Spolia in Fortifications:
Turkey, Syria and North Africa

Michael Greenhalgh, 
Department of Art History
Australian National University

Introduction

After briefly explaining why the East is worthy of study for its use of spolia, setting both the geographical scene and the chronologies involved, and examining the reasons for their very survival and availability, this paper will focus on their military reuse in fortresses and city walls. It provides an overview of the antique structures which were the models, set against the decline of civic life from late antiquity onwards, and concentrates on the aesthetic and the practical reasons for reuse, which include both strengthening and structural support, and conspicuous display, such as the widespread reuse of column shafts in fortress walls. Fortifications at Nicaea and Korykos, Ankara and Byblos will be examined, together with the reuse of antique reliefs at Seljuk and Halicarnassus, and of antique ‘architectural furniture’ at Myra. Finally, we shall look briefly at French experiences in Algeria in the 19th century, because these were probably analogous to those of our mediaeval forbears in Europe over a thousand years beforehand, when the antique monuments in the West were in a roughly similar state to those when the French invaded Algeria in 1830. If the French made very practical use of the spolia they found, then so did armourers: and details will be given of the reuse, well into the 19th century, of marble and granite columns as cannon balls.

Because of the special circumstances of Turkey and North Africa, the concept of alto medioevo is stretched beyond breaking-point, but with the bonus that studying such areas can provide us with insights into how the ancient monuments may have appeared to our mediaeval forbears - evidence largely unavailable in the West because of the pressure of further development in succeeding centuries, and hence obliteration of the majority of source monuments. The French, for example, benefitted from this apparent “time shift” in Algeria. Given the very variable takeup of city-dwelling in that country, it much impressed the French when they invaded Algeria in 1830 that their direct predecessors as city-dwellers (and hence as architecturally aware, for both civilian and military works - indeed, as civilized people rather than barbarians) were the Romans, including their Byzantine successors. Their establishment there of a colonial empire provides the most recent thoroughgoing practical use of spolia, analogous to mediaeval usage.

In Turkey, the population has never (until our century) been sufficient to devastate all the monuments (and one can still find classical sites there occupied by nomads, although fewer now than decades ago); as a thirteenth-century dervish put it, in a lament which might stand as a leitmotif for this paper, and which is repeated down the centuries: It is for the work of demolition that Turkish workmen must be hired. For the construction of the world is special to the Greeks [...] They erected numerous cities and mountain fortresses [...] so that after centuries these constructions serve as models to the men of recent times [...] [God] created the people of the Turks in order to demolish, without respect or pity, all the constructions which they see…. However, destruction was necessary in order to build: many Turks took up alien traditions, and were as enthusiastic users of spolia as the Crusaders, as we shall see from the walls of Konya, where the Seljuk Turks, especially prizing Greek and Roman architecture, reused it for aesthetic ends. Their successors generally lived off spolia, often using it in a purely utilitarian manner. However, Mehmet’s reported reaction to the glories of Constantinople (cavalco da un luogo all’altro, considerande con grandissima maraviglia fabriche tanto rare)  suggests something more programmatic, as perhaps does that of Tamerlane before him, who wondered at the costly buildings of the temples, the faire ingraven pillars, the high pyramides; whilst at Jerusalem, he sought out all the antiquities of that auncient citie. 

Why study Spolia?

When we study the past, we search for patterns, for influence, and hence for meaning – no more so than when we study spolia.Throughout the Middle Ages, and indeed to our own day, we have contemporary accounts which express enthusiasm for the prestigious materials of antiquity (especially marble, which could carry “power”, columns, and squared building-blocks, some of large dimensions) – an enthusiasm for the heroic age, and the older the better (perhaps), similar to Pausanias’ attitude to his material. Columns were attractive to the Middle Ages for a host of reasons. Not only were they almost a trademark of classical architecture, but they were easy to get at and easy to transport, because they could be rolled like logs. Usually of marble, they were (when monolithic) long and strong, and beautiful as well, because highly polished. 

Not, of course, that reuse of spolia is restricted to Greek or Roman materials, or indeed to the Middle Ages. There are plentiful examples of pre-mediaeval use; at Rome, the 3rd century BC Temple of Apollo Sosias used 5th century BC spolia to make a coherent monument with reference to the older antique. Nor is it unusual in Greece to find megalithic spolia in Christian churches, presumably with some meaning to be attached to the reuse; and it has been argued that the history of monument construction and reuse in Messenia (SW Greece) specifically refers back to the Heroic Age. In at least one 12th-century French account of abbey building, the spolia may be antique, but taken from a ruined church – a mirror of what the Seljuk and Ottoman Turks did with earlier structures in Turkey. Cassiodorus is enthusiastic about the qualities of spolia: Sine usu jacere non decet, quod potest ad decorem crescere civitatis: quia non est sapientiae profutura contemnere. Et ideo illustris magnificentia  tua  marmorum  quadratos  qui  passim diruti negliguntur, quibus hoc opus videtur injunctum, in fabricam murorum faciat deputari; ut redeat in decorem publicum prisca constructio, et ornent aliquid saxa jacentia post ruinas...

Spolia allow us to trace the afterlife of classical art and architecture (or, in different contexts, of Phoenician, or cyclopean architecture; or mediaeval architecture in Britain after the Dissolution of the Monasteries). Their very use generally reflects diminished population levels, whilst the quantity employed underlines the large scale of many classical cities. Sometimes there is an aesthetic component in reuse, so that classical gloria survives, as if reuse were a thermometer of a continuing classical tradition. But without documentary evidence, or abundant comparanda, there are manifold problems. Does display mean pride in one’s own or an adopted past? Or can use be equated simply with nonchalance? 

Different aesthetic horizons from the Middle Ages mean that it is difficult for us to appreciate purposes of reuse, or contemporary impact: some of the great Byzantine basilicas of non-metropolitan Turkey (such as that at Xanthos) may well seem crude to us – but did they to contemporaries? Thus even when later travellers declare the high quality of walls which we know are decorated with column shafts (as at Aleppo), they annoyingly refuse to mention anything beyond appropriate decoration, or an equivalent phrase. Even in the West, documentary evidence of finding spolia is scarce. Indeed, just because a monument exists, does not mean it was appreciated: for example, we know that many Crusaders saw Baalbec; but it seems to have made no impression. In 1100, Bohemond and Baldwin went up the Jordan Valley to the Litani Valley, but we have no accounts from them; whilst Fulcher of Chartres confused Baalbec with Palmyra . Even Ibn Battuta stayed only overnight, mentions that it is a beautiful old city, but says no more - although one Arab author classifies the ruins, along with the Lighthouse of Alexandria, the Lake of Tiberias and the Dead Sea as one of the marvels of Syria. One reason for disjuncture between our horizons and earlier ones is that the re-creation of the antique in the Middle Ages usually ignores antique monumentality, as Hansen states to be the case in the Renaissance before 1470: antique architecture only appeared as discrete decorative elements, typically elements of the columnar orders such as bases and capitals, disconnected from their monumental raison d’etre, the building as such. A parallel point he makes is the lack of interest in ruins – the skeleton of structure, as it were, on which the clothing can be placed. So, dealing with spolia, perhaps we should not be too exigent in expecting our rebuilds to look Roman to our eyes.

Spolia can help us study the aftermath of the classical world, because spoliation may protect antiquities, and help them to survive (for example, the great walls at Olympia or Pergamum). Sometimes reuse involves the complete dismantling of standing, intact antique structures (Pergamum, Korykos); but usually charting an afterlife is complicated by earthquakes, and stages of ruination and depopulation. Use of spolia offers us insights into the history of fortification and of religious buildings (large civic examples might once have existed, but none have survived from our period and area); into transportation: fewer antiquities survive the nearer they were to the sea; and into the mechanics of building, underlining the immense effort required to construct late antique spolia fortifications. All these features are easier to study in Turkey and North Africa, where we can infer what the monumental antique and spolia landscape of the western Middle Ages might have been like.

Although the term spolia includes anything reused from earlier buildings or artworks, and not necessarily from classical antiquity, for our purposes it is columns, granite, marble reliefs and veneers, and large building blocks which constitute the majority of the material covetted by the Middle Ages, East and West, Christian and Muslim alike, as we see throughout in the Patrologia Latina, where there are plentiful examples of what Sodini calls an un engouement extraordinaire pour les marbres, appréciés pour leurs couleurs et leurs veines from the earlier Byzantine centuries. The Middle Ages are expansive on the features they especially prized in such spolia - often features they would have found difficult or impossible to reproduce conveniently themselves. One is that they are polished, and therefore gleam; this same obsession is common, of course, in the West as well. Another is that they are square, and therefore a decided help in good building construction; the walls of Antioch were admired in part for this very reason. Mortarless joints and iron- or lead-cramped joints are also an admired feature, and people marvelled as late as the 19th century that the fit between the blocks could be so tight. Pulling down an antique fortress allowed the Muslims to study earlier construction techniques, and a letter of 1179/80 provided one of several admiring descriptions of earlier techniques. It comes from Nour el-Din's and Salah el'Din's Livre des deux Jardins, describing in a letter from El Fadhel to Baghdad in 1179/80 the destruction of the fortress of Beit al-Ahzan: La largeur de la muraille dépassait dix coudees: elle était construite en pierres de taille énormes dont chaque cube avait sept coudées, plus ou moins; le nombre de ces pierres de taille excedait vingt mille … Entre les deux murs s'étendait une ligne de blocs massifs.  The very use of cut stone - spolia blocks - is thought worth recording, as is confirmed by El-Bekri's description of the amphitheatre at Sousse, of which little now survives: Ce vaste édifice, de construction antique, est posé sur des vôutes très larges et très hautes ... Souca est entièrement bâtie en pierres de taille - and he seems to consider pierre de taille as a kind of stone, to which he gives a technical name.

To the practical and aesthetic reasons for using spolia, we may add the interest of later generations in linking with their own past, or of invaders in constructing a local identity. This idea has been much supported for spolia in  the West, as in Todisco's account of the antique lions, inscriptions  and funerary reliefs at Melfi, where la rivitalizzazione di antichi blocchi inscritti  ...   si  giustifica  infatti nell'interesse, ricco di implicazioni ideologiche, da parte dei Normanni per il retroterra culturale  delle  regioni  conquistate, e quindi di quelle romane dell'Italia  meridionale.

Spolia are sometimes so prized that their discovery is hailed as a miracle, as in the description of the uncovering of marble blocks when the building of Modena was held up for want of materials. This can be paralleled in the building of a church to the Mother of God in Jerusalem: the site ... made it impossible for those who were preparing the foundations to bring columns from outside ...  God revealed a natural supply of stone perfectly suited to this purpose in the near by hills, one which had either lain there in concealment previously, or was created at that moment ... So the church is supported on all sides by a great number of huge columns from that place, which in colour resemble flames of fire, some standing below and some above and others in the stoas which surround the whole church except on the side facing the east.  Two of these columns stand before the door of the church, exceptionally large and probably second to no columns in the whole world. The colour might indicate a breccia, or a variety of giallo antico. 

Such a high value placed on spolia explains its role as booty, for use in the most prestigious buildings. Thus for Saladin's repairs to the Al-Aksa mosque in Jerusalem in 1187: on fit venir du marbre dont on ne pourrait trouver le pareil, de cubes (de verre) dorés ... la façon byzantine, et autres objets nécéssaires, le tout amassé depuis longues années ... The Franks living in Jerusalem were some of them bought out by the Muslims, and the Franks abandonnèrent de nombreux objets qu'il leur fut impossible de vendre, tels que lits, coffres, tonneaux, etc. Ils laissèrent aussi une grande quantité de marbre qui n'avait pas son pareil, et qui consistait en colonnes, en tablettes, en petits cubes (pour former des mosaïques)… Thus could the Moslems imitate Rome, said by Ibn Al-Faqih Al-Hamadani to contain 24,000 churches, les plafonds, les murs, les pierres d'angle, les colonnes et les fenêtres sont des monolithes de marbre blanc. Muslims were perfectly happy to reuse Crusader spolia, often with just a light chiselling out of human features: they chose the most exquisite pieces for the Haram al Sharif. The Dikka in the Al-Aqsa mosque is almost completely made out of Crusader spolia, whilst in the north transept of the Holy Sepulchre, the spolia include 8thC Abbasid Corinthian capitals, and 11thC Byzantine material. Clearly, their watchword was quality, not necessarily origin. Again, Muslim admiration for marble perhaps begins very early: it is related that Mahomet was buried in a wooden coffin with a marble roof over it, and an inscription in marble; whilst the Ka’ba was very rich in marble.

Notwithstanding the foregoing comments, many questions remain. Is reuse primarily practical before it is decorative or identity-giving? Assessing intention is contentious and difficult. How would we tell? Is the movement always from practicality to decoration - from fortification to Palazzo Pitti, as it were - or is usage diverse? Does spoliation have universal constants? Is there any use of column shafts for decoration or strengthening west of Turkey and Greece? If we consider what might have been fashionable, are there any connections between the use of column shafts in the east, and of marble disks in Rome and ceramic bacini in (for example) Pisa, where there were probably once well over 2,000? If so, can we determine date-limits for such fashions? Again, does reuse of spolia signal a continuous classical tradition ? Not in Turkey, but there are separate Byzantine, Seljuk, and Armenian revivals. And what did the mediaeval spoliators learn from late antique spoliation? Does imitation operate here, as with imitation of original classical structures, as for example in bossed decoration? 

What should we understand from cases which seem to reveal no selective concern for earlier remains, such as at Kanytelleis, or the lack of interest in archaic statues on Delos, although probably only half-buried? Several of the kouroi in Delos Museum are degraded from the waist upwards, suggesting long exposure of their upper portions; others are degraded all over – and hence presumably ignored by the marble-hunters who came for columns. From such evidence, can we posit an aesthetic stance which demonstrates decided preserences via a lack of interest in archaic styles? Delos, conveniently on trade routes, was probably being robbed during the Middle Ages, and was being systematically plundered by the 17th century, and on a large scale. Travellers kept a weather-eye open for likely materials, even if the French Ambassador to Turkey visited the island in  1700, and could still examine les ruines incompréhensibles non seulement du temple d'Apollon, mais de l'isle entière … ce sont des montagnes de pierre et de marbre. Kenelm Digby scavenged there for the British King, and Thomas Roe as agent for Arundel and Buckingham. Thus Chishull counts six granite columns erect, and notes that there were eleven standing when Spon  and Wheler were there in 1675-6). He also notes pieces of the sacred lions facing the lake, but a local hunter assured him that a few years previously there were five whole ones. Stuart and Revett complain of continuing depradation in the following century, especially for new funeral monuments, but also for lintels and window cills; so that, in a few years, it may be as naked as when it first made its appearance above the surface of the sea . From the point of view of the ideology of reuse, such cases are interesting. 

At Kanytelleis, on a ridge overlooking the south-facing coast of Turkey, not far from Korykos, and apparently never a city, a Byzantine sanctuary was built with five churches - large and very imposing basilicas and monasteries, and all apparently constructed without recourse to spolia – and this in spite of the enormous quantities available in the immediate vicinity. Indeed, the Hellenistic watchtower, a splendid construction of bossed masonry at the southern entrance to the city, survives, probably because it was still useful; but outside the city’s northern limits are some fine tomb terraces of much earlier date including, to the west, a temple tomb with barrel vault, and another with Doric columns. These announce the beginning of a still extant street of tombs, which is echoed on the city’s southern approach. So were the necropoleis (and watchtower) preserved as a testimony to the city’s august origins? Something similar occurs not many kilometres to the east, at Elaiussa Sebaste, a much larger classical settlement, where several of the many churches do indeed use spolia, but where, although the temples seen in the early 19th century have now gone, the enormous necropoleis seem similarly intact. In both cases, of course, the visitor to the city would have been impressed by the approach; and at Elaiussa, the traveller passing along the coast, or even out to sea, would have seen the terraced necropoleis displayed along the ridge. To our modern minds, non-use would imply a much greater respect for the monuments than parcelling them into pieces and re-using them as spolia; but we have no evidence that, in Turkey, leaving ancient monuments intact meant anything beyond indifference, or a superabundance of targets for spolia.

Applying all these questions to a study of survivals in Turkey and round the Mediterranean to North Africa, five salient factors emerge:

1.	Most reuse of spolia is opportunistic, being played against a background of declining population, frequent danger, and an aggressive stripping of the past to accommodate the present;
2.	So ruthless was such stripping to become that we can recognise the same developing “marble starvation” in the East that we find in the West – that is, a dearth of matching materials, and a make-and-mend mentality; 
3.	Marble, presumably robbed from ancient monuments, is prized (certainly by the 12th century) by Christian and Moslem alike, and collected over time - hoarded, in fact;
4.	However we must always be aware of differing aesthetic horizons. Although we have insufficient evidence to determine clear civic attitudes to spolia, such encroaching “marble starvation” is in itself a pointer toward aesthetic appreciation of the past, at least for the beauty of the materials, if not their matching regularity;
5.	We have much stronger evidence of aesthetic reuse of the past by the military, and for the defence of cities, where such work is frequently modelled on a consistent vision of the past which embraces spolia for practical as well as aesthetic purposes.

The Military Use of Spolia in Structure and Decoration

A common, but little studied, feature of city walls and fortresses from late Antiquity and through the Middle Ages is the extent to which they often owed their structure, and sometimes their embellishment as well, to the re-use of materials originally cut for some other location or purpose. 

The topic is of interest for several reasons. 
1.	It demonstrates new methods of construction, especially in reusing columns as tie bars (since classical tie-bars, when used at all, are metal cramps. The first build of Anavarza is indeed Roman, but unless what we now see in the lower levels is also Roman, I can find no examples of limestone or marble baulks in Antiquity used to tie walls together. Perhaps, therefore, the move away from metal cramps is a marker of new and less careful methods, and perhaps a fall-off of the necessary skills. Thus the Wall of Valerian in Athens (early 3rd century AD) uses cramps, whilst the Post-Herulian Wall (built after 267AD) does not . An indication that this technique had indeed fallen partly out of use in the Middle Ages is that, instead of being passed over as merely routine, it was received with marvel: on at least one occasion the huge blocks and tie-bars of a Roman wall were greeted with admiration in the Middle Ages, as in the dismantling of parts of the Wall of David at Jerusalem in 1239: les pierres estoient si granz que tuit s’en merveilloient. Elle estoit si fort maconee a chaux et ciment et a arainne, et les pierres soudeez a plomc et a grosses handes de fer acroschiez d’une part et d’autre que a trop grant painne et a trop grand force la porent ruer jus. So when Willbrand of Oldenburg visited Beirut in 1212 and noted the use of iron cramps in the walls and towers, was he looking at contemporary work, or classical work?
2.	The use of spolia in military structures highlights the prestige with which military architecture was surrounded: lacking information about palaces, the only other types of buildings we know to have been decorated consistently with antiquities are churches, and palazzi pubblici in Italy. Embellishment with spolia may indicate that such architecture was conceived as performing much more than simply a protective function: rather, it served as a symbol of political as well as of military power.
3.	Such reuse can be read, furthermore,  as revealing a widespread and consistent respect for the antique past - especially in the most conspicious of its productions, namely architectural members, columns and reliefs - at a time when there was a dearth of contemporary productions to rival them.
4.	The lavish use of spolia makes clear just what large quantities of material were available well into the second millennium after Christ - so that the mid-11th century Persian author Nasir-I-Hosran exclaims that Nella provincia di Siria la terra e seminata di piu che cinque centomila colonne, capitelle e fusti; nessun sa a che cosa esse abbinao servito ne donde siano stato portate la. This is still the case: Burckhardt noted vast quantities of shafts of columns at Om Keis and, to its north east, over 190 standing full-height, and over 100 part-shafts standing at Gerash, whilst Buckingham counted nearly 200 in reuse in the town of Acre.
5.	The phenomenon draws attention to one of the most abundant sources for later centuries of examples, not only of antique architecture and sculpture, but especially of inscriptions. In this respect, military architecture may be seen not just as a reflection of social attitudes, but as an actual instrument which, by re-using the past and displaying it, keeps at least some of the monuments of Antiquity in view rather than buried, and therefore actively helps in the various revivals of interest in the classical past that, in the West, inform the Middle Ages and determine the nature and extent of the Renaissance itself . The walls, in this sense, make the city. They should not only dissuade any attacker, just as the strength of a castle does, but their architectural decoration is also intended to indicate power and wealth. In exactly the same way the Middle Ages made the Renaissance in the West, while further East spolia walls have released their treasures only much later, over the last two centuries.

But we are hampered in our assessment of mediaeval walls because of a sparsity of information about the decoration on the antique enceintes on which they were probably modelled. Our knowledge of the gates of Rome and of Constantinople is an exception here, because they were so famous. To illustrate the problem from the West: the walls of Narbonne were highly decorated with spolia antiquities, clearly deliberately. It seems more than possible that this is in imitation of antique examples, most of which have of course disappeared. For example, nearby Toulouse had a South Gate, the Porte du Chateau Narbonnais, destroyed in the 16th century, which had bas-reliefs of “captives” to either side of a trophy, framed by cannellated columns. This was almost certainly antique in origin, with the statues and the blocks probably in reuse as spolia. Thus we learn that the chateau was formed de grosses pierres de taille avant plus tot apparoissance de dépouilles, reliques et vestiges d’autres bastions que d’avoir été faits à propos grandes pierres, de quoi les murailles d’iceliu étoient construites, n’[étoitent] d’aucun mortier, ne ciment assemblees, mais seulement l’une a l’autre cramponnées et de toutes parts ainsi iontes et rangées à la règle. But it is impossible now to draw any parallels with the walls of Narbonne.

Occasionally, documents in  the West suggest the reuse of antiquities in fortress walls, as at Lucera - but we do not know whether spolia were reused here for their convenience or for their beauty. Thus two documents of 1303 write  of a location called Antiquallia, at Lucera - (presumably a find spot for spolia?) and requests the castellan of the fortress  for  materials in secondary reuse, item  columpnas marmoreas et lapides antiquarum  ecclesiarum  pro constructione. In May 1304, another document  refers to columpnas omnes existentes in fortellicia  dicti  castri,  que  non  sint affixe in aliquo opere. With other documents, we are not sure whether the references are to antiquities or not.

Luckily, but again only in  the West, we have in mediaeval manuscript illustrations plenty of supporting evidence for the prestige in which decorated walls were held. Such manuscripts frequently give emphasis to the importance of ramparts, of triumphal gateways, and of urban splendour. To which we can add an admiring  description of the gallo-roman enceinte at Angers, c.1150, that it consistit in moenibus vetustissimis, gloriam fundatorum recensens, in  quadris lapidibus, which underlines the historical dimension. These can be backed up by surviving examples, albeit partial, of surviving antique gates and their mediaeval imitators: Frederick II’s gate at Capua was, according to one author, decorated with spolia; as was Castel del Monte. Some surviving antique gates were decorated: Volterra's with heads, Perugia's with shields, several with arcading and, sometimes, figurative pilasters and pillars, some no doubt in imitation of triumphal arches. Judging by the Golden Gate at Constantinople or Hadrian's Arch at Antalya, decorated gates may well have existed in Turkey, and perhaps been imitated by the Knights, whose castle at Bodrum had Mausoleum reliefs flanking at least one gate. In Athens, for example, the Krystalliotissa Gate which probably replaces an earlier one in the north flank of the post-Herulian Wall, dating to the period of Justinian, is richly decorated, from the plentiful available materials. Similarly, the “castle” of the Acropolis at Athens was in a sense decorated, since it incorporated the Propylaea, and it is not clear from early accounts by travellers whether they realised the fact, or believed them to be constructed as part of the castle itself. Reworking with spolia could indeed be confusing: the propylaea at Baalbec, for example, included the Roman flanking towers with some Arabic cladding to the propylaea, and the Temple of Bacchus became a lofty donjon.

Even the frequent and widespread vogues for diapering of various kinds, including polychrome courses, probably originated in antique fashions of at least Hellenistic date. In this regard, what connections may be established between imitation, spolia and pastiche? When spolia walls alternate different colours of stone, this could well be in imitation of the antique, but it is also a reflection of contemporary aesthetics., and is a technique which appears in mediaeval walls in Turkey. Clive Foss (whose work on Byzantine fortifications is extensive and valuable) identifies as Metabole the site where are to be found limestone spoils (perhaps 7th century, by analogy with Ankara and Sardis) carefully arranged in regular courses. They include numerous column drums and several doorstone tombs, all apparently without inscriptions. The whole effect, enhanced by the contrast between the whitish stones and the red bands of mortar between them, is highly decorative and quite unexpected. - unexpected perhaps, but by no means unique: compare Ama, in Syria, which uses similar striations, and Haruniye, which horizontally stripes the east gate in dark and lighter coloured stone blocks. Mediaeval fortresses in Turkey were frequently built on the same site as their antique forbears, very often on top of the same foundations, and often employing and making good what was found there. Imitation is therefore likely, with bossed masonry as another deliberate evocation of antique grandeur.

Certainly antique-inspired is the vogue for bossed masonry, the origin of which is clearly and plentifully to be seen in classical Greek architecture, and in many Hellenistic fortifications in Turkey (such as Assos), to be imitated in structures such as Urfa, Haruniye, Anavarza and Korykos. It is also possible that its use is primarily practical rather than simply decorative - namely, that such a profile better withstands the shocks of projectile-throwing siege engines. Nevertheless at Rumkale, the church has bossed decoration, underlining once more how the practical and the decorative can intertwine. Enlart even suggests that it was a common practice to apply bosses to new pieces of stone to match those of spolia. But the imitation of the past might also be in play at Porta Pinciana, Rome, and at the temple at Split, which seem to imitate the small lifting bosses left on some earlier work for a decorative or perhaps apotropaic intent. The display of pagan spolia in Christian contexts, for which there is evidence in Turkey, might also have been apotropaic, just as it was for Bernward of Hildesheim in Germany. Pagan columns might sometimes have needed sanitizing as well, as with the apparent reference to Solomon’s Temple in the Pilastri Acritani.

If earlier architectural members were redolent of past prestige and important in invoking it for the present, this was all the more the case with sculpture, which had itself frequently played an essential part in the political programs of antique rulers. As Hanfmann writes of sculptural programs in Asia Minor, These sermons in stone [...] did preach a definite ideology. While official acknowledgment was made to the ruling power of Rome, the main theme was a classicizing attempt to extol the past glories of the Greek mythical world, of the city’s history, and of the Greek literary education and culture [...] while enjoying the benefits of the organizing ability and the comforts of the Roman present. Cultural “hand me downs” are an important element in several aspects of mediaeval cultural life, from law and poetry to surveying, the art of war and wine-making. Fortress building and decoration are no exception, so strongly were our forbears influenced by the continuing prestige attributed not only to the antique achievement but also to its many surviving remains. To the potency of tradition, of course, is added the sheer pragmatism of military engineers, who appear to have used the best material they could find, and frequently to have distinguished (almost as if they were painting a portrait) between the “good side” of a structure - that is, one which would be readily visible to visitors - and the others, which could safely be constructed out of inferior materials. 

The point of such decoration was that it was politic to impress; and we know from travellers' accounts that they certainly admired monuments made of spolia, whether or not they realised this was how they were made. Thus Niccolo da Martoni, who visited Athens in 1394, writes: qui introytus est de lapidibus marmoreis, pulchris laboribus fabricatus, sic pulcer sicut est introytus turrium civitatis Capue (an estimation which would no doubt have pleased Frederick). But it naturally gets better inside: in quo castro est[imo?] quedam sala magna in qua sunt columpnae magne XIII, Supra quas columpnas sunt trabes longi pedibus triginta, et super ipsas trabes sunt tabule marmoree: magnum et mirabile opus videtur.. Equally, Chaucer via Boccaccio might have echoes of admiration for the “Frankish Tower” on the Acropolis. 

Similarly, the great spolia walls of Africa are held in high esteem by Leo Africanus, who approaches his task in an ordered but far from formulaic fashion, so that his descriptions might easily appear in tables rather than as running text. Indeed, his book generally judges cities and their prosperity by the grandeur of the walls, which he always notes, although he sometimes had to contrast the poverty of the latter with the grandeur of the former. He always notes carefully when a city is Roman in origin, as distinct from when it is African; and he does so from a standpoint of almost complete ignorance of the Greek and Roman geographers, so that we may accept his observations as eye-witness reports. A great admirer of what the Romans left, he is no apologist for his own day, which seems to him often degraded, and he frequently condemns later generations for letting fortifications fall into ruin.Thus El Hama e una Citta anticha edificata da Romani e cinta di mura fatte di pietre grosse e molto ben lavorate, e fino di d’hoggi si veggono tavole di marmo con lettere intagliate su le porte; le case e le strade di questa citta sono brutte, e gli habitatori poveri. Urbs Citta is Roman, 190 miles south of Tunis, e sono in lei molte antiche reliquie de Romani: come sono statue di marmo, tavole di marmo su le porte con latine lettere intagliate per entro, e molti muri di pietre grosse e lavorate. The town was then taken by the Goths, deserted, and came back to life only as a village. Costantine has walls which are antiche, alte e grosse, e fatte di certe pietre negre, e lavorate, whilst at Stefe they are di pietre belle e grosse fatte in forma quadre. At Bresch, near Oran, Nella citta rimangono molte vestigia de gli edifici, e fabriche de Romani, e di quelli sono fatte le mura, just as they are at Sersel and at Deusen. He has wide experience of things Roman, and can make comparisons with what he has seen in Europe. So Tebessa he recognizes as a Roman city, e cinta d’intorno d’alte, forti e grosse mura, fatte di alcune grosse pietre lavorate, le quali somigliano alle pietre, che sono nel coliseo di Roma; ne io per tutta l’Africa, ne in tutta Europa ho veduto mura di quella sorte. Ma le case di dentro sono altretanto brutte. And at Caphsa, the walls are of grossissime pietre lavorate, come sono quelle del coliseo di Roma, and the streets are lastricate di pietre negre, come sono le strade di Napoli e di Firenze.

Leo was in no doubt about the symbolic value of the Roman inscriptions he saw displayed in spolia walls. For him they were triumphalist, and no less than the proof that the Romans have destroyed African civilization and replaced it with their own. He muses on what lost African writing would have been like, finding it strange that the inscriptions on tombs or walls should be Roman, not African. Why was it lost? Because of the inevitable and traditional annihilation by every race of the monuments of their predecessors: quando I Romani, che fur loro nimici, dominarono quei luoghi, essi, come e costume de vincitori, e per maggior lor disprezzo, levassero tutti i lor titoli e le lor lettere, e vi mettessero I loro, per levar infieme con la dignita de gli Africani ogni memoria, e sola vi rimanesse quella del popolo Romano … Non e adunque da maravigliarsi che la lettera Africana si perdutta …  This theme appears in the index as Romani, destruttori delle memorie Africano. 

It is clear, therefore, that the military use of spolia, both in structure and as decoration, offers a rich source for investigation; and some sites will be studied in more detail below. 

Spolia Riches in Turkey and North Africa

From Turkey round to North Africa very large quantities of spolia sources have survived, simply because population pressure has destroyed most comparable complexes in the West (compare Douai in 1391, where  95% of the stone appears to have been in reuse, with the systematic purchase of old properties for demolition.) Hence streets of tombs of which the Via Appia now provides such scarce remains are better envisaged from Elaiussa Sebaste, Hierapolis, or Assos in Turkey. In a sense, we can visit such areas today and imagine when we view the large range of surviving ancient monuments that we are actually transported into mediaeval Europe, and confronting ancient monuments there. In spite of depradations and some extremely serious earthquakes, large quantities of antiquities remain; some antique sites have only recently stopped being inhabited; and the population pressures that were such a devastating feature of later mediaeval Europe are largely non-existent, so that antique sites, except those by the sea, are probably safe for the future.

The re-use of spolia may be observed all over the ex-Greek or ex-Roman world, often by peoples who have no genetic or apparently cultural connection with Greece or Rome, but who affected the antique taste for extravagant materials such as marble, without necessarily wishing to quarry their own. This practice seems most frequently to be taken for granted, and we may suspect the re-use of spolia as totems of Roman grandeur, tradition, or architectural splendour – a usage arguably parallel to that of nouveaux-riches who acquire old portraits for their houses in order to give themselves a pedigree. In the case of fortifications, the ideological justification is an old one, because the equation between walls equalling civilisation, and no walls equalling either barbarism or subjection, goes back to the Greeks. Spolia walls, with the enormous effort needed to construct them, display continuity; but contemporary accounts are as lacking in  the East as they are in the West, so we have no mediaeval rationale proffered to confirm this.

The richer the spolia, the greater the impact and influence: Crusaders and Armenians imitated classical building techniques in many of their castles, and employed antiquities frequently; the Seljuk Turks did likewise; the Ottoman Turks denuded classical sites for their own vast building works; and the French relied heavily on Roman roads and fortresses, as well as on Roman water systems and cisterns, for their conquest of Algeria. In other words, the French probably made use of antiquities in the same practical fashion that must have informed most of the Western Middle Ages, when Roman water supplies were convenient for baptisteries.

In the West documents, luckily, provide some kind of counterbalance to the lack of physical remains, but usually only by inference: explicit references to spolia are rare, although occasionally archaeology can help, as at San Vincenzo al Volturno. In the East, scholarly attention will not yet allow the production of the level of facts and figures, graphs and charts that may be found, for example, in Randsborg’s work for the West. In Greece, the beginnings of a corpus of mediaeval towers is appearing, fighting against scholarly disinterest. In Turkey, Syria and North Africa, Foss, Pringle and others are charting the landscape of mediaeval fortifications, and establishing a chronology. 

Spolia are plentiful in Turkey and North Africa because in both areas invasions took over a country whose population had dropped dramatically since the hey-day of Roman occupation, and because of the fact that the invaders were without any tradition of their own of monumental architecture. Consequently, they continued at least some of the traditions of those they had conquered, including a respect for classical materials, which they also re-used in enormous quantities. For example, the 500-plus antique columns in the Great Mosque at Kairouan were famous, with some particularly admired for their sheer beauty by Leo Africanus, no doubt partly because the aesthetics imposed on the spolia with symmetry of forms and colours. El-Bekri, amongst others, remarks on the deux colonnes rouges, tachetées de jaune, dont la beauté est incomparable in the mihrab of the mosque at Kairouan, which he says came from an old church, that L'on raconte qu'avant le déplacement de ces colonnes, le souverain de Constantinople avait voulu les acheter au poids de l'or, aussi les musulmans s'empressèrent de les transporter à la mosquée. It has even been suggested that the Arabs bothered to cut but a few columns until well after Seljuk times, preferring to use spolia instead.  Certainly, foreigners  were frequently impressed by their use of marble, and descriptions of sumptuous marble-rich palaces and baths abound, together with wonder at the quality of the marbles used, their whiteness and their smoothness. Even Christian churches as far east as Diyarbakir were rich in marble, and some of this survived past mediaeval times. But then, some people were clearly obsessed by marble, sometimes mistaking limestone for it.

In North Africa, such large quantities of spolia were available at least in part because of the spolia walls built during the Justinianic conquests of AD 533/554, and because of that same an acceleration of the processes of decay in once-populous cities that we find in Italy. Such walls arguably represented a renovatio for North Africa, although there are good reasons for treating such statements in inscriptions with some scepticism, the more so since dedicatory inscriptions (not to mention Procopius) do not mention spolia, perhaps taking it for granted that their very use betokens a renewal, as they claim. Certainly, some sites do display care in the reuse of spolia - such as Timgad, where the Byzantines generally did not recut any spolia for the fortress (built 539-40, as we know from the foundation inscription), but simply chose the blocks carefully. In the barrack houses, material was recut, but equally carefully laid (although of low quality when compared with the Roman wall). Columns are also reused in the walls, dans l'appareil du mur, remployé sans doute dans le noyeau du mur en cours de régularisation. However, the (usually inflated) late antique boast of renovatio tends (in North Africa, as in the West) to mean making good rather than completely building a fundamentis – although in some cases parallels with the renewal of the whole Empire are implicit, even if only rhetorically; and the very act may imply the reconstruction’s status as a historical monument, or yet, perhaps, as imitation of the antique , as is obviously the case with S. Mark’s, Venice, which struck at least one commentator (as it was certainly intended to do) as comparable to Hagia Sophia. Civic boasting is always irredeemably upbeat, and similar boasting, often explicit, is to be found in funerary inscriptions. Parallels are to be found in claims of military conquest, as well as in fort-building by the Arabs. 

Even though Procopius is not explicit on the beautifying properties of spolia, from the actual results we can conclude that he believed spolia helped produce that effect. He describes Justinian's energetic wall-building at length and, even where ruinous walls were rebuilt, presumably with spolia, as at Kertsch and Sevastopol, he writes that the walls had fallen completely into ruin, and he made them remarkably beautiful and thoroughly safe (III.vii.10). But as an antidote to Procopius' exuberance (or mendacity), Cameron believes that a lot of Justinianic buildings were shoddy, relying on interior marble for their effect - perhaps this is why so many contemporary ekphraseis, including the section on S.  Sophia in the Buildings, spend so much of their time praising the coloured marbles.   For Duval, spolia enceintes are a symbol of the continuity of civilization, just as the building of a wall marked the foundation of classical colonies. Assessing intent is always difficult, however. Thus with the Panaghia in Antalya, built with temple spolia, it is argued that the building was indeed a renovatio, being seen as new, not as old - what Gassi calls attualizazione del materiale antico. The spolia, in this interpretation, lose their connotation of antiquity,  armonizzandosi perfettamente con quelli bizantini in un contesto ornamentale e architettonico unitario. This theory, even if correct, still gives little insight into how the builders viewed the spolia they used, or whether they knew what they were, and how old. But the general idea is surely analagous to display on fortifications; as Uggeri has it, the display of antiquities on churches are I parlanti monumenti della romanita, and the church un vero archivio di pietra, il luogo piu idoneo per conservare le memorie della citta. 

One of the ironies of our study is that Crusaders and pilgrims certainly knew many of the places and monuments in our territories, including monuments which have since disappeared, much better than we can today reconstruct them. Myra, where S. Nicholas was still performing miracles,  was a landfall for pilgrims as, further west, was the now-deserted Patara - jadis puissante et belle, a été aujourdhui [late 1330s] détruite par les turcs. Again, many important antique centres in Turkey (or rather their hinterland) were targetted for trade in the Middle Ages. We may suspect, by analogy with what happened in Europe, that this included trade in spolia, perhaps as ballast (cf.Vasari), along with staple commodities - an eastern counterpart to the marmorarii of Rome, whose work reached England and France by the early 11th century. Certainly, there is at least one narrative account of Christians selling spolia to North Africans, if only from the early 18th century. In a sense, after the Ottoman Turkish takeover, and the cutting of many of the sea and land routes, in the 16th century Western Europe, through her travellers, had to pick up the pieces of antiquarian study, and re-learn what mediaeval generations of crusaders and pilgrims probably already knew. Such travel accounts are frequently important, because we cannot trust the current appearance of monuments as necessarily identical to the mediaeval appearance - although they help us ponder on  the meaning of renovatio. Even 19th century photographs give us information now otherwise lost.

Another irony, which hinders any chance we might have had of coherent contemporary discussions of the use of spolia, is the studied indifference that can be read into metropolitan Byzantine attitudes to classical statuary. Thus Cyril Mango believes that, when the Turks took the City the Hercules reliefs on the Golden Gate, and the serpent column, were the only two specimens of ancient sculpture left. He is equally mournful about Byzantine artistic engagement with the classical past, and with the impact of the past on the present: Each time we find a Byzantine representation of a classical subject, it appears, upon inspection, to be separated from its ultimate classical model by a long chain of transmission, usually in the minor arts. A penchant for relief sculpture, not to mention iconoclasm, of course, were the reasons. But an indifference to the past is surely startling, with the classical tradition killed in a city once crammed with antique artworks - whereas the use of spolia elsewhere in Turkey helps preserve that tradition. Mango's assessment seems confirmed by an early 8th century chronicle which intimates that not much material is left and, when it writes of portrait sculpture, cites work from four centuries before. Krousmmos' sack in 813 AD depleted the stock of antiquities even further. Some travellers much later found such a dearth of antiquities somewhat odd. Nevertheless, some imitation of the past continued in the matter of spolia, if we accept Foss’ suggestion that 12th-century restorations of the Land Walls followed, in using spolia, ninth-century models.

Inhabitants’ Attitudes to Antiquities and Spolia 

What comments we have from travellers about the attitudes of inhabitants to antique monuments do not antedate the foureenth century, but nevertheless give us an essential introduction to what happened earlier. Such comments may well be prejudiced, but they accord well with the richly documented ones from Western Europe. The usual stance is that all the ruins from the past were built by kings (or giants, because of their stupendous size), and were sites for magic or, if one was lucky, rich with treasure (not too different from the characteristic Byzantine superstitions about antique statues and reliefs); the majority, what is more, were castles or palaces (and are thus re-named), often with long subterranean passages. Western peasants seem not to have considered that such remains had been built by their own ancestors ; and the Turks or (most) Arabs, of course, were not in Turkey or North Africa when her Greek and Roman cities were constructed. Thus Western toponyms (such as palatium into Piazza Armerina) can be paralleled in Turkey. At Miletus, Chandler notes- that this is a very mean place, but still called Palat or Palatia, the Palaces - or, in the modern name, Balat. 

Ignorance of antiquities, ranging from lack of interest to a destructive zeal, struck Islamic and Christian foreigners alike. At Pergamum, Fellows complains that The Turks take you round, and show you all they have not themselves built, calling every ruin by the simple name of the “old walls”. They know nothing of traditions, for they are only conquerors here, and extremely ignorant; and at Assos, whilst examining a road flanked by tombs, he reports that all buildings, whether bridge, bath or aqueduct, temple, theatre or tomb, all “Esky kalli”, “old castle.”  Conversely (and once again as in Western Europe), the Turks were puzzled by travellers’ investigation of antiquities, the common belief being that they were hunting for gold and treasure, or wishing to worship the “idols” they unearthed. This is because of strong traditions from late Antiquity of finding treasure in old buildings.

But caustic opinions by Europeans about Turkish attitudes to the past are not necessarily exceptional, nor yet applicable only to Anatolia. Similar comments on attitudes to the antique past are provided by the fourteenth-century writer Ibn Khaldun, whose perceptive comments on the reuse of spolia are unmatched by contemporary accounts from Turkey. He characterises the Arabs as being not only child-like in their attitudes to the past, but frequently destructive as well. (which can be backed up by plenty of evidence, and by European opinion - although travellers to Algeria were later to deplore the génie déstructeur of the Vandals, Turks and French military engineers.) This social realist, who recognizes the inevitable change in human institutions, berates them as being generally uninterested in monumental building which, as he remarks, attests to the civilisation of earlier nations. The conclusion is inevitably that, since sedentary culture is the goal of civilisation (IV.17), since the buildings erected in Islam are comparatively few considering her power (IV.7, IV.8), and since those that are built quickly fall into ruins (IV.9), then the Arabs are not civilised in Ibn Khaldun’s sense. He also hints at supernatural explanations for the size of antique buildings. Is Ibn Khaldun’s assessment justified? Probably not in the case of the Vandals who, complains Bourgeois, have had an unfairly bad press. Nor in the case of the Seljuks, as we shall see. And the Ottomans reuse of spolia both as building materials as well as for their historical value, prestige and size is identical to what happened in the West. But it was just such an assessment of Arab lack of interest in fortresses which informed the French invasion of Algeria in 1830.

His analysis of the building cycle (IV.10) is interesting, because it surely proceeds from his own observations, because it incorporates spoliation as a natural part of the process, and because it accords with what we know of the process during the Middle Ages and later. In the absence of parallel accounts, we may use it as a model for what happened in Turkey. He writes that when cities are first founded, they have few dwellings and few building materials, such as stones and quicklime, or the things that serve as ornamental coverings for walls, such as tiles, marble, mosaic, jet, shells [mother-of-pearl], and glass. Thus, at that time, the buildings are built in Bedouin [style], and the materials used for them are perishable... [But civilization grows and reaches its limit] The civilization of the city then recedes, and its inhabitants decrease in number. This entails a decrease in the crafts. As a result, good and solid building and the ornamentation of buildings are no longer practised. ... Materials such as stone, marble, and other things are now being imported scarcely at all, and (building materials) become unavailable. The materials that are in existing buildings are re-used for building and refinishing. They are transferred from one construction to another, since most of the (large) constructions, castles, and mansions stand empty as the result of the scarcity of civilization [population]. ... (The same materials) continue to be used for one castle after another and for one house after another, until most of it is completely used up. People then return to the Bedouin way of building. They use adobe instead of stone and omit all ornamentation. The architecture of the city reverts to that of villages and hamlets. The mark of the desert shows in it. [The city] then gradually decays and falls into complete ruin, if it is thus destined for it. This is how God proceeds with his creatures..  And he deplores the common belief that the ancients were giants, erecting buildings with their bare hands:  They forget the importance of machines and pulleys and engineering skill implied in this connection..

The Geography and Chronology of Spoliation

Although it is impossible to draw chronological charts of spolia usage in Turkey or North Africa,  and although some spolia received a new lease of life during the industrious fortification of the Crusades, we can be certain that the Middle Ages had even more remains at their disposal than now survive, but perhaps less confident than the 19th-century French that the Arabs had left spolia alone. The extent and the time-frame of such use has been addressed by Siraj, who has argued most ingeniously that the difference in  those sites that al-Bekri (11th century) and Leo Africanus (15th century) consider to be antique is a direct result of el-Bekri actually seeing antiquities ( - les témoignages de la période préislamique étaient encore nombreux), whereas Leo simply listened to oral traditions ( - quoique les ruines antiques n'avaient pas complètement disparu). Accepting this argument means we must accept that many spolia were reused between the Crusades and the beginning of what we might call a second period of European influence. Indeed, in spite of Ibn Khaldun's strictures about the usual lack of interest of Arabs in the past, such large reuse of spolia by Muslims is easy to demonstrate, perhaps not inferior to that of Christians in the West, conceivably for similar reasons practical, aethetic and ideological - witness Siraj's discussion of Tangier's loss of her antiquities. 

To take Carthage, the most famous site of North Africa, and conveniently located on the coast next to a good harbour, we find it first plundered by Africans, not Europeans: El-Bekri asserts a high level of spoliation in the 11th century, because Le marbre est si abondant à Carthage que si tous les habitants de l'Ifrikiya se rassemblaient pour en tirer les blocs et les transporter ailleurs, ils ne pourraient pas accomplir leur tache - the implication is that many people did indeed come from far away, but the quantity of spolia defeated them. Subsequently, Edrisi noted that les fouilles ne discontinuent pas, les marbres sont transportés au loin dans tout le pays, et nul ne quitte Carthage sans en charger des quantites considérables sur des navires ou autrement; c'est un fait très connu. Accordingt to Ibn Sa'id Gharnati (died AH 673 or 685), at Carthage se trouvait des idoles de marbre représentant toutes les espèces d'animaux, des hommes  [presumably mosaics he saw in the theatre?], but that the ancient city was destroyed in the time of Abd El Melik Ben Merwan (reigned AH 65-8], who transported materials thither to Damascus. There was enough left for Ahmed Ben Qali Mahalli to write, in the 10th century, that La construction en est belle et l'arrangement remarquable: des palais de marbre blanc y étaient surmontés de statues coloriées representant des hommes et toutes sortes d'animaux … aujourd'hui en ruines , and Et-Tidjani emphasises that there was a large population there in the early 14th century - although by 1832, Falbe finds the remains pitiful.

One further reason why the chronology of spoliation can be difficult to determine is that cities in both the East and the West have pulled down their walls over the last 150 years, usually for similar reasons: partly because they were now useless for defence purposes (not least because of expanding populations), but also because they were a symbol of the old-fashioned past and could easily be sacrificed for needs like roads and boulevards. Sheer lack of interest may have been the reason for Antioch’s loss of what was still in the last century a splendid set, although a serious earthquake in 1906 did not help; but the walls of Konya and Ankara, and most of those of Antalya, have gone. In East and West, spolia from the late antique or mediaeval walls have been used to make museums (e.g. Konya and Narbonne). 

The pace of spoliation in Turkey is generally obscure, but certainly increased greatly in the 18th, 19th and 20th centuries, as growing cities needed immense quantities of building stone. Beaufort described the rich remains of Soli in 1811 (i.e. Pompeiopolis) as containing a theatre, city walls, tombs and aqueducts, describing nearby Mersin as a small hamlet with a few houses, called Mersyn, on the foundations of an unfinished fort, and two iron guns lying in the sand (just down the coast, Silifke once had a recognisable amphitheatre.) Since little now remains on site beyond the fine colonnade, we may assume Mersin grew at least initially at the expense of Soli: but what need had Mersin for columns, except for a few mosques? Of the colonnaded street, for example, some 450 metres in length, only thirty-seven columns remain; perhaps the rest were carted off much earlier by sea to help build Korykos down the coast, which uses columns of similar girth and coarse stone as tie bars in several of its towers (in thinner walls, they might more properly be called headers; but columns are so long that they tie together skins that are wide apart). Supposedly destroyed by an earthquake in the 6th century, Soli is called in Turkish Viransehir - that is, city of ruins - a common appellation, as is eski kale. Again, when Beaufort visited Antalya, the circuit of walls was still complete; little now remains. He believed that Anamurium (now completely denuded of veneer, and with very few columns indeed) lost most of its spolia well before his visit, being carted off to Cyprus (there being no viable roads along the coast at that date, but plenty of excellent anchorages); and he perceptively compares its style to that of  some of the antient castles of Great Britain. Other Turkish sites clearly made less sense in the 18th century, because they were covered in later constructions or detritus. They have been dug since Morritt’s day; so that his description of the acropolis at Pergamum as having been used by the Genoese and Turks, is now one hodge-podge of fine remains jumbled pell-mell into walls and fortifications is no longer relevant; instead, such sites have been sanitized down to much earlier layers of little interest to us spoliatori. And at Lindos (Rhodes), Morritt says that a Turkish castle occupies the situation of the ancient Acropolis, and contains nothing remarkable: the area has now been cleared, and the colonnade of the classical acropolis re-erected.

Geography and convenience frequently join hands for the acquiring of spolia, with islands and sites by the sea being targetted. There are plenty of narrated instances from the 17th century onwards where columns made convenient ballast, as well as being highly prized back in Europe – a combination of immediate utility and later meaning, so to speak. The French were scouting for spolia perhaps on government orders, and certainly with government encouragement, and it seems highly likely that they dismantled late-antique and mediaeval walls in various parts of Greece to get at the bas-reliefs they contained. Thus we have the expense accounts of Michel Fourmont, Professor of Syriac Languages, during his travels. Was he after spolia in fortress walls? He was Au monastere de S Cosme et Damien near Tiryns for 2 days; at Tiryns itself, he payed for 12 men for 13 days qui ont travaillé à la démolition du château - which suggests a Byzantine fort on top, perhaps; at Damala, he payed for 8 men to dig for 5 days; and at Argos, he spent money for la fouille des temples. 

Geography and geology also played their part on spoliation, and the very artificiality of some of the ancient cities of Turkey, some of which existed almost as a conjuring trick of marble and water, clearly led to their demise. The water they needed to survive was impossible without maintenance to the infrastructure of harbours, aqueducts or cisterns, and watercourses, the resultant silting and marshes provoking malaria and abandonment. This point is relevant for spolia, because water is an antique version of conspicuous expenditure, and any systemic breakdown released large quantities of spolia, as can be seen from the fate of Perge, Aspendos and Side. The elaborate water system at Perge is furred up spectacularly, as can be seen both in the fountain under the acropolis, and in the baths by the south gate. At Side, Beaufort remarked nearly 200 years ago  that There is no stream of water here and therefore no inhabitants; no fire-wood is in the immediate vicinity; and the harbours are now too shallow... At Aspendos, the demise of the spectacular aqueduct, with its inverse syphon, left the acropolis of the city literally high and dry, and ripe for spoliation from nearby Antalya.

Earthquakes may also have prompted the reuse of spolia, by conveniently dismantling classical structures. There are plenty of examples of earthquake damage throughout our area. At Berenice, for example, Stucchi demonstrates that excavations show the 249 AD earthquake damage not only unrepaired for a century and a half, but the town was also ransacked for useable materials. The extraurban sanctuary of Demeter at Cyrene was destroyed in the 262 earthquake, and never rebuilt; and spolia appear in Christian basilicas at Apollonia, as well as in three fountains at Cirene and one at Tolemaide. In all cases, the appropriateness of the reuse bespeaks aesthetics, and not mere convenience, per un amore per  il  passato  glorioso,  forse anche nell'illusione di rinnovarlo . But what about quality? Stucchi cites the base of the minaret of the Giama Sahnun at Agedabia (no longer extant), stato ritenuto a lungo un monumento romano. However, this assessment may be unnecessarily sunny and optimistic. William of Tyre, for instance, also cites earthquakes as occasioning the need for rebuilding, but specifically mentions the mediocrity of some of the results.

As for typology, there are so many fortifications of various periods in Turkey that we look in vain for anything like a comprehensive catalogue, even of the classical period. A start has been made on typology, in a Survey of the Medieval Castles of Anatolia, which began in 1981, sponsored by the British Institute of Archaeology, Ankara. The series begins with Clive Foss, who believes that the type of spolia used can help dating. If work on our period is under way in Turkey, it has scarcely even begun for North Africa. Duval gives a good bird's-eye summary, but deplores the lack of digs on truly Byzantine work in N. Africa. 

Levels of Meaning in the Use of Spolia

We can frequently find perfectly good practical reasons for re-use, with no discernible rationale in either the aesthetic or the historical dimension. Foundations get re-used because they are convenient and strong; squared blocks because they are to hand or easily transportable to the site of the new works, being by the sea; tombstones make good facing panels or paving slabs; column shafts make good tie-bars; marble veneer is easily re-locatable; and marble makes excellent lime. Indeed, the use of classical blocks for quoins, with the remainder of tile, rubble and mortar, has been described as a rule-of-thumb building technique found all over Europe from the Tyne to the Tarygetus and extending chronologically from the late Roman to modern times. Not that transport presented insuperable problems, if we are to believe a ninth-century account of using spolia from Estremadura and transporting them by river and sea to Santiago. Similarly, the Muslims took spolia from Acre for Cairo, from Carthage to Damascus, and from the Dome of the Rock to Mecca.

In any search for meaningful spolia, a major problem is that in our area using spolia is the norm not the exception, since it is only natural to use what is to hand. But does using a Greek relief, with inscription, as a scrubbing board for washing, have meaning? Or a column shaft to keep an earth roof rolled flat? What about those cases where antiquities are used for support or as containers, such as pagan altars as holding up Christan altars, columns for cannon, or capitals as Holy Water stoups ? Is such reuse triumphalist in some way, or merely practical? For example, at Lepcis Magna, where a Roman triumphal arch is incorporated into the later enceinte. Grouping and consistency of such varied uses in the West would suggest that they do indeed carry meaning. None of this, of course, excludes an aesthetic appreciation of the past, and an impulse to use it, possibly for propaganda purposes with which we might identify. There are good, practical reasons why some antique sites were left alone, and equally good ones why others were robbed bare. But could it ever be shown in East or West that architectural antiquities (and sculpture) were left alone precisely because they were antique, and therefore in some way special? Survival and re-use always seems to have involved practicalities: usefulness as a conversion; strength as a fortification; certainly prestige in a new location – but never apparently the almost exclusively 19th and 20th century reaction of preserving the past in its original state just because of its age and just because it is numinous. 

The reputation of marble continues in the widespread reworking of antique slabs and columns for tomb markers. The practice continued in North Africa into this century, and is observable on many sites in Turkey, such as  the small cemetery amongst the Byzantine churches at Kanytelleis, where one uses an upturned Byzantine acanthus capital as headstone, and at least fifteen use parts of column shafts; the latest grave apparently dated 1965. The practice is also well documented by travellers. In 1800, a Frenchman reported  the use of column shafts, some 15 feet high, as well as capitals, friezes and architraves - all in use as grave markers near the Maeander at the village of Guzzel-Kissana. A little later, Arundell came across a Greek stone-mason at Denizli reworking a frieze into a tombstone. It had come from Laodicea (which the Muslims had sacked in 1188, admiring its marbled porticoes and stone buildings, and carting off the material to Syria): In fact, the immense quantities of stone which are daily brought from thence for building and other uses will very speedily destroy the remains, numerous as they are, which at present exist; and the demolition will be complete, as they have now begun to excavate, and are daily digging up and splitting the finest sculptured marbles. On at least one occasion the Crusaders may have built a fort at Antioch of Turkish tombstones, perhaps as a deliberate insult - although another source says that "pagan" sarcophagi were used.

Much less casual is the gathering of spolia for large monuments such as gates and arches. Constantine may be the first emperor to export spolia from West to East, and possibly in the other direction  as well. Holloway contends, however, that there is no program, hence no real meaning,  in the spolia on the Arch of Constantine , many shipped, he believes, from Greece or Asia Minor.  For him, the spolia are simply a decorative but miscellaneous collection of sculpture, and hence no attempt to associate Constantine with the past grandeur of earlier Roman emperors. But is it likely that several cubic tons of marble, a long inscription, and so many reliefs, have been put together jigsaw-wise into a triumphal arch without plan, program or meaning? Or simply more likely that we can grasp the aesthetics but not specify the program? Without this apparently pioneering example of the application of spolia to political ends, can a specific rationale be found for later re-use of spolia beyond that of an appreciation of the beauty of the constituent materials (as in tombstones), or vague aesthetics?  But by Holloway’s own argument, shipping enormous panels back from the East must surely have some aim, otherwise why not use equally "meaningless" panels from Rome? To which we should add other scholarly opinion that at least some of the reliefs came from the Forum of Trajan - a conjunction which must have been meaningful, as might the use of Pentelic marble.  

So are there other instances of Constantine’s engagement with the past, which can help us? Yes: there is evidence at least of Constantine’s fondness for marbles and columns, because he insisted on high-quality materials, and on approving the objects selected for work on the sacred places of Jerusalem, which were to be gathered from various unspecified locations; and given the phraseology there is a high likelihood that he meant spolia. Again, his adornment of Constantinople can surely be seen as an antiquarian act, and one continued by hjis successors: pagan priests were ordered to bring statues out of wherever they had hidden them; precious metals were stripped from them and melted down for the public purse, and the bronzes were kept to adorn the City. (The deliberate hiding of pagan antiquities continues right up to Late Antiquity.) 

A Turkish story may reflect a folk-memory of Constantine's gathering of spolia: Constantinople was built by Solomon, who wanted a pompissimo palazzo. The steps taken to build it may reflect knowledge of spolia fortifications still extant in the Greek Islands, such as Paros: Solomon commanded the winds to built the palace, in search of the materials for which they went through Arabia, Persia, India, and so on, and finally arrived alli nobilissimi paesi della Grecia, ad un luogo vicino all’Archipelago, posto tra la Seruta e la Ionia, trouvorono un luogo molto ameno, chiamato li monti d’Aidingik, ove si trovano ancora li vestigi, e chiamato il luogo della circuittone, la fabricorono con grandissima diligenza la rocca e il Palazzo; mentre questi spiriti correvano per il mondo, trovorono in Berez e in Kaf  molte minere di marmore del quale, come anco de altri adobbamenti ne portorono seco, preparorono marmore di diversi colori, formorono diverse colonne, fre le quali n’erano ancora colonne porfiretiche, le quali havevano preparate nel paese di Kaf, e hoggi di si vedono in Constantinopoli nella Chiesa di Santa Sofia (dicono che il altri luoghi non si trova pietra Porfiretica) convenuti li spiriti, fabricarono una rocca e un Palazzo, al quale nissuno era simile nell’universo. Other stories concern Arabic building to rival those of fabled antiquity, including the use of marble and glass.

Such stories record effort, if not meaning. But we can record meaning in the accurate reuse of spolia in Turkish sites. At Ephesus, the Baths of Scolastica are of spolia, and we cannot determine a programme therein; however, the nearby Temple of Hadrian, the restoration of which can be precisely dated to 383, used spolia reliefs of the city's founding, together with representations of Theodosius and Arcadius, in order to underline the continuity of tradition. This, at the very least, is the meaning of the Arch of Constantine, and the peopling of Constantinople with spolia from Rome, where the present is associated with the past. It is also the impulse for military use of spolia, as we shall see below.

The Decline of Urban Life, I: Spolia in Defensive Architecture

Such large quantities of spolia are available in our area because, probably from the 6th century, there was a decline of urban life; and although the process probably began from a more prosperous base than it did in the West, and in cities of greater magnificence, its tell-tale features are to be seen throughout Turkey, Syria and North Africa. (Of course, not all antique structures or fortresses were in cities, and many such artificial emplacements also declined, releasing spolia, as conditions changed.) Taking as a suitable measure the twenty cities of Byzantine Asia named in a list compiled by the tenth-century Emperor Constantine Porphyrogenitus, Clive Foss has concluded that in Turkey there was a significant decline in standards of urban life, of population and of commerce; and he gives summaries of the situation at centres such as Ephesus, Sardis, Miletus, Priene, Pergamon, Smyrna and Magnesia. Similarly, there are indicators of decline in Byzantine North Africa, such as much smaller new churches, although the extent of city-dwelling is a matter of fierce debate.

As in the West, three factors determined mediaeval use of (and perhaps attitudes to) earlier buildings: 

1.	The range of building types was now too large for reduced needs; so that as activities declined, so the buildings they supported (from the bath and the agora to the colonnaded street and the temple) became surplus to requirements, probably in the course of just a few generations. Fountains lost their water; and the pipes became furred, as at Perge, where this still in evidence at the acropolis fountain and in the baths to the north of the south gate – surely signs of long-time neglect;
2.	The longevity of antique walls and fortresses provided a constant reminder of the greater glories of the past. Strongly built, they long survive more fragile structures such as temples, and many continue in use when temples decay or, like Baalbec or Didyma, are converted into forts. Mediaeval fortress builders would have been well aware of previous achievements in the genre, the more so because so many of them reuse the materials on site. To take examples from just one area - the Morea - the fortresses of Corone, Zarnata, Old Navarino, Methone, Arkadia, Argos, Patras are all in this category. 
3.	Finally, the inability of reduced populations to defend existing enceintes required the construction of smaller ones. One factor promoting the use of spolia is the dearth of quarrying. It is probable that quarry production declined drastically (but perhaps never ceased) in Turkey during the Byzantine period, just as it did further West - so the re-use of earlier architecture and sculpture from now-unneeded buildings was an obvious course of action to take. Again, no proof has emerged yet of the re-opening of quarries in the 9th century in Proconnesus, Attica, Phrygia, or in the Islands of the Aegean. Sodini has suggested that quarries slowed down and perhaps stopped between proto- and medio-byzantine periods, with a decrease in colonnaded streets, and basilican churches replaced by small Greek-cross employing few columns, so that diversity is replaced by Empire-wide homogeneity. Perhaps, therefore, the very diversity of spolia in a sea of uniformity is a factor in their popularity, especially when we add Sodini’s observation of  a progressive return to antiquarian sculpture, especially in 14th century Constantinople.

What happened to existing sets of city walls in the East when urban life declined? Apparently, just what happened in the West. From records of refurbishment in the Late Empire, with proclamations of renovatio which we have already surveyed, it is clear that the concept of the city as an entity protecting its citizens continued but, given a lower population, there seem to be no cities in Turkey (with the exception of Constantinople) in which the originally designed or upgraded circumference of walls could be defended. At Ephesus, for example, large areas of the city were in ruin by the time of Diocletian, at the end of the third century AD; and although some monuments were repaired under the Tetrarchs, with a spurt of work in the fourth and early fifth centuries, and some prestigious Christian ones built (such as the Church of St. John), the city soon had to respond to the Persian invasions. Ephesus built a new wall, using spolia, encompassing only a proportion of the classical city (abandoning, for example, the Agora), and incorporated within that wall suitable monuments, such as the theatre. We find older materials being regularly re-used for refurbishment - such as in the Baths of Scolastica, or in the great marble streets at Ephesus, the flanking colonnades of which are assembled from a curious mixture of columns of different materials and girth, all of which must have been robbed from earlier, now derelict buildings.

The Decline of Urban Life, II: The Stripping of Cities 

In spite of building walls with spolia, so small was the population in our area that we must picture even greater quantities of building material than still survive lying for centuries in deserted antique cities - which was also the case in the early mediaeval West. And the desire for sturdy construction caused castle builders to go in search of convenient building blocks and other members, which they found in great quantities by stripping decayed cities. A large number of these in Turkey, and several of the important ones in North Africa, are situated on a river and/or near the sea, so transport was no problem- even, perhaps, from Greece to Venice. Post-mediaeval maps and charts, whilst not an infallible guide, indicate that many of the antique centres were calling-points, or points de repère, for trade, as they were earlier for pilgrims.. Beaufort's survey of the south coast for the Admiralty in 1810-12 notes that, In a naval point of view, the resources of the coast of Karamania must be considered important; and he goes on to list the quality of the harbours, water, wood, and food supplies, none of which had diminished by his day. Much still remains on such sites, but it is certain that large numbers of buildings have completely gone - and now reside in the walls of mediaeval fortresses. As we shall see in a survey of spolia defences, the walls of Nicaea  and those of the lower fortress at Seljuk, amongst others,  provide conspicuous examples of this process.

There are four reasons for stripping cities of their materials: 

1.	The re-use of fallen antiquities in houses, or to make walls for sheep-pens and the like. Thus the frons scenae of the theatre at Alabanda is still a pig-sty with the farm attached; and at Uzancaburc village walls are still constructed from column drums, just as they were of Doric capitals at Assos. Another good place to see this would be Aizanoi, where the people still live amongst and still make use of the ruins, because the site has not been tidied up by the archaeologists: it is still a lived-in antique city, and we can still walk around it with Fellows’ description in our hands, and make full sense of what we read. 
2.	As well as building materials, mediaeval searchers also needed metal, especially lead and iron, for daily needs as well as for weapons and especially missiles - but not for cramping mediaeval walls. Both these metals were used in Antiquity as cramps (sometimes iron covered in lead) to hold together the blocks of large antique walls. There was perhaps plenty of metal to be found in exposed walls. At Nyssa, for instance, the retaining walls of the theatre were half-buried long ago by a land-slip; and although the upper sections, dirty through long exposure to the air, have been robbed of cramping materials, nobody bothered to dig into the earth to rob the lower sections which, recently uncovered, are now fully in view, pristine-clean and undamaged;
3.	The thirst for antique columns to be used in contemporary buildings is important all over the ex-Roman world because of its effect on the dismantling of antique structures, Matching sets seem to have been as prized in  the East as in the West, and the idea has a long pedigree: for example, S. Agnese fuori le Mura, Rome, where great care has been taken, and the best columns go nearest the altar; and Old S. Peter's. In the East, we find Justinian importing large and impressive columns from various parts of the Mediterranean for his building projects in Constantinople. There are few mosques of the Seljuk period or later which do not boast several antique columns or pieces of architectural decoration, and it sometimes seems that remarking on matching sets of columns might indicate that make-and-mend sets were commonplace. The consequent destruction of any building of which columns formed a part is easily illustrated: Bernardo Michelozzi and Bonsignore Bonsignori went to Turkey in 1497/8, and wrote interesting letters back to their home city of Florence. They visited one of the great temples, that of Hadrian at Cyzicus, and were amazed by its dimensions, with 70-foot columns and Corinthian capitals nine feet in height. Others had been impressed before them: Cyzicus’ convenient location near the Sea of Marmora meant that Justinian took spoils for Hagia Sophia (completed 548), and the Turks (much later) for the Suleymaniye Mosque, building between 1550 and 1557. Material was also disappearing in the 15th century as well: for Ciriaco, who visited and drew the site in the middle of the century, counted more columns than Michelozzi. We do not know whether columns were still being carted off for use (and, if so, to where); but Bonsignore does refer to the Turkish propensity for refashioning the drums (10 of which made up one column) into cannon balls (this is dealt with in detail below), and Ciriaco refers to the destruction of the temple in his day by lime-burners.
4.	Finally, and particularly relevant to our purpose, enormous quantities of spolia disappeared into defensive walls, frequently for display, but sometimes as mere infill. An example of "hidden" antiquities from Greece would be the protection afforded the pedimental sculptures of the Temple of Zeus and, for Turkey, the preservation of the reliefs of the Great Altar of Zeus, at Pergamum. Because of the monumental nature of the original constructions, the walls built with blocks from older monuments are often very thick, and sometimes even double-skinned (as at Saintes or Bordeaux in France); hence they have been a prime agent in preserving both bas-reliefs and architectural members;

Everywhere, the later the (post-antique) building, the less likely it is to find a set of matching columns, let alone capitals and bases. Such "marble starvation" is perfectly obvious in religious buildings, where various devices (differential heights for impost blocks or bases; adding sections to damaged columns; reserving the good material for the presbyterium) must needs be employed. (It may very well have happened in the East precisely because of the profligate use of column shafts in fortress walls.) Here are two contrasting Turkish examples, one early, one late:
1.	In an interesting case in AD 400,  Bishop Antoninus of Ephesus was charged with theft, and actually deposed, for going against the strictures of Constantine the Great and taking columns from the adjacent church to decorate his dining-room, and marble from the baptistery for his bath (public baths may still have been functioning in Lycia in the 6th century or even later, as they probably were in Antioch, and displaying art as well). Parallel examples can be demonstrated from the ongoing excavations at Aphrodisias;
2.	The second example is the Great Mosque at Adana (a city not far from a whole range of antique sites) which was built beginning in 1513, and opened for worship in 1541. There are re-used classical columns in the partly-covered courtard and also inside the mosque. Five large, matched grey-white columns grace the interior, but there were insufficient sets of smaller columns to use in the courtyard. The builders have disguised this fact by adopting two procedures (both of them seen further West as well, and in profusion): they have alternated granite with marble columns for the front rank, choosing complete columns for the purpose; then, for the posterior rank, they have carefully pieced together column fragments, sometimes from similar but not identical marbles. Indeed, closer study shows that even the front-rank marble and granite columns, although similar, are by no means identical in material, height or girth. From such painstaking work we may certainly deduce the scarcity of suites of columns, but also suspect that it reflects the prestige in which antiquities were frequently held.

Such marble starvation occurred even in towns such as Seljuk, and it was apparently not satiable by looking around nearby Ephesus, probably because most useful and beautiful material had already been picked over by the fortress builders, and used in enormous quantities in the road-facing defensive walls; so that anything further was difficult to retrieve. Evidence for this can be found in the Isa Bey Mosque, just below the lower fortress, and built in 1375. The courtyard is adorned half-and-half with granite and veined grey-white marble columns, with different bases and capitals - some of the latter antique, others in Moorish stalactite design. And although the granite columns are placed together, they match neither for height nor girth. Inside the mosque, the enormous granite columns (for which the builders have provided new stalactite capitals) can only have come from some very large Roman building at Ephesus.

Late Antique Walls: Aesthetics and Defence

The walls and gates imitated in mediaeval times are the obvious ones, the standard for embellishment in the West being Rome and, in the East, Constantinople. Here the Porta Aurea was beautified by statues and reliefs (the statue of Theodosius the Great only fell in 739/40AD in an earthquake) and formed an important element in Imperial ceremonial. The flanking wall also appears to have been decorated with marble and granite column shafts, as Lafitte Clave observes in his military reconnaissance of 1784: toute cette partie de l'enceinte a été autrefois réparée avec des colonnes et des pierres d'entablement d'anciens édifices grecs et romains que les Turcs n'ont pas respectés: on les voit sur le parement de la muraille et on peut lire sur quelques unes des restes des inscriptions grecques.  In Constantinople, up to the Sack of 1204, pagan statuary of the city was still considered to be an essential element of the city’s iconography, culturally and aesthetic ally. When the Bulgarian Krousmmos, the new Senaccherab, sacked Constantinople in 812/813AD after having admired the walls of the city, he carted away bronzes and marbles.  To the disappointment and puzzlement of later travellers (as we have seen), almost nothing was left beyond the Hercules reliefs by the time Mehmet took the city. Krousmmos was following a tradition much older than Julius Caesar at Corinth or Verres in Sicily, and one which the Turks also followed.

A description of the Golden Gate is appropriate here, not only because it incorporated spolia, but precisely because its richness set a standard for others to follow. The Golden Gate was therefore lavish in materials and decoration, impressed medieval travellers greatly when it was perhaps but little decayed, and was coveted for its reliefs even when dilapidated (although, of course, there was little else in the City of similar date). We shall see the Golden Gate imitated in other cities in  Turkey, such as Nicaea and Thessaloniki with, in consequence, a lavish use of spolia.

The state entrance into the capital, the Golden Gate was architecturally splendid, and was built of large square blocks of polished marble fitted together without cement, and flanked by two great towers of the same material. Van Millingen listed amonst the other decoration a cross, a Victory, a crowned female figure (the city’s Tyche), a statue of Theodosius the Great, a bronze group of four elephants; and the gates of Monpseuesta, gilded and placed here by Nicephorus Phocas, as a trophy of his campaign in Cilicia; a Roman eagle at the SW angle of the N Tower; a laureated XP over the central archway on the city side; and twelve bas-reliefrs of classical subjects. It would be interesting to know how large a proportion of these adornments were spolia. Sir Thomas Roe, British Ambassador from 1621-8 (and with Earl of Arundel behind him), tried to get them, but after negociations the locals reckoned that the City would collapse if the reliefs were removed so, says Roe, they are like to stand, till they fall by tyme. And so they did: Spon admires various bas-reliefs in 1675, Sestini in 1778 notes that some reliefs are still in place; but Dallaway in 1795 states that those of Hercules have been brought down by an earthquake, and the Punishment of Prometheus mutilated by the Turks, who have walled up the gate. And the most exquisite fragments of finely sculptured columns, friezes, etc still littered the area in the early 19th century. Other parts of the walls were also decorated, such as  near Bab Kapoussi along the Golden Horn, where one arched entrance had a bas-relief on either side, of which only the Nike on the E side has survived. The Golden Gate also had propylea, with columns of green marble, colonettes and pilasters, and was closed with gates of bronze (Macoudi) or iron covered with gold (Edressi) 

Unlike Constantinople, which kept her fourth-century size, most mediaeval enceintes are smaller than their antique counterparts, and built from spolia released by the shrinkage. An old idea is that such walls were built quickly as a response to immediate threat, so that the constructors, lacking the time to use newly cut stone (or perhaps lacking the necessary resources) have simply taken what came most conveniently to hand, and cleared away earlier monuments, possibly already in a state of collapse. This theory takes some believing, especially for anyone who has actually built anything, knows the ways of builders or, indeed, has examined French enceintes such as Le Mans, Beauvais or Sens. Shunning material already on or near the site, especially high-quality squared blocks, would have been perverse indeed, since every builder yearns for a straight edge and a square corner - qualities for which Roman materials were, as we have seen, much prized. Even the apparently brutal reuse of funerary material (a practice at least as old as classical Athens) is for a good reason, since areas extra muros, where the cemeteries were located, needed to be cleared for military purposes, to ease troop movements. What is more, building brick or rubble walls would have been much easier, and surely equal to the scarce artillery and siege machinery of any likely invader. Thus we may conclude that admiration for the achievements of the past occasioned the use of spolia to produce smaller enceintes which yet retained the aura of the classical city about them, and proclaimed their heritage. That we must look for an aesthetic explanation (without necessarily imposing any concepts of decadence) for the appearance of spolia walls is underlined by parallel use in churches, where speed of construction did not matter.  Even the argument that spolia were used for convenience does not negate an aesthetic appreciation of their qualities.

But the “rush” argument is not yet dead, the speed of marauding Arab cavalry being paraded to explain what are perceived as badly-built walls in North Africa, with violence done to bas-reliefs – when it is obvious that these would be used face-inwards so as to present a smooth surface to the outside, with practicalities winning over aesthetics. As always, applying a different aesthetic viewpoint changes the nature of the argument. Thus at Thessaloniki, J.M. Spieser sees the walls as 249-250AD at the latest, and les remplois, provenant en grande partie des monuments funéraires, indiquent une reconstruction hative. But his Plates XII & XIII show redan 86, with beautiful marble blocks in careful reuse, and scarcely hative. His Plate IX shows redan 97, south face, with hippodrome seats in re-use (they go as far south as Odos Egnatia). Since the hippodrome was located in the south corner of the walls, east-facing, we should ask why it is therefore that enormous quantities of its seats are re-used in the west walls, to a consistent height, and (by Odos Eirinis) carefully stepping down the hill so much so that the walls (partly dug out to their probable ground level) gleam white with marble? Surely because (by analogy with Nicaea and Constantinople), they flank the main gate – the Porta Aurea, and hence provide decoration in the most prestigiously classical manner possible. Similarly, the fort of the Heptapyrgion uses large quantities of column shafts, proud of the wall and angled, in careful courses alternating with tile; and at Odos Klavdianos, on the main west road, marble slabs, some of them fourteen feet in length, decorate the remaining complete bastion – another imitation or echo, perhaps, of the Golden Gate at Constantinople, and very splendid.

In Western Europe, such later defensive walls were usually dismantled in the 19th or early 20th centuries; in Turkey, the excavators are in some cases still doing so, in order the better to study the monuments from which they were built. At the same time we can study how monuments became spolia. They might have been taken from complete as well as from ruinous monuments. Foss, for example, examining the seventh-century acropolis wall at Pergamum, and noting the use of the elements of the adjacent Temple of Faustina carefully laid in reverse order (architrave at the bottom, columns, and so on upward), suggests the whole structure was dismantled on the spot – in a spoliate version of “Chinese Towers”. This seems likely, for the same thing happened at Mytilene, where the mediaeval walls shelter at least seven identifiable structures, with the spolia grouped together. In a slightly different case, at Athens, it has been pointed out that the architects of the Beulé Gate to the Acropolis consciously tried to imitate earlier works in their use of spolia, by dismantling a complete 4th century BC choragic monument: of Nikias, and incorporating in its new military setting much of the façade, with cornices, Doric frieze and epistyle blocks, complete with the identifying inscription. Nor is this chance for, in order to reassemble the pieces in the correct order, the workmen cut letters on some of the blocks while still in the original position, and then put them in the proper order to avoid unnecessary cutting and fitting. This is most unusual, since the usual approach is a straight dismantling which (as at Pergamum) inverts the order of the elements; much the same happens with the complete monuments included in the Herulian Wall at Athens. If the Beulé Gate was indeed built about the middle of the 3rd century AD, then this is conceivably the earliest use of meaning-rich spolia from the Graeco-Roman world. It is not the only sensitive translation of spolia for an identical use: at Bodrum, that the Knights did re-use for the original purpose when they could is suggested by the complete architrave beam from the Mausoleum built into the castle. At Aphrodisias, the smallish hill to the south of site (and called the acropolis) was defended, using spolia from nearby monuments, including the theatre and the adjacent theatre baths, and arranging them decoratively. At Miletus, where the only highish ground has the theatre built against it, it was necessarily the theatre which was converted into a fortress by the Byzantines, towers of which are still to be seen. At Seljuk, 23 coins of Constans have been found, which provides some dating evidence.

Where high ground was not available, convenient monuments would be employed to help make a smaller set of defences, and reduce the amount of building work required. At the flat peninsular site of Side, for example, the extent of the Roman defences was effectively halved about the middle of the fourth century by building a second wall at a narrower point along the finger of land, and employing the theatre walls in the process. Here a high arched gateway flanking the theatre was roughly filled in with stones, to make an aperture small enough to close with a gate. Although obviously make-and-mend in view of the treatment meted out to the now-external monuments, it features column shafts and blocks, which are used in the new wall in great quantities. The date of such work is unclear but, according to Foss, who discards a dated inscription because he believes it is itself a spoil, the repairs to the Hellenistic walls are a response to the Isaurian threat, and the inner gate, with spolia, of the 7th century - just as the entrance to the citadel at Sardis boasts a third-century inscription, although it too is 7th century.

A concern for monumentality attained by the employment of spolia is frequently in evidence, not only in defensive walls, but in civic structures inside cities. At Side, this takes the form not merely of the careful decoration of the new walls with the spolia, but also of the construction of a new monumental gateway which, like the previous (outer) one, has a monumental fountain adjacent to it (although the fountain antedates the gate). At Aphrodisias, we find restoration of the Agora Gate and its adaptation as a fountain. At Ephesus, the Library of Celsus was apparently ruinous at about the same period, and its façade was converted into a fountain embellished with spolia reliefs (Amazono- Giganto- and Centauromachies) brought from elsewhere in the city. Thus possible influence from one site to the other, and a suggested date of 435/6 – which accords with an increase in building activities at both sites in the mid- and later 5th century. However, at Side such refinement is not extended to the later gate, by the side of the fountain, which blocks up the large arch to make a much smaller opening, and column shafts are incorporated in the infill in regular courses. The effect for the outer face is arguably decorative but, although the courses are well-laid, using large blocks and slimmer entablature blocks, and presumably the granite column shafts from the adjacent agora, it is not easy to see what final effect was intended because the opening remains like gaping teeth in an open mouth. And on the inside, the builders have not even bothered to saw level those shafts which are too long, although perhaps they were rubbled or plastered over. At Xanthus, parts of several monuments were retrieved by Fellows from the defensive wall built on top of the theatre; at Bodrum, the Mausoleum reliefs were decoratively displayed in the Knights' castle; at Pergamum, sculptures from the Altar of Zeus were also retrieved from a Byzantine defensive wall which, however, did not display them decoratively - although Winnefeld wonders whether Cyriaco’s reference to colossaeque de marmore deorum herounve simulachra might be sightings of pieces of the Gigantomachy; given later accounts, this is quite possible. This, and indeed the whole upper city, survived much better than the buildings in the valley. Ibn Battuta, for example, when he visited Pergamum in 1331, found the city in ruins, but with a formidable fortress; which we know displayed the usual column shafts, neatly laid, together with other marble spolia although not, apparently, reliefs.

In North Africa there are handsome forts which are clearly Byzantine (because they are comparable with similar ones in Asia Minor), as well as fortifications which were clearly thrown up in a great hurry (and, as it now appears, in unsuitable places). In this latter category are the fort at Haidra, which is surely the most spectacular of all such works; and the fort of similarly large dimensions at Ain Tounga, overlooking the main road through the pass. But the Triumphal Arch at Haidra is also fortified by being encased in additional (spolia) masonry and, to modern eyes, looks a mess. Likewise the Capitol temple at Dougga was once presumably completely fortified. But we must remember local conditions, including lack of manpower, equipment, transport or quarries, all of which bedevilled the French in Algeria (see below). 

One antique practice which, curiously, the Middle Ages did not try to imitate (except perhaps at Arles) was to relate the famous dead to the august antiquity of the city by associating standing funerary monuments with the walls and approach-roads (although on one occasion at Antioch tombs were dismantled for fort-building). The practice was common in Turkey, so there was no shortage of possible models, such as the streets of tombs at Hierapolis, or great tomb terraces at Elaiussa Sebaste, surely designed to be seen from out to sea. Again, at Kyaneae, the north-east wall of the city is beautified (in much the same way as the southern approaches to Termessus) by siting sarcophagi on top. In places, column shafts are also employed in a much less suave fashion. Since the main approach to the city was indeed from the north-east, is this then, simply imitation of the “conspicuous display”, of the earlier builders, with the walls and the crowds of free-standing Lycean sarcophagi emphasising the venerable antiquity of Kyaneae? Probably, because the city also boasted an elaborately “triumphal” entrance gate, with pilasters and capitals, if no reliefs, which must have impressed her later inhabitants. We have seen how, for Leo Africanus, the incorporation of Roman inscriptions in enceintes is a type of triumphalism: might it also be argued that placing specifically funerary inscriptions in walls is itself intended as a proof of venerable antiquity? 

Antique Models for Spolia Fortifications

To understand the reasons for the premium placed on spolia in the Middle Ages, and to understand their reuse in mediaeval military structures, we must first turn our attention briefly to the models the spolia-builders were imitating. In the Greek and Roman world, city and fortress walls (and indeed the masonry walls of other monuments) frequently have a secondary function, which is to impress the visitor in the same way as the monuments contained within them. Like other monuments, they are symbols of civic pride, and reflections of the wealth and prestige of the cities they enclose and protect. This conclusion is supported not only by the extreme care with which many of them have been constructed - a care which has nothing to do with structural solidity, but much to do with refinement - but also by opinions of antique authors. As Aristotle remarked, the wall should contribute to the embellishment of the city. The same concern with making a good impression continues throughout the Middle Ages.

The concept of luxurious art and of its main materials (marble, and massive blocks of stone) as an important arm of the propaganda of the state - state art - has a long life. Although a full account would start with the city-fortresses of Mycenae or Tiryns (or perhaps further East, with the Hittites or Persians), and although Pericles’ beautification of Athens (not the walls, but rather the temples) provides the most blatant example of the political use of art, there are plentiful examples of Greek and Roman walls as works of art in their own right - constructed, that is, with more care than was needed merely for solidity or defence. Winter traces this aesthetic trend from the 5th century onwards, beginning in Ionia, and strengthening in the Hellenistic period. Aesthetics (rather than earthquake protection) are his suggestion for the use of polygonal and trapezoidal walling over plain ashlar; and he sees the use of complex surface ornament (and even architectural orders on towers) as confirming the place of the walls as the architectural facade for the whole city, rather than simple defensive ramparts. From the Hellenistic period, Pergamum provides the touchstone for the use of art and architecture as carriers of a political message; for the whole of the upper city buildings, sculptures and general opulence, were intended as a military – and hence political - statement of the achievements of the reigning dynasty, and designed to be admired from a distance as well as from nearby, as they “marched” in terraces down the high hill of the acropolis.

If classical Greek and Hellenistic walls are things of beauty in themselves, without any applied decoration, and stone the usual material (excepting Euromos), later walls are built to a similar ethos, and often aim at a similar but enhanced effect by introducing pilasters and columns, friezes and cornices and even reliefs, as at Sillyon, Perge, Isaura or Paestum. In late Roman times, this concern for decoration can involve the decoration of gates with marble spolia and with fountains (as at Perge), or even with incorporating triumphal arches as actual gates in the wall (as was done at Patara or, in Italy, at Benevento). Gates and walls were symbolic as well as functional for the Romans, and some gates might well have incorporated sculptures. Vitruvius, Hadrian’s architect conceded, in his handbook of architectural practice (I,5.8), the need sometimes to re-use earlier material, for convenience, if not for beauty: there must be laid down no rule beforehand; because we cannot have in all places the supplies which we desire. But where there are squared stones, or concrete or lava or baked brick or unburnt, we must use them. This is for convenience, not for beauty.

The decoration of such Roman and later walls is usually of marble, and ipso facto luxurious, because marble in architecture was an index of sophistication that the Romans of the later Republic imported from the East. The weight of this Greek and Hellenistic precedent might have been one of Augustus’ reasons for beautifying Rome, which had previous lacked the trappings which befited the dignity of its empire, as Suetonius says (Augustus XXVIII, 3ff.); so that Augustus’ boast to have left in marble that which he found made of brick was quite justified. He produced a topos which the Middle Ages, with their spolia, never tired of repeating. 

This taste for marble veneer (usually over brick or cement cores) was to remain popular throughout the Empire, and the Middle Ages as well. Even the style of some mediaeval fortifications seems predicated on a desire to imitate earlier constructional and decorative methods. In one respect, however, they differ from their Roman forbears. An interest in grandeur is clearly a characteristic of much Roman architecture - build it bigger and make it fancier being the general rule - and just as clearly modelled on places such as Pergamum. However, it was one that the Middle Ages could not follow, for their smaller population together with their more restricted territorial reach (the Byzantines not excluded) meant that their constructions were not only more modest, but also that earlier constructions would frequently be surplus to requirements. To a desire to model themselves on the classical past by using its remains was therefore added a large surplus of those very same remains. Saradi suggests very convincingly that the topos of city walls and their continuing beauty reveals the attachment of such authors to the ancient idea of the city, adorned with magnificent public buildings. As the transformation of the urban public space was becoming more profound in the early Byzantine period, the educated authors wanted to preserve a visual representation of the antique city by the excessive use of the rhetorical topos of the urban kallos. Underlying the rhetoric is the idea of the city as architecturally magnificent, while in reality it was progressively disintegrating.

We can confirm, however, that such propaganda actually worked in later centuries not only from the Umayyad imitation of Roman ceremonial gates such as the Porta Aurea at Diocletian's Palace at Split, but also from the admiring descriptions of the cities of Roman North Africa by Leo Africanus, or indeed from an anonymous account of the tenth-century Magyar occupation of Aquincum-Buda which specifically admires the walls as ipsique ibi civitates et munitiones ad defensionem sui fecerunt, aliaque aedificia multa, sicut adhuc apparet. Indeed, the same propaganda aims are in evidence in the great spurt of wall-building in later mediaeval Italy. As Hogg remarks, as cities grew in wealth, their walls became symbols of civic pride and affluence. How much they were an effective defence and how much a civic symbol is sometimes hard to decide. Such traditions of direct imitation of the antique, which continued into the Middle Ages, appear in France in the various tours sarrazines and, as bossed decoration, arguably forms a componente classicistica of Frederick II Hohenstaufen’s buildings. The hellenistic fortifications at Pydnae, near Xanthos, and conveniently next to the sea, seem to have been occupied both Byzantine and Turkish times, so opportunity is here joined to familiarity with Hellenistic techniques, as it is with the Crusader work in the Citadel at Jerusalem.

Spolia Column Shafts in Fortifications

Turning from the antique exemplars to their impact we find a peculiarly Eastern manifestation of the desire to beautify as well as strengthen fortresses: the widespread reuse of column shafts in fortification walls. Some commentators believe that the technique, as well as especially favoured by the Muslims, was actually invented by them; although it is most likely that the techniques were learned from the Byzantines - just as it seems the Muslims learned the use of lead in joints from the same source. 

Very long lists could be constructed of the use of columns as structural members and as decoration, and their enthusiastic use - conspicuous display in the extreme - constituted a heavy drain on finite supplies. We should bear in mind that they are used in churches and mosques as well as in fortresses, so what may have begun as structural assuredly becomes decorative. Thus a classic example of column shafts used in a Byzantine wall is by the "Queen's Garden" at the very top of Pergamum, where stood the Temple of Faustina. Even given the convenient nearby temple, the manner in which the material has been laid is regular and aesthetically pleasing. Similarly, granite columns are used as ties in the Byzantine wall by the small church on At Meydani, Istanbul; a succession of marble columns is used as floor supports both in the Red Tower at Alanya, and in the outermost square tower of the peninsular fortifications (both sets protruding as bossed decoration); or in the east tower of the south gate of the lower wall at Ankara; or in the east tower of the Gate of Persecutions at Seljuk; columns forming a floor in the mediaeval fortress-cum-house (and still occupied as a house) as Syedra, east of Antalya; columns are used both as decoration and as tie-bars in the Byzantine wall near to the theatre at Side, in the Byzantine citadel at Bursa (and other spolia in the later Turkish walls), and under exactly the same conditions at Theveste, in North Africa; columns are infill both under the arches of the theatre of Side (that is, on the line of the new late walls), in the towers south-east of the theatre, decoratively laid in courses about 3.5m from the ground (conceivably against ramming) and also, once again in regular courses, in the tower by the Baths (now museum).

When the Arabic writer Watwat (died March 1318 AD) writes that Gafsa est une ville batie sur des colonnes de marbre, he is presumably referring to justv such a use of column shafts which he saw in the city walls, or in any of the outlying Byzantine forts which surrounded the oasis. In what may be an adaptation of the use of wooden piles, they were generally employed not so much to hold walls together as, it is suggested, to protect foundations and footings against sapping. It is equally possible that they were used as levelling courses; and they also appear in patterns which are clearly decorative – a feature of fortresses such as Caesarea and Aleppo, with the Crusaders certainly using the technique, although they were certainly not the first to do so. Creswell notes the use of such column shafts in the Bab an-Nasr in the Cairo fortifications (AD 1087), and accepts that they are intended to prevent sapping, by reference to Maqrizi's comments on Caesarea. But this is not very convincing. At Caesarea, the column shafts are down at today's ground level, which is well over a metre above that of Roman times; nevertheless, their practical use is easily seen. But surely the shafts in the Bab an-Nasr are too high up to serve in any way against sapping? Are they not just decorative, the more so because they are sparse, stand proud so they cast attractive shadows, and are not even all on exactly the same plane? Columns or marble baulks seem to have had limited success, however, against saps seems doubtful, if we accept the account of the 1097 assault on Nicaea, when a breach made with ignited logs was very quickly repaired They do not seem to have been much protection against violent earthquakes. 

Constantinople may well have provided the initial model for the use of column shafts, as it surely did for the beautification of the Constantinople-facing walls of Nicaea, in the adorning of such city walls with marble. Certainly, the practice is at least as old as repairs (date unclear) to the Sea Walls and Land Walls of Constantinople, and possibly in repairs to the Golden Gate. At Mamure Kalesi, rebuilt by Keykubad in the 13th century, there is no sign of column shafts to landward; but the seaward south-east corner tower does have a line of shafts in the foundations (but are these Byzantine, Armenian, or Seljuk?). By analogy, columns may have been used as underwater defences to stop ships approaching shore, as spolia were frequently used for the building of harbours. In neither case is there any reason to believe the usage numinous since, for example at Seljuk and Nicaea, we find shafts and long marble baulks used as header ties, whilst at Nyssa square baulks were set into the wall, but perhaps not column shafts (none are currently visible). 

Although it is frequently the case, then, that columns with structural importance are also decorative, in some structures, the column shafts must only be decorative: the Red Tower at Alanya, for example (built by Alaeddin Keykubad), has its shafts widely spaced, conceivably as internal floor supports, but certainly not against ramming. This is consistent with other spolia displayed rather noncholantly in its walls: inside, architectural fragments are set in the internal walls, including a Roman entablature block, and a tomb door. Why such concern? Because Keykubad had competition in wall-building from the fine Hellenistic walls visible as the lower line of fortification up the hill from the Red Tower – which Keykubad himself made good by bringing up to their original height.

Could the use of decorative column shafts be part of a more widespread use of roundel patterns? Can we infer from a reference in the 12th-century traveller Ibn Jubair, describing the Gate of Abraham at Mecca as decorated with des entrelacements dans le stuc qui ressemblent à des troncs de colonne s’enlacant cercle sur cercle that column decoration was common? Yes, at Konya, as we shall see. And there are semi-parallels in the West, for example in the use of “wheel and tree” tile motifs in Tower C at Terracina, studied by Christie & Rushworth; and a fashion for such ornaments is acknowledged, following Cozza, in 5thC Italy; but they are unwilling to accept his suggestion that such motifs (wheel=sun, lunette=rising sun) are Christian symbols of faith, because they are also found on Honorius’ (AD 401-403) retructuring of the Aurelian walls of Rome, and also exist on pre-Christian circuit walls. At Thessaloniki, for example, the western walls have a lot of brick decorations, like blind relieving arches, but close together and clearly decorative. Of the late walls at AcroCorinth, it has been suggested that where in several places the shaft of a Byzantine colonette is built into the wall as a centre to a rosette of thin stones this could be either original decoration, or later plugs for damage. Foss has suggested that cloisonné work, and other careful use of spolia in Byzantine fortifications, may be a sign that the structures were Imperial ones. Thus for a tower in the acropolis at Smyrna, with towers attributed to the Lascarid reconstruction, he notes coursed spoils and some cloisonné, together with a tree-shaped brick design between two sockets which he believes once held spolia. As he points out, Smyrna, Tripolis and Magnesia all have decorative patterns of brick and stone, which is rare; hence the suggestion that since these three castles were imperial foundations, they might be expected to show a more careful and elaborate style of construction than forts erected for the defence of places of only local importance. The identical argument could be extended to Amastris in Paphlagonia, which incorporates Hellenistic masonry, the careful use of decorative spolia, and parallels with the Golden Gate at Constantinople: no grander Byzantine gateway survives in Anatolia, write Crow and Hill, concluding that it was an Imperial naval fortress.

Again, whether the use of columns is decorative rather than structural (or decorative and structural) can sometimes be difficult to determine. To take first a non-military example: at Xanthos, column shafts are used vertically as infill in a Byzantine basilica, in the north transept (or narthex), but presumably plastered over (as ditto the vertical shafts set in the exterior of the apse). In the same basilica, an indication that the builders’ aesthetics differ from our own is the mismatch between the splendid spolia entablature blocks used as door-jambs and entablature from narthex to church, and the careless placement of marble blocks for the paving of the nave. At Aphrodisias, the Byzantine wall at the theatre also uses column shafts to form triangular weep-holes for water drainage, as well as shafts as tie-bars. In this last case, however, the layout is regular, there are column drums set about 5.5m from the ground, and the decorative effect deliberate, since bucrania-and-garland friezes are set in the same wall. At Apollonia (Mysia: near Bursa: on the lake of Uluabat Golu, with the village of Golyazi on top of it), bucrania friezes with a monumental Greek inscription, and column shafts, decorate the walls. At Tlos, the Byzantine wall contains not only bases, capitals, and even sarcophagi, but sections of column shaft (some with capitals attached!), all laid with extreme neatness and regularity. The columns were presumably rolled down the hill to their present location, or conceivably hoisted the 4m from the stadium area below. Work of equal quality is also to be seen in the late Roman wall at Aegina.

If columns are generally used horizontally either as tie-bars or as bossed decoration, more exuberant decoration is possible, as in the Byzantine (? or later) fortress on the peninsula of Iasos. Both genres are used but, in one tower, a vertical column shaft is flanked by two lower and adjacent column-ends in an obvious and unmistakable gigantic phallic symbol.

Examples of Cities Stripped to Build Defensive Walls 

The usual reason for stripping cities is convenience: nearby monuments are piled up on existing structures: for example, the Byzantine fort at the top of the theatre at Miletus (a radical shrinking of the city area), or the fortress built over the gymnasium at Stratonikeia (where not enough is known about the wall circuit to form a judgment). In some instances, brutality verging on violence is done to noble antiquities, conspicuously at Limyra, where the Byzantine defences march over the corner of the Hellenistic Ptolomeion (a cubic base with an Ionic tholos above), and reuse some of its splendid cannellated columns and upper structure therein (together with seats from the theatre nearby). If ever there were an opportunity for conspicuous display, this was it; and it was ignored - so, clearly, not all Byzantine wall builders were attuned to the aesthetics of ancient architecture, or at least, wished to capitalise on them. Frequently, however, earthquakes conveniently did the initial dismantling, both in Turkey and in North Africa. Similarly, an earthquake may have been responsible for the abandonment of the fortress built on the ruins of Baalbec.

Excellent examples of how antique cities were stripped to provide for mediaeval fortresses and walls are Nicaea and Seljuk, Ankara and Korykos. But there are plenty of others, such as around Byblos (Lebanon), where the splendour of the mediaeval fortifications relies on their antique materials.

Byblos

The north facade of the castle at Byblos (Giblet) followed the line of the Roman road by the acropolis, and incorporated a double colonnade, no doubt the easy source of the column shafts used en boutisse in its walls. There is no doubt about the extent of reuse here because, as Longchamps remarks, the Crusaders built atop Phoenician, Persian, Graeco-Roman and Fatimid walls. The fortifications to the town make great use of column shafts, which project some three or four inches from the plane of the wall, almost like the bosses left on some classical Greek structures, to milk yet more decorative effect from the shadow of its profile thrown by the sun against the backing wall. The Crusader Castle over the north entrance employs the same techniques, whilst the keep is built of enormous conglomerate blocks in the lower courses, and all the blocks have all their sides drafted back in the hellenistic fashion – a most impressive effect. Similarly the south-facing glacis, looking onto the moat, employs at least 44 shafts in an area of 600 square feet, in a diapered effect that is repeated in the next curtain to the east, as well as in the north-east corner tower, which has an enormous block at its base. The builders have left several centimetres of each column protruding. These columns perhaps came from the large and impressive Roman nymphaeum immediately to the north, for which only the capitals and bases survive. 

Outside the castle is a line of mediaeval walls, of spolia limestone blocks for the towers, and petit appareil for the curtains; the northernmost corner tower has carefully fitted spolia blocks, some very large (8 x 3 x 2 feet), and column shafts in groups of four. The harbour was flanked by twin towers, the northernmost one of which still stands to its full height, with columns in the foundations. Inside the harbour is the town wall, now only some ten feet in height, but in its existing 200 yards length are column-shafts, in either two or three rows, some 300 or more on just this one stretch. Any suggestion that these are not decorative is scotched by the fact that in many cases the limestone course blocks have themselves been cut back, a quarter of a circle each around a shaft, to allow the shaft to punctuate the coursing. This was necessary because of the enormous size of some of the columns: there are pink granite shafts some two feet in diameter. To the west of the fortress, the excavators have collected together some 200 and more column shafts, the ends of which are very worn, and presumably extracted from the now collapsed (sea) walls. 

Nicaea and Nicomedia

Nicaea, once an important city, now a backwater, is still surrounded by its two sets of walls, five kilometres in length, and punctured by imposing gates at the cardinal points (except toward the lake, where the gate has disappeared). It was during the classical and mediaeval periods an essential stage on the route from Constantinople into Bithynia, as well as sometimes the seat of the Emperor; hence the comparison with the capital is the more pressing. This is reinforced by Nicomedia, of which little now remains, but which had spolia walls similar to those of Nicaea. Nicomedia declined as Constantinople grew, only sixty miles away. An earthquake in 358 destroyed the city, which never recovered, the more so since Justinian abolished the postal service from Chalcedon to Dacibyza and had his courriers go across the sea of Marmara to Helenopolis and Nicaea. What little digging was done (and almost no publication) showed baths revetted with marble, a colonnaded square paved with marble, and colonnaded streets meeting at right angles, together with massive public buildings. Its walls were built by Diocletian, just like those of Nicaea in alternating brick bands and rubble, and with ashlar spoils from the Hellenistic walls. The Lascarids refaced some of the earlier walls and towers rather than, as at Nicaea, building their own outer enceinte. Foss quotes Odo of Deuil, on the Second Crusade that By its lofty ruins overgrown with thorns and brambles, Nicomedia first showed us its ancient glory and the inertia of the present rulers – presumably the ruins were impressive because his contemporaries only occupied acropoleis, as he points out. 

It is not by chance that, at Nicaea, it is the walls and towers between towers 69 and 73 that get the gorgeous marble revetement, in order to impress anyone approaching from the Istanbul road, whereas immediately east of Istanbul-Kapi the walls swing quite sharply away from the gate. If proof were needed of conscious beautification, there is also tower 94, erected on the south side of the southwest  sea  gate.  Schneider  dates these  particular beautifications around 727, which might also be the date of the insertion of dark marble blocks as tie-bars, especially on the long eastern section. The first wall was erected in 268 by Claudius Gothicus, the second (separated from it by a fosse) by the Lascarids, who may not have been the first to restore the earlier wall. With the exception of the stretch facing the lake (west), the walls of Nicea, although they cannot compete with those of Constantinople for height or length, both sets, the lower outer walls and the higher main set - are marvellously complete, gates and all. Ogier de Busbecq found Nicaea a mournful place because of its relative depopulation, the more so because of the Turks digging spolia for use in Constantinople, and battering with their hammers a cuirassed statue they found. Nor was such a jaundiced opinion solely that of Western, classically educated sophisticates, as the quotation from Jalal al-Din Rumi, the 13th century dervish, in the Mamaqib al-Arifim, at the beginning of this paper, makes clear. This was a common theme of visitors to Turkey in later centuries.

Nicaea’s walls are well decorated with reliefs, with large heads, and also with column-shafts, both as horizontal wall-ties and as decoration: in the central one of the three square towers of the north wall, some 37 columns are used to decorate the upper storeys and, at the same time, to act as floor-joists. The East Gate has reliefs, still visible, which impressed Kinnear, as did the reliefs and heads on the North (Constantinople) Gate. The south gate, for Bursa, has marble blocks and an inscription . The walls and towers on the north side are noticeably of creamy-white marble (in contrast with the much darker blocks used elsewhere: it is far from fanciful to perceive the desire to create an effect on the side of the city facing Constantinople, since we find exactly the same attention given to marble display in the more important parts of other citadels, such as Seljuk. Thus the antique monuments of Nicaea have been reused in the construction of the first set of mediaeval walls, in a direct echo of the marble prestige of the finest of Constantinople's set pieces, the Porta Aurea itself.

Seljuk and Ephesus

At Ephesus, as might be expected, the Byzantine walls took in much less ground than Lysimachus’ Hellenistic defences, and made great use of spolia from adjacent monuments, some of which might have been conveniently demolished by earthquake. At some later date, the (surely small) population moved about 2km to the north, to the settlement now called Seljuk. This was still strictly within the purlieu of Ephesus even if outside the walls, the most conspicuous monument being a Byzantine fortress containing the 7th century Basilica of St. John. The entrance to this fortress, perhaps of the mid-seventh century with a mid-eight century rebuild, is liberally decorated with spolia, as are walls adjacent to the basilica with columnae caelatae from the archaic and late classical builds of the Temple of Diana, in what is arguably an evocation of the grandeur of the past, while sculptures from the same location have been found in the fortress walls' backfill. On even higher ground is the citadel. At Ephesus and Seljuk, then, the newer settlement is built with spolia from the old. Fellows notes that the town of Seljuk is entirely composed of materials from Ephesus, and these old castle and mosque walls have become in their turn our quarry for relics of antiquity. For Foss, the walls of Seljuk are seventh century, like those of Pergamum and Sardis, which he  ascribes to time of Constans II (641-668).

At Seljuk, the lie of the land dictates that spolia increase as we move down the long hill from the upper fortress toward the Gate of Persecutions – and with immense quantities of spolia on the eastern-facing (or road) side. Many monuments must have been demolished to provide such a quantity of blocks: the theatre, large as it undoubtedly was, would have been an insufficient quarry for even a fraction of the span from the north to the south gates - a distance of some three kilometres, with regular towers as well. A pride in the past and its productions is obvious, not only in the splendour of the lower citadel and its curtain wall to the upper citadel (supposedly built in the 7th to 8th centuries, against Arab incursions), but especially with the Gate of Persecutions to the lower citadel, so called from a mis-reading of its re-used antique bas-reliefs, which were carted off for the 6th Earl of Bedford to Woburn, in 1819. This is built entirely with re-used creamy-white marble blocks, and decorative friezes were incorporated to beautify it. Chandler, who visited the site in 1764, remarks on the theatre or stadium seats buttressing the Gate, and Pitton de Tournefort admires the Lower Citadel precisely because of the beauty of its spolia, including the reliefs.  That the intention is to impress is confirmed by viewing the inner skin of the wall, which is only rubble and brick. 

The upper fortress, overlooking the site of the Temple of Artemis, is built largely with rubble and brick toward the west (toward the sea) and the north - except for the use of squared blocks in the 45-degree revetments between the towers, presumably to guard against mining). But a considerable amount of antique material is to be seen in the east gate, facing the road, the arch of which is supported on antique blocks, and all along the adjacent walls. The antique-block revetments continue round onto the south wall, facing Seljuk itself, which also incorporates some antique and Byzantine blocks - including part of a figural relief (perhaps from a sarcophagus), a triglyph, and a frieze. May we conclude from this disparity that, just as at Costantinople and Nicaea, the gleaming marble walls were to used as a distant advert to the traveller? The disparity between Upper and Lower Fortress certainly struck Charles Tompson, who found in the upper citadel several curious Fragments of antique Marble being carelessly intermix’d in the Walls amongst other less valuable Materials, but then towards the south, the Remains of another Citadel of greater Antiquity, the Works whereof were cover’d with the finest Marble – and he then admires the bas-reliefs in the Gate of Persecutions and ( like many travellers) mistakes the Isa Bey Mosque for the church of S. John.

If the upper fortress has sparse antiquities, this is not the case with the eastern curtain wall joining the upper to the lower fortress (the latter containing the Church of S. John): recently dug out cleared of debris, this contains thousands of antique blocks, several of them with inscriptions, some presumably from large public buildings, and stands to an average height of 3.5 metres. Lawrence suggests this work might date to the 8th century. Again, no doubt some of the material came from monumental tomb structures from outside the walls of Ephesus - Ephesus now being conspicuously lacking in such tombs, whereas at other sites in Turkey (Hierapolis, Assos, Patara, Eleiussa Sebaste), they are plentiful.

Antalya

Here the city walls are of various periods, topped off with Seljuk merlins and proud inscriptions. South of the Gate of Hadrian in Antalya, a splendid triumphal arch, are laid some fine large blocks; adjacent to the gate, however, the builders have thrown together large and small blocks and levelled them off more-or-less every six courses or so. The result is a mess, contrasting with the towers flanking the gate, which are presumably 2ndC BC (the date of the foundation of the city) and, like the surviving stretch of wall to the north of the gate, of impeccable courses of large blocks, as presumably representing the most important (landward) aspect  of the city. At the bottom of Kurtulus Sokak is a mediaeval rebuild, with column shafts, decorated corbel blocks framing an inscription, and the use of fine sheets of marble veneer for decorative effect – probably part of the Seljuk refurbishment. Whilst such shafts could have come from Antalya itself, it is likely that many came from nearby Perge: this still boasts a splendid colonnaded street, but with conspicuous gaps (and many more bases on site than columns to go with them); and the enormous south baths have few columns left, and only insignificant scraps of marble veneer. By contrast, most of the granite columns of the agora are still in place: are we therefore permitted to conclude that the (Seljuk?) robbers preferred marble, and left granite alone? But marble may have been in short supply even at Perge, witness the construction of the episcopal basilica there using granite - not marble - columns, which probably came 150m from the palaestra of the North Baths. This is odd, and matches the odd feature of the spectacular colonnaded street, namely that the western side is almost entirely marble, but the eastern side is granite: is this make-and-mend after earthquake damage?

Konya: the Seljuks and the Antique Past

The Seljuks had a robust interest in reusing the classical past for decorative purposes in their fortifications, and were unusual in their acceptance of iconic sculpture, including sarcophagi. Sarre has provided a photographic record of some of their spolia-rich creations. The most famous are the walls of Konya, whose towers were erected by Alaeddin Kuykubad I in 1221; he encouraged the inclusion of figural sculpture, inscriptions, and having sculptured stones of various sorts set into both his gateways. So exuberant was the Seljuk reuse here (with inscriptions dated 1067 through to 1184 and even 1206-10) of figurative sculpture that one scholar suggests that this was an index of whether rebuilds with such sculpture were Seljuk or not, and draws the evident conclusion that les conquérants n’auraient pas conçu d’architecture militaire non historiée - in practical effect, that such architecture was inconceivable without spolia.

Konya, in all its glory, could have been well known to the mediaeval West, since it had French and Genoese merchants in the thirteenth century. The walls and gates are now gone, but descriptions survive, the best being by Kinnear. They contained many broken columns, capitals, pedestals, bas reliefs and other pieces of sculpture Loop-holes were formed by pillar pedestals, some with Greek inscriptions; the north walls displayed an excellent Roman bas-relief and a colossal statue of Hercules, damage to both of which has been repaired by the Turks. Gates and towers are embellished with Arabic inscriptions, and a relief of a lion couchant is above the Gate of Aiash. Some of the antiquities displayed in the walls, such as the Apollo sarcophagus from the citadel, are now in Konya museum. Konya is mentioned by one of Barbarossa’s Crusaders in 1190 as already having walls and a citadel but, unfortunately, we do not know what these earlier walls looked like, hence whether Alaeddin’s rebuild incorporated spolia from what he replaced in the 13th century. 

Again, just as the Seljuks conjure up Roman glory by incorporating spolia in their walls, so also they imitate antique practice by adopting the use of frieze-like inscriptions on a monumental scale - a particular version of continuous moulding, also found imitated from classical and Byzantine monuments in Syria. This did not apparently happen in the West, where there is no proof for a continous tradition in the use of monumental inscriptions during the Middle Ages: after the Arch of Constantine, Mitchell suggests the practice died out except for Corvey, the Golden Gate at Constantinople, and S. Vincenzo al Volturno. An additional attraction for such large inscriptions, beyond mere decoration, is that they may have been associated with venerable antiquity, as in William of Tyre's estimation of the Dome of the Rock. Such a taste surely derives from knowledge and admiration of antique inscriptions, even when the new mode is kufic. Nor is such display confined to Konya. Considerable remnants of an “inhabited frieze” (with human & animal heads) survives in the walls of the fortress at Baku, many from the prominent NW tower. Also at Baku, the Muhammed Camii has a large inscription as a frieze around the top of the minaret, just below the corbels for the walkway. Again, the use of symmetrical decorated roundels is common throughout Anatolia and Syria, flanking the entrances of mosques, turbes and pious institutions, as well as cervanserais and bridges –  and often used in associated with protruding column-shafts and other spolia. So what price column shafts as decoration? Indeed, could any of these roundels actually be decorated column shafts? In other cases, the influence of adjacent classical work is clear, as at Balat (Miletus), when the Ilyas Bey mosque is made out of spolia from the site, and a new frieze is cut to decorate the external walls. This frieze is clearly Turkish, and just as clearly inspired by classical work – parallel examples are at Solhat, at the Ozbek Han Camii (Ulu Camii, dated 1332).

Another motif vigorously employed by the Seljuks is the lion, in bas-relief or in three dimensions - a favourite further West as well (where there is evidence of the reworking of antique lions). This may be why the Knights incorporated lions, (presumably from the Mausoleum: there were estimated to be either 56 or 72 lions decorating the Mausoleum) in their fortress. Given that the motif precedes the Greeks as well as the Romans, and may well come from further East (nearer the homelands of the Seljuks), nevertheless the combination of monumental inscriptions and apotropaic lions, as at Diyarbakir; of spolia lions couchant from ancient Pyrgi to decorate the mosque at Birgi, dated 1312, and almost completely built of spolia blocks; of lions on the fortress at Kayseri (with a rebuild by Alaeddin Keykubad) as well as Konya; and of contemporary columns clearly modelled on antique spolia - the inspiration of the antique for the Seljuks can be considered to be strong. It has also been suggested that the Seljuks helped revive the institution of the Roman bath at Constantinople - a likely notion given the later Ottoman propensity for fountains, which are often based on Roman spolia.

For the Seljuks, then, stripping antique cities led in part to a renewed display of antique splendour with which they wished to associate themselves, and this was both conspicuous and admired. Thus during his 1800 visit to Konya, Leake remarks on its walls, of the time of the Seljukian kings, who seem to have taken considerable pains to exhibit the Greek inscriptions, and the remains of architecture and sculpture belonging to the ancient Iconium, which they made use of in building their walls. 

Ankara

For Ankara, the best descriptions of the city walls, which were largely pulled down by the beginning of this century, is (like that of Konya) given in the accurate and careful account of Kinnear, who visited Anatolia in the years 1813 and 1814. They were clearly works of some splendour, incorporating many antiquities in decorative order, and with fragments of columns and entablatures strewn around; he identified the site of the amphitheatre spolia from which he believed were used in the walls, from which the residents were still taking the external coating (presumably ashlar blocks) to build their houses. He compared the gates of Constantinople and of Changora with that of Smyrna, and noted the use of spolia inscriptions in Greek. If Pitton de Tournefort’s sketch-engravings are accurate, there were plenty of spolia around: columns and other marbles litter the streets and the area outside the walls, and even the mud-brick houses contain de fort belles pièces de marbre. As for the walls, he remarks Greek, Latin, Arabic and Turkish inscriptions, and admires the beauty of the lions at the Smyrna Gate, which apparently incorporated material from a portico or temple, with remains of the amphitheatre in the walls.

Spolia lions are a leitmotif here, as at Konya. Kinnear saw lions at the Caesarea Gate, and counted in all six of the same size and figure in the circuit. At the fortress also (which survives), he logged two more lions (one life-size, the other colossal), as well as bas-reliefs and inscriptions on the gate, and observed that some great building must once have stood near this place, as an adjoining mosque abounds with the most beautiful columns: in one part of the wall I observed ten pedestals of pillars ranged in order, four bas reliefs, and [and inscription] on a block of marble about eight feet in length. He then went back to the castle, and copied some inscriptions, which he illustrated in order to examine with more attention the mosque and bas reliefs.

Lions, inscriptions and architectural spolia can only be deliberate decoration. Just as at Nicaea or Seljuk, the spolia at Ankara were placed where they would have been clearly visible; and there seems no doubt they were used for decorative  and, it has been argued, for numinous effect, as at Miletus, Ephesus, Sardis and Pergamum. 

Korykos

The coastal site of Korykos, in the region called Karamania, was a familiar point of reference for mediaeval sailors, as well as an end-point for routes from inland. There are two castles, but no mediaeval town wall. The building dates for the land castle are disputed,  although what we now see is probably 12th century; and the sea castle has foundation inscriptions of 1206 and 1251, but these do not necessarily reflect any original build date. A comment by Anna Comnena (Alexeiad xi.10C) that the land castle was ruinous when the Crusaders on the First Crusade occupied it in 1100 gives us a date for repairs, but not necessarily for the main spolia decoration, let alone the start date for the incorporation of such spolia (Lawrence reminding us that it was permissible to demolish temples only after 391). Nevertheless, analogous to the present appearance of the land castle at Korykos are the fortifications at Heraclea Pontica, where a tower is conveniently provided with an inscription dating the work to 1207.

The land castle made full use of the blocks from the ancient city on the same site (many relics of which still lie all around), in some cases dismantling whole buildings for the task, as well as conceivably building the west-facing facade of the castle around a still-standing Roman gate. The castle prominently displays decorated entablature blocks, and column shafts, and also reuses Roman limestone waterpipe sections. It also boasts bossed stonework. Still to be seen around the area are the ruins of baths, houses and rock-cut tombs (some of these with relief sculptures), together with the quarrying beds: near the castle, a bow’s shot to the east, si trovano arche di marmi d’un pezzo. Buona parte delle quali sono rotte da un capo. E queste sono si da uno, come dell’altro canto della strada, et durano infino a una certa chiesa mezo miglio distante, laqual mostra essere stata assai grande, et ben lavorata di colonne di marmo grosse, e di altri eccellenti lavori. Indeed, nearly all the castle is built from spolia, including some very large blocks, and also some make-and-mend walls with outer faces smooth, but inner faces all jutting and receding because of the irregular antique bits and pieces used for their construction. Several towers of the land castle are decorated with columns, which could conceivably be in secondary reuse, taken from any of the twelve Byzantine churches parts of which still survive here; the same applies to the use of stone arches, which could simply have been dismantled, marked and re-erected, because several survive hereabouts as chancel arches of churches. 

“Decorate” is indeed the correct word, and travellers recognised the beauty of the walls. Thus Beaufort writes that in some parts these broken shafts are laid in regular courses, and in one place they appear to be symmetrically arranged, somewhat resembling the balls in the arms of Tuscany. All the shafts are laid in exact patterns, symmetrically disposed, and protruding a few centimetres from the face of the wall, giving a bossed, sculptural effect to a geometrical pattern. An elegant variation of this is seen on the second tower from the west, east-facing side, inner ward, where it is the flange of the head or foot of the column which protrudes, creating an attractive profile. There is no need here for shafts against sapping or sea erosion, since the whole structure is built on bed-rock, to a visible depth of 3-4m at the SE and 4-5m at the NE corners of the rock-cut moat. Entry to the tower is difficult and dangerous, passes masonry with a bossed, sculptural effect. From two samples lying at its foot, it appears that the shafts are used solely for decoration, because they are cut-down columns of about half their original length, and not the full-length ones needed to span the thickness of the wall. There is no instance where they appear to have been floor-joists, which were catered for by wooden putlog holes, still to be seen; and, visibly in the NE tower of the outer defences, by orthostats, perhaps doorjambs, from nearby ancient houses. 

The present appearance of Korykos, especially the treatment of bossed masonry and column shafts, compares well with the walls in other constructions of securely Armenian date. Thus at Findikh, Payas and Gosne, and in the sea castle at Korykos, we find bossed masonry. In the land castle at Ayas (modern Yumurtalik), column shafts feature on the towers and the curtains  - taken from antique Aegae, to the north and west of this little seaside town. The fort has a curtain wall extending down to the harbour, and both use column shafts in the footings, and bossed blocks. Luckily, part of that wall is ruinous, which clearly reveals that (as we have noticed at Korykos) the shafts are cut off short and therefore definitely not used in all cases as tie-bars: inside the fort, for instance, column shafts also appear, so strength does not appear to be a factor here. But decoration does, since the watchtower of Suleyman I uses multi-coloured blocks in a distinct diapering effect (also seen in the found towers of Silifke), as well as column-shafts. With the demise of the fine spolia traffic island at Sultanhisar (near Nyssa), where a column shaft supported the town clock, Yumirtalik is the only municipality I know that ornaments its road with very large spolia column shafts. Just as towns in Turkey today use spolia as decoration, there is no doubt whatsoever of the intention of the fortress builders to decorate their castle, and it seems likely that the work carries meaning, even if only as continuing a tradition of splendour that its builders could have observed both in the antique city on the site and the Byzantine churches in the surroundings.

Syrian Cities

Antique cities in Syria were often to be stripped by the Crusaders, just as cities in Turkey and North Africa had been by the Byzantines. At Chastel Pelerin they built on Phoenician ruins; at Gabala (French Zibel), the Roman theatre became a fortress. But most rebuilds were on Byzantine fortresses, and they show the same interest in  the use of spolia for strength as well as for decoration. Thus for Ascalon, we have a reference in Matthew Paris (by Richard of Cornwall, relayed by Matthew, and relating to the rebuild of 1240-1) which makes it clear that he believed the use of marble used in its fortifications was indeed for decoration: duplici muro cum altis turribus et propugnaculis et lapidibus quadris et incisis columpnis marmoreis decenter ornato et circumeunte, omnia quae ad castrum pertinent et rite erant perfecta… – and Pringle, surely correctly, translates incisis columpnis marmoreis as cut-up marble [through] columns. The harbour moles were also graced with projecting column shafts, so much in evidence that Guerin, writing in a century of artillery advances , fancied that they figurent de loin autant de pièces de canon se projetant hors de leur embrasures… 

At Darum, south of Gaza, William of Tyre (XX.19) writes that the fortress was made occasione vetustorum aedificiorum, quorum aliqua adhuc ibi supererant vestigia; and the same author (XV.24) mentions that Jabneh (French Ibelin) was also built from ruins: Pierres trouverent en cel leu des forteresses qui jadis y avaient este, car, si comme l’en dist, Chastel abbatuz est demi refez. Some at least of the contemporary terminology would suggest Roman remains, as in Blanche-Garde, of which William of Tyre (XV.25) writes of aedificant solidis fundamentis et lapidibus quadris oppidum cum turribus quatuor, congruae altitudinis. Or at Bethgibelin in 1143 (XV.24-5), where  aedificant praesidium cum turribus quattuor, veteribus aedificiis, quorum multa adhuc supererant vestigia, lapidum ministrantibus copiam; puteis quoque vetusti temporis, qui in ambitu urbis dirutae frequentes apparebant, aquarum abundantiam This is entirely convincing, given that the nearby amphitheatre was still being ripped up in the 18th century, with gunpowder as necessary, to build a nearby mosque.

Nor were spolia being reused simply for fortress walls, but also to beautify living quarters therein. In what is surely a large exception to any rule, Wildbrand of Oldenbourg, who visited Syria about 1212, describes a room in the chateau of Barut that must surely be completely spolia, with a mosaics floor which represente une eau ridee par la brise et on est tout etonne en marchant de ne pas voir ses pieds empreints sur le sable represente au fond. Les murs sont revetus de placages de marbre qui simulent des tentures. The painted vault displays the Zodiac, and in the middle of the room is un bassin en marbres de couleurs diverses formant un ensemble admirable ou l’on voit une variete infinie de fleurs qui eblouissent le regard. We know almost nothing of palace architecture in this area, but can be categorical that Moslem and Christian alike prized marble spolia for secular decoration, as we learn from the life of Saladin: capturing Jerusalem in 1187, which  ils avaient reconstruite avec des colonnes et des plaques de marbre, ou ils avaient fondé leurs églises et les palais des Templiers et des Hospitaliers, de belles (fontaines) en marbre dont l'eau ne cessait de couler ... On ne voit que des demeures aussi agréables que des jardins et brillantes de la blancheur du marbre, que des colonnes auxquelles leurs feuilles donnaient l'aspect d'arbres verdoyants. Presumably the marble must have come from ruined Roman cities, or from the ruined monuments of Jerusalem itself, because there is no marble anywhere near Jerusalem. Unfortunately, nothing survives of Barut, though apparently wisely run by Jean d’Ibelin after being re-taken in 1197 from Saladin. So we can never know whether this was a deliberate evocation of a classical environment, analogous to the Seljuk rebuild of the walls of Konya - or perhaps to the pseudo-antique rooms later favoured by the princes of the Renaissance.

Greece

Similar examples of spolia decoration exist in Greece – witness the Castle of the 40 Columns at Paphos, so called because of its granite shafts; this was destroyed by earthquake in 1222, and used henceforth for building stone. Indeed, many Byzantine fortifications in Greece incorporate spolia: the east wall at Sparta, with column shafts and marble blocks arranged in a decorative attempt to imitate a Doric frieze; whilst at Aegina, decorative alternation of courses as well as ancient inscriptions, many of them upside down or sideways, were used to decorate the exterior, and the custom seems to have continued into the later Middle Ages, most notably on islands such as Sipanto, near Melos, and especially on Paros, where much material remained above ground in the 18th century, but was frequently carted off. Pitton de Tournefort gives a full description of Parechia, the main town, and admires the spolia walls, noticing the column-shafts used en boutisse. But he is alarmed by the casual treatment accorded antiquities in his own day: the French, British and Venetians remove them, while the Greeks break them to make field-walls. Other travellers describe both the spolia in the castle, and likewise deplore the bad treatment accorded to beautiful antique remains. Thus Charles Tompson visits the quarries, and goes thence to Parechia, remarking also on the destructive cruel Ignorance of the Greeks, noting that walls formerly were a Part of much nobler Structures, and describing the litter of antiquities which for some reason or another could not be loaded into boats - an index of the continuing spoliation: Several fine blocks of marble – fragments of columns, are lying close to the water’s edge, and seem to have been brought there by travellers, who for want of a proper purchase to get them on board, have not been able to carry them farther.

Spolia Reliefs in a 15th-Century Fortress: the Mausoleum of Halicarnassus

The enthusiastic use of spolia continued in Turkey, not only amongst the Turks, but also amongst Europeans. The most important use of spolia for structure and decoration is of the large quantities of the building blocks and reliefs of the Mausoleum of Halicarnassus, one of the Seven Wonders of the Ancient World, by the Knights of Rhodes, although this reuse is too late fully to be considered here. Nevertheless, it is important because it offers the first semi-documented and datable reuse of Hellenistic relief sculpture by the Renaissance, and near to the source site as well. Hence it is worth mentioning here as a measure against which we may set earlier instances of reuse, such as on the Gate of Persecutions at Seljuk.

The Mausoleum was almost certainly largely intact and hence visible throughout much of the Middle Ages; and reuse by the Hospitallers is not in doubt – although it is likely that at first the original constructors of the castle, in 1404, did not know it was the Mausoleum, or even that there were spolia on site, since we are told that squared stones (a usual shorthand for spolia blocks) were taken there in ships for the construction when Bodrum (Halicarnassus) was captured. The Castle of St. Peter was built on a new site, some distance away, but its extension and repair meant hunting locally for spolia. The reuse and aesthetic display of Mausoleum reliefs (arguably not before 1494), together with large quantities of building blocks, indicate that the Knights were interested in and knowledgeable about Antiquity and the prestige the display of its remains could offer to theirt endeavours. We may wish to believe that they probably knew precisely what it was that they were reusing, although there is no evidence for this beyond the tangential account of Michelozzi and Bonsignori, who visited Turkey in 1497/8, and who tended to go around attempting to square what they saw with what the ancient authors wrote. At Halicarnassus, following the ancient authors, they naturally expected to see the famous Mausoleum, where were to be seen the great ruin of the Mausoleum [...] and in this same place there is now the Castle of Saint Peter. Although there is some vagueness in the phraseology, it is possible that what they actually saw was the Mausoleum, or perhaps what they identified as the Mausoleum, namely the castle of S. Peter (as did Beaufort in 1818). For how would they have known what such a structure looked like?

But could the superstructure of the Mausoleum still have been visible in the 15th century? If we accept the well-known account of the Commandant de la Tourette (who was in charge of the 1522 repairs to the Castle), the tomb chamber was actually discovered leading from a room containing much marble decoration and bas-reliefs. It went the way of the rest: having at first admired these works, and entertained their fancy with the singularity of the sculpture, they pulled it to pieces, and broke up the whole of it. The account makes it clear that the sappers were digging downwards for stone and not therefore dismantling any remaining superstructure; indeed, the characteristic grey- green stone of the foundation blocks also appears in the 1404 building (in all, to a calculated 6,000 cubic metres) - which surely means that parts (at least) of the superstructure had by then disappeared. The likelihood is therefore that, possibly after being severely damaged by earthquake, the Mausoleum was dismantled in two stages (1404, and again in 1523) by the Knights – symmetry, as it were, for the nearby Colossus of Rhodes, another of the Seven Wonders, also fallen in an earthquake, was carted off by the Arabs in the seventh century, apparently together with sculpta saxa. However, because much of the surviving sculptural decoration from the Mausoleum also appeared in the castle walls, and placed so as to be as decorative as possible , it is possible to argue that the tomb stood almost complete before the first castle was begun: for the reliefs (in excellent condition, and therefore probably still in place) would have to be stripped before the builders could get at the structural blocks.

The Knights certainly appreciated the sculptured relief pieces of the tomb, for some of them were placed prominently in the walls of their castle - just as discovered antiquities were exhibited on city walls back home in Europe. They probably took others abroad with them. Thus the fragment no. 1023 now in the British Museum was found in a Turkish house on Rhodes, only a few hours’ sailing away, and possibly taken there before the Turkish conquest of 1522; It was probably cut for easy transport, carefully leaving intact the figure of an Amazon which it displays. Another piece, fragment 1022, reached Genoa, perhaps in the same manner. Sufficient sculptures remained visible later in the century to prompt the enterprising project of Fra’ Sabba da Castiglione to take the whole tomb to Italy, to beautify Mantua; unfortunately, the Turks got in the way. Sabba appears to have acted as the Cyriacus of his generation, importing two little heads of Amazons into Italy, and sending to Isabella d’Este sculptures from Kos, Naxos and Delos. 

But we should beware of suggesting that the Knights took over the Mausoleum sculpture wholesale, when all they reused was the reliefs. For the sculptural load of the structure was enormous, and the great majority of it has disappeared. Waywell estimates 5 statues in the chariot group, 56 or 72 lions at the base of the roof, 36 portrait statues between columns, 56 colossal statues in groups on upper step of podium, 72 heroic portraits on middle step of podium, and 88 life-size groups at the base - plus the reliefs. Their main interest was in the greenish squared blocks of the Mausoleum as building materials, few of which now remain on the Mausoleum site, but they also used some lions, and a Centaur frieze slab. Whilst acknowledging that The Amazon frieze slabs, which were on the outside as well as in the interior of the castle, must have created a unique and impressive gallery of classical sculptures , Luttrell sees no iconographical significance in their reuse, although surely we may at least accept their subject-matter as appropriate for a fortress.

But whatever the appearance of the Mausoleum in the Middle Ages, it seems certain is that even the very tradition of its site disappeared when the Knights evacuated the area. Why was this? If there is one litany of the antique well known to the Renaissance, it is the Seven Wonders of the World. So can we attribute the slow re-learning about the Mausoleum to the exclusory attitude of the Turks? This is in fact likely, once we accept that people did indeed believe (wrongly) that the Castle was the site of the Mausoleum - and the Castle being a military installation, was very difficult of access for non-Turks even to the end of the 18th century. Even Beaufort, who is very perceptive about antiquities, surmises that at Bodrum the Mausoleum occupied the land where the castle now stands but, like many others, could only admire the reliefs outside. He believed Thevenot, in 1656, was the last to get inside.

Spolia Churches and the Classical Past

Of course, not all re-use of spolia in Turkey was in fortifications; a large amount was in Byzantine churches, the majority of which are now in advanced states of ruination. An exception, because of the veneration in which it continued to be held, was the church of S. Nicholas at Myra – Father Christmas’ church. Myra is a Roman site (now largely occupied by cold frames for tomatoes), and its port of Andriake is 2km distant; both sites still boast substantial antique remains, conspicuously the theatre in the former, and a huge and very well-preserved Hadrianic granary in the latter. The building of the church of S.Nicholas at Myra provides an early and significant example of the consistent, bulk reuse of spolia. The quantities employed are so large as to suggest a deliberate aesthetic campaign, since the church is largely of rubble construction, but antique blocks are employed to square up the corners, and the fittings and furnishings are almost completely antique (and some splendid column shafts lie in the couryard to the north). Door frames, cills, entablature blocks, columns, veneer, mosaic tessera- all are lifted wholesale from the ancient city, and cut down or packed in somewhat crudely to make them fit their new location. The only reason for this can be the prestige offered by the qualities and perhaps source of the marble used.

Such complete spolia churches are not rare in Turkey, There was little compunction there (or indeed in Greece) about building a church directly onto a temple – see Uzancaburc, Side, or Sardis. At Kadirli (ancient Flaviopolis), the blocks of Ala Camii began as a temple; the structure was then converted into a church with some rearrangment of the blocks and use of only part of the podium of the antique temple. The south entrance is a Roman door (perhaps from the temple); the north door has a Christian lintel but old jambs. The flanking west doors are antique and complete, whilst the larger central door (which retains its threshold) uses an antique lintel, and make-and-mend antique blocks roughly matched together to form jambs. Since the church sits square on the antique podium, and is arguably 100% spolia, are we entitled to conclude acclaim of the numen of the classical past, or simply convenience? Appearances certainly come into play, since the bossed masonry of the antique (temenos?) wall, reused for the church walls, has been turned around so that a suave outer face is presented to the outside wall – so was the bossed interior then plastered? The mosque does likewise, and adds some marble blocks for good measure. 

But the rearrangement is minor at Kadirli compared to Aphrodisias, where the columns of the temple were actually moved in order to suit Christian ideas of layout. Cormack dates the conversion  tentatively  to  the middle or late 5th century.  He also notes the misplaced corner Ionic capital, thereby reflecting the massive scale of the Christian reworking, and strikes a very  positive  tone by emphasising the engineering skills displayed, and suggesting that reuse underlines not continuity, but rather the triumph of Christianity over paganism. At Antalya we find the same –temple-church-mosque transition, with high-quality Byzantine capitals, in the church of the Panaghia, as we have already seen.

The range of spolia available for such church-building in the early Middle Ages was immense, but it would be perfectly possible to build a spolia church of the size and sumptuousness of S. Nicholas at Myra even today. For example, 20km from Silifke, on the road to Uzancaburc, are the inhabited villages of Ovaqcik and Tekkadin, both on the sites of antique cities. At Tekkadin, the village sits mainly on the necropolis, and many of the antique houses, as one walks through the city on the antique selce, stand to three metres and more: I counted sixteen complete sets of door jambs plus lintels and thresholds. Distance from the sea (and poorish communications – unsealed road from Tekkadin to the Uzancaburc turning) has ensured this site’s survival. But the vogue for marble doorframes is very long-lasting, as El-Bekri, writing in the 11th century, noted for Carthage and Tunis, retailing a word-play in the process: Les portes de toutes les maisons sont encadrées de beau marbre; chaque montant est d'un seule morceau; un troisième morceau, place sur les deux autres, forme le linteau. De la vient le dicton La Tunis, les portes de maisons sont en marbre (ROKHAM), mais à l'intérieur tout est couvert de suie (SOKHAM). This may have been a common practice, since Edrisi notes the use of complete sets of spolia door furniture throughout the city of Constantine, in Algeria . 

(The use of spolia in mosques and other Islamic religious buildings lies beyond the scope of this paper, but it is a rich subject. Some structures, such as the Alaeddin Medresesi at Korkuteli, the antique Isinda, reuse classical spolia with taste and discretion, as does the extremely sumptuous Eljas Bey Mosque at Miletus, built from a wide choice of spolia; hence it is common to find some Islamic decoration derived from classical friezes, especially maeander motifs, and especially by the Seljuks.)

The Continuing Usefulness of Spolia, I: The French in Algeria from 1830

Les Arabes ne travaillent en fait de fortifications ni pour élever ni pour détruire, ce n’est ni dans leurs idées ni dans leurs habitudes; ils ne comprennent pas l’avantage d’une position fortifiée dans laquelle pour rien au monde ils ne voudraient s’enfermer. Enfin faute des outils nécéssaires la destruction du fort très important que j’avais élevé devenait impossible de leur part pendant la durée de l’expédition

In spite of incursions and trading by Turks, English, French and Spanish, the French were the first since Justinian seriously to contemplate the conquest, occupation and colonisation of large tracts of North Africa, which was sufficiently unknown in the early 19th century for there to be an Association for Promoting the Discovery of the Interior Parts of Africa (which publish Burckhardt's Travels in Syria). Contemplated at least as early as 1802, unfortunately the whole affair was badly planned, and in some respects not planned at all. Military leaders, unsure of their ultimate objectives, and far too thinly spread, did their work against a barrage of continual sniping from Paris. Whilst the settled Arabs were often friendly, the wild, tribal Kabyles continued to fight, and in a fashion to which the French were not accustomed - so that we find six pages of a 15-page Notice sur les montagnes Kabyles entre Collo et Bougie dedicated to explaining why the very lack of roads was un puissant moyen de défense pour les tribus dans leur inimitié réciproque, and then enumerating the mere tracks the French would need to use to get near to them. Again, they had to cope with a difficult climate, lack of water, very poor communications, and many health problems. The expedition consumed enormous resources, because they had to take or build everything they needed - ovens, mills, hospitals, abbatoirs, bridges, barracks, machinery. Help from the Roman remains and infrastructure was welcome not least because their use and restoration saved money, time and human resources. As one Engineer Captain remarked in 1837 in semi-apology for allowing archaeology to bulk so large in  a military report, strategy had been little changed by weaponry, and an appreciation of the sites occupied by the Roman army was still very useful.  Indeed, the French felt fellowship with their antique predecessors because they were fighting the same enemy on the same ground, and much in the same manner using the same infrastructure. 

Napoleon’s famous comment to his troops at the Pyramids about history looking down upon them sounded grand, and there were similar parallels made in North Africa which were inevitable, but both desirable and invidious. The French were the new Romans, or so they believed, and using Roman forts, roads, bridges, way-stations. Such parallels were desirable because France, like Rome, was an Empire, and needed room to expand, tgaking over from the declining Turkish Empire. The Ministry of War was kept informed of the re-use of Roman forts, roads and town walls during the conquest, and evidently approved. Soldiers wrote local histories, and these are preserved in the archives. But comparisons with the antique past were also invidious because of the hugely different time-scale involved, the lack of military colonisation, and the complete absence of the citizenship setup which the Romans used to buy and promote security. However, like the Romans again, the French believed that the past could teach them for the future. Capitaine C. Martin, for example, wrote an Histoire de la subdivision de Sétif for the General Inspection of 1852, and noted that he had done so (and wished that other subdivisions would follow suit) in order that officers would have the facts before their eyes, de s'emparer du passé de la subdivision pour concourir au progrès du présent.

For the French, there were no Middle Ages in North Africa – nothing of interest to them between the Romans and Byzantines on the one hand, and the present day on the other. They believed that the North Africans were not fortress-builders or really city-dwellers, although they did in fact reuse Byzantine fortresses, concentrated new fortress-building on the more vulnerable coastline, at the same time as developing a prosperous civilization. This same fairy-tale quality of freshness and survival had also impressed El Bekri when he visited El Mogheira, near Bone, where solid monuments still stood firm, and churches preserved their marble revetments, as if the workmen had only just left.  Eight hundred years later, the French would make use of these ample Roman remains, which they needed because (unlike the Kabyles) they fought in a manner that required roads, canals, anchorages and fortresses. Conveniently, the French took over the Roman infrastructure, even if parts of some roads needed re-routing because French artillery could not manage the steep Roman slopes. Also, they quickly realised that the spread of ruins meant settlement patterns much more intense (and hence better communications and water supply) than in the 19th century, And therefore great possibilities for development. (Had they studied their own archives, they would have known that the same conclusion had been reached over a century previously.) They were surprised to find themselves using Roman roads for their transport, but were in fact following in a long tradition: when Musa ibn Nusayr invaded Spain in 711/713, he did so on the Roman roads – and, indeed, there are Roman roads in Spain known to us only from Arab authors. And the Spanish in North Africa in the 16th century were well aware of such roads, and remarked upon them. Hence it is not surprising to find in Spain the same horizons of reuse as in France or Italy. Again Leo Africanus identifies such roads from their characteristics, which he recognises from his travels in Italy.

The fit, in terms of attitudes to the ancient monuments, between the Western mediaeval situation and that of the French in Algeria, is not of course ideal, but gives us the best idea we can gain of what might have happened in earlier centuries (much helped by the truly monumental scale of the French 19th century army paperwork). There are three stages: military, the campaign for early colonization, and then civil growth.

First, the military stage. From 1830, there are signs of systematic scavenging for spolia. The military generally looked with a kind eye on the Roman remains of the country, because these were their meal ticket, and a very present help in trouble: against marauding bands of mounted Arabs, they needed Roman roads to move their artillery; Roman bridges for the torrential streams, Byzantine forts (built usually on top of Roman ones) for security and signalling (and the French made a bee-line for these, in spite of disadvantages). They made straight rebuilds of late antique enceintes, as at Bougie; or simply made good as at Sétif. Roman cisterns and fountains served to supply the troops in the brutal climate; and, above all, the evidence of abundant Roman occupation in areas now semi-desertified was used to convince Paris and themselves that it was all worthwhile. (The French were still studying Roman hydraulics in 1964, with exactly the same aims in view.) But military occupation always entailed destruction. At Bougie, for example, an early account remarks on the losses the town has endured to secure a field of fire for the reduced enceinte - and because of  ce penchant pour la destruction que l'on rencontre chez presque tous nos soldats.  

Why were they there? Not for war, but for peace: c’est une marche des légions romaines à travers l’Afrique; c’est la civilisation qui vient policer les barbares – indeed, cette croisade de la civilisation contre la barbarie. The indigenous population was a problem, and believed to be in need of regeneration, which colonisation would achieve by providing a moral and civilising example. They were the new Centurions; Rome had, indeed, returned to Africa (as the Italians were to proclaim a century later); and they invaded Algeria with copies of the ancient historians in their knapsacks, some of these specially produced for the troops, and to be read in leisure moments in garrison or bivouac. Typical of the genre is Dureau de la Malle, L’Algérie: Histoire des guerres des Romains, des Byzantins et des Vandales, (Paris 1852),  and subtitled Manuel Algérien. It gets straight to the point on the first page: Examen des moyens employés par les Romains pour la conquête et la soumission de l’Afrique Septentrionale, and then after ten pages moves on to Sallust Jugurtha. Such handbooks generally ignored the fact (later to be admitted) that the original Romanisation of North Africa hovered between a myth and a complete failure. The context in which they fought, their paragone, was a Roman context – and the Romans took 240 years to conquer Africa. A spin-off from the common classical education of soldier and politician is that it is abnormal, but not unknown, in the midst of letters from the Governor-General back to the Minister of War to find descriptions of antiquities, apparently for purely scholarly reasons, together with transcribed inscriptions. Thus Lieut. Desmarets' Itinéraire de Medina à Bathna, of 1 October 1846, dwells on the ruins at Baghai, notes Peysonnel's identification of them in 1724, but malgré toutes les recherches que j'ai faites il m'a été impossible de découvrir aucune inscription, pourtant, comme la 3e Légion commandé par August, était établie à Tebessa, on serait tenté de croire que les villes et les postes qui couvrent le pays, étaient sous son commandement. At Bougie, excavations as early as 1836 (only three years after the occupation of the site) discovered an inscription which allowed the antique site to be identified. And E. de Neveu, in his Renseignemens statistiques sur la ville d'El Kantara has one page of the fifteen-page report dedicated to Historique: Concordance des itinéraires anciens avec l'emplacement des ruines actuelles, whilst concluding his accompanying letter to the Duc d'Aumale with the message conveyed by the omnipresence of the Roman remains: Héritier de leur pouvoir, qui sait si la Providence n'a pas permis que les ruines de leurs établissements restâssent à la surface du sol pour nous servir de jalons et nous indiquer sans recherches pénibles et souvent inutiles les lieux où d'un seul bond nous devons nous poser nous-mêmes pour travailler à l'oeuvre civilisatrice qu'elle nous a donné mission d'accomplir dans ce Pays?  The parallel question was still being asked in 1856: Pourquoi …cette contrée, entre nos mains, ne deviendrait-elle pour nous ce qu'elle fût jadis pour nos devanciers?

Inland the ruins remained in great quantity, whilst almost everything had vanished along the coasts. Thus a Historique de Djidjeli  (undated, perhaps 1842) has a substantial section on Roman roads, admires the enormous stone kerbs which some of them boasted; but deplores how in  that area so many have degraded, and been replaced by frequently impassable tracks.  

In the early years, there was a tendency, therefore, to make good what the Romans had left, to admire what the Romans had done, and to plan to do likewise – plans, even, to take members of the Academie des Inscriptions et Belles Lettres along on the reconnaissances, much as had happened earlier, to produce the Description de l’Egypte. A powerful factor was cost: it cost the French 18.75 million francs for 1834 and 1835 alone, so it is not surprising that committee advice was to secure positions against native attacks, and put off les ouvrages de fortification régulière for the future. - henced the prominence allotted to refurbishing Roman enceintes. There were also plenty of military who enjoyed antiquities, and enthusiastically set about the task of recording and collecting them together, as at Milianah. Ironically, the French lived a more straightened existence than their Roman models; and therefore, just as with late Roman enceintes, the French ones are aften much smaller than their predecessors, and built with stones from the bigger brother, as at Tebessa, at Setif, where the French forces would eventually fill the Roman enceinte, at Medeah, where the spolia are re-used for extending the enceinte, at Bougie, or at Tlemcen. The very best, such as the triumphal arch at Setif, was projected by the Duc d’Orleans for Paris, when the area was conquered in 1838.It was to have been erected in Paris, but transport difficulties made this impossible. Similar to thededications on the Arc de Triomphe de l'Etoile, its inscription would have read L’Armée d’Afrique à la France.

This first stage of French occupation is elastic in date, depending on the area of the country, and the date of its conquest. In the province of Constantine, for example, Lieut Demesmay in 1847 can still judge the site of the old Roman fort at K'sour as worthy of reoccupation, with good wood and water, and plenty of building stone. At El Kantara itself, the bridge is Roman, is solid enough for artillery, and needs only a little work on the parapet. At Setif, praised for its fine and abundant water, they will search for more Roman water conduits as the population grows. At Bougie, Lieut. Sarrette  observes that antique prosperity has left its traces which are still to be discerned on the once-beautiful gardens of the plain, and the canals which fed them. 

The second stage was the developmental building stage, when the Roman monuments began to suffer serious damage. Given the enormous costs of quarrying, in investment and manpower, Roman walls and ruins were simply too convenient to leave alone, because they were so thick and high that they could provide materials for whole cities. What is more, the Engineers soon began to consider fortification against European powers, rather than simply defence against the local Arabs. Captain de Neveu's assertion that Constantine was fine comme une ville d'Afrique placée au milieu de populations qui ne possèdent pas d'artillerie, but not against European weaponry, is typical, and spelled the death through insufficiency of surviving Byzantine or vandal enceintes. Above the voices of those who believed that establishment in Africa was impossible because of cultural differences, others pointed to the once-rich, now semi-desertified territories, and planned experimental farms. Yet others pointed to the waste of money on military operations, including building, pointing to the need for true centuriation on the Roman model: Si depuis huit ans vous aviez depense en colonisation militaire la moitie de ce que vous ont coute vos troupes en Afrique, vos travaux de fortifications, vos expeditions ruineuses et steriles, vous aviez deja une vaste province a vous et bien a vous. In a country with transportation problems and labour shortages, re-using Roman remains was the obvious course of action, as at Guelma in the early 1840s, when a reconnaissance finds at Mda-Ouroch some 28 hectares of ruins, including a temple, and a small fort built over a theatre: son assiette conviendrait parfaitement à l’établissement d’une ville Européenne. Les matériaux propres aux constructions tels que pierres de taille, moellons, pierre à chaux, y sont très abondants - and with the Roman road from Carthage to Sirta passing close by. And at Setif, in the 1840s, planting colons was thought possible only because of the protection afforded by the Roman fort and its materials, which now begin to get reused as spolia at an increasing rate. Such exploitation of the remains was systematic for several decades, until better counsels prevailed. For example, the materials of the Roman baths at Guelma were being used to repair the walls, and it was projected to incorporate them in the enceinte (a familiar echo of late antique walls!) following an 1845 recommendation to use the line of the Roman enceinte as much as possible, dont les fondations au moins serviront, et produiront une économie en donnant plus de solidité aux nouvelles constructions, with the Roman towers to be used as silos.

It was during the third stage that very serious problems began for the ancient monuments, and laws became necessary to protect them. The frequently disparaged French colons practised large-scale robbing and lime-making, probably because they knew no better, and because spolia were better and cheaper than quarrying and transport. The depradations are amply documented, not least by the laws enacted to try and stop it. By 1845 important monuments had been lost: Ce mot de barbarie que nous prodiguons aux arabes, on pouvait dans l’avenir nous le renvoyer avec juste raison, à nous qui faisons profession d’etre une nation lettrée, et qui avons plus détruits en dix ans de monuments antiques que les arabes en deux siècles.  People who should have known better were targetting yet more. Problems subsisted into this century, with the Navy Engineer at Algiers pointing out in 1908 the need to demolish the Porte des Lions (a classified site) to build barracks for sailors, and the refrain without archaeological value being overused as an alibi for destruction. There were similar problems in Tunisia, as we gather from Saladin’s excellent census of 1886. And just as Caylus’ Recueil d’Antiquités in 18th-century France depended for many of its discoveries on the work of the Ponts et Chaussées, so colonisation in Algeria acted as a kind of vacuum-cleaner for the archaeologists, revealing and (if they were quick enough) preserving antiquities. As for the thirst for antiquities and marble in France, this simply continued, with Paris calling for antiquities just as she had earlier done from the monuments of Provence, and then from all around the Mediterranean (brought back on Royal ships), whether for building materials, or for stocking museums. But attitudes did not generally improve with time, as Ginther observes for Sétif . After quoting what the 1872 French Commission would do to building for the colons at Bordj-el-Arreridj, namely that les ruines de la ville romaine pourraient donner des matériaux tout préparés, he concludes quite correctly that Partout, donc, ou une ville européenne s'est bâtie sur l'emplacement de la ville antique, les trouvailles archéologiques sont rares et tiennent du miracle. Such depradations were partly counter-balanced by serious attempts to map and catalogue the monuments, frequently by as well as with the help of the French military. An illustrious name here is that of Colonel Carbuccia, who was instrumental in the systematic recording of material in the province of Batna. His identification with his Roman predecessors strikes a romantic tone: out on campaign, and coming across a ruined tomb monument to a Roman centurion, he had his troops rebuild it, and then passed them in review in honour of their antique comrade - a tableau worth of Horace Vernet.. 

To pose the question about the influence of the Roman monuments of North Africa on the French is to suspect that the conquest of Algeria simply could not have taken place (or would have done so enormously more slowly) had the Roman infrastructure not been in place (just as it may be argued that General Roy’s work for the Ordnance Survey had military spin-offs for the pacification of Scotland, because he studied Roman techniques). Here again, in comparison with the Middle Ages in the West, and the Roman monuments, time is telescoped, so that we might imagine that one day Justinian left, and the next the French arrived. Undoubtedly, also, the sense of fraternity with their Roman forbears (as evinced by Carbuccia) was strongly felt thanks to the classical education of French officers, who had been brought up on the military tactics of the Romans, and had handbooks in their knapsacks giving the ancient authors and making explicit parallels with the modern situation: the French invasion was therefore easy to present as the triumph of a great Empire over native tribes - of civilization over barbarism, and a benison, not a rape. Were the French unusual in  the interest they took in the monuments of Algeria? Because they were the only ones to attempt the occupation of the interior, the question cannot fully be answered; but along the coasts, there is evidence that the Spanish took little interest in the past. At Bougie, for example, the French found plenty of granite and marble columns and capitals, some of them lying above ground, which the Spanish might easily have appropriated, but instead apparently ignored.

The Continuing Usefulness of Spolia II: Canons-Pierriers and Marble Cannon Balls

Another drain on spolia is the very convenience of column shafts for the cutting of cannon balls for pierriers - that is, cannon designed to throw stone and marble shot, rather than iron shot, with often devastating results for the enemy, because the projectile shattered, thus acting somewhat like a shell. The pierrier was a common weapon in the mediaeval West, and accounts survive not only of the huge numbers of cannon balls manufactured by the French and English crowns, and their destructive power. In a sense canons-pierriers are the descendants of ballistae, which perhaps survived from Antiquity into the 9th century as torsion catapults (used by the Normans at the Siege of Paris in 885-6), and then apparently replaced by counterbalanced manganons as used by Charles the Bald in 873 at the Siege of Angers and then Paris. The Chevalier d’Arvieux, suggests they may have been used against Acre during the Crusades, for he saw in Acre and the environs in 1658 de gros boulets de pierre et de marbre, dont quelques-uns ont jusqu’à quatre pieds de diamètre, que les assiégeans jettoient dans la Ville et contre les murailles. This is likely, given William of Tyre's account of their destructive effect during the Crusader attack on  Tyre: Excitebatur de collisis lapidibus et cemento dissoluto pulvis tam immensibus … quasi nubes interposita … in urbem cum impetu lapsi, aedificia magna cum habitatoribus in minuta redigebant fragmenta. Steinkrieg rather than Blitzkrieg?

The pierrier was, as a very large-bore cannon, a particular favourite of the Turks. It was conceivably invented by them or by the Venetians, perhaps used by the Knights at Bodrum, possibly used by the Turks in taking the Constantinople in 1453, and undoubtedly in the offensives against Rhodes. The courtyard of the Palace of the Grand Master still holds over 1,000 of them, and there are some very large ones in the city ditches. The greatest device at Rhodes was an “engine” called The Tribute, noted for the huge pieces of Marble it threw with an unspeakable violence but, by another account, sometimes without much effect. The great 40-ton Styrian Bombard at Constantinople in 1453 threw 700kg stones of 80cm diameter, but managed only three shots a day, and required over 100 men and 70 pair of oxen to manoeuvre. 

Their use survived in Turkey well into the 19th century. (Whether the use of hollowed-out shafts for a whole battery of cannon, reported at Pergamum, caused damage, seems doubtful.) It is worth emphasising the enormous quantities of ammunition used by siege pieces: at Naumur in 1692, for example, the French had 262 pieces of artillery, and expended 40,359 cannon balls. These were not pierriers, and artillery in the Middle Ages would have been less numerous; but the drain on marble column shafts - so usefully produced in near-standard gradations of diameter - would have been enormous. Again, there is evidence that marble funerary colonnettes were also used to make such shot.

A French soldier examined the setup at the Dardanelles in 1726, and found that the pierriers there were seventeen feet long, of which eight feet are for the external length of the chamber, with an external diameter for the biggest of some two feet eight inches; thickness of metal: some eight inches, and throwing a ball of some 700 pounds in weight. Unnervingly, the Dardanelles batteries saluted friendly ships with shot, not just powder, and the nearer they go to the vessel, the greater the compliment : in a manoeuvre made yet more famous by Lord Nelson, such balls would cross the Dardanelles, hitting the water one-third or half the way across, and ricocheting the rest. Pierriers were also used on Turkish vessels, but were less feared: the Chevalier de Clairac, writing in 1726, notes such shot often emplanted themselves in the ship's planks, and the captains, especially Venetians, would prise them out and take them home for souvenirs. The Bosphorus and Dardanelles batteries were still using pierriers at the end of the 18th century, and they could certainly sink ships. They were still in use, and apparently still using re-cut antique columns, in 1838, with gunnery practice being a popular entertainment after mosque. There are still plenty to be seen at the Dardanelles, with the large ones outside the Jandarma opposite Canakkale naturally whitewashed, military-fashion, and many more decorating the various World War One cemeteries. No Western armies appear to have used them in the 19th century (although the French made use of Turkish stocks at Milianah: see below); but KilitBahir was still mounting eight pierriers (enormous bronze guns of ancient date, varying from 20 to 29 inches in diameter) in 1876. In 1853, the Turks are still carving cannon-balls very accurately in the quarries of Mount Ida but, pour économiser le travail, les tailleurs de pierre turcs ont profité des belles colonnes en granit qui se trouvent dans Alexander-Troas. But in spite of their reputation, advances in artillery and defence turned canons-pierriers into antiques. As a Royal Engineer reported in 1877 of the forts of Kilitbahir and Cannakale, These masonry towers, keeps and masonry batteries, must be classified with the stone shot guns that arm them - curious, as antiquities: useless, as fortifications or weapons.

Conclusion

In Turkey and North Africa, and in spite of the encroachment of increasingly city-dwelling populations, fortifications built and decorated with antique spolia survive in great numbers, built by Byzantines, Armenians, Seljuks and later Turks, Arabs, Crusaders Christian and Moslem  and, eventually, by the French in Algeria. They allow us to chart aesthetic as well as practical use of earlier monuments, sometimes on or near the same site, sometimes brought from afar. The enormous work required to handle often immense blocks, and the profuse use of decoration, give the lie to the old idea that such structures were a hasty reaction to imminent trouble. Rather, although couched in what to post-Renaissance eyes may seem a shaky and haphazard manner, often crude and with inscriptions sometimes inverted, these walls impressed contemporaries and successors alike, sustaining the antique notion of the importance of city and fortress walls as a potent symbol of identity and continuing power. 

Undoubtedly, the profusely surviving earlier fortresses and city walls acted as exemplars, so that we find several enthusiastic redeployments of the classical tradition: the use of Hellenistic-inspired bossed masonry and multicoloured courses by the Byzantines, and at the time of the Crusades; antique bas-reliefs and sculptures, especially lions, to decorate walls and gates; a taste in several Anatolian city walls for some imitation of Constantinople's Golden Gate; a long-lived enthusiasm for the use for marble columns as both structural and decorative elements in such walls; and a revival of monumental inscriptions. Such enthusiasms were shared by Christians and Muslims alike, even to the acceptance by the Seljuks of iconic sculpture implying (like their re-invention of monumental inscriptions) an admiration for the antique.

Why did the interest in such uses of spolia decline from what was, in this respect, the golden age of the earlier Middle Ages? Partly, at least because, after the Crusades (when travel had decidedly broadened the mind), access to Turkey and North Africa became difficult except for traders (who were not interested in antiquities) and ambassadors (who wished only to collect museum-quality pieces). The Western military eye, as it were, was missing for centuries: the Knights were pushed from Bodrum to Rhodes, and then to Malta; there was no new Turkish tradition of fortress-building (they tended to continue using existing structures); and Western military interest in Turkey (which, through essential surveys, gives us much background information about fortifications and weaponry) begins only in the 18th century, and declines during the 19th  century. The antiquarian discovery of Turkey likewise begins only in the later 18th century but, even then, spolia had no place unless they were of exceptional beauty. This is seen in the highly selective plundering by Westerners of Eastern sites such as Delos or Leptis, which was done for prize pieces of special marble or granite, rather than for the wholesale extraction of building materials, which was the purlieu of North Africans and Turks, who continued to rob antique sites wholesale, turning columns into cannon balls and bas-reliefs into tombstones, and carting away whole cities over large distances for use in buildings, roads and eventually railways.

Another reason for a declining interest in such use of spolia is because Renaissance-inspired aesthetics in the West saw buildings as unitary, and not to be assembled from diverse pieces; again, spolia were scarce in the West, so that there is no extravaganza to match the rare example of the decoration with spolia of the fort at Narbonne in the 17th century. Most importantly fortification, with gunpowder artillery, became a developing science, and new forms were needed, often on an immense scale, which could not for that reason employ spolia. Hence after the Crusades, spolia enceintes were no longer built, except for Charles V's fort at La Goulette (Carthage / Tunis), and in French Algeria. Gunpowder (often by naval bombardment) was also responsible for the destruction of several North African enceintes, meaning that spolia in the coastal regions - the walls of Algiers, the Tunis forts, Bougie or Oran - were often pounded to dust. 

Finally, the great and increasing vogue for marble in the West paradoxically saved spolia, if only from Westerners. Thus by the end of the 17th century the thirst for marble in Europe was so great that spolia could not satisfy it in terms of quantity, quality, the enormous transport costs over great distances (plus expensive rigging, deadlegs and lifting devices, and specially strengthened ships), or the work required for recutting - hence the enormously expensive quarries opened up by Louis XIV and his successors in Languedoc and the Pyrenees to staunch the crippling costs of imports from Carrara. Spolia were still imported into France throughout the eighteenth century, but as trophies and treasures of especially prized marbles and porphyries, not as building stone. Inventories of French Royal marble stocks survive in quantity, and tallies were kept to the nearest cubic inch - but these were for marbles for cutting up, whereas spolia statues and bas-reliefs went to the Royal collections. 

The French invasion of Algeria provided close contact with spolia in profusion, and we may draw three general conclusions from their relationship with Roman ruins which might inform us about the complexion and extraordinary inventiveness of mediaeval re-use. The first is is that the rate of destruction is relative to the march of civilization: for all their re-use of them at the start, the French did indeed obliterate more antiquities in ten years than had the Arabs in two hundred. Transferring this mechanism to the mediaeval West, we can understand that it was the growth of towns that at first prized, and then destroyed antiquities, as the thirst for building stone became insatiable. 

The second is the nature, speed and extent of the reuse. The French, for all the exertions of their Engineers, often experienced considerable difficulty in re-erecting Roman fortifications because of the size of the blocks involved, and their lack of manpower and machinery; so it is incorrect to see the erection of spolia walls in the Middle Ages as rushed jobs: rather, they should be seen as intellectual statements of civic pride and aesthetic integrity. 

The third conclusion stems from the second: unlike the inventive Seljuks or the renovatio-minded Byzantines, the French never lavished any aesthetics on their fortifications, in spite of abundant materials. Why not? Because, apart from changed aesthetic horizons, they were continually pressed for men, money and machinery - they always needed money to build hospitals, latrines, bakeries, or sewers. Above all, their whole fort-building strategy was soon influenced by changes in artillery and defence technology, including fears of a serious artillery-led attack by a European power, rather than by Arabs armed with rifles. This, aided by the growing popularity of concrete, and the need to update walls every few years to cope with developing artillery techniques, made spolia walls walls just as much useless antiques as the enormous marble-fed Turkish pierriers at the Dardanelles. Spolia, as an index of tradition and permanence, were out of place in such a fast-changing, modernistic setting. And out of fashion for all but the grand gesture, such as triumphal arches transplanted to Paris. 

Thus the ideal of beautiful fortifications, which augment their moral firepower by their antique connections, and display columns, bas-reliefs, and squared and shiny  blocks, attenuates in the face of Renaissance notions of order and uniformity, and of the new construction strategies required by gunpowder. It vanishes completely with 19th century technology, leaving the earlier Middle Ages as the only period seriously to embellish their fortifications with spolia - and sometimes, as Matthew Paris has it, even cum altis turribus et propugnaculis et lapidibus quadris et incisis columpnis marmoreis decenter ornato.