ABSTRACT
To what extent were the Military Orders innovative in the technical side of construction? This is a question that can be satisfactorily answered only by a serious and comprehensive study of medieval building methods in the Latin East. As no such study has yet been carried out, we are obliged at present to limit our observations, relying on a restricted number of discussions of construction techniques carried out at certain sites. One of the few such studies is found in the excavation report on the castle of Crac des Chevaliers by Paul Deschamps.1 Deschamps describes different methods of stone tooling, the use of masons’ marks, and the techniques used in the construction of vaults, arches, windows, gates, towers, firing embrasures, machicolations and various non-defensive features including water installations and the baking furnace. An examination of stonemasonry in Armenian castles was published by Edwards in his major study of the Cilician castles.2 Edwards identified nine distinct types of masonry. He also noted that the Armenians built their walls using the ‘poured-wall technique’; that is, they constructed outer and inner facings and poured a mortar and rubble fill into the space between them. This was the technique employed by the Franks in almost all their buildings.
