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 Phœnicia, 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.