WITH that romantic sentiment which marks the nineteenth century, M. de Vogüé expresses the feeling of a visitor to Jerusalem in the days when Gothic architecture meant so much to the enthusiastic student of history: “Je retrouvais avec bonheur, au temps désiré du pèlerinage ces formes communes qui me rappelaient la patrie, et qui mêlaient aux glorieux souvenirs qu'elles évoquent les douces pensées du clocher domestique.” At the present day these charming sentiments would perhaps be less keenly felt by the tourist who has visited many other lands where the remains of Gothic architecture survive in the midst of alien surroundings. The distinguishing characteristics of Gothic art are well enough pronounced in the buildings of the Holy Sepulchre, but they are certainly not so well preserved as in the cathedrals of the neighbouring island of Cyprus. The churches of Nicosia and Famagusta, the immediate successors of the Jerusalem monuments in point of date, are singularly untouched except for the removal of all Christian emblems, and this of course is due to their conversion into mosques. Far different has it been with the Church of the Holy Sepulchre, owing chiefly to the great fire of 1808, and to the subdivision of the interior into the tenancies of the different sects of Christendom.

The study of the existing group of buildings is complicated by many remarkable circumstances. The visitor to the Holy City is confronted by the appearance of the half-ruined, half-rebuilt remains of one of the grandest monuments of the Middle Ages, tenanted by representatives of every branch of existing Christianity except the Protestant; and these various sects occupy the place as the tenants of Mohammedan owners of the property.

AT the time of the first, or great Crusade, Jerusalem was under the rule of the Fatimite Caliph of Egypt; but the different races composing the Caliphate of the period were at constant war with each other, and their dissensions allowed of an easy conquest of the Levant by the enterprising colonists from Western Europe. A short time before the Crusaders arrived on the scene the Holy City had been occupied by the famous Sokman son of Ortek the Seljuk Turk, who a few years later founded a powerful Seljuk dynasty in the region of Mesopotamia. The Egyptian Caliph had however succeeded in driving the Turks out of Jerusalem in August 1098—only in turn to be driven out himself by the Crusaders on the 15th July of the following year.

The settlement of the Franks within the walls of Jerusalem was evidently accompanied by an immense revolution in the condition and ownership of properties within the city; from the Temple area the Moslems were ejected, and it is not clear how far the Christians who were not Crusaders were allowed to occupy the Christian Holy Places.

Possibly the Orthodox monks may have been allowed an equal share in the use of the Holy Sepulchre as a shrine, although we do not hear of such being the case, and it was only at a later period, when the feudal law had been firmly established, that the rights and privileges of the native Christian communities were clearly defined in the usual documents and decrees.