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