ABSTRACT
During the works at the Aqsa Mosque in the 1920s, a small piece of paper was discovered between two stones of a pillar supporting the mosque’s dome. It is the only Latin document of the period of the crusades ever discovered in what had been the Frankish Levant. Gerard’s is not only the sole extant letter on paper from the Frankish Levant: Apparently it is the earliest letter on paper in the Latin world that has come down. The Livre des Assises des Bourgeois, dating from the second quarter of the thirteenth century, lays down explicitly that a will is valid whether written on parchment, paupier, or wax-coated tablets and it is plausible to assume that binding documents of a similar nature, pledges for instance, could have been written on paper. In the thirteenth-century West, paper was slowly gaining ground as the material to be used for writing books.
