I have here to deal with a singularly restricted family of glass—that made in the Saracenic East during the thirteenth, fourteenth, and fifteenth centuries. This enamelled glass is important for more than one reason. It is undoubtedly, as a group, the most magnificent and decorative that we meet with in the whole course of our history. Technically, again, the interest of the group is supreme, for this application of solid enamels, translucent or transparent, to the surface of glass, was a new departure, and it preceded, as far as we know, the use of any material of the kind in the decoration of porcelain and fayence. The Romans and the Byzantine Greeks, it is true, decorated their glass at times with thin washes of opaque paints, but we have no definite proof that they ever applied fusible lead enamels in this way.

There is every reason to believe that this method of decoration was not in any general use in the East before the thirteenth century. But if we are still quite in the dark as to the origin of the art, it may be some consolation to remember that barely thirty years ago the few rare pieces of Saracenic glass that had reached us were classed as Venetian. It is only quite lately that this important ware has met with due recognition.

No doubt much of the sculptured and engraved glass, that we have for convenience of arrangement dwelt upon in the last chapter, is of Saracenic origin; I do not, however, remember any instance of an Arabic inscription being found on such vessels, but on the deeply carved vases of rock crystal that seem to have formed the models that these engraved glasses closely followed, in more than one case tall cufic characters form part of the decoration. I will only point to the magnificent crystal vase which bears the name of an early Fatimi caliph (975-996 A.D.), preserved in the treasury of St. Mark’s.

Apart from that in daily use among the people, we may, however, look upon the glass made during the first four or five centuries of Arab domination as on the whole following in the wake of the carvings in hard stone, above all in rock crystal, then so much in vogue. During the whole of this period the Saracens had hardly developed any well characterised art of their own: they followed in this, as in so many other matters, the traditions of the countries in which they dwelt. At this period their art was at best but a mingling of Byzantine and Sassanian elements. But before the end of the twelfth century a great change had come about, and during the course of the next century there had arisen a definite style—one that has remained ever since the type of what we know as Saracenic art. It would be impossible to dissociate this change from that which took place in the West about the same time. But the Gothic art that sprung up in the land of the Franks was but one phase of a continuous evolution, while the wonderful outburst that had in the main its centre in Cairo, became either locally stereotyped or shared the decay and neglect that overtook other branches of Mussulman civilisation.

So far as the art of glass is concerned, we may note in the thirteenth century a strange contrast between the East and the West. For while in both lands the material was applied essentially to supply a scheme of colour in decoration, in the West its use was restricted to the stained glass in the windows of churches; in the East the source of colour was obtained from translucent enamels applied to the surface of glass lamps and vases. The Saracens, in the stained glass of their windows, merely followed in the old Byzantine lines; the pierced framework of plaster, filled in with fragments of coloured glass, is but a development of the marble chassis of the Romans and the later Greeks. In the West, on the other hand, the art of building up pictures by means of segments of glass was rapidly developed, while the ‘hollow ware,’ the verrerie in daily use, had, as we have seen, received little attention, and it was reserved to the few precious pieces of enamelled glass brought from the Holy Land to find a place along with the plate and jewellery in the inventories of princes.

The fabulous wealth accumulated by the Fatimi caliphs of Egypt (908-1171 A.D.) became proverbial in later days. Makrisi, writing about the year 1400, quotes from an older writer the description of the treasure-house of the Khalifah Mustansir Billah. This building was sacked and burned with all its contents during a military riot between Turkish and Soudanese troops in 1062. Here among the vast accumulation of Oriental wealth were, it is stated, many thousand vases of rock crystal and others of sardonyx. We hear also at this time (but not in the list of these treasures) of glass mirrors in filigree frames, and of vessels of glass ornamented with figures and foliage. How the decoration in this last case was given we are not told, but the reference is probably to carvings in relief: at any rate it would, I think, be an anachronism to look for enamelled glass in this connection.

There is, however, one application of glass that we can definitely associate with these heretic caliphs, but this is scarcely an artistic one. The little coin-like discs of glass stamped with an inscription in Arabic had their prototypes in Roman times; a few rare examples have been found with the heads of Roman emperors and letterings in Latin. Among the Saracens these coin-like discs continued in use as late as the fifteenth century. In all cases, I think, they come from Egypt. The glass discs of the Fatimi period are, however, the most abundant and these are of special interest, as they bear the name of the ruler, while those of the later Memlook times have only private inscriptions. The glass varies from an amber tone to a dark bottle-green, but many are quite opaque and of a purplish black. As these little discs are of uniform weights, corresponding to parts and multiples of the gold dinar and the silver dirhem, they were at one time regarded as coins; they are now, however, recognised as weights, but essentially weights for weighing coins. Indeed a contemporary Arab writer (985 A.D.) distinctly states that in his day in Egypt they used money weights of glass; and an Arab traveller of the time mentions incidentally that such weights have this advantage, that they cannot be readily increased or decreased. The inscription occupies generally the whole surface, but a few of them bear a rough design—a ‘seal of Solomon’ or a rosette. Larger weights of glass are rare, but some of a cylindrical form weighing more than a pound may be seen in the British Museum. In Dr. Petrie’s Egyptian collection at University College is a large mass of black glass with a solid ring handle, the whole some four inches in height. This is probably a weight, but its date is uncertain.

On the whole, the art of the Fatimi caliphs who had their capital at Cairo (Misr) was still under Byzantine influence. The change of style that we have dwelt upon is rather to be associated with the Kurdish and Turkish Emirs, who, ruling first in Upper Syria and Mesopotamia, finally overwhelmed the effeminate and heretic Fatimi dynasty. To find the country where the new style arose we must look not to Egypt, but to the tract of land lying along the frontier of the Byzantine and Sassanian empires, from Tabriz to the north, by Mosul to Bagdad and Bassorah. The old Persian and Sassanian elements here doubtless prevailed over the Byzantine tradition; but the word Persian must not be applied to the new art, for the Turkish element was perhaps as important as the Iranian. It was under the Memlook sultans, almost all of them Turks by birth, that the great mosques that gave to mediÆval Cairo its special cachet were erected. As for the artists themselves, though a few may have come from the Persian borderland, they were, for the most part, of the old stock of the land, and many were doubtless Christians.

In the towns of the Syrian coast, the change of mastership did not interfere with the work of the glass furnaces. We have seen in the Syriac manuscripts how fragments of Arabic are interlarded with the old indigenous dialect in passages treating upon the manufacture of glass. Around Hebron the manufacture of glass on primitive lines was carried on through the Middle Ages: a German pilgrim of the fifteenth century speaks of the many furnaces in which the ‘black glass’ was melted: the industry is indeed even now not extinct. There is one form of early Arab glass which we may perhaps associate with this centre. Certain long nail-shaped bottles, square in section and pointed at the base, have sometimes been classed with the old primitive glass of Egypt and Phoenicia, on the ground probably of the ‘dragged’ decoration of white on a black base found on some of them. But Franks was undoubtedly right in attributing these elongated flasks—they are sometimes of considerable size—to Saracenic times.^[104]

William of Tyre says that the glass of his native town was exported to all countries, and Benjamin of Tudela, the Spanish Rabbi, praises the beauty of the glass vases there made. There were, he tells us, four hundred Jewish glass-makers and shipowners in Tyre, and in other cities of the coast the glass industry was in the hands of the Jews. This was about the middle of the twelfth century. The Jews long before that time had, it would seem, a monopoly of glass made with lead. It was to them, then, that the first enamellers must have gone for their materials. An Arab writer distinguishes among the exports from Sour (Tyre) both objects of verroterie and glass vessels worked on the wheel.^[105] Of the glass-works of Tripoli, one of the last towns held by the Franks, I shall have something to say in a future chapter.

Just as in the case of the glass found in Egyptian and in early Greek tombs, so now with the enamelled glass of the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries, we are once more brought face to face with the question as to where it was made—in Syria or in Egypt. Syria was at this time again under rulers who had their capital in Egypt; there are indeed few important periods in Egyptian history when this has not been the case. Alexandria, it is true, had fallen from its old position,^[106] but it is distinctly recorded that glass was made in the fourteenth century at Mansourah, the recently founded ‘town of victory,’ above Damietta. At many places in Upper Egypt, especially at Achmin, fragments, most of them, but not all, to be referred to Saracenic times, have been found. But on the whole the evidence for a Syrian origin for this enamelled ware is much stronger,—I say the origin, because it is just in the case of those rare pieces to which an early date can be ascribed that we can be certain of an Asiatic provenance.

The enamelled glass of the Saracens forms, as I have said, a compact group. The specimens that we have of it are all, or nearly all, handsome pieces, worthy, apart from their archÆological interest, of a conspicuous place in our museums or on the shelves of the most fastidious amateur. Their number is strictly limited—indeed Herr Schmoranz has drawn up a careful list which claims to contain every known example.^[107] Thanks in great measure to the researches of this expert, we are able now to make a rough general division of this glass into two classes:—

1st. Vases, goblets, and basins of many forms, brought for the most part from Syria. The bulk of the enamelled glass in this division appears to date from the thirteenth century. Several famous pieces have for centuries been preserved in the treasuries of Western churches. For these it is claimed that they have been brought back from the Holy Land by crusaders and pilgrims—filled, some of them, with earth taken from Bethlehem or other holy spots.

2nd. Lamps, obtained almost without exception from mosques in Cairo. These lamps belong, as a class, to the fourteenth century. Only of recent years has much attention been given to them; they were almost unknown to the older collectors.^[108] The supply appears, however, to be already exhausted. The decoration on these lamps is on the whole more broadly treated, with less detail and finish, than that found on the vases and goblets of our first class.

The glass itself is in all cases remarkable for the number of minute bubbles contained in it; in some of the lamps these bubbles are so numerous that the material is barely to be classed as transparent. In colour the glass varies from a pronounced bottle-green to an amber tint; it is more rarely of a greyish white. The size of many of the lamps and bowls must have necessitated the use of large melting-pots as well as considerable skill in blowing and manipulation. The irregular form so often to be observed in both lamps and vases is more likely to be the result of a partial collapse during the melting on of the enamels, than of any defect in the original piece as it came from the glass-blower’s hands.

In composition, to judge from the analysis of a fragment of a Cairene lamp made by Dr. Linke of Vienna (Schmoranz, p. 42), this Saracenic glass is essentially a normal soda-lime silicate with 69 per cent. of silica, 15·4 per cent. of alkali, and 8·6 per cent. of lime, thus far resembling the ordinary Roman type. The specimen examined, however, contained in addition to the lime as much as 4 per cent. of magnesia. As Dr. Linke points out, the presence of this last base would hinder the complete fluidity of the glass in the pots and make it difficult to get rid of the bubbles. But whether the presence of this earth in a single specimen is in itself sufficient to prove the non-Egyptian origin of these lamps as a class is another question. The fact that nearly one per cent. of manganese was found in this glass is of interest, as it shows that some attempt had been made to ‘cleanse’ the metal.

As regards the enamels on this Saracenic glass, we find that, with one important exception, they resemble generally in composition and character those employed at a later date by the Chinese in the decoration of their porcelain^[109]—we have a readily fusible flux containing much lead coloured by various metallic oxides. The opaque red is given by oxide of iron, the green by oxide of copper, and the yellow by antimonic acid. The presence of this last substance is of interest: Dr. Percy found antimony in the glaze of Assyrian bricks, and I have taken for granted that it is the source of the yellow in the primitive glass of Egypt. The opaque colours, including the white, are probably produced by the addition of a little oxide of tin to the flux; Dr. Linke, however, does not seem to have found that metal in his analysis.

It is when we come to the blue, the dominant colour in this scheme of decoration, that a surprise awaits us. This colour, we should almost have taken for granted, would be derived from cobalt, for it is now recognised that at this time the use of that substance in the painting of earthenware (under the glaze) was prevalent in Western Asia. Dr. Linke, however, declares ‘that even the most subtle re-agents failed to discover any trace’ of either cobalt or copper in the blue enamel. For the grounds upon which he was able to attribute the origin of this fine blue to minute fragments of lapis lazuli, only partially dissolved in the flux, we must refer to the German chemist’s report. Now as ultramarine, the colouring matter of this mineral, contains a considerable amount of sulphur, some of it in an unoxidised state, it could not be used in combination with a flux containing lead, and indeed an analysis of the blue enamel proved it to be essentially of the same composition as the glass of the lamps; it contained, however, as much as 24 per cent of alkali, and this excess would ensure a slightly greater fusibility. It will be observed that the thick blue enamel on this Saracenic glass has considerable translucency as seen by transmitted light, but that the surface is always dull. In the British Museum is an admirably executed imitation of one of these mosque lamps, made as long ago as 1867 by M. Brocard of Paris. The blue, in this case cobalt, differs little in hue from that on the old lamps that stand beside it. It is, however, somewhat cruder in effect, and the surface is quite glassy.^[110]

I come now to the scheme of decoration of this Saracenic glass. The important point to bear in mind is that the gold has for the most part disappeared from the surface. This gilding, however, played originally a most important part in the decoration. The fine lines of opaque red now so prominent were originally drawn with a free hand upon a detailed pattern of gold, with the object of accentuating the design. This gold brocading, when it is preserved, is of great beauty, especially that found upon the older pieces. Examine carefully the tall-necked bottle in the Slade collection: the body is covered with a fine arabesque of red lines, the pattern being made up of long-necked birds among foliage, and this appears poor in effect compared with the bands of rich enamel on the shoulder and neck. The effect, however, was very different at first when these dull red lines were carried over a rich ground of gold, of which traces only now remain here and there.

The gold, then, was applied first—at an early stage in the development of this family of glass it was perhaps the only decoration; the outline was then accentuated by means of red lines, and the coloured enamels then laid on in thick masses. We cannot say whether the colours were all melted on at one firing, for we know nothing in this case of the practical arrangements of the muffle-stove. On the exquisitely enamelled bottle from WÜrzburg in the British Museum (Plate XXII.), perhaps technically the most superb specimen of this class of decoration that has come down to us, the pinkish tint of the red and the manner in which it is gradated into the white, call to mind the use of the rouge d’or on Chinese porcelain of the eighteenth century; the green also of the conventional foliage is here shaded into the opaque white. The blue ground of the central medallion is of a brilliant turquoise, quite unapproached in other examples; the surface, however, of this blue enamel is in this case glassy and quite unlike the dead surface that we see on the mosque lamps. Are we to regard this opaque turquoise enamel as also based upon lapis lazuli, or rather as a soda-copper silicate?

As to the motives of the enamelled decoration—if figure subjects are absent from the mosque lamps, they are of frequent occurrence on the bottles and goblets: there we have polo-players and falconers mounted on horses, yellow, pink, and white; seated figures drinking and feasting or playing on musical instruments—always the same jovial, round-faced type; in only one instance have I noticed an elderly man with a beard. We sometimes find a frieze with dogs chasing stags and hares, or it may be a row of conventional lions. Birds are still more frequent—flying geese, as in the background of the hunting scenes, or long-necked herons forming part of the ornamental design of the field. Certain quaint little fishes with big heads and long fins, always of the same form, are not uncommon on the vases and cups; they are sometimes arranged herring-bone fashion; in one case, indeed, these little fishes are found on a mosque lamp.

But the more conspicuous part of the decoration is formed by bands of tall cufic^[111] letters and by flowers, more or less schematised. Apart from a fleur-de-lis, which occurs chiefly in medallions, the most important flower is the Oriental lotus. This flower as it appears relieved on a blue ground in the later mosque lamps is identical in drawing with the lotus that we see so frequently in Indian and Chinese art. It is often combined with what at first sight appears to be another flower, treated en rosette, with an involucre of six oval and six triangular petals, and an indication of a seed-vessel in the centre; but this again may perhaps be only the same lotus-flower seen full-face. In some cases, as on certain mosque lamps, these flowers, broadly treated, form the sole decoration; but more often the floral design passes into the formal schematised patterns so characteristic of Arab art at this time.

The medallions that interrupt the broad bands are an essential part of the decoration; they are filled sometimes with inscriptions, generally in this case in the nashki or running script, or more often with certain badges, which are of much interest in connection with the heraldry, if it can be so called, of the day. These badges are derived from the most divergent sources: there is one simple design that resembles the cartouche of an old Egyptian king—it has even been read as ‘Lord of the Upper and Lower Country’ (a good example may be found on a bottle at South Kensington). Another badge takes the form of a strange bird with long tail-feathers, undoubtedly derived from the imperial phoenix of China; any hesitation as to the origin of this design is removed on observing in the field certain little curly clouds, an essentially Chinese motive. A sword, a pair of polo-sticks, or still more often a cup, charged upon a fesse or band which divides the medallion, are badges of more local origin. The same may probably be said of the eagle variously displayed, which in one example, in the British Museum, occurs exceptionally upon an ovoid shield. In some cases the Memlook sultans and emirs adopted ‘canting badges’ based upon their Turki names; as, for example, the well-known duck of the Sultan Kelaoun. The identification, however, of the owner, or the date of a vase or lamp from these badges alone, is, in the absence of an inscription, a somewhat hazardous proceeding.

It is a curious fact that we have only two instances of a signature of an artist in all this series of enamelled glass. On a lamp from the Mannheim collection, now, I think, belonging to Mr. Pierpont Morgan, an inscription in running characters on the foot has been read: ‘Work of the poor slave Ali, son of Mohammed Ar Ramaki (?), God protect him’ (Schmoranz, p. 67). It is the same Ali, apparently, who signs his name on another lamp described by Artin Pasha.

I should say at once that these mosque lamps are more properly of the nature of lanterns—the lamp itself was suspended inside them. I do not know, however, of any example of these little internal lamps in our European collections, unless it be one of gilt green glass now at South Kensington (Plate XXIV. 2). This lamp, however, is somewhat large for the position assigned to it, and it certainly resembles those sometimes found in Coptic churches.

These large lamps or lanterns were suspended by chains from the roof or from the arcades of the mosque. From the Sultan Hassan mosque alone have come twenty-one glass lamps, now in the Arab Museum at Cairo, and there are others from the same source in our home collections. The effect in the mosque when these lamps were all lighted must have rivalled the illumination of St. Sophia, described by Paul the Silentiary (p. 97). We must not forget another essential part of the Arab lamp: this is the little sphere from which the smaller chains that pass to the handles of the lamp radiate. In private houses—for the general arrangement is the same in them—this globe may be replaced by an ostrich egg. In the mosques these spheres are of metal or of glass; we have only two specimens of the latter material in European collections—one of amber-yellow glass in the British Museum (Plate XXVII. 2), a second, larger and ovoid in shape, at South Kensington. There are three others, one of blue glass, in the Arab Museum at Cairo.

A similar method of suspending the lamps was in use in Byzantine churches, and something of the sort may still be seen in St. Mark’s. In the pictures of the Venetian painters of the later fifteenth century—of Bellini, and Cima, and Carpaccio—the lamps, of a strictly Oriental or Byzantine type, that hang from the niches that form the background to their enthroned Madonnas, well illustrate this arrangement.^[112]

It may be said generally of the Saracenic enamelled glass as of the unadorned glass of the Byzantines that preceded it, that the lamp in one shape or another is the master form—no longer the wine-cup, as among the Romans. It would be an interesting study, were the thing possible, to trace the steps by which the later arrangement of an outer lantern of glass grew out of the simpler Byzantine or Sassanian prototype. But it must be remembered that these gorgeous mosque lamps or lanterns are quite a specialised form; they are only found, as far as we know, in Egypt and Syria, and they belong essentially to the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries. The typical Oriental glass lamp is of quite a different type—a little cup in the shape of a truncated cone, from four to six inches in height. This is a form that is generally in use in the East at the present day. Such a vessel constitutes the essential part both of the street lanterns (the conical cup in this case passes through an aperture in the base) and of the coronas of lights by which the larger rooms are illuminated. In the latter case the cups pass through apertures in a ring or disc of wood or metal, which is itself suspended, often from an ostrich egg, in the way already described.

The little vessels are filled halfway up with water, upon which the oil floats; the wick passes up through a tube which is fixed at the bottom in various ways. I have before me a cup of this description brought from an old house in Cairo; it is of very thin, tough, greenish glass; the ‘kick’ at the bottom is pushed deeply in and is open at the apex. This opening has been sealed up with some hard pitchy substance, into which the little glass tube (of later date apparently) that carries the wick has been fixed. In another type of these cup or beaker lamps the base ends in a blunt point which is prolonged by one or more knops, so as to resemble the stem of a wine-glass without the foot.^[113] This is the form that, as I have already mentioned, is so often represented, suspended from the roof in the altar-pieces of the Venetian painters. Such lamps are generally elaborately mounted in metal.

But the other form, the truncated cone (the ‘spear-butt’ of Paul the Silentiary), was in use in Italy at an earlier date. In the chapel of the Arena at Padua is a careful wall-painting of an elaborate compound corona or lantern built up with hoops of metal to resemble a large bird-cage. The little lamps of plain glass fitted into this framework are of two shapes; one resembles the truncated-cone cup just described, while the other may be compared to a mosque lamp with the foot removed and the body prolonged to a point. I do not know if this painting is contemporary with the famous frescoes of Giotto that cover the adjacent walls, but to judge from the Gothic framework that surrounds it, it cannot well be later than the fourteenth century.

This conical cup, then, was widely employed in the later Middle Ages for suspended lamps. It had quite replaced the balance-pan form of lamp support of early Byzantine days, some specimens of which, preserved in St. Mark’s treasury, we have already described: such pans, we should add, probably supported little standing lamps, more or less of the well-known classical form. But both these and the conical cups may possibly at times have held candles, an essentially Oriental means of illumination.^[114]

We must now return to our enamelled glass, and consider a remarkable series of little beakers very similar in size and outline to the lamps of truncated conical form that we have been dwelling upon. Many of these have now passed, from the treasuries of churches and convents in which they had been long preserved, into various local museums. Round more than one of them a legend has grown up—the very names by which they are known are picturesque and suggestive—St. Hedwig’s beaker, the glass of Charlemagne, the goblet of the Eight Priests, and nearer home the famous Luck of Eden Hall. Such cups are to be found from the confines of Poland to our own rude border country; indeed, the enamelled beakers of this simple form have, for one reason or another, been chiefly preserved in northern lands: of late years, however, a few further examples have been brought from Syria and Egypt. No doubt the general tradition that these cups have been carried back from the Holy Land by crusaders and pilgrims is well founded. It is possible that some of them may, like the carved glasses, have travelled by northern routes rather than by the Mediterranean.

We see, it is true, a beaker of somewhat similar form in the hands of the wine-bibbers, in the illustrations to the manuscripts of contemporary poets, and even pictured on our enamelled glasses themselves.^[115] There is, however, one point to be noted in many of the beakers in our collections, that makes it difficult to believe that they have ever been actually used as wine-cups. I refer to the remarkable construction of the base. This point had been overlooked by previous writers on the subject, even by Schmoranz in his great work. It was first pointed out by Mr. C. H. Read in a paper read before the Society of Antiquaries (ArchÆologia, vol. lviii. p. 217). To use Mr. Read’s words in speaking of one of these vessels: ‘The goblet is provided with a foot-rim that has been separately made and fixed on the base. The bottom of the vessel has been pushed up inwards, in the fashion to be found in a champagne bottle, but it has a peculiar feature in that the actual centre, the apex of the cone thus formed, is reflected downwards, apparently leaving a small hole through the bottom of the glass which is only closed by the fixing on of the added foot. This feature appears to be common in these Oriental goblets, and as far as my experience goes, is not found in any of European make.’ Such an arrangement would surely have one practical disadvantage if the cup had been used as a drinking-vessel—the liquid would lodge between the false bottom and the foot, so that it would be almost impossible to clean out the cup, and this is a point that would especially appeal to a Mohammedan. On the other hand, this open ‘kick’ would be admirably adapted to the introduction of a wick^[116] if the vessel before the soldering on of the ring at the base had been used as a lamp. I should myself be inclined to think that the little cups in question, sold perhaps by Jewish dealers at Aleppo or at one of the Syrian ports to wandering pilgrims before their return from the Holy Land, were never intended for any practical use. The peculiarity of the form may have been a result of the prevailing use to which such vessels were put in their own country, or at least a survival of such a use. I should add, that for such a suggestion—it is nothing more—I am alone responsible.