A History of the World in 100 Objects - Dr Neil MacGregor [145]
As another demonstration of religious renewal, the friars were calling not just for good works but for a good war, and the Franciscans and Dominicans were among the most effective advocates of the Crusades. As St Hedwig drank her wine, the Crusades were in full swing. In 1217 her brother-in-law, the king of Hungary, took the cross and led an armed expedition to the Holy Land. The curious thing is that, despite this military activity – or perhaps because of it – trade seems to have flourished. David Abulafia, Professor of Mediterranean History at the University of Cambridge, elaborates:
The contact between Europe and the Middle East in the twelfth and thirteenth centuries was built around some quite intense trading. The Venetians, Genoese, Pisans in particular, managed to carry on their business – this sometimes caused a certain amount of scandal as you can imagine, that they were still present in the port in Alexandria for instance, while Saladin was preparing his campaigns against the Christians in the Holy Land. The basis of this trade was the exchange of raw materials from the west for luxury goods which came out of the Islamic world, notably silks, glassware, ceramics, things like this, which could not be produced to anything like the same quality within western Europe.
It is this phenomenon of trade coexisting with war that explains one of the most extraordinary things about the Hedwig beaker.
The designs of the Hedwig beakers all feature similar images: a lion, a griffin, an eagle, flowers and geometric motifs. But this beaker is the only one that combines all these elements. There is a lion and a griffin each raising a paw in homage to the eagle that stands between them, and the deep-cut design runs all the way round the glass. A mould must have been pressed into the glass while it was still hot and soft, and details of the texture and pattern were then meticulously carved. There is a real sense of feather and fur, but, above all, there is a strong sense of style. I think many people, shown this without explanation, would think it was a great piece of 1930s Art Deco glass, possibly from Scandinavia. The Hedwig beakers certainly don’t look like anything produced in medieval Europe, which may well be why this extraordinary group of glasses was associated with a miracle.
These beakers clearly did not originate in the world in which they were found. The question of where they did originate is one people have been asking for more than 200 years. We may now be nearer an answer, because scientific analysis of this glass, and other Hedwig beakers, shows that they were made not out of the potash glass of European tradition but out of the soda ash glass of the coast of modern Israel, Lebanon and Syria. The Hedwig beakers are all so similar in shape, material and style that they must have been produced together, in a single workshop, and that workshop must have been in one of those coastal cities – the glass was almost certainly made by Muslim craftsmen. We know that at this period a lot of Islamic glass was made for export to Europe: ‘Damascus glass’ appears in the inventories of many medieval treasuries. Acre, the main trading centre of the Crusader kingdom of Jerusalem, was the principal port for this trade. Professor Jonathan Riley-Smith, a historian of the Crusades, sets the scene:
Acre, which is now in Israel, became the most important commercial port in the eastern Mediterranean, which meant that shipping from the West was bringing out European cloth and bringing back spices to the West. We have a fascinating list of commodities traded in the port