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a low but defensible wall was thrown up in 1100, enough to house 15 knights and protect the Syrian settlers and their houses. During the next two years, the Syrian farmers and artisans were joined by families of Frankish men and women. Their main produce was from a vineyard controlled by the clerics into whose hands Ramleh had been given. The settlers were given their land in return for a rent paid to the Church in the form of produce.12
Thus, at first, the work of building had a purely defensive impetus, gradually transformed into more peaceful architecture. Stone walls were needed for protection from the real and expected onslaughts of the Moslems, temporarily driven from a land they had held for four centuries. Tripoli, formerly an open market town, was girded with frowning stone walls, as were others.
Once the immediate needs of fortification were met, for many of the women of the First Crusade, life would have taken a new but essentially familiar turn. The noblewomen had been ladies of castles and manors while in Europe: in the Holy Land, they replicated their task. The lady of Outremer was expected to do everything that her counterpart in Europe had to do.
But there were many differences: for one thing, the strongholds were on the edge of what the Europeans knew. The settlers were frontierswomen, and at their castle gate might begin a hostile, unconquered strangeness of a kind not known in the heartlands of Europe, although it was to be encountered still on the outlands of the European settlements, such as the border with Scotland or the Baltic region.
The other difference was that the castles had to be built literally around them and on a scale unprecedented in Europe.
The Europeans were familiar with the concept of stone castles, such as the White Tower of William the Conqueror. But there was nothing in Europe to compare with the elaborateness of Byzantine fortifications they saw at Constantinople, Antioch and other sites. The first European castles in the east were replicas of their homeland fortresses: they soon transformed into something new. The pilgrims began to develop such castles of their own, at fantastic cost.
The Castle of Saphet, for example, built by the Templars, cost 1.1 million bezants at a time when a knight's income was 500 bezants a year. Each subsequent year, the builders spent about 40,000 additional bezants in maintenance and extensions. Every day, the castle had to provide for a minimum of 1,700 people. Some 12,000 mules laden with barley and wheat as well as other foodstuffs and cash for payment to the mercenaries were brought into the castle each year, beside other horses, munitions and armour.12
The ladies and women of Outremer encountered strange new ways of living in such strongholds and in the towns which were more frequently their usual place of residence.
Some of these customs they adopted readily - at other times they flaunted their European way of life in front of the outraged local inhabitants. Usama, for example, complained about the way women in the streets of Acre and Jerusalem went out of their homes with their faces bare, in contrast to the Moslem women who were always veiled.14
Many Christian women did in fact adopt the veil - but only when they felt it necessary to preserve their complexions against the extremes of the climate.
For most women, their lives were cast in the mould of what they knew - but informed and enriched by the culture they encountered. Bathing, for example, was now possible, not only because the milder climate would have made undressing fully more comfortable year round - anyone who has bathed even today in the average English house during the middle of winter knows that it requires forethought - but because elaborate water systems made it convenient to do so. Even the rough mercenaries who came in search of plunder luxuriated in steam heated baths in their quarters as a matter of course, as at the remote castle of Belvoir near the southern end of the sea of Galilee.
The new settlers soon adopted much of the opulence of the East into their homes, creating a degree of luxury still unknown in the cramped, shabby and smelly keeps of European castles. Willbrand of Oldenburg, for example, commented during his pilgrimage that the castle of Beirut had walls covered with beautiful marble panelling.
The vaulted room of the main hall was painted to resemble the sky. A colourful marble fountain in the middle of the room added coolness and the gentle music of falling water. 15
This was a far cry from English and French castles, with their arrowslit windows, flinty walls, and a fire burning in the centre of the hall simultaneously fumigating and toasting the inhabitants.
BAZAARS AND VINEYARDS
For most women, the towns and cities of the Holy Land would have been more familiar than the remoter castles.
It is estimated that ninety per cent of the Frankish settlers chose to settle in urban areas. These cities and villages contained splendours undreamed of in the pitiful hamlets of Europe. The Moslem town of Aleppo, for instance, as described by Ibn Jubayr in 1184, was both immense in size and planned with meticulous care. It had vast bazaars set out in regular, adjacent rows. Each row was reserved for a particular trade, and the shopper could go from one to another until purses were light and feet heavy. These bazaars were covered with shady wood roofs that were also beautifully designed, so that even busy people passing by would stop to gape in admiration. The main bazaar was like a gracious and beautiful enclosed garden, surrounding the chief mosque. Its shops were principally of wood, each in an original design.
As well, settlers were encouraged to move into empty lands in new towns with a purely economic reason for existence. A similar description to the one of Aleppo survives of a much smaller new town, Dunaysar in northern Syria. It was on a vast plain and was surrounded by sweet smelling herbs and irrigated market gardens. Without walls, it had retained a rural look. Crowds of shoppers came from all the outlying regions to its bazaars seeking the produce of its surrounding farms. In order to get to the markets,
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