Sample Pages: Bringing the Holy Land Home

Bringing the Holy Land Home

The Crusades, Chertsey Abbey, and the Reconstruction of a Medieval Masterpiece edited by amanda luyster

HARVEY MILLER PUBLISHERS

table of contents

CONTRIBUTORS 5

FOREWORD by Michael Wood .......................................................................................................... 11

DIRECTOR’S FOREWORD by Meredith Fluke ............................................................................... 17

PREFACE by Amanda Luyster ........................................................................................................... 21

We who were Occidentals have now become Orientals

CATALOGUE ESSAYS

Amanda Luyster ....................................................................................................................... 29

The Chertsey Tiles: Reassembling Fragments of Meaning

Suleiman A. Mourad .............................................................................................................. 81

A Clash of Civilizations? Diverse Motivations, Multiple Actors, and the Hidden Richness of Muslim Historical Sources

David Nicolle .......................................................................................................................... 93

The Crusades: A Short History

Euan Roger ............................................................................................................................. 109

So Much National Magnificence and National History: The Foundation, Structure, and Fall of Chertsey Abbey

Richard A. Leson ................................................................................................................... 127

Epic Sensibilities in French Art of the Crusader Period

Cynthia Hahn

......................................................................................................................... 149

Re-creating the Holy Land at Home: Relics from the East in England

Elizabeth Dospěl Williams

................................................................................................. 177

The Mobility of Fabric: Textiles in and around Medieval Eurasia

Eva R. HoFFman

...................................................................................................................... 203

Crusaders in Jerusalem: Frankish Encounters with Idols, Holy Monuments, and Portable Objects

Sarah M. Guérin

.................................................................................................................... 229

Oliphants and Elephants: African Ivory in England

Scott Redford

........................................................................................................................ 255

A Cupbearer Crosses Cultures: Figural Ceramic Traditions of the Eastern Mediterranean

Paroma Chatterjee ................................................................................................................ 271

Citizens and Invaders: Encounters with Sculpture in Constantinople during the Fourth Crusaded

OBJECTS IN FOCUS

Andrea Myers Achi

............................................................................................................... 289

Black Fighters on a Late Antique Textile

Sean Gilsdorf

......................................................................................................................... 292

St. Menas Pilgrim Flask

Nina Masin-Moyer ................................................................................................................ 295

Brooch/Amulet with Inscribed Arabic Seal

Nina Masin-Moyer ................................................................................................................ 297

Enkolpion Reliquary Cross

Nina Masin-Moyer ................................................................................................................ 299 Chess Piece with King or Vizier

Alicia Walker

......................................................................................................................... 301 So-called Crusader’s Bowl

A. L. McClanan

...................................................................................................................... 305 Architectural Fragment with Griffin

Nina Masin-Moyer ................................................................................................................ 308 Amphora with Confronted Hybrid Figures

Meredith Fluke

....................................................................................................................... 311

Section of a Cassone Panel with Beasts in Roundels

Grace P. Morrissey ............................................................................................................... 315

Lusterware Bowl with Figure

Eurydice S. Georganteli ...................................................................................................... 318 Gold Penny of Henry III

Nina Masin-Moyer ................................................................................................................ 321 Gemellion with the Arms of the Latin Kingdom of Jerusalem

Students From Boston College

........................................................................................ 323 The Morgan Picture Bible

WORKS CITED ............................................................................................................................... 327

INDEX ............................................................................................................................................. 351

This volume and the exhibition it accompanies tell a fascinating story. The setting is Chertsey, once an island in the Thames and still surrounded by water meadows, marshes, river channels, and flood dikes, twenty miles west of London. Here is the site of a famous monastery founded in the seventh century that rose to become one of the richest in Britain before it was dissolved by Henry VIII in 1537. In the years that followed, the buildings were almost totally destroyed: within a century, virtually nothing remained on the site apart from a few overgrown walls. But beginning in the eighteenth century scholars were alerted to chance finds of fragments of exquisite glazed floor tiles of rich color and fabulous delicacy of execution. In the mid-nineteenth century excavations revealed further traces of the great abbey and its decoration, showing that the chapter-house floor had been completely covered by two-color tiles bearing figural decoration. Hundreds of fragments were excavated on site in 1854, and more of these glazed tiles—prized for their beauty—were found reused in a summer-house floor on nearby St. Ann’s Hill; others have turned up as far away as the church of All Saints in Little Kimble, over twenty miles away in Buckinghamshire.

When they were published in 1885 the tiles fired the public imagination, especially those illustrating Arthurian tales, notably that archetypal medieval story of forbidden love, the legend of Tristan and Isolde. Others depicted the zodiac, part of the monthly cycle of the farming calendar in the tradition of medieval painted calendars going all the way back to the Old English period. Above all there were brilliant, indeed majestic, combat tiles showing King Richard the Lionheart in a fictional battle with the Arab hero Saladin (Salah al-Din), sultan of Egypt and Syria. These were accompanied by other combat images with lions, alluding to the superhuman strength of the Lionheart himself—the origin of the Three Lions emblem of the English monarchy.

Mold-made and inlaid, the tiles were so fine that at first it was thought they must have been made in France, coming as they did from the period of the French King Louis IX (later St. Louis), patron of the Sainte-Chapelle in Paris. But in 1922 the find of a kiln nearby in Abbey Gardens, complete with unfired and reject tile fragments, showed that they were locally manufactured, using clay excavated from an area south of the town long known to locals as the Potteries, an outlier of the belt of London Clays that stretches across the southeast into Suffolk. Perhaps the finest tiles from medieval Britain, the Chertsey tiles had been designed, manufactured, glazed, and fired by local craftsmen. Further finds in 1984 and

The Chertsey Tiles: Reassembling Fragments of Meaning

Wesee medieval England’s apparent isolation, on an island situated at the edge of the orb of the world, on a twelfth-century map drawn in a Benedictine monastery in Cambridgeshire (Fig. 1). From this point of view England seems remote, only tangentially connected to global networks. Yet the aim of this volume and the exhibition it accompanies is to explore the impact that art objects manufactured far away, particularly in the Byzantine and Islamic Mediterranean, had on the medieval visual culture of England. A focus on the portable and decorative arts, including ceramics, textiles, ivories, and metalwork, permits a different vision of England’s relation to the outside world to emerge.

We take as our starting point the iconic Chertsey tiles (ca. 1250; Fig. 2), which have been objects of scholarly attention since the eighteenth century and are among the most admired ceramic tiles in England. The combat tiles depict scenes of battle within a complex program that includes a number of previously undeciphered Latin inscriptions. Earlier scholarship had identified the floor generally as a “series of famous combats,”1 but my research shows that all of these scenes refer to crusading deeds accomplished in the eastern Mediterranean, portrayed in the light of an invented English victory.2 While this imagery focused on King Richard the Lionheart, we will see that it had contemporary importance for the crusading aims of Richard’s nephew, King Henry III (1207–72), and his wife, Queen Eleanor of Provence (1223–91).

The combat tiles were discovered in a broken and disturbed state, with no pieces in situ. With assistance from many individuals, including digital-imaging expert Janis Desmarais, and the generous cooperation of the British Museum, including current tiles curator Beverley Nenk, we recently completed a digital reconstruction of the figural roundels as well as many of the lost texts. Analysis of the reconstructions has revealed that the pavement, comprising both images and texts, was an original composition that emphasized the (fictional) victory of Richard the Lionheart over Sultan Saladin in the

1 Mappamundi, made in the early twelfth century at Thorney Abbey, a Benedictine monastery in Cambridgeshire. Oxford, St. John’s College, MS 17, fol. 6r. © The President and Fellows of St. John’s College, Oxford.

4 Performance of a Crusade play at King Charles V’s feast (detail), Master of the Coronation of Charles VI, Paris, ca. 1375–80. From the Grandes chroniques de France (Great Chronicles of France). Paris, Bibliothèque nationale de France, MS fr. 2813, fol. 473v. © BNF.

6 Chertsey tile, Tristan series, with Isolde in the boat to Brittany. Second half of the thirteenth century, found at Chertsey Abbey. British Museum 1885,1113.8990. © The Trustees of the British Museum.

8

Digital reconstruction of Richard the Lionheart and surrounding text, tile molds designed in the 1250s.

Cf. Elizabeth Eames, Catalogue of Medieval Lead-Glazed Earthenware Tiles in the Department of Medieval and Later Antiquities, British Museum (London: Trustees of the British Museum, 1980), 2 [hereafter: Eames]: 466. © Janis Desmarais and Amanda Luyster.

1.

Iconography of the Combat Tiles: The Lion Hunters

Samson

(Fig. 17)

The Old Testament figure of Samson is recognizable here because of his long, tousled hair and characteristic gesture, hands at the lion’s mouth, preparing to tear it apart with his bare hands (Judg. 14:6). This Samson is clean-shaven, youthful, with floating locks and a narrow, ornamented band encircling his head. He belongs to an iconographic group in which Samson rides the lion as if it were a horse, having leapt astride the lion’s back.

Medieval readers’ and writers’—and artists’ and viewers’—understanding of biblical figures, including Samson, was rich and flexible.39 Samson appears frequently in medieval art alongside other images of men fighting. He also appears as a decorative motif on candlesticks, as a leather stamp on bookbindings, and on game pieces. Significant nodes of meaning for Samson in medieval England include his impressive physical strength, the assimilation of his battle with the lion to the battle between Christ and Satan, and the narrative of his life spent in the Holy Land. He shares his identity as a strong man who fought in the eastern Mediterranean with the other Chertsey combatants, and his presence connects the other Chertsey fighters to biblical history and the Holy Land; he is their typological forerunner. His well-known combat with a lion links his struggle with that of Richard, the famous “lionheart” whose coat of arms bore lions, as well as with the other lion combatants.

2. Man Raising a Club (Fig. 18)

In this incomplete design, an unarmored man in a long tunic raises a weapon—probably a stick or club—above his head while directing his attention downwards. This roundel could have represented the Old Testament king David: many images show David using a club to slay a lion, and David was also a model biblical king and a prototype for crusader rulers. Indeed, the crusader territories were known as the Regnum David. 40 Like Samson, this tile design can be understood as a representation of great physical strength.

3. Lion and Standing Knight (Fig. 19)

A lion rears, scrabbling his claws against a shield held by a standing knight. The knight wears a long tunic over chain mail, his helm is down, and he plants his feet to hold his shield firmly against his attacker. He positions his sword down low, focusing on defense. As noted above, we have been able both to add more fragments to this design and correct the number of chevrons on the knight’s shield in the drawing (Fig. 20).

This tile design was probably copied from an English seal. As George Henderson observed in 1978, the image shows a close connection to an English seal whose matrix (the metal die that impresses the

19 Digital reconstruction of Chertsey combat tile with lion and standing knight, tile molds designed in the 1250s. Eames 470. © Janis Desmarais and Amanda Luyster.

20

Drawing of Chertsey combat tile with lion and standing knight, tile molds designed in the 1250s. Eames 470. © The Trustees of the British Museum.

53 Conrad III slays an enemy at the Battle of Ascalon, from William of Tyre, Histoire d’Outremer, ca. 1250. London, British Library, MS Yates Thompson 12, fol. 109v (detail). © The British Library Board.

63

Apse of the upper chapel, Sainte-Chapelle, Paris, second quarter of thirteenth century. Wikimedia Commons, Oldmanisold, CC BY-SA 4.0.

87

Dome of the Rock, Jerusalem, built by order of the Umayyad caliph Abd al-Malik, 691–92 CE. Photo

by Stacey Franco on Unsplash.

Oliphants and Elephants: African Ivory in England

On one of the last Chertsey tiles that narrates the ill-fated romance of Tristan and Isolde, the adulterous queen makes a seabound journey to Brittany to reunite with her banished lover (Fig. 6). Protected by a broad hat over her cowl, seated in a lateen-rigged wooden vessel with a sailor manning the rudder, Isolde crossing the English Channel figures the voyages taken by so many of the luxurious objects that adorned the palaces of the English king Henry III. Although the Chertsey tiles, which originally graced the halls of Westminster Palace, are literally made of the English earth, many of the raw materials that contributed to the sumptuousness of the royal court had taken long-distance, intercontinental journeys before arriving in England. Like spices, silks, perfumes, and exotic animals, sundry artistic materials were sourced from abroad, including pigments from Afghanistan, glass from the Levant, precious gems from India, pearls from the Red Sea and the Persian Gulf, and rock crystal from Madagascar.1 Especially in the thirteenth century, with sailors’ growing mastery of the treacherous Straits of Gibraltar (Homer’s impassable Pillars of Hercules), England was more closely connected than ever before to such Mediterranean entrepôts as Majorca, Alexandria, and Constantinople, clearinghouses for luxuries from across Afro-Eurasia. In the thirteenth century, Genoese and Venetian ships docked directly at London’s ports, bearing in their holds an eye-popping array of sumptuous goods along with more quotidian commodities like minerals, base metals, and the chemicals and dyes needed by the flourishing northern European textile industry, which generated so much of England’s wealth.2

Ivory is perhaps the most obvious of the imported artistic materials. The tusks of the African savanna elephant (Loxodonta africana) furnish a dense, protein-rich calciferous material that is superbly adapted to fine, detailed carving, and its unique properties were consistently desired throughout the Middle Ages. When the interregional trade routes linking northern Europe with sub-Saharan Africa were weak, England, northern France, and the Rhineland deployed walrus tusks as an acceptable substitute. But

97 Elephant of Henry III, from Matthew Paris, Liber Additamentorum. London, British Library, MS Cotton Claudius D.i, fol. 169v. © The British Library Board.

122

Circus and hippodrome of Christian Constantinople, from Cassell’s History of England from the Roman Invasion to the Wars of the Roses, vol. 1, The King’s Edition (New York: Cassell, 1909), p. 141, after an engraving in Anselm Banduri, Imperium Orientale (Paris, 1711), https://www.gutenberg.org/files/48451/48451-h/48451-h.htm#chapter_xv.