Introduction

This paper will address primarily the archaeological evidence of the defensive outworks and ditches of Jerusalem that would have been major impediments to attacking Crusader forces in June–July 1099. New information on the northern and southern ditches has now become available as a result of recent archaeological excavations conducted to the north and south of the city. A re-examination of archival materials on earlier work done in the nineteenth century helps to contextualize much of this new material. The northern ditch was established at the time of the Fāṭimid Caliphate, and it served as a major defensive obstacle at the time of the Crusader siege in 1099. Indeed, it was still there and needed to be overcome at the time of Ṣalāḥ al-Dīn's siege in 1187. It would appear that the northern ditch was abandoned following the destruction of the Ayyȗbid fortifications in 1219/20, and that its infilling took place in subsequent Mamluk and Ottoman periods.

In July 2004, an exhibition entitled ‘Off the Beaten Track: Three Centuries of Women Travellers’ opened at the National Portrait Gallery in London. The subject of the exhibition was the watercolours painted by these travellers during their sojourn abroad. These women were not professional artists but ‘amateurs’, artists who operated in the sphere of leisure, not of commerce. The pictures, ranging from the ‘Ruins of Palmyra’ and ‘Four Portrait Heads of Afghan Leaders’ to ‘The Cactus Grove, near Algiers’ and botanical illustrations of Brazilian plants, were presented as art and as unique documents by the exhibition catalogue. This struck me, because the reason Jane Digby, Emily Eden, Maria Graham, and Barbara Bodichon were able to produce this art was that they had learned to paint watercolours, the ‘ideal medium for women’, as an accomplishment, a necessary part of their education as young ladies. Yet, such ‘female accomplishments’ were often disparaged at the time and have been treated in the historiography as a metonym for the dire state of female education in the period. This may explain why the term ‘accomplishment’ is not mentioned in the exhibition nor in its excellent catalogue.

In the long eighteenth century, accomplishments were debated by educationists, moralists, men and women of letters and artists, in essays, novels, poems, educational treatises as well as in visual culture. Most frequently, they were contested, variously held to be showy, superficial, trifling, mindless, and useless though sometimes useful, while the figure of the female performing accomplishments was often the object of satire or ridicule in the period's literature and satirical prints. Yet, the pervasiveness of accomplishments in debates of the time suggests that they must have performed important cultural work. In this chapter I propose to identify what this cultural work was, by using a different approach to the accomplishments. I argue that accomplishments must be studied not just individually but as different expressions of one overarching discourse, just like they were understood to be in the texts and discourses of the period. ‘No doubt the whole of the accomplishments have some general principles…’ declared Mudie at the start of the chapter on ‘Accomplishment’ in The Complete Governess.

The Latin kingdom of Jerusalem's catastrophic defeat at the battle of Hattin on 4 July 1187 has been the subject of considerable study by historians of the Latin East. So comprehensive was the Frankish defeat at Hattin that very few knights remained in the kingdom for its defense, and in the months that followed the battle, the kingdom was almost annihilated as one Frankish city after another fell to Islam.2 Only through the intervention of the Third Crusade (1189–92) was the Latin kingdom preserved, as crusader forces successfully restored a narrow strip of coastal territory, punctuated by a handful of port cities, to Frankish control.