century of their quest to recapture Jerusalem. Commissioned by kings and queens, patriarchs and bishops, knights and merchants, who came as pilgrims or settlers to the Holy Land, it is an art of manuscript illumination, fresco painting, mosaics, stone sculpture, metalwork, ivory carving, coins and seals by artists trained in the Latin West, and the Byzantine and Islamic East. Combining the stylistic and iconographic traditions of these regions, Crusader art defies easy categorization: indeed, it is a unique phenomenon within the spectrum of medieval art.

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