T. E. Lawrence’s Undergraduate Dissertation – Page 154

maintain the prosperity of the Order when a sudden raid had set the nobles of Syria face to face with financial ruin. Perhaps all these many and varied advantages of the orders were most felt where they have survived most clearly, in their military architecture. The orders held practically every fortress of importance in Northern Syria, and they added to or rebuilt nine-tenths of those they occupied. This build- ing was done by Templars and Hospitallers in the same period,the last twenty years of the twelfth century, and the first half of the thirteenth century, but the bitter rivalry and jealousy between them led them to adopt different styles for their building. The Templars, always suspected of a leaning towards mysterious Eastern arts and heresies, took up the mantle of Justinian, as represented by the degenerate fortresses in Southern Syria, and amplified it, in making it more simple. The Hospitallers, in harmony with their more conservative tradition, drew their inspiration from the flourishing school of military architects in contemporary France, and so the in- born antipathy of East and West, which more than any one thing has been the primary cause of all Crusades was demonstrated in the fortresses of the Latin East. The two schools of builders had entirely different ideas and principles, and the two classes of buildings are entirely distinct, without a link or compromise between them. It will be easier to con- sider first the castles of the Templars, as the smaller class,