The Crusades stand for more in Palestine than it is easy to realise. The comprehensiveness of their historical significance is by no means exhausted when we have stated it in such paradoxes as those with which our chapter began. They were indeed the greatest sham and at the same time the greatest reality of Syrian history, but they were far more than that. They were heirs to all the past of the country, and they did much to perpetuate that past and to carry it on into the time to come. Even from the Moslem life they wrestled with, they borrowed something. They, and the chivalry which they fostered, are the most spectacular part of Western history, and give a dash of brilliant colour to the grey life of the Middle Ages. That brilliance is in part the splendour of the East. The Crusader has borrowed from the Saracen at least a scarf for his sword. It is chiefly as builders that the Crusaders remain in Syria exposed to modern eyes, and in their building they have perpetuated and utilised the other three invasions. From the first Christians they took over their churches and rebuilt them, retaining something and adding more. From the older Jewish architects they had almost as great an inheritance. There seems no incongruity in the heavy stone mangers and far-driven iron rings which they fixed in the walls of those tremendous vaults on which the Temple area rests; and it is by a not unnatural transference that tradition has given to these the name of Solomon’s Stables. Solomon’s vaults they may have been, but as stables they were of crusading origin. Their own building is a rough imitation of the drafted stones of the Jews. The rustic work is much the same, only rougher, but the plain chiselling is very far from the minute fineness of the older workmanship. Altogether, they were fighters first and builders second. Like the men of Nehemiah’s time, “every one with one of his hands wrought in the work, and with the other hand held a weapon.... Every one had his sword girded by his side, and so builded.” Nor did they fail to utilise the work of Roman builders. At Cæsarea there is the most striking instance of this, and one of the most suggestive facts in the whole story of the Crusaders. Cæsarea was the most Roman of all Syrian towns. Built as the seaport for Sebaste by Herod, it was the part of Syria which travellers and governors sailing from Italy first sighted, and it was designed to give them the impression of a land Romanised. Herod’s delight in pillars is attested by the colonnades of Sebaste, and the wealth of shaft and capital which marks the ruins of all his cities. But in Cæsarea he seems to have excelled himself. The Roman mole which forms the northern side of the harbour “is composed of some sixty or seventy prostrate columns lying side by side in the water like rows of stranded logs.”[31] On the long promontory south of the mole stands the Crusader Castle, notable for the circumstance that the