Already, folks, hello again! This chapter might be one of the longest (if not the longest one) so far. It clocks in something near 30.000 characters, and there are LOTS of information and tidbits, some minor spoilers and etc. Overall, its just a non-linear and non-narrative effort into worldbuilding. I've tried to divide it in sections to facilitate reading, but I imagine that there will be many details you guys will be interested in discussing.
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INTERLUDE 4 - ABOUT THE LIFE IN THE OUTREMER (PART ONE) - ECONOMICS
The Levantine economy in the 12th Century is, as are most of the pre-modern societies, predominantly agrarian, but with a substantial urban infrastructure, relatively more developed and populous, even in comparison to the Mediterranean polities. However, we can be certain that a very substantial fraction of the overall wealth and revenue produced in the Outremer comes from the urban settlements, mainly due to their role as a siphon of the Asiatic commerce into the Mediterranean basin, but also because of their well-developed industries, which only beginning to (re)develop in Europe, after the long period of decline after the downfall of the Carolingian monarchy.
1.1. From the earth and from the sea
A Medieval Painting depicting a Biblical scene of the Exodus, where the Israelites are shown consuming the "heavenly" manna
Canaan - the region corresponding to central Palestine - is famously known, in the Bible, as the land of mannah and honey. Palestine, even if comparably drier than the surrounding regions, experienced nonetheless a variety of seasons, from tepid and malaria-stricken summers, to drenching rains and frigid winters. Well-served by an ancient irrigation system, its agriculture is wholly dependent on small-scale gardener cultivation, with but a few plantations in the Jordan valley. While the population as a whole depended on the cultivation of traditional Mediterranean crops, such as wheat, barley, olives and grapes to sustain itself, the Franks - as the Arabs before them - greatly prized
fruits such as date palms, figs and bananas and made efforts to grow these produces for both internal consumption and for the external markets. The most remarkable and favored one, however, was
sugarcane, whose high value in the Asiatic and European markets meant its production was deserving of constant regulation by the Latin authorities. After the conquest of Egypt, indeed, the Franks would become
de facto monopolists of sugar production in the eastern Mediterranean.
Another important economic segment in many agrarian societies is the exploitation of animal resources, from which we can highlight some practices: (i) cattle raising, predominantly of bovines, sheep and swine (ii) animal husbandry, notably of horses and camels; and (iii) hunting. Even if shepherding has a special place in Judeo-Christian cultural worldview, being an activity often referenced in Biblical scripture, be it by association with historical characters, such as King David, or by allegory, when it identifies the Christians as the flock of God, its economic relevance is all but negligible in the Crusader Era. Money was to be found in the production of various other raw goods: meat and milk, wool, hide and fur, honey and wax, and so forth. In Syria, differently from Palestine, we still see, to this day, rudimentary corporations, usually centered in parochial villages, mediating the trade between individual producers and the urban hubs of Antioch, Aleppo and Damascus; this, however, was but a feeble vestige of the complex socio-economic structures that existed in the prosperous years of the Umayyads and of the Abbasids, severely disturbed by the collapse of the Caliphate.
A Muslim chronicler from late 12th Century Baghdad famously described that the holy sites of al-Quds [
Jerusalem], as well as the routes of pilgrimage used for the hajj were now infested with swine, a double entendre that likely referred to both actual pigs and Franks. Nonetheless, there is no evidence that the arrival of the Crusaders provoked an increase of
pig-herding nor of
pork consumption, for the simple reason that the Islamic authorities that used to rule the realm before them had never actually interfered in non-Muslim dietary practices. By the same token, these activities, regarded as basic fixtures of daily life, were submitted to few controls by the newly-established Latin authorities, with the exception of those seen as pertaining to nobiliar interests, such as milling, creation of horses and hunting, which were submitted to specific feudal obligations.
Yet other aspect so fundamental to Levantine society, that also warranted several mentions in the Bible, is
fishing, both riverine and maritime. The eastern Mediterranean in particular seemed particularly blessed by Neptunian plentiness ever since time immemorial, as the wealth of Phoenicia attested, and, in the centuries of the Crusader Era, the goods harnessed from the water bodies were still fundamental to the basic diet, from the rich to the poor. From fish to crustaceans, seafood forms a staple of Mediterranean cuisine, and, sometimes, we see some oddities such as dolphin skin and whale meat mentioned by contemporary authors as pertaining to the communal table of the wealthy merchants and noblemen. Other worthy mentions are given to the harvest of
sea snails that produce the
purple dye (Tyrian purple), so venerated by the ancient Romans, senators and emperors, and the extraction of
corals from the reefs near Egypt and Cyprus, well-valued in the Syrian emporia.
Finally, one essential production of Mediterranean societies is that of
salt. For millennia, the sea littoral has seen the construction of various structures designed to harvest this infinite resource that whitens the blue water of the globe, and, like every other rulers before them, the Latins in the Outremer enforced their own policies to carefully regulate the production of salt. As most of the aforementioned economic activities, the menial and intensive labour dedicated to produce salt is ever performed by the submitted native Palestinians and Syrians, but the greatest profits of this commerce, heretofore reaped by the Arabic and Jewish merchants, now pertain mostly to the Italian and Provençal entrepreneurs, by the decree of the Latin Princes.
A 14th C. painting from Milan depicting two fishermen and a fantastic giant fish
1.2. From the cities
In general terms, it is correct to say that the manorial system peculiar to European feudal entities was imported by the Frankish equestrian caste to the Outremer, but it had to be adapted to suit the socioeconomic structures developed in the Near East. This means that a lord, in the countryside, holds a share of the land as an hereditary property, granted to him by the suzerain - or, as was the case of the veterans of the First Crusade, by the right of conquest - and the people who work the land are obliged to provide a share of their labor to sustain the “household”, including those employed by the lord, his knights and sergeants. This in contrast with the iqta system adopted by the Arabs, one in which the nobleman is entitled to a share of the wealth produced by the laborers, in pecunia, but does not possesses the land itself.
In the cities, however, the dynamics of power and wealth distribution are markedly distinct, and more similar to the aforementioned tax-farming structures hitherto adopted by the Arabs. The Count of Tyre, as much as the Count of Acre, is deemed the lord protector of the subjects residing inside the limits of the walls, much like the King of England for London; however, one would be more likely to find his vassals living in a palace or mansion in Tyre than in a rural manor, this very much unlike the English barons. And to sustain their wealth, the suzerain will entitle the vassal not with a piece of the city itself, evidently, but rather with a share of the collected tributary and fiscal income. And, indeed, it was a very substantial portion of their wealth, likely larger than that of the agricultural income.
While the income derived from the tributation of the urban activities by itself was large enough to justify detailed regulations by the Frankish lords - whose charters defined provisions for all sorts of activities, from smithing to shoemaking -, the one that incited their constant interest (and greed) was
commerce. And a lot of attention is dispensed to ensure that the merchants bringing their goods, from either land or sea, are paying the lordly dues. The lordly retainers and sergeants are appointed officers of a cadre of agents dedicated to oversee the wharfs and gates, so that no wagon of Arabic insense, Ethiopian ivory or Cathayan [i.e.
Chinese] silk, nor any shipment of French wine or Burgundian timber penetrates into the city without this very fact reverting in a payment to the lord. And the magnanimity of one magnate incurs in the loss of another one, because the merchants, knowing that the tolls in Acre are lesser than those of Beirut, will undoubtedly prefer the first instead of the latter.
Predictably, the prevention of the nobiliar conflicts arising from this “fiscal war” will be a perpetual concern of the Latin Princes, and, later of the Kings of the Outremer, lest the nobles might shed their own blood out of a conflict fostered by “Mammon”.
1.3. The guilds and the caravans
A guild is a corporation of laborers dedicated to a certain craft, an hierarchical and rule-bound structure of compulsory adhesion. More than simply a code of conduct, the statute of the guild is a norm. And just as a fish cannot swim without being immersed in water, so a craftsman cannot develop his industry without being integrated into the guild.
The lord, being the suzerain, has the right to exact tribute and impose certain obligations over the lowborn caste, but, unless he is a tyrant, he will be well aware of the complexities of the different strata, and preserve the distinctive treatment owed to each of them. The serf is bound to the land, but the yeomen and free tenants are not, and they are all too different from the artisans and craftsmen, whose skills make the fruit of their labor more valuable, because they are unique. And the lord knows, after all, that he cannot interfere or attempt to control the corporations, because they are bound to their own order, much like the monks are bound to their monastic congregation, and not to his household or his vassalage, as are the sergeants and the knights.
Painting depicting a parchment producer (c. 14th C.). Owing to the demand for parchment to sustain the Outremerine bureaucracy, this production rose to proeminence in the Levant during the 12th Century, and this led to the formation of a guild in Jerusalem
For a long period of the Crusader Era, the venues of maritime trade were de facto monopolized by the Italian city-republics, with the prime agents of the flow of goods from the Orient being Venice and Genoa. Later on, we see a greater presence of other groups, notably the Provençals from Montpellier, the Ragusans, the Iberian Galicians and even the Flemish, who will arrive to exploit the profitable Egyptian markets. And everyone of these peoples are benefited by different lords of the Outremer according to the respective political interests, usually with the grant of special rights of private districts and self-applied laws and customs.
If the maritime commerce is dominated by the Europeans, the same cannot be said about the land one, which is still a domain of the Jews, the Syrians, the Arabs, and the Persians because they harness the routes of Asia. Travels in these are dangerous ones, for every merchant can be easy prey to a dedicated band of Turcoman raiders, Bedouin bandits or Yemeni pirates, unless he is joined in a caravan, and, even so, he ought to sacrifice some coins to be worth the protection of sellswords. Some of these even became the stuff of popular legends in Arabia and in Persia, and a common motif is that of the noble mercenary - usually an exiled noble - who vows to protect pilgrims in the way to Mecca and is assaulted by impious cross-bearing barbarians, only to find out that the caravan is transporting a princess, to whom he will marry.
And the various caravans, whether they dialogue in Arab, in Persian, or even in Hindi, all come to Cairo, Damascus or Aleppo, and from there to Acre, Beirut and Antioch, among others, and so the wealth cycles from the four corners of the Earth in one season, only to begin anew in the next one.
1.4. The Arteries and Veins of Commerce
Detail of an illustration inside of a Medieval "Peryplus" depicting a caravan of merchants in a venue of the Silk Road (c. 13th C.A.D.)
The heart of Asia pumps the flow of commerce across the four corners of the continent, much like the heart of man movements the humors to every of its flesh crevices. Silk, jade and other precious stones, porcelain and teas flow from the bountiful realms of Serica and Mangi [i.e.
Manzi/Southern China] into Transoxiana, and from there it spreads northwards to the steppe of Cumania, westwards to the riverlands of Babilonia and southwards to the realm of Ghor, all of these that once were mere provinces in the universal kingdom of Alexander the Great.
From India Magna [
i.e. Indian Subcontinent] comes the spices and saffron, the medicines and the colored woods, but these more often than not come by the venues of the ocean, because the realms of the Indians are bordered by insurmountable mountains and unforgiving deadlands. These ships go by the way of Hormuz or around Arabia into the Red Sea, and are avidly procured by the viziers of the Sultan of Persia and by the camel-lords of Oman and Yemen before they can be conducted to the Mediterranean littoral, but here the routes are acresced of incense, camels, dyes and sugar.
And from the distant realms of Abyssinia [i.e.
modern Ethiopia] and Azania [i.e.
Horn of Africa region] the Franks also fortunate to receive so much as they are awarded from Asia; of ivory, exotic furs and hides, incense, gems and even live animals, many of which will adorn the menageries of the crowned princes, from striped horses to bald black lions, and unicorn-bulls.
All of these goods flow into the Mediterranean, as aforementioned, and by this virtue the masters of the Levant were fated to be the benefactors of the flow of commerce, considering that it is by the ports of Palestine, Phoenicia and Syria that these riches will be transshipped to Italy, Iberia, Francia and beyond. Once the Crusaders made themselves the masters of the realm of Egypt, they finally welded the conduit between the profitable “Erythreian” venue and the Mediterranean one and the collected wealth inaugurated a new age of material development for Europe as a whole, even as much as the Silk Road continues to be submitted to the monopoly of the Persian commonwealth.
1.5. Money in itself
Until the Crusader Era, the circulation of gold coinage was rare in Latin Europe. Barring what could be harvested from Transylvanian and Bohemian mines or the Rhenish alluvium, most of it had to be imported from the Moorish caliphates, which, in turn, acquired precious metals from the distant kingdoms of Ghana, of Nigritica and Farosiana [i.e.
Nigritai and Pharusii, refers to Songhay/Mali] and of Benichileba [i.e.
“Bnichilebs”, ITTL refers to the Fulani], inhabited by coal-skinned giants and dog-headed barbarians.
European gold, in general, was “recycled” from what was already in circulation, as it was common for it to be reforged from centuries-old pieces of treasure and similar devices. It is said that the Avar hoard plundered by Charlemagne some three centuries before the Crusades was the one destined to finance Duke Godfrey’s Lorrainer army, coming from the Archbishopric of Aachen, whose gold pieces had been gifted by the greatest scion of the Carolingian dynasty.
To be fair, precisely because it was comparatively rare, there was never a substantial demand for gold before the Crusader Era; it could really only be acquired by crowned aristocrats and ecclesiastic institutions, and it was not commonly used as a medium of exchange. Silver, in contrast, was produced continuously through the Middle Ages in Europe, and even exported from there. It was mainly extracted from Sardinia (11th-12th C.), Franconia (10th-12th C.), Saxony (12th - 14th C.) and Bohemia, the latter which supplied silver in great quantities to the occidental markets for centuries. While gold was commonly used for ornamental purposes, silver’s main function was exactly to furnish material for the production of coinage, and thus it was more usual to be seen circulating as money than as a decoration.
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Currencies - then wholly dependent on the exchange of metal, as paper money was unheard of, barring one or another regional oddities such as in Prague - were generally based around the copper (sometimes bronze) billon and the more valuable (silver) denarius (later: Denier or Denario) thus named by the Carolingians in an attempt to emulate the ancient Roman coinage paradigms.
In Europe, Rhōmania alone had a complex currency that orbited around gold coinage, descended from the ancient Roman (gold) solidus, and which for centuries until the 11th one had been a standard of international commerce, owing to its substantial fineness, until its abrupt debasement by Imperial fiat. Yet another applause that must be bestowed to the the terrific Komnenoi because they restored prestige to the gold currency in the form of the hyperpyron. To understand its influence, one must see that two words to refer to gold coinage that will be elsewhere in the continent for some centuries to come - “
besant” and “
perpera” - are related to “Byzantium” and to the Greek name of the currency, respectively. There were, of course, other currencies such as the silver “
aspron” and the copper “
tetarteton” (one which, before Alexios I Komnenos, referred to a type of gold currency), but outside of the Empire, none of these were as popular as the gold coinage.
Depiction of an hyperpyron of the reign of Basileus John II Komnenos
In the Arabic world, including al-Andalus and the Maghreb, the gold standard was in force too, and, oddly enough, the name for the gold coin, dinar, derived from the Roman name for the silver coins, the aforementioned denarius.
Now, this explained, we must repeat that the, in the Crusader State, urban economy had a strong numismatic element, and, unlike in other polities in Europe, the central government, even in the earlier moments of its political consolidation, made an effort to control and develop coinage production, to make it less dependent in the acquisition of Rhōmaiōn or Saracen gold - even if these were free to circulate. Thus, while in Europe it was acceptable for counts and barons, as well as bishops, to struck coins, without any sort of royal oversight (even if a common motif for coins was the depiction of the monarch’s effigy), and this from Castille to Poland, in the Levant, the Archiepiscopalian Office from a very early date evoked the powers to determine the minting of coins in Jerusalem. Nobles were not actually forbidden to do so, but it seems that, for a long time, they consolidated a customary consensus around the notion that the coins had to be produced by the Jerusalemite mint, and were more content with simply imposing tolls over monetary circulation than actively participating in production. This centralization of the currency making would become the norm throughout all the existence of the Crusader State in the Orient, unlike what would later happen in the Latin Kingdom of Egypt, where coinage minting would be devolved to provincial level for many other decades before being centralized in Damietta.
Depiction of the templimi or Frankish besants (c. 13th C.A.D.). Cross motifs, as one can imagine, were in vogue for most of its period, in association of the central symbolic element of the Crusader ideology
If in its first century, the Latin-Levantine currency could not be regarded as anything better than a vulgar imitation of the Saracen and Rhōmaiōn numismatics, by the middle of the 13th Century, it was developed enough to circulate as an autonomous and particularly valuable trade due to its purity in comparison to its European counterparts. Its gold standard was mostly on the
hyperpyron, commonly called
Frankish besant (
bezanti francorum) or “
templimi”, because the mint was established near the Temple of Solomon. Its earlier production showed a preference for varied religious iconography, from crosses and fishes to lions and angels, but later on, as it became standardized, depictions shift to consistent patterns, such as an abstract representation of a river sided by date palms, representing the Jordan or perhaps the Garden of Eden, and the symbol of the true cross. It is worth mentioning that royal effigies are very rarely used in Jerusalemite coinage, in all its centuries, a bizarre similitude with Islamic traditions in detriment of what was more usual in Christian polities.
The silver coinage was called
denario, another one based in the
denarius, and, perhaps because it was less valuable and the metal itself was more readily available, it experienced a greater production and exchange than that of gold currency. The most common one, however, was the bronze "
papalesco", thus named because in its early years it served to homage Pope Urban II, and was frequently used in commercial intercourse, notably between the Italian republics and the Levantine emporia.
Now, as mentioned previously, considering that gold exchange was mostly dependent on the Moorish intermediaries in the trans-saharan commerce, it would take until the late 13th Century, with the consolidation of the Crusader Kingdom of Egypt, for alternative trade routes to be solidified the links between Europe and Ultragetulia and western Ethiopia [OBS: Ethiopia here is referencing the Sahel region as a whole, and not the modern country, which will be referred as Abyssinia in this time frame].
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The consolidation of the monastic militarized orders and of the trading guilds in the Levant quickly led to the development of the first forms of paper currencies of the Medieval Occident, in a similar fashion to what had already happened in Imperial Cathay some centuries before.
In the case of the Templarians, most certainly inspired by earlier developments by the Venetians and other trade-venturing agencies, we see, as early as the 1180s one of the first evidences of the adoption of a rudimentary banking system. This worked by employing a deposit/draft mechanism: one could place his liquid assets in the custody of a chapter of these institutions, and then obtain a similar value in other place, all of this controlled by a “letter of good-faith” [i.e. a credit document]. It was a matter of time before this system became complex by the establishment of a series of provincial houses, most notably in Provence, in Burgundy and in Italy. By the late 13th Century, their wealth had grown so much that it put the orders in conflict with ecclesiastic and monastic institutions, and in 1273 A.D. the incumbent Pope summoned a council to discipline aspects related to the dispensation of largess by the sword orders. This, in spite of imposing a sort of regulation, did not prevent them from doing so - not in the least because the Papacy itself was the main beneficiary of the stipends paid by the Templarian overmasters, and this, for a long time, would prevent them from being afflicted by the will of crowned heads and epicoscopalian entities alike.
Last, but not least, a word about the credit titling system developed by the Venetians. It was most certainly not created by them, as there is evidence about the use of contractual negotiable instruments in other commercial polities before, but it were certainly the Venetians that perfected it by employing a sophisticated regulation and even devising incentives for individuals to act as intermediaries as “micro-banks”, thus pulverizing the use of credit and hard money. This because, unlike other feudal and republican rulers, the Doges of Venice frequently interfered in the private circulation of credit and in contractual activities by imposing statutes, which usually were conducted by the guilds. If the mercantile guilds at first frowned upon the State’s interference, they soon realized its benefits when it became clear that the Republic itself would guarantee the fulfillment of their contracts and instruments, even against foreign contractors.
Unlike many of the other political entities in the Mediterranean, the “Serene Republic” had the military strength and will to enforce their own laws and contracts, and this they often did in Alpine and Sicilian Italy, even across the sea, in their colonies and client states such as Ragusa and Zara. Ancona, for example, would learn this in the worst way in 1288, when the Republic of Venice declared war on her to demand the fulfillment of contracts defaulted by Anconitan debtors against a firm of four Venetian citizens. The price to pay was a heavy one: the Venetian armada destroyed that of Ancona and stormed the city, plundering it with such a violence that the Pope himself issued a formal protest threatening the Doge with excommunication. Fortunately for the Venetians, the question was solved by a hefty donation to the Holy See.
The trustworthiness of Venetian credit instruments was proverbial, so much that one would say that it was easier to break a castle wall than a contract signed under the banner of the winged lion. Not unlike what used to happen in ancient Rome, there was a bizarre superstition and ceremonial element in contract-binding in Venetian (and, by extension, in Franco-Levantine) entrepreneurial culture, because all contracts had a preamble entrusting the fulfilment of its clauses to the protection of the saints. Even more curiously, there were various forms to “bypass” the eccleasiastic prohibition of usury, by simplory expedients such as using specific terminology that avoided mentioning “interest” and more peculiar ones such as inserting in the contract a clause obliging both parties to pay a fraction of their wealth to the Church to guard it from the devils that infested the human soul with greed…
1.6. By the hand of Man
After the establishment of the Latin Principality of Jerusalem, it did not took long for the arriving European settlers to assimilate into the Levantine economic arena, with its own peculiar crafts and industries. If it is correct to say that the Oriental hand-work practices were in some ways more sophisticated than those of the contemporary Europeans, one can not ignore the fact that the latter had some of their own to contribute and, even more than that, that they quick learned how to endeavor in these “foreign” professions.
Regarding basic crafts, the most noteworthy mentions go to the development of various Frankish
textile establishments, as it happened in the city of Jerusalem itself, and also in Tyre and Beirut. While it was a norm, in Europe, to have separate agencies dedicated to various processes involved in the creation of clothing, like
dyeing,
tanning,
weaving, and so forth, in the Levant, these were usually concentrated in the same establishment, and, with time, they became large enough to create their own regional guilds. The most notable example was that of Damascus, where one could find, in these years, a bustling district saturated with fabric workshops.
Regarding textiles, the most significant craftsmanship was
tapestry, because it was particularly lucrative; in the course of the 12th to 14th Centuries, the acquisition of fine clothing and carpets became a fixture of the European elites, from Leon to Krakow, usually under the umbrella-term of “Saracen cloth”.
Even if the Syrians, Arabs and Egyptians were quick to belittle the Latin industriousness, believing their own work to be much superior to that of these barbarians, the truth was that the Franks did have their own areas of expertise. Two of these were
woodwork and masonry, most notably in the construction of fortresses and cathedrals, with few parallels in the Islamic world when we compare the complexity and durability of the structures. Harnessing the plentiful cedar forests of Lebanon and the dependable quarries of Palestine and Syria, the Franks endeavored into a multitude of projects, from military to civilian and religious purposes. While one could suppose that aristocrats would impose these sorts of buildings, it is worth noting that the operations, in many places, especially in provincial parishes, were executed as a communitarian affair, in which whole families joined into an association to undertake a project, commonly furnished by donations in kind to sustain their efforts.
One of the most prized industries of the Orient, which exploded in popularity during the Crusader Age, was
glassmaking. The demand for it was always high in Europe, be it to create stained glasses in temples, or utensils such as vials for perfume and substances and culinary vessels, and even artistic sculptures, like the enameled black-glass lion gifted to King Thomas I of England by a certain Latin-Levantine monarch in 1193 A.D., which to this day survives in the Palace of London. And the supply of raw materials in the Levant is particularly significant; in fact, the preferred site for the extraction of sand to produce glass by the ancient Romans was precisely in a beach near Acre, where sand is naturally mixed with lyme. The main foundries would be established by the Latins in Tyre and Caesarea for the production of raw glass, one that can be acquired by other specialized craftsmen to devise their own personal compositions, most notably in Homs.
Depiction of a enameled glass chalice of Outremerine confection (c. 13th C.A.D.)
A similar fashion was developed in contemplation of
ceramics, and the growth of economic institutions in the Near East coincided with a mass-production increase of pottery, both for the domestic and international markets. Much like glassware, pottery can either be fashioned for utility or for ornamentation, and there are plenty of contemporary examples.
Finally, one can not ignore the role of metal-making in the Franco-Levantine economic culture. As in Europe and in every other place of the world, metals are transformed and alloys forged for a multitude of purposes that defy any necessity of listing. However, one single aspect, so peculiar to the Asian craftsmanship, is very deserving of a mention, that is, the forging of “
Iosuean steel” - thus named in reference to the Biblical figure
Joshua, widely venerated as a pre-Christian hero in the Medieval Era; folklore of the 13th Century ascribed to him a legendary magic sword -, a fixture of the Damascene industry. It was, then, a priceless specialty of the heartland of Syria, made from steel imported from India and forged by the foundries of Damascus into fine blades with bizarre, wave-like carvings.