France and the Holy Land: Frankish Culture at the End of the Crusades ed. by Daniel H. Weiss, Lisa Mahoney (review)

REVIEWS 229 which could be, and that which is already received by common opinion.” CHARLES RUSSELL STONE, English, UCLA France and the Holy Land: Frankish Culture at the End of the Crusades, ed. Daniel H. Weiss and Lisa Mahoney (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press 2004) xx + 375 pp. France and the Holy Land: Frankish Culture at the End of the Crusades is a collection of essays that examines cultural exchange and interaction between France and the Middle East at the end of the Crusades. Relations between East and West in the Middle Ages are often characterized as adversarial, and so this new book adds a layer of complexity to our understanding of this important period in medieval history. The focus is on France because the majority of crusaders and settlers in the Latin kingdoms of the Middle East were French. The warriors, settlers, pilgrims and merchants who lived in or traveled through the Crusader Kingdoms were remarkably open to new ideas and influences from their Byzantine and Islamic neighbors. The exchange between the Crusaders and Middle Easterners exchange created a new visual and literary culture that was “neither Eastern nor Western but a distinctive mélange of both” ( xv). The thirteen essays in this volume take an interdisciplinary approach to the subject and benefit from the talents of distinguished archaeologists, historians of art and architecture, and literary scholars. They give particular focus to the late thirteenth century, a paradoxical time when this hybrid culture was at its height but the Crusader Kingdoms themselves were failing. The fall of Acre in 1291 marked the end of an organized French presence in the Middle East and of the crusading effort as a whole, but in the decades beforehand there was a flowering of arts and literature which was partly a result of this cultural mixture, and partly a response to the visible decline of the Crusader Kingdoms. An entire section of this book focuses specifically on Acre, which became the main center of the Crusader Kingdoms after the fall of Jerusalem. Acre grew into a thriving city during this period and a major transit center in Mediterranean trade, not only between Europe and the Middle East as is so often supposed, but between Byzantium and Egypt as well (104). It was as a very cosmopolitan city, where social and economic interaction between westerners, Jews, Oriental Christians, and even Muslims (albeit more limited) were part of daily life. At any given time Acre contained a large number of temporary residents —pilgrims and merchants—who tended to congregate in ethnic and linguistic clusters that dotted the suburbs. This transient population “had a substantial impact on Acre’s society. They enhanced the circulation of books, the transfer of artifacts, many of which carried social, religious, and aesthetic messages , the movement of artists and craftsmen, and the diffusion of Western social values and attitudes” (99). They also attracted large numbers of indigenous artisans who catered to Latin patrons, thereby diffusing artistic styles and techniques even further. Taking up the notion that the late crusaders were “more fully in touch than their predecessors had been with the culture not of their European or their adopted Levantine homelands, but with the cultures of both simultaneously” (313), several of the chapters examine how Middle Eastern culture was absorbed into western art. Part of this was accomplished through extensive gift- REVIEWS 230 networks linking the Crusaders with Muslims and Byzantines, but it also occurred when local artists architects were employed by Latin patrons. This challenges the commonly held view that Latin culture remained distinct from the culture that surrounded them. Other essays address how the growing consciousness of the failure of the Crusades affected French culture in the Middle East and at home. Literature and the arts both responded to the decline of the Crusader Kingdoms, and reflected “a desire by members of the crusader community to reconcile all that loss and failure” (3). Depictions of Old Testament battles in the windows of the Sainte-Chapelle in Paris and in illuminated Bibles from the time suggest an effort to create a sense of continuity with the past, and the “historical sweep and epic human struggle of holy wars” (9), while...