From Rome to East: How Crusaders transformed bathing traditions at Marqab Castle

AMMAN — The collapse of the Western Roman Empire in 476 AD meant a decline of urban centres in western and northern parts of Europe and several areas of everyday life were affected including bathing culture. The bathing culture was one of trademarks of Graeco-Roman civilisation and it was preserved in the east. 

Europeans moving to the Near East as a result of the Crusades seem to have quickly adopted the superior bathing culture there that preserved a greater deal of the highly developed Antique traditions. This is clearly reflected in the letters of Jacques de Vitry, the Latin bishop of Acre, who when he came from Europe saw the local Latin settlers as “more used to baths than battles”. 

"The importance attached to bathing in the Latin Orient is further underlined by the fact that even the military orders felt it was necessary to deal with it in their statutes, which make more than one reference to bathing," said Hungarian archaeologist Balasz Major, adding that although at first glance these rules seem to be rather restrictive, which would be normal in the case of a strict monastic organisation, it is very likely that they were generally referring to public baths. 

The knights and other armed soldiers of the orders, who were regularly sent on patrols and military missions, must have had an extra need for hygiene, he continued, adding that this necessitated the construction of their own baths, such as at the Templar headquarters in Jerusalem, which “contained a wonderful number of baths” below the Temple esplanade, as mentioned by the pilgrim Theoderich.

In spite of the apparent popularity of the baths, very few are known from the Crusader period and even fewer survived in the context of the sites of the military orders. The discovery, through the excavations of the Syro-Hungarian Archaeological Mission (SHAM), of a hitherto unknown mediaeval bathhouse that can be clearly dated to the Hospitaller period of the castle can therefore be regarded as a significant contribution to the better understanding of these structures.

The fortified site of Marqab in Syria, near Tartus, is mentioned in the written sources as having been established in 1062 by local Muslim tribes. 

"It changed owners more than once in the 12th century and was purchased by the Order of St. John in February of 1187. A decision seems to have been made from the very beginning that the newly acquired site was to be developed into one of the main Hospitaller headquarters, from which they could effectively govern and protect their huge northern Syrian estates," Major said, adding that the re-modelling of the castle started with the almost complete demolition of the former fortifications and the erection of a new fortified complex with a completely different design, made to serve the needs of the great number of staff in this new governmental and defensive centre. 

Major continues, "The multi-storey buildings of the inner castle of the order were arranged around a central courtyard in an irregular rhomboid shape, with the chapel in the south, the chapter house in the west, two vaulted arcades framing the courtyard on the east and one vaulted structure on the north."

The bath building underwent several expansions, and might have been destroyed at the time of the Mamluk occupation in 1285. According to the preliminary study of the objects found, the bathhouse did not seem to have been used in the post-crusader period and most of its walls might have been systematically demolished at a rather early date.

The constant use of the main courtyard of Marqab in the past centuries has done much to erase the remains of any medieval structures, so the remains of walls from the bath buildings hardly exceeded 1 metre in height at any point, however most of what stood below this level was preserved by the debris. 

"It is clear that the bath was built well after the construction of the huge vaulted areas. A carefully designed catch water drain system in the area preceded the construction of the bath itself, and some or maybe all of the three main drains  collecting the rainwater from the roofs of the structures and  might have been constructed before the planning of the bath," Major underlined.

The entire surface of the bathhouse area and the adjacent courtyard was paved with basalt flagstones and waste water was drained away of with the help of sloping floors and masonry channels. Clean water inside the bathhouse was circulated through lead pipes and some raised tanks like the one to the west of the bathhouse were used to provide pressure for delivering the water into the pool of room B and into a portable basin whose hollowed out base is still in a little niche of room A. 

"This first bathhouse covered an area of 77.4 m2. An evidently later improvement was the construction of a new boiler in room A, which took over the duty of b1. This might have been connected to the expansion of the bathhouse, one of the first steps of which saw the closing of the formerly open corner of the courtyard  between the bathhouse and arcade with a wall and a doorway," Major explained.

This newly created area was covered with a flat roof and added on to the bathhouse. 

In a later phase the western side of the bathhouse received a new building that – judging from its very wide drain and its masonry technique – was in all probability a latrine area, the archaeologist speculated, adding that the insertion of the new building resulted in a serious re-modelling of the former drain system, establishing a complex network of drains inside and outside the bathhouse area.