ABSTRACT
The lure of Eastern Mediterranean bathhouses appears to have mesmerized many Europeans long before the era of the Crusades. The inclusion of bathhouses in the demands for privileges that the Italian communes submitted to the Frankish rulers should be regarded as a further testimony of the pre-crusade familiarity of Italian merchants, especially Venetian, Amalfitan and Genoese, with the attractions of Byzantine and Muslim cities. In Jerusalem, most of the bathhouses mentioned in the sources belonged to Frankish ecclesiastical institutions. Frequent use of baths was a characteristic of the Pullani, the Franks born in the Levant. In the mid-twelfth century, there were forty bathhouses within the walls of Damascus and seventeen outside of them; a century later, these numbers had risen to eighty-five and thirty-two, respectively. In later years, bathhouses and ovens were mentioned in conjunction in accounts of two excavated sites of the Frankish Levant.
