T. E. Lawrence’s Undergraduate Dissertation – Page 240

wonderfully strong, with its enormous talus and massive walling : but his garrison were not able to make use of it against Philip Augustus. The day of very small castles had gone by. One detail of Chateau Gaillard, the horizontal striping of the walls by alternate courses of light and dark stone, is thought to be Byzantine on the analogy of some towers in the enceinte of Constantinople. Unfortunately no account of Richard's visit to that city has been preserved. Chateau Gaillard is no exotic growth, but a development of the multiple castle of the style of Taillebourg and Hautefort in the hands of an engineer of genius. There is no evidence that Richard borrowed anything, great or small, from any fortress which he saw in the Holy Land : it is not likely that he would do so, since he would find better examples of everything in that South of France which he knew so well. There is not a trace of anything Byzantine in the ordinary French castle, or in any English one : while there are evident signs that all that was good in Crusading architecture hailed from France or Italy. A summing up of the whole matter would be the statement that "the Crusading architects were for many years copyists of the Western builders."