Earthenware floor-tiles, lead-glazed with inlaid slip decoration. Four quarter tiles making up a circular picture; six surviving fragments; representation of Saladin (Salah al-Din) on horseback, in combat with his adversary Richard I (Coeur de Lion).…
Saladin (Arabic: صلاح الدين Ṣalāḥ ad-Dīn) is an animated television series inspired by the life of Salah Al-Din Yusuf Ibni Ayub, the Islamic hero who united Muslims in their fight against the Crusaders in the 12th century. The series depicts…
Remains of an expansive sugar factory, part of the Crusader castle of Colossi, Cyprus, 13th century.
What's the connection between "sweet salt" (=sugar), the Crusaders, and Cyprus?
Nearly one year after a fire ravaged the famed Notre Dame Cathedral in Paris, the city’s archbishop briefly returned to the cathedral its most prized relic, the Crown of Thorns, on Good Friday, the day in which Catholics commemorate Jesus’s suffering…
Commissioned by Cardinal Pietro Ottoboni, a great-nephew of Pope Alexander VIII, this was part of a massive series, heroic in scale as well as narrative, of fifteen tapestries depicting the romanticized version of the Christians’ First Crusade into…
Mystras was a major late medieval fortified city in the Peloponnese, Greece, founded in the 13th century. The site became the seat of the Latin Principality of Achaea following the fall of Constantinople to the Crusaders in 1204. In 1259, the city's…
This large, impressive canteen, the only known example of its kind from the Islamic world, was created in Mosul (now in Iraq) in the mid-13th century during the Ayyubid period. The canteen recalls the shape of ceramic pilgrim flasks. Its inlaid…
The Shroud of Saint-Josse, now in the collections of the Musée du Louvre, is a silk samite saddle cloth that was woven in northeastern Iran for Abu Mansur Bakhtegin, some time before 961.
When the precious textile was brought back from the First…