We may safely associate the apparently sudden appearance of this richly decorated enamelled glass with the change that came over the other arts of the Saracens about this time, and Dr. Lane-Poole is probably right in connecting this change with the rise of the Kurdish and Tartar families who played so important a part in the history of the twelfth and thirteenth centuries (_Art of the Saracens_, p. 127 _seq._). Nur-ed-din, who ruled at Damascus and Aleppo in the twelfth century, came from the stock of the Beni Zenky, who adorned their coinage with figure subjects taken from both Byzantine and Persian sources. His successor, the great Saladin, came of the Ayubi stock that had ruled in Mesopotamia. Both families brought with them the traditions of Sassanian art and a complete freedom from the religious scruples of the earlier Semitic rulers. A little later the great Monghol invasion of Genghis Khan, who founded a new dynasty in Persia, opened the way to other influences, this time from the Far East. During all this period, the civilisation of the Frankish West was fighting its way into Palestine and Northern Syria. It would be difficult to find a parallel case in history—a case, I mean, of as many exotic influences as were now brought to bear upon Syria and Egypt, at work at the same time and in the same country. In both lands one result was an outburst of artistic splendour. This, in the first country, came to a premature end with Timur’s devastating campaign. In Egypt this glorious period lasted somewhat longer; but already in the fifteenth century the Memlook sultans had returned to the stricter rule of the faith, and by the next century, when after a period of turmoil Egypt fell under Turkish rule, the short-lived art of enamelling on glass was already extinct. How completely this was so we may learn from an interesting document discovered some time since by the late M. Yriarte in the Venetian archives—amid the inexhaustible store now preserved in the old convent behind the Frari Church (_La Vie d’un Patricien de Venise au XVI^{me} Siècle_, p. 147 _seq._). In the year 1569, Marc Antonio Barbaro—that type of a Venetian noble, the liberal patron of artists and writers—was ambassador at Constantinople. The document in question is a despatch addressed by him to the Venetian senate; on it he has drawn in outline two designs for lamps—one a somewhat depressed version of our old mosque type, the other what M. Yriarte calls a ‘godet-lampe’ of elongated form,—in fact, a version of our ‘spear-butt’ or cup-lamp suitable for fitting into a wooden or metal frame. Barbaro urges the senate to see to the execution at Murano, with the greatest care, of as many as nine hundred pieces after these designs, for the demand came from no less a person than the Grand Vizier himself. There is no reference, in the order for these lamps, to any enamelling: those that are not plain (_schietti_) are to be decorated in the Venetian way (_a reticelli_).[125]