A scale model of the Church of the Holy Sepulcher in Jerusalem. The model consists of 16 separate pieces that can be disassembled.
Olive wood inlaid with mother-of-pearl and bone.
Still standing in Jerusalem, the Church of the Holy Sepulcher…
The amphora was made in Port Saint Symeon, in the Frankish principality of Antioch, shortly before the sack of the city by the Mamluks in 1268. It features incised decoration, highlighted with malachite green and manganese brown. On the body of this…
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…
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…
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…
The film, released in 1938, retells the story of the fight between the Teutonic Order and the people of Novgorod led by 20-year old Prince Alexander Nevsky in 1242. The event was directed by Sergei Eisenstein. The music score was written by Sergei…
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…
The most important patron of the arts in the Latin Kingdom of Jerusalem was the half-Armenian Queen Melisende. Melisende (1105–c. 1160) and her husband, Fulk V of Anjou, became joint rulers of the Crusader Kingdom of Jerusalem in 1131. However within…
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…
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…