates the movements between the two as inherently contradictory, each pulling in a different direction, the pattern also, miraculously, seems to square the circle; somehow, it arrives in the magical universe of mystical unity where objects both exist, yet everything is fully integrated, of objecthood yet incorporation, objecthood yet no division. Once the pattern is analysed in this way, it seems to call for a spiritualist, theological reading—although the term mystical is most appropriate here because the visual form seems inherently to be dealing with the same questions of interconnectedness that mystics traditionally pursue. Indeed, we might put these patterns at the crossroads of ontology and mystical theology. They are a philosophical meditation on the ontological structure of the universe in its broadest possible terms, with ontology here taken to refer to the very state of becoming itself, before an object “is” this or that thing. Ontology is then crossed with another issue, the spiritualist mystic’s quest of living in an interconnected universe, the desire to transcend the separation that being inevitably seems to bring with it.13 And again, once we come this far in the 13 On mysticism in general, see the collection of essays in Understanding Mysticism, ed. Richard Woods (Garden City, NY: Image Books, 1980); on mysticism in Islam, see Alexander Knysh, Islamic Mysticism, A Short History (Leiden: Brill, 2010).

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reading, how can this integration be seen as anything other than the result of the unifying force of the single Maker of it all? With this reading of the pattern in mind, let us turn now to a consideration of some of the objections to spiritualist readings of this kind. Grabar, it will be recalled, writes the following: “There does not exist … a single instance justifying the view that the Muslim community … understood mathematical forms as symbolizing or illustrating a Muslim cosmology.”14 Grabar, here, is combining two separate arguments. The first concerns a lack of evidence about how contemporaries of the art viewed that art. The second contains a specific claim that those arguing for a theological meaning see the art as “symbolizing or illustrating” certain religious ideas. Likewise, Blair and Bloom describe their opponents as trying to “find meanings in Islamic art that are comparable to the complex symbolic systems of Christian and Buddhist art,” and of claiming that “Islamic art has an iconography as complex and meaningful as other great artistic traditions.”15 Let us begin with the symbolization argument. Grabar and Blair and Bloom understand the claims made for the spiritualist reading as being that the interlace pattern represents or symbolizes God, or creation (or infinity) in much the same way that, for example, within Early Christian catacomb iconography, an image of a fish represents (or symbolizes) Christ.16 On the one hand, I agree with this characterization of the usual pro-spiritualist argument, and I, too, object to it. On the other hand, however, the model that I am proposing is very different. If earlier I maintained that the forms in the patterns, in their state as objects coming into or out of being, bear a relation to creation, I am not saying that the scenes symbolize or illustrate or, indeed, even represent creation. The symbolization model operates on a two-term system; one defined element (the symbol) stands in for and refers back to another defined element (the referent). The claim that I am making, however, rests on an alternative way of conceptualizing the relationship between the visual forms and the ideas that they concern. The girih pattern is better thought of not as a symbol or illustration of something, but as a meditation on, an inquiry into a specific set of phenomena. It is, in effect, a form of thinking, an exploration in the mode of the visual. In this respect, a better analogy than symbol and referent is that of a theologian 14 Grabar, Mediation of Ornament, 151. 15 Blair and Bloom, Cosmophilia, 25. 16 For a study of the development and functioning of Christian iconography, see the classic work by André Grabar, Christian Iconography. A Study of Its Origins (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1968).

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writing a text. The pattern is not a code waiting to be transcribed back into its original sense or meaning, just as the text in a work of theology is not a symbol for the idea being discussed. Rather, we see the text as a form of thinking about a subject, a consideration of a problematic. In much the same way, we should conceive of the pattern as the process of thinking itself, except that here the thinking is taking place in visual terms. In this case the pattern is thinking through what the problematic of creation might mean, how it might be construed, what the implications of coming into existence are, what coming into existence might look like, when considered in visual terms. These patterns are thus a form of theology in visual terms: visual theology.17 Visual theology should be set in relation to the conventional mode of theology that investigates and explicates its concepts in textual form, and that should now be named verbal theology. Verbal theology usually gets all the glory because it has, for so long, been taken as the only form of theology. Indeed, the symbol-referent idea is the natural handmaiden of the notion that verbal theology is the only theology, since it presumes that a visual symbol always refers back to a primary idea that will already have been elaborated in verbal terms. There is no good reason, however, why visual theology must always be thought to be lagging behind and dependent on the verbal/textual mode. If the visual forms here are not codes, not symbols, not illustrations, but a mode of theology, then they do not necessarily come after the thinking on the subject has happened elsewhere in words. The visual is not the afterthought of the verbal, and it is no less a mode of thinking. We should rather say that each mode, the visual and the verbal, operates on its own track, and probably at its own pace, although there are undoubtedly overlaps and cross-references between them. Yet, although, the comparison to verbal theology is perhaps the best way to break out of the symbol-referent mode of thinking, significant differences do exist between it and visual theology. Equivalent though they might be in that 17 The phrase “visual theology” appears in the titles of two relatively recent art history books, Visual Theology: Forming and Transforming the Community through the Arts, ed. Robin M. Jensen and Kimberly Vrudny (Collegeville, MN: Liturgical Press, 2009), and Jack M. Greenstein, The Creation of Eve and Renaissance Naturalism: Visual Theology and Artistic Invention (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2016). In their preface, Jensen and Vrudny sketch out a general position where the arts “reflect or address pressing contemporary religious questions” (p. xi), and most of the essays in the book consider artworks in relation to theological issues. However, they do not contrast visual theology with verbal theology, as I have attempted to do here. Greenstein, likewise, does not attempt any theorization of the concept—the phrase appears nowhere else in the book but in the title—although he does concentrate on the way in which the specificity of the visual form of artworks carries particular theological content.

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each is an independent form of pursuing theology, they are also radically different in that, as has been long discussed over many centuries, the visual and verbal operate in very different ways. Each is its own mode of contemplation, reflection, and understanding; each captures its own particular set of phenomena, and perhaps even more importantly, each generates its own problematic to be thought through in its own terms. Perhaps the most significant difference in relation to visual versus verbal theology can be seen in connection with the constellation of concepts that surround the ideas of infinity and divinity. In this respect, visual theology takes us on a very different journey. To start with the notion of infinity, the patterns bring us to a conception that is much more than a straight line going on forever or than the never-ending repetition of motifs. As Laura Marks points out, an immeasurably more subtle infinity exists in the mind-boggling trajectory of the constituent lines.18 This is an incessant movement that perpetually goes out and comes back on itself, dematerializing surface and calling into being a hovering plane of wonder. In this endless, restless, movement is the very stuff of infinity itself, infinity in its visual incarnation. It is possible to see within all this back and forth of the lines a tendency towards irrationalism.19 Yet we should be wary of this description. In the first place, much of the pattern does make sense, with recognisable forms appearing regularly. Equally, however, it is also almost impossible to grasp how this is all generated. And then, even stranger is the overwhelming sensation that we ought to be able to; something in its constitution tells us that there is a structural principle waiting to be seized. Yet, despite the fact that everything we see is in plain sight, still, we cannot quite decipher it. It thus enmeshes us in something like a paradox because it seems to make sense, yet we cannot make full sense of it. We both understand and do not understand. Or perhaps more accurately, we discover that even as we understand, even as we analyse, so also, we do not understand, so also something escapes our grasp. Yet in this paradox, much work in the characterization of infinity is being done. In the first place, this is not, as mentioned, the boundlessness or infinity of the simple idea, lightly held, of a long line. Nor, significantly, is infinity figured as an absolute concept (very big, very small), but rather as a relational concept. Here, it is considered in its relation to us, to human consciousness, as that which, in the first place, we must struggle to understand. Ultimately, 18 Marks, Enfoldment and Infinity, 18–21. 19 For more on the irrationalist reading of geometrical motifs, especially of the muqarnas domes, see Tabbaa, Transformation of Islamic Art, 132–33, and Marks, Enfoldment and Infinity, 190–94.

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however, we must realize that we do not. The infinity in the pattern thus asks us to engage in paradoxical thinking, to think up to the limit of our comprehension, and then, somehow, to conceive of the “outside” of it. It asks us to engage in the impossible effort, the paradox, of thinking our own limit and its beyond. And, there, within that paradox, it says, lies infinity. If this is the issue conceived in terms of the paradox of infinity, then it barely needs stating that within the religious context, we could simply replace the term “infinity” with “God.” If the pattern is, in some senses, a description, an exploration of God, then we arrive at the formulation of God as paradox. It is a commonplace to say (in words) that God is more than we comprehend, greater than we can imagine, but the pattern embeds these terms, so often so lightly pronounced, in the paradox of what “more than” means to us as thinking human beings. The work of the pattern, its genius as a visual form, is that it plunges us visually (and viscerally) into the struggle to think our limit and its beyond. To “(not-) know” God, we must never cease grappling with our own impossibilities. The pattern turns each one of us who engage with it into a theologian, engaged in the labour of the pursuit of God. Yet, the pattern also does more than this. It is very specific in terms of its descriptions of the characteristics of God in his relation to us. We do not not because there is nothing there to get hold of. On the contrary, even if we do not understand, we are in no doubt that there is order and intelligence and plan and law at work. It is certain that the pattern is perfectly structured, perfectly formed, rigorously generated according to specific principles, even if we cannot quite fathom the secrets of its formation. If it escapes our grasp, then, it is precisely because we are not up to the heights of the intellect that designed it. God, here, is supremely rational, but he eludes us due to the complexity of his rational thinking. Further, even within this mode of intelligence, the characterization of God can be expanded. He may be beyond our reach, but he is not very far from us because we still have an intimation of the sense that he makes. He is not so remote that we give up in loss and despair. This is not quietism and surrender before forces we do not comprehend; as much as he eludes us, this is not a God enshrouded in unknowable mystery, not a God who lies in shadows (as, arguably, the God of Early Christian and Byzantine art sometimes is).20 Instead, this 20

See the two articles by Rico Franses, “When all that is Gold does not Glitter: On the Strange History of Viewing Byzantine Art,” in Icon and Word: The Power of Images in Byzantium. Studies Presented to Robin Cormack, ed. Liz James and Antony Eastmond (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2003), 13–24, and “Lacan and Byzantium. In the Beginning was the Image,” in Byzantium/Modernism: The Byzantine as Method in Modernity, ed. Roland Betancourt and Maria Taroutina (Leiden: Brill, 2015), 311–29.

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is a God of enlightened rationality, of extraordinary complexity and beauty, with whom we are constantly engaged in a close struggle to approach. The fullness of God may lie on the other side of our limit, but never far from it. Such is the specificity of the visual theology of God in the interlace pattern. It is in the mode of our not understanding that the heart of these visual forms lies. The very nature of the incomprehensible beyond of the limit that we are asked to grapple with is indicated to us here. Such are the possibilities of visual theology. One of the key features that emerges from this discussion is that the experience generated by the pattern is both complex and highly specific. Moreover, this experience is distinctive in that it is not sudden or abrupt, but rather develops through time. Indeed, it is tempting to call these abstract patterns a time-based medium. And within that mode, as a viewer, if I follow these complex visual forms as they unfold before me, I find a strange effect befalls me; I feel as though I fall under their spell, entranced, absorbed by these linear trajectories, all moving somewhere, all tracing a moving path that I cannot help but follow. Posing questions, half-resolving them, but never enough to let me let go, and always, driving, driving somewhere; I find that as I follow where I am led, as though through a labyrinth, I am mesmerized, in a trance. And within this trance-like state, everything is different. What and how one perceives is radically altered. We have spoken about the questions of divinity within infinity and boundlessness that the patterns address, but we should not think of this all as merely an intellectual exercise. Within the trance, one is made to experience infinity, almost as a physical sensation, as a careening journey through its arterial branches. One feels its pulse, rides its vicissitudes, not only as its lines twist and turn, but more, in its status as something that now one grasps, now one does not. This is just the opposite of a cold verbal-intellectual definition of infinity. This is an invitation to experience it as a living phenomenon, from the inside out. It is also opposite to the conception of symbolization or iconography that we encountered earlier. This is not a representation of, or a reference to infinity. The pattern is not at a remove from the phenomenon; within the trance-like state, surely, it is the thing—infinity—itself, the thing in our encounter with it; the pattern is not an abstraction, but an enactment. Such are the wonders that visual theology enables. Through the course of this essay, we have characterized the pattern as operating under several different descriptions. First, we spoke of it in relation to the ontology of things and to questions of connectedness within creation. We also considered it in relation to some of the qualia of God and in connection with boundlessness and infinity. At this stage one may, indeed, legitimately pose the question of what, if anything, the relation between all these elements may be.

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Part of the answer is no doubt the one given by almost everyone who supports the spiritualist hypothesis: the Islamic belief in tawhid (absolute unity or oneness of God).21 Taking into account the trance-like state, we can add to this that it is an encounter with some of the modes of being of God, with his creation, and within which, according to the pattern, one cannot really be separated from the other. Yet, our earlier discussion of infinity and our uncertain, unsettling relationship to it must also modify this answer. Within the trance and its state of active immersion, the visual field opens up to me in an extraordinary moving, shifting, engrossing kaleidoscope of forms. But if we combine this with the profound disorientation provoked by the encounter with infinity, perhaps the best way to phrase the experience is that I am lost in God. Lost, because all certainties and stabilizing points dissolve. Lost in a world where so much escapes my grasp. And yet, as certainties and stabilizing points dissolve, I fall not into chaos, but into a world of magical interconnectedness where boundaries are no more, but thingliness still survives. I am lost in a world where certainties vanish, but order and form still persist, lost in something that encompasses me, includes me, that has me in its grip, yet exceeds me, and still does not annihilate me. Lost in God. Let us turn now to the further objection raised by Grabar and Blair and Bloom, the lack of direct evidence for any of the spiritualist assertions that we have so far been considering. This objection itself can be countered by an argument deriving from standard art historical methodology. Much art history proceeds not on the basis of direct, first person viewer-response reports, but rather draws on intellectual climate or cultural context. The work of Yasser Tabbaa, mentioned above, is exemplary of such a methodology, examining positions in contemporary theology and establishing connections between those positions and architectural forms. In this kind of inductive argument, direct evidence is not required because the intellectual or cultural context itself carries the burden of proof. The requirement is only that the inferences across the fields being examined be plausibly and convincingly made. From this perspective, the pro-spiritualist arguments all fall well within the recognized academic bounds of the cultural or religious-context methodology. 21 An early mention of the idea of tawhid is made by Louis Massignon, “Les méthodes de réalisation artistique des peuples de l’Islam,” Syria 2 (1921): 47–53, 149–60; see also Nader Ardalan and Laleh Bakhtiar, The Sense of Unity: the Sufi Tradition in Persian Architecture (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1973), amongst many others. Against this, many of those who reject the spiritualist hypothesis also object to the use that those in support of that hypothesis make of the concept of tawhid, finding it to be “essentializing” of Islam and Islamic art. For more on this, see Necipoğlu, Topkapı Scroll, 73–83, esp. 76–82.

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With that said, however, I believe the context argument is fundamentally flawed when viewed from the perspective of visual theology. In order to examine this, let us look more closely at the Tabbaa discussion in relation to the muqarnas. Tabbaa draws on the extremely sophisticated verbal theology of the time, analysing its complexities across different schools of thought and singling out the Ashʿaris for particular attention. Building on the prior views of the Muʿtazilis, the Ashʿaris focused on the nature of the material universe and its relation to God. These two schools differed from the theological opinions of other groups that conceived of the material world as existing, in some measure, independently of God. The Ashʿari exceptionalists, as they came to be known, rather took the world to be composed of atoms whose constant rearrangement by the hand of God resulted in the “accidental” configuration that is the universe as we know it. Thus, in this view, the world is constantly being recreated by God and, perhaps even more importantly, were it not for Divine Presence the world would be, in Tabbaa’s phrase, in “discontinuous chaos.” It is on the basis of this position that Tabbaa moves to his contention that the muqarnas dome looks like it is in imminent danger of collapse, but for the hand of God that holds it all up.22 It will be clear that this religious-context argument gives precedence to verbal theology. As was the case for the symbolization discussion above, the visual forms are conceived of as though they are fulfilling the dictates of ideas and concepts that have already been brought to fruition in verbal terms. This, of course, goes contrary to the central claim of visual theology, which is that it is not necessarily causally dependent on concepts developed in other spheres. This problem of the verbal being conceived of as the fundamental armature on which the visual is subsequently built is endemic to any attempt to arrive at a visual theology. As soon as verbal theology is permitted as an interpretive strategy, it is extremely difficult to stop from running rampant. Inevitably, it becomes almost impossible to avoid the impression that it provides the key to understanding the visual material and allows one to penetrate to the “truth” of the visual. One way around this problem is to try posing the question that the idea of an independent visual theology has at its core: what does the visual material say, in and of itself, if considered apart from verbal theology? In this respect, we might ask a hypothetical question of those who make the spiritual context

22 Tabbaa, Transformation of Islamic Art, 133. See also Marks, Enfoldment and Infinity, 189– 213 and Necipoğlu, Topkapı Scroll, 95–97, for discussion of these topics.

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argument in relation to the girih pattern on the basis of the surviving texts: what would happen if all the theological texts had been lost and all we possessed was the visual material? What kind of theological reading would we arrive at only through a formal reading of the patterns? This, in a sense, is the question this essay has attempted to answer; indeed, it is an experiment in seeking out what point one might arrive at without resorting to verbal theology. Although the interlace patterns deal with some of the same general issues of God’s ongoing role in sustaining the universe, they do not lead to the intricacies of the discussion in the same way that the verbal theology does. Here, it would be relatively easy to tie the discussions of Ashʿari exceptionalism to the geometrical interlace and to arrive at similar conclusions as Tabbaa in relation to the muqarnas: that the chaos and confusion of the interlace are only held together by the force of God. Yet, this was not quite the claim of our original analysis. Although we started from the point of apparent chaos in the pattern, a careful visual analysis revealed that it was not as disorganized as first appeared. The relevant feature of the interlace is not its chaos, threatening to fall apart, but the elusive nature of its full order. Had we been looking for the disorder that the verbal theology focuses on, it is more than likely that we would have stopped there, convinced by the match-up, and looked no further. This is, again, one of the areas in which the verbal theology context argument may lead us astray. If all we ever do is read the visual forms against the verbal theology, all that emerges is the verbal theology—the only aspects that it selects within the visual are those that it finds in its own image. Additionally, a focus on the descriptive, verbal theology might also have blinded us to what I take to be the core of the pattern, its most important aspect. This is its capacity both to carry a profound theological content, such as the nature of God in infinity, and to induce a trance-like state of wonder that somehow, brings one into visceral contact with that content. Although the geometrical motifs deal with broadly similar themes to the verbal theology, as noted earlier, they take us on a different journey. From the point of view of visual theology, the religious context argument should thus be used with great caution, and always with the consciousness that the visual material might be exploring an alternative set of ideas that may or may not be in consonance with the verbal theology. Bearing this in mind, let us return now to the matter of evidence raised by Grabar and Blair and Bloom. We had earlier seen that one of the reasons these authors were opposed to the spiritualist readings of geometrical motifs was the absence of proof. Against this, we had demonstrated that the religious context argument is broadly used within art history in lieu of direct evidence. If we are now casting doubt on context as a methodology, where does this leave us on the issue of evidence?

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Two further arguments may be made against the call for evidence as formulated by Grabar and Blair and Bloom. In the first place, we might ask the question of why the patterns should require any more proof than they themselves offer. The close visual analysis, to many observers, provides more than sufficient confirmation of the subtle, complex ideas that they set forth. In the second place, however, we might adduce one further piece of evidence, derived again from the argument for visual theology. The proof that Grabar and Blair and Bloom are looking for is written, in the form of someone stating directly that the visual material they have seen refers to spiritual and theological matters. Yet, visual theology attempts, precisely, to separate the visual, as a strand of inquiry, out from the line of the verbal. Not everything has to pass through verbal discourse. Within the world of visual theology, the most appropriate way to respond to an image is with another image; it is not necessarily the case that a worshipper who has a profound encounter with visual infinity in a moment of trance-like absorption will go home and put pen to paper to describe it. In this sense, the best evidence for the spiritual understanding of the geometrical forms of Islamic art is the next instance of their use, the next mosque in which they are placed. What more evidence, we may ask, does one need? References Alami, Mohammed Hamdouni. Art and Architecture in the Islamic Tradition: Aesthetics, Politics and Desire in Early Islam. London: I.B. Tauris, 2011. Ardalan, Nader, and Laleh Bakhtiar. The Sense of Unity: The Sufi Tradition in Persian Architecture. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1973. Baer, Eva. Islamic Ornament. New York: New York University Press, 1998. Behrens-Abouseif, Doris. Islamic Architecture in Cairo: An Introduction. Leiden: Brill, 1989. Blair, Sheila, and Jonathan M. Bloom. Art and Architecture of Islam, 1250–1800. New Haven: Yale University Press, 1994. Blair, Sheila and Jonathan Bloom, eds. Cosmophilia. Islamic Art from the David Collection, Copenhagen. Chicago: McMullen Museum of Art, 2006. Bloom, Jonathan M., Ahmed Toufiq, Stefano Carboni, Jack Soultanian, Antoine M. Wilmering, Mark D. Minor, Andrew Zawacki, and El Mostafa Hbibi, eds. The Minbar from the Kutubiyya Mosque. New York: Metropolitan Museum of Art, 1998. Burckhardt, Titus. Art of Islam: Language and Meaning. London: World of Islam Festival, 1976. Elias, Jamal J. Aisha’s Cushion: Religious Art, Perception, and Practice in Islam. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2012.

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Franses, Rico. “When All That Is Gold Does not Glitter: On the Strange History of Viewing Byzantine Art.” In Icon and Word: The Power of Images in Byzantium. Studies Presented to Robin Cormack, edited by Liz James and Antony Eastmond, 13–24. Aldershot: Ashgate, 2003. Franses, Rico. “Lacan and Byzantium. In the Beginning Was the Image.” In Byzantium/ Modernism: The Byzantine as Method in Modernity, edited by Roland Betancourt and Maria Taroutina, 311–29. Leiden: Brill, 2015. Grabar, André. Christian Iconography. A Study of Its Origins. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1968. Grabar, Oleg. The Mediation of Ornament. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1992. Greenstein, Jack M. The Creation of Eve and Renaissance Naturalism: Visual Theology and Artistic Invention. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2016. Jensen, Robin M. and Kimberly Vrudny, eds. Visual Theology: Forming and Transforming the Community through the Arts. Collegeville, MN: Liturgical Press, 2009. Knysh, Alexander. Islamic Mysticism, a Short History. Leiden: Brill, 2010. Kühn, Miriam. “Two Mamluk Minbars in Cairo: Approaching Material Culture through Narrative Sources.” In Material Evidence and Narrative Sources: Interdisciplinary Studies of the History of the Muslim Middle East, edited by Daniella Talmon-Heller and Katia Cytryn-Silverman, 216–35. Leiden: Brill, 2015. Leaman, Oliver. Islamic Aesthetics: An Introduction. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2004. Marks, Laura. Enfoldment and Infinity: An Islamic Genealogy of New Media Art. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2010. Massignon, Louis. “Les méthodes de réalisation artistique des peuples de l’Islam.” Syria 2 (1921): 47–53, 149–60. Nasr, Seyyed Hossein. Islamic Art and Spirituality. Albany: State University of New York Press, 1987. Necipoğlu, Gülru. The Topkapı Scroll: Geometry and Ornament in Islamic Architecture. Topkapı Palace Museum Library Ms H. 1956. Santa Monica: Getty Center for the History of Art and the Humanities, 1995. Tabbaa, Yasser. The Transformation of Islamic Art during the Sunni Revival. Seattle: University of Washington Press, 2001. Thümmler, Sabine, ed. Kunstgewerbemuseum Berlin am Kulturforum. Munich: Prestel, 2014. Museum Guide. Windisch-Graetz, Franz. Möbel Europas. 2 vols. Munich: Klinkhardt & Biermann, 1983. Woods, Richard, ed. Understanding Mysticism. Garden City, NY: Image Books, 1980.

Index Illustrations, tables, and plans are indicated by italicized numbers. Abbasid 8, 232 ʿAbd al-Latif Fathallah, Shaykh 218 ʿAbd Allah b. Shaykh Ibrahim al-Khatib, 214 Abu al-Barakat Yuhanna ibn Abu Layth, Shaykh 150 Abu al-Khair, scribe 146 Abu al-Makarim Saʿdallah ibn Jirjis ibn Masʿud 142, 144, 146, 150 Abu al-Qasim 242 Abu al-Wafa‌ʾ ibn al-Bishr, priest 146 Abu Ghosh 97 Abu ʿAbdallah Muhammad b. ʿUmar ibn Waqid al-Aslami (al-Waqidi) 177, 190, 191, 192 Abu-Lughod, Janet 4 Abu Zakri ibn al-Bishr, Shayk 146 Acre Triptych 35, 36, 37, 38 Adomnán 196 Agia Mone, (Monastery of the Priests), Cyprus 120–129, 121, 131 Ahmad Pasha al-Jazzar 215–216, 218 Alexios Angelos Komnenos 67 Alexios I Komnenos, Emperor 7, 79 Alice of Ibelin 163 Allen, Terry 189 American University, Beirut 265 Amir Assaf Mosque, Beirut 213, 214, 226 Amir Munzir Mosque, Beirut 213, 214 Amjad ibn al-Shaykh al-Taqah, Shaykh al-  150 Anastasia Saramalyna 113 Anastasis 67 Andaloro, Maria 26 Andronikos II Palaiologos, Emperor 66 Archangel (Michael?), mural icon, St. Mercurius, Cairo 146, 147 Arculf. See Adomnán Ashʿari theology 282, 283 Athanasios of Athos, Saint 120 Audi, Raymond 227 Augustine, Saint 90, 92, 93, 101 Ayyubid 3, 11, 142, 144, 146, 148, 160, 209, 232

Bakalova, Elka 41–44, 45, 46, 47, 51 Baladhuri, Abu al-ʿAbbas Ahmad bin Jabir al196 Baldensperger, Philip 260 Barquq, funerary complex of Sultan ibn, Cairo 265, 266, 269–272, 271 Barsauma, Saint 152 Barsbay, funerary complex of Sultan al-Ashraf, Cairo 265, 267, 269–71, 270, 274, 274 Barsky, Basil 120 Basil, priest, son of Lord Olimites Madellos and Nengomia 166 Baydumur al-Khawarizmi, amir and Mamluk governor of Damascus 212 Beirut 158, 205–233 Bell, Gertrude 243–244 Bellew, Henry 249–250 Berchem, Max van 192 Bertem Bodin 127–128, 129, 131 Berzé-la-Ville, France 94 Beysanoğlu, Şevket 192 Biblical imagery 147 Biruni, Abu Rayhan al- 250 Blacherna, church of the, Arta 19, 20, 21, 23, 24, 28 Blair, Sheila 268, 276, 281, 283, 284 Blessed Themionos, church of the, Lysi 160 Bloom, Jonathan 268, 276, 281, 283, 284 Bohemond, Prince of Antioch 76 Bowring, Sir John 239, 240 Braudel, Fernand 6 bronze horses, San Marco, Venice 59, 62 Buchthal, Hugo 34 Budge, Sir E. A. 256–257 Burckhardt, John Lewis 246, 253 Burkhardt, Titus 268, 269 Butcher, Edith 240, 252 Cairo 6, 8, 34, 142, 143, 144, 148, 224 Canosa Cathedral, Apulia 76 Cappadocia 66, 95, 153

288 Catalonian marriage chest, Kunstgewerbe Museum, Berlin 272, 273, 274 Çelebi, Evliya 184, 197 Charlieu Abbey, France 94 Chaudhuri, Sukanta 24 Chilandari Monastery, Mount Athos 69 Christ Pantocrator 152 Christological scenes 111 Chora Monastery (Kariye Cami), Constantinople 67, 68 Christ Enthroned 147 Christopher Kopsenos 24 chrysography 9, 44, 45–46, 49, 50–51, 52 church-mosque conversion 12, 175, 184, 187, 192, 194, 205, 211–212, 225, 231 Clermont, Council of 7 Cluny Monastery, France 92, 93, 94, 101 Condé, Bruce 225 Constantine Lips Monastery (Fenari Isa Cami), Constantinople 66, 77 Constantine, basilica of, Jerusalem 195 Constantine of Rhodes 75 Constantinople 8, 51, 56, 59, 63, 69, 76, 77, 78, 79, 80, 110, 151, 159, 190 Contarini, Doge Domenico 55 Coppo di Marcovaldo, Madonna del Bordone 45, 46, 47, 51, 52 Coptic Christianity 5, 11, 142, 144, 146, 148, 151 Cordoba 198 Cotton Genesis, British Library, MS Cotton Otho B VI, 58 Crac des Chevaliers, Syria 154, 155, 156, 158, 167 Creswell, K. A. C. 192 Crowfoot, Grace, 255 Crucifixion 67, 117, 163 Cruikshank Dodd, Erica IX–XIII, 1, 9, 14, 19, 33, 55, 89, 108, 137, 175 n.1, 261 n.47, 265 Crusades: First 7–8; Third 108; Fourth 8, 10, 57, 77, 80 Cuinet, Vital 239, 240 Ćurčić, Slobodan 69 Cutler, Anthony 44–45, 46 Dale, Thomas 74 Damascus 159, 196, 198, 210, 215, 221, 238, 240, 241, 244, 245, 252, 259 Dandolo, Doge Andrea 73, 78

Index Dandolo, Doge Enrico 77, 78 Darrouzès, Father Jean 121 December Menologian, Paris, Bibliothèque Nationale, MS gr. 1531 120 Deesis 90–91, 90, 92, 95, 96, 97–98, 101 Deir al–Khandaq (Monastery of the Moat), Egypt 144 Deir al–Qusayr, Egypt 150–151 Deir Mar Musa (Monastery of St. Moses), Syria 141 Demus, Otto 55, 61, 63, 64, 65 Directorate General of Antiquities (DGA), Beirut 227 Diyarbakir Cathedral 184. See also St. Thomas, church of, Amida Diyarbakir 175, 193, 194, 197, 198 Dome of the Rock, Damascus 93 donor images 90, 91, 94–95, 112, 113–115, 116, 139–140, 140, 144, 153, 154, 165, 166, 167–168. See also supplicant images Doubting Thomas 165 Doughty, Charles 244, 245 Dyke, Henry van 238–239, 240 Eirene Komnene, Empress 66 Elias Bar Shinaya of Nisibis 194, 195 Enlart, Camille 208–210, 224 Euphemia, wife of Ioannes Romanites 122, 124, 129 Euthymios, monk and tailor 129 Eutychius of Alexandria 195, 197 Falier, Doge Ordelaffo 71, 79 Falier, Doge Vitale 55, 70, 70, 71 Fatimid 11, 142, 144, 151, 232 Ferrier, Joseph Philippe 247–248 Flood, Finbarr Barry 187 Forsyth, George 34 Forty Martyrs of Sebaste 151 Fraser, James 249 French Mandate, Beirut 205, 206, 207, 222, 223, 232 Futuhat al-ʿIraq (Conquest of Iraq), Copenhagen, National Library, Cod. Arab 190–194 Gabriel, Alfons and Agnes 249 Garden, Robert J. 186 Gatt, Georg 240

289

Index George Synglitikos 127 girih 13, 265, 274, 275, 276, 283 Godfrey de Bouillon 91 Goitein, Shelomo 6 Gombosi, Giorgio 61 Gospel Book, Library of the Coptic Patriarchate, Cairo, Bibl. no. 196, 148–150 Grabar, Oleg 268, 276, 281, 283, 284 Gradenigo, Doge Bartolomeo 73 Great ʿUmari Mosque, Beirut 12, 205–237, 206, 207, 209, 217, 220 Great (Umayyad) Mosque, Damascus 175, 187, 196, 212, 218 Great Mosque, Cordoba 197 Grivaud, Gilles 111, 121 Hagia Sophia/St. Sophia, church of, Constantinople 51–52, 78 Haidar, Youssef 227–229 Hallaq, Hassan 229–230, 232, 233 Hamadhani, Ibn al-Faqih 250 Hamilton Psalter, Berlin, Kupferstichkabinett 78.A9 29–31, 30 Heraclius, Emperor 176, 184 Herzner, Volker 59, 60, 61 Hibatallah of Gurgan 183 Hodegon Monastery, Constantinople 51 Hoffman, Eva 5 Holy Apostles, church of the, Constantinople 10, 56, 58, 65, 67, 74–76, 77 Holy Cross, church of the, Pelendri  165–167, 166 Holy Sepulchre, Jerusalem 93, 101, 195 Homilies of James Kokkinobaphos: Vatican Library, MS gr. 1162; Paris, Bibliothèque Nationale, MS gr. 1208 75 Horden, Peregrine 6 Hosios Loukas (Stiris), Phocis 21, 49 Hourihane, Colum 5 Hunter, Captain Frederick Mercer 250–252 Ibn al-Bawwab 243 Ibn al-Hufi 146 Ibn Jubayr, Muhammad ibn Ahmad 196 Ibrahim ibn Salih 246–247

“Idea” relief, Castello Sforzesco, Civiche Raccolte d’Arte, Milan 29, 29 Innocent IV, Pope 64 Innsbruck Plate 3 Ioannes Romanites 129 Ioannes Xenos 129 Ioannes, monk 120 Isaac Komnenos 68 Ishac, woodworker 146 Istanbul 190, 215, 221, 224. See also Constantinople Jabarti, ʿAbd al-Rahman al- 259 Jacoff, Michael 79 Jacopo da Verona 167 ʿJami al- Bahr (Sea Mosque), Beirut 214–215 Jerusalem 89, 90, 91, 100, 101, 195, 197, 259 John and Irene of Moutoullas 137, 140, 160 John Chrysostom 76 John Chrysostom’s commentary on Matthew, Paris, Bibliothèque Nationale, MS gr. 668 120 John II Komnenos, Emperor 66 John I Tzimiskes, Emperor 28 John Kappadox 127 John Lampadistes, Saint 118, 119, 120, 130 John Montolif 127 John of Lusignan 165 John Xenos of Crete, Saint 128 Kabala, Irene 93, 94 Kingdom of Jerusalem 55, 89, 90, 91, 100, 163 Klemes, monk 120–121 Kondakov, Nikodim Pavlovich 47 Kotlov, L. N. 244 Kuran, Aptulah 186 Kurd ʿAli, Muhammad 239 Kykkos Monastery, Cyprus 129–131 Lamei, Saleh 212 Lane-Poole, Stanley 259 Last Judgment 67, 93, 94, 97, 112 Last Supper 96 Lauffray, Jean 224 Lavaudieu Abbey, France 94 Lawrence, T. E. 243

290 Lazarev, Viktor 45 Leontios Makhairas 163 Lurcy-le-Bourg, France 91 Macridy, Theodore 77 Madrid Chronicle of John Skylitzes, Bib. Nac. Vitr.26.2 28–29, 29 maiestas domini 93, 97, 98, 101 Makhairas (Machairas) Monastery, Cyprus, 25, 26, 110, 117, 163 Malik Shah, Sultan 177, 180, 187 Mamluk(s) 150, 205, 206, 210, 211, 212, 213, 215, 224, 228, 229, 231, 232 Mansur of Antioch 146 Mar Charbel (St. Charbel), Maʿad 153, 154, 158 Mar Phokas, Amioun/Amiun 19, 20, 20, 137, 138, 155 Mar Saba (St. Saba), Eddé al-Batrun  155–156, 156 Mar Tadros (St. Theodore), Bahdeidat 155, 156–158, 157 Maria Comnena/Komnene 139 Marian Confraternity at Naupaktos, charter of, (Tabularium, no. 1, Tesoro, Cappella Palatina, Palermo) 9, 19–32, 22 Marks, Laura 268, 278 Maronite(s) 141, 153, 155, 156, 158, 159 Martin da Canal 62, 64, 77 Masʿudi, Abu al-Hasan ʿAli al- 196 Mathews, Thomas 64 Matthew of Edessa 185 Maxwell, Gavin 252 McCoan, James 260 Melisende Psalter, British Library, MS Egerton 1139 97 Melkite(s) 11, 137, 141, 142, 150, 154, 159 Menologion of Basil II, Vatican Library, MS gr. 1613 75 Methodios, Patriarch 31 Metochites, Theodore 67 Michael III, Emperor 31 Michael the Syrian 152, 195 Michiel, Dogaressa Felicitas 70, 71, 71 Michiel, Doge Domenico 71 Michiel, Doge Vitale 71 Mitchell, William J. Thomas 20

Index Mordtmann, Andreas David 191–192 Morosini, Dogaressa Romenica 73 Morosini, Doge Marino 61, 62, 64, 72, 73, 80 Mother of God Kykkotissa, icon, Cyprus  130–131 Mother of God Machairiotissa, mosaic icon, Cyprus 25, 26 Muʿallaqa, church of al-, Cairo 148, 149, 150, 152 Mufti of the Republic (Shaykh Muhammed Rashid Qabbani), Beirut 226–229, 231 Mughultay al-Husni 212 Muhammad ʿAli 244 Muhammed al-Amin Mosque, Beirut 222, 229 Musa, son of al-Zayni Musallam 212 Mushkin Kalam 244 Mustafa al-Asbaʿi 243, 244 Nabulsi, ʿAbd al-Ghani al-, 214, 215, 218 Nafpaktos 9 Nahiya, Coptic monastery, Egypt, 151 Nasir-I Khusraw 185 Nasr, Seyyed Hossein 268 Nativity, church of the, Bethlehem 97 Naupaktetissa/Nafpaktitissa 9, 21–22, 22, 24 Necipoğlu, Gülru 269 Neophytos, Saint 109–110 111 Nicholas Mesarites 75 Nicolaou-Konnari, Angel 129 Niebuhr, Barthol Georg 191–192 Niero, Antonio 74 Nikephoros II Phokas, Emperor 120 Nonantola Abbey, Italy 94 Old Testament: Genesis (Creation) 58, 60, (Abraham) 60, 96, (Joseph) 58, 60, 61; Exodus (Moses) 58, 60, 61 Ottoman(s) 74, 121, 180, 184, 205, 206, 207, 213, 214, 215, 218, 219, 220, 221, 222, 223, 224, 228, 229, 230, 232, 239, 253 Ouspensky, Bishop Porphyrios 33 Ousterhout, Robert 67, 68 Pala d’Oro, San Marco, Venice 79 Palace of the Boukoleon, Constantinople 51 Palermo 9, 19, 24, 25

Index Panagia Angeloktistos, Kiti 115 Panagia Phorbiotissa, church of the, Asinou  111–114, 112, 117, 120, 121, 129, 130, 131, 161, 162, 167 Panagia tou Arakou (tou Arakos), church of the, Lagoudera 48, 49, 160 Panagia, church of the, Moutoullas 137, 140 Pantokrator Monastery, Constantinople 52, 66 parekklesion/parekklesia 10, 67, 68, 80 Paris, Bibliothèque Nationale, MS gr. 280 121 Partecipazio, Doge Giustiniano 55 Pentcheva, Bissera 47–49, 51 Peter II, King of Cyprus 125, 165 Pherrai Monastery, Thrace 68 Philip of Ibelin 137, 138, 139 Philip, unknown Crusader 19, 20. See also Philip of Ibelin Polani, Doge Pietro 72 Polyeleotissa Monastery, Cyprus 121 Possidius 90, 92, 93 Presentation in the Temple 154 Purcell, Nicholas 6 Pushkin Madonna, State Museum of Fine Arts, Moscow 44, 45, 46, 47, 51, 52 Qudsi, Elias 240 Raby, Julian 188 Radoslav I, King of Serbia 68 Raymond, Candice 230 Razi, ʿIsa ibn Ahmad al- 197 Redford, Scott 3 Regina Coeli. See Virgin as Queen of Heaven Reilly, James 232 Resurrection, church of the, Jerusalem 195 Rice, Edward Wilbur 259–260 Roger II, King of Sicily 26 Rome 63, 65, 101 Rustom, Joseph 227 S. Cipriano, monastery of, Murano 72 S. Clemente, church of, Rome 65 S. Giorgio Maggiore, monastic church of, Venice 71 S. Ilario, monastic church of, Venice 71

291 S. Lorenzo in Lucina, church of, Rome 65 S. Maria Antiqua, church of, Rome 65 S. Maria Gloriosa dei Frari, church of, Venice 73 S. Maria in Cosmedin, church of, Rome 66 S. Pietro di Castello, church of, Venice 63 S. Zacaria, monastic church of, Venice 71 Sadid Abu al-Fadaʾil, Shaykh al- 146, 151 Saliba, monk 152 Salibi, Kamal 213 Salih b. Yahya, Buhturid amir 211 San Marco, church of, Venice 10, 55–88, 56, 57, 59, 60, 62, 70, 71 Sayyid Ahmad b. ʿIzz al-Din, al- 214 Scarpa, Jacopo 64 Seljuk(s) 7, 153, 176, 177, 180, 185, 186, 187, 189 Selvo, Doge Domenico 70 Seven principal feasts, gilded icon 146 Sheil, Lady Mary 260–261 Simonin, Crak des Chevaliers, Syria 155, 167 Sinai icon collection 33–34 Solidere, Beirut 225–229, 231–233 Soranzo, Doge Giovanni 73 Sotiriou, George and Maria 33, 34, 44, 47. spolia 10, 12, 57, 59, 62, 78, 180–181, 185, 186, 188–189, 210 SS. Giovanni e Paolo (S. Zanipolo), church of, Venice 72, 73 St. Alipios, mosaic, church of San Marco Venice 61 St. Barbara, church of, Cairo 148 St. George Mangana, monastery of, Cyprus 110 St. George, church of, Amida 189 St. George, mural icon, church of the Panagia Phorbiotissa, Asinou 111, 112, 113 St. George, wall painting, church of Mar Tadros, Bahdeidat 156 St. Herakleidios (katholikon), Kalopanagiotis 117, 118, 119, 130, 131, 163 St. John Lampadistes, monastery of, Kalopanagiotis 115, 117, 120 St John Philby, Harry 246–247 St. John the Baptist, church of, Damascus  187, 196 St. John, cathedral of (Crusader Church), Beirut 12, 208–210, 211, 223, 225, 231

292 St. John, icons, church of St. Herakleidos, Kalopanagiotis 118, 119 St. Mamas, mural icon, church of Mar Sabas, Eddé al-Batrun 155 St. Margaret Agros, monastery of, Cyprus  110 St. Mary of the Admiral, church of, Palermo 69 St. Mary Pammakaristos (Fethiye Cami), Constantinople 66, 67 St. Mercurius (Abu Sefein), church of, Cairo 142–144, 143, 145, 146–147, 147, 148 St. Mercurius, monastery of, Tamwaih 151 St. Neophytos, enkleistra of, Paphos  109–110, 111, 127 St. Nicholas in Haret Zuwayla, church of, Cairo 151 St. Nicholas of the Roof, church of, Kakopetria 115–117, 116, 118, 120, 128, 131, 163 St. Nicholas, icon, Byzantine Museum of Archbishop Makarios III, Nicosia 115, 118, 128, 163, 164 St. Panteleimon, church of, Nerezi 67 St. Peter’s, church of, Rome 65, 75 St. Philip, mural icon, church of Mar Phokas, Amioun/Amiun 19, 20, 137, 138 St. Sergius, icon, monastery of St. Catherine, Sinai 158 St. Theodore, wall painting, church of Mar Tadros, Bahdeidat 156 St. Thomas, church of, Amida 176, 190, 192. See also Diyarbakir Cathedral St. Vincent, church of, Cordoba 197 Stavros o Phaneromenos, monastery of, Cyprus 163 Stavrovouni Monastery, Cyprus 117 Stefan Nemanja, grand župan of Serbia 68 Strube, Christine 64 Studenica Monastery, Serbia 68 Stylianou, Andreas and Judith 117 Suad al-Humaidi, Shaikha 227 Summers, David 25 supplicant images 137, 138, 139, 144, 153, 155, 155, 156, 156, 157, 158, 161, 162, 165, 166, 167–168. See also donor images Synaxarion, Paris, Bibliothèque Nationale, MS gr. 1588 120–129, 123, 126, 130

Index Synaxarion, Paris, Bibliothèque Nationale, MS gr. 1590 111, 121 Syrian Orthodox Church 141, 152, 153, 158, 159, 188, 189, 195 Tabbaa, Yasser 268, 281, 282, 283 Taha al-Wali, Shaykh 230–231 tetrarchs, porphyry statues, church of San Marco, Venice 78 Thebes 9, 19, 24, 26 Theodora Palaiologina, Empress 66, 77 Theodora, Empress 31 Theodotus, monk and bishop of Diyarbakir  189 Theophanes 195 Theophilos 161 Tiepolo, Doge Jacopo 72–73 Tiepolo, Doge Lorenzo 73 Tikkanen, J. J. 58 Transfiguration, church of the, Sotera 139 Translatio Sancti Nicolai 75 Triumph of Orthodoxy, icon, British Museum 30, 31 Udabno Monastery, Georgia 96, 98 Ulu Cami (Great Mosque), Diyarbakir 12, 175–204, 178, 179, 181, 182, 183, 187, 188 ʿUmar b. al-Khattab, Caliph 205, 231 ʿUmar, Covenant of 195, 197, 198 Umayyad 197, 225, 230, 232 Urban II, pope 7 Venice 10, 55, 58, 72, 74, 75, 77, 80 Venice, cathedral of. See S. Pietro di Castello, church of, Venice verbal theology 277, 282, 283 Virgin and Child Enthroned with angels, prophets, apostles, monks, and prelates, wall painting, church of St. George, St. Mercurius, Cairo 148 Virgin and Child, gilded icon bought by Patriarch Anba Sabas ibn al-Layth 151 Virgin and Child Hodegetria Dexiokratousa, icon, Monastery of St. Catherine, Sinai 35, 38–41, 40 Virgin and Child Hodegetria Dexiokratousa, mosaic icon, Monastery of St. Catherine, Sinai 37, 38, 39, 41, 43, 47–51, 52

293

Index Virgin and Child Hodegetria on a lyre-backed throne, with angels, icon, Monastery of St. Catherine, Sinai 37–38, 41–47, 42, 51, 52 Virgin and Child Hodegetria with angels, icon, Monastery of St. Catherine, Sinai 35, 36, 37–38 Virgin and Child Hodegetria, icon, Hodegon Monastery, Constantinople 21, 23, 51 Virgin and Child, mural icon, Panagia Phorbiotissa, Asinou 112, 113, 161 Virgin and scenes from the life of Christ, icon, Monastery of St. Catherine, Sinai 27, 28 Virgin as Queen of Heaven 9, 46, 47, 50–51, 52 Virgin Blachernitissa between two archangels, church of al-Muʿallaqa, Cairo 148, 149, 150 Virgin Hagiosoritissa, icon, Museo Diocesano, Palermo 26, 27

Virgin in Haret al-Rum, church of the, Cairo 146 Virgin in Haret Zuwayla, church of the, Cairo 148 visual theology 277, 282, 283 Vocotopoulos, Panagiotes 44 Walid I, Caliph al- 176, 196, 197 Walker, Alicia 99 waqf properties, Beirut 207, 219–220, 223 Watzinger, Carl 196 Weitzmann, Kurt 9, 33–41 Wellsted, James 251 Wharton, Annabel 76 William of Tyre 91 Wilson, Charles Thomas 254–255 Wulzinger, Karl 196 Ziani, Doge Pietro 80 Zuqnin Chronicle 184