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This chapter surveys sacred places in the Holy Land from pre-historic times down to the end of the Ottoman Empire. They are mostly attested either in archaeological remains or as structures which still stand today. Particular attention is paid to pre-biblical ‘Canaanite’ shrines with altars and standing stones, high places that continued into the Israelite period, synagogues from antiquity and more recently, churches throughout the centuries, including the Crusader period, and mosques.

The accounts of Scandinavian journeys to the Holy Land in the twelfth and thirteenth centuries, whether preserved in sagas, chronicles, itineraries or charters, not only constitute a valuable source of information about travel, warfare, politics and the ideology of north European pilgrims and crusaders, but also contribute more specifically to the body of western European literature from this period reflecting the state of the Holy Land and its inhabitants at the time of the Latin Kingdom of Jerusalem. This chapter focuses on just one aspect of the latter: the information that such texts give us about the condition of the Holy Places and their sanctuaries and churches.

This paper presents and discusses four Latin tombstones relating to Italian residents of medieval Ephesus that have been recovered from properties on the terrace of Ayasuluk (Selçuk), near the Byzantine Church of St John the Evangelist. Two of them, dating from the late 14th century, were originally published in 1937, while the other two, from the mid- 15th century, came to light more recently in January 2017.

For over a century the church that the Greek monks of Dayr Mar Saba are known to have possessed inside the walls of Jerusalem in the twelfth century has usually been associated with a chapel surviving inside the Disy family house opposite the police barracks south of the Citadel, while the Zāwiyyat al-Shaykh Yaʿqūb (Yaʿqūbiyya), on the east side of Christ Church, has been identified as having originally been built in the twelfth century, possibly by Monophysites, as a church dedicated to St James the Persian, or the ‘Cut-up’ (Intercisus). New documentary research, however, now makes it appear more likely that Mujīr al-Dīn was correct in attributing the building of the Yaʿqūbiyya to the Greeks and that it was also the church referred to by pilgrims in the twelfth century as that of St Sabas. This means that the identity of the church in Dār Disy, if indeed it was a church, remains to be determined.

C.N. Johns - a bibliography guide to 'Atlit - the Crusader Castle, town and surroundings excavations at Pilgrim's Castle ('Atlit) - the Faubourg and its defences medieval slip-ware form Pilgrim's Castle (1930-31) excavations at Pilgrim's Castle, 'Atlit, (1932) - the ancient tell and the outer defences of the castle excavations at Pilgrim's Castle, 'Atlit (1931-32) - an unfinished church in the suburb excavations at Pilgrim's Castle, 'Atlit (1932-33) - stables at the south-west of the suburb the Citadel, Jerusalem - a summary of work since 1934 medieval 'Ajlun - I - the castle (Qal'at ar-Rabad) the attempt to colonize Palestine and Syria in the 12th and 13th centuries.

The aim of this project, a collaboration between the Leon Levy Expedition to Ashkelon (Harvard University) and Cardiff University, which has also been supported by the Council for British Research ...

The treaty concluded in 1241 by Richard, earl of Cornwall, with the ruler of Egypt, al-Malik al-Salih Najm al-Din Ayyub, represented the high-water mark of Frankish territorial gains made in Syria and Palestine following Saladin’s conquests after the battle of Hattin in July 1187, when virtually all the former kingdom of Jerusalem had been lost. The main expansion of the area under Frankish control took place in 1229, following the arrival of the emperor Frederick II in the Holy Land. Continuing rivalry between the different Ayyubid rulers led al-Malik al-Kamil to seek Frederick’s help in return for the cession of a large part of the former kingdom of Jerusalem. The great rivalries that had afflicted the descendants of Saladin became particularly acute in the late 1230s and early 1240s and led the different Ayyubid factions to negotiate separate military alliances with the Franks in return for territorial concessions.

Some 90 years ago Camille Enlart was able to identify certain antecedants in 13th-century Acre for the style of Gothic architecture that blossomed in Famagusta almost a century later. Recent research in Syria–Palestine and in Cyprus has been able to put more flesh on the bones of this proposition, while also acknowledging the more up-to-date stimuli from the west that are also apparent in the architecture of Lusignan Cyprus.

The "Spring of the Cresson" is perhaps best known to historians of the crusader kingdom as the scene of a bloody engagement which took place on 1 May 1187 between 7,000 mamluk troops led by Saladin's amir, Muzaffar al-Din Kukburi, and a Christian force of some 140 knights, including the masters of the Temple and of the Hospital. The Muslims then returned to Banyas, passing Tiberias once again and continuing around the north shore of the lake, carrying the severed heads of the dead Templars and Hospitallers on their spears. The chapter reviews the available evidence relating to the Spring of the Cresson and to suggest that it should be identified as forming part of the river system known in medieval times, and quite possibly earlier, as the Kishon. The Crusaders in 1217-18 also seem to have camped in this general area, beside the stream flowing from it, either in the Wadi al-Madi, in the plain further south.

The crusader states. By Malcolm Barber. Pp. xvii+476 incl. 21 maps and 2 figs+15 plates. New Haven-London: Yale University Press, 2012. £25. 978 0 300 11312 9

The order of Knights Templar was established in Jerusalem in the former Aqsa Mosque around 1120 and received its rule after the Council of Troyes in 1129. It is likely that the Templars would have established a house in Acre at an early date, since that was the kingdom of Jerusalem’s principal port and the point of entry for pilgrims, soldiers and supplies arriving from the West. The existence of a house is implied when Philip of Milly was received into the order in Acre on 17 January 1166. The earliest specific references, however, appear in the order’s Hierarchical Statutes of c. 1165. These mention the order’s commander of Acre and the commander of its shipyard there. The latter was a sergeant; and he and the Templars’ ships at Acre were under the authority of the ‘commander of the Land’, to whom all goods arriving by sea normally had to be delivered. The shipyard was probably located on the strand in the eastern part of the old city, where the Hospitallers also later had an arsenal adjacent to the larger one belonging to the king. Goods and supplies, however, would more likely have been landed in the inner harbour under the eyes of the royal customs officials and transported thence to the order’s house.

Founded by William Fitz Osbern, earl of Hereford, soon after the Norman Conquest, Wigmore Castle passed in AD 1075 to Ralph de Mortimer, whose successors held the barony until 1432, when it descend...

Deux inscriptions latines retrouvees en 1975 respectivement parmi les ruines des fortifications byzantines d’Ain Djelloula (Cululis) et d’Henchir Sguidan, en Tunisie, sont decrites et commentees. La premiere, comportant un poeme de dix lignes d’hexametres, datee du regne de Justinien, celebre la construction des murs et la restauration de la cite par le prefet du pretoire Solomon et le tribun Nonnus entre les annees 535 (ou 539) et 544, au moment meme ou elle fut rebaptisee au nom de l’imperatrice Theodora. L’enceinte urbaine etait irreguliere, mesurant 150 m sur 300 environ, et etait renforcee par des tours rectangulaires. La pierre inscrite formait le linteau de la porte principale et etait assez abondamment decoree. Les vers occupaient le champ epigraphique d’une tabula ansata flanquee d’une paire d’edicules composes d’elements architecturaux, qui, vus ensemble, devaient representer le fronton et l’abside d’une eglise. La seconde inscription date d’entre octobre 574 et aout 578, pendant le regne de l’e...

The Crusader cathedral of Tyre, built in the twelfth century and destroyed by the Mamluks after 1291, was one of the largest and most prestigious ecclesiastical buildings in the Latin Kingdom of Jerusalem. Although its above-ground remains were studied in the nineteenth century and its foundations fully excavated in the twentieth, no satisfactory plan has yet been published. A new survey of what little now remains was therefore undertaken in May 1998. This paper combines the results of the new survey with an account of the history of the building.