This text is also in the Duke of Burgundy library
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Listed as KBR MS 9404-5
Maps: I 346 - I 353
Swallow-tailed merlons on I 113, I 223 and four examples on I 281.
Certainly appears to associate these merlons with Muslim 'fortifications'.
I only had a moment to glance through them (I have to run), but it does appear that way. I have seen this kind of symbol used to mean "this is ours, we won this" but these examples don''t have that same feel to them.
There was a sort of pointed merlon in the middle east at the time, but it didn't really look the same as the Ghibelline merlons that were in northern Italy. It was a slightly a different proportion and shape, just as the ones in southern Spain were a different proportion and shape—when you see them together, you can tell the difference. I wonder if the person who drew the illustrations applied what he knew to what he had heard.
Quote:This set of maps by the Genoese mapmaker Pietro Vesconte forms a supplement to a work by the Venetian author Marino Sanudo entitled Liber secretorum fidelium crucis (the book of secrets for faithful crusaders). This was a treatise written for Pope John XXII in order to promote a crusade to the Holy land in 1321. The maps consist of a ‘mappamundi’ world map drawn in the style of a sea chart, five portolan sea charts of the coasts of Europe and North Africa, culminating in a map of the Holy Land.
Going out on a limb here. The description says that this is promotional material. So might they be trying to push the right buttons by putting these merlons in specific regions?
Merlons is a topic from some investigations in the past, and since it remains of interest to me, and since the KBR is new (to me, again), and recently doing digital, I just thought, hey look, swallow-tailed merlons, in the Duke of Burgundy's library.
The images clearly do contain a bit more architectural fantasy than architectural reality. The drawings are a mixture, but they still reflect a reality. They substantiate the knowledge of their existence. But has the artist actually seen the merlons? Has the artist actually seen the muses or the cosmos? Maybe not.
There were a number of different crusades in history, so it's hard to get excited about one that didn't happen, but that is the situation regarding Philip the Good - as the main military support behind the two strongly pro-crusade popes of that time. It almost came together; then it fell apart. There is at least one other text (MS 9309-10) in the KBR exhibit that shows interest in the Outremer. The 213 texts constitute roughly a quarter of the original collection. Even so the exhibition has everything from Xenophon to Aristotle, the Oresme translation, Cicero and Seneca, Augustine, Boethius, Anselm, Petrarch, etc., histories and chronicles as far as Morea in Greece, multiple histories of Troy reveal a mythical tendency, copies of the Bible and discourses on philosophy. Filling in on some of the more obscure events of this time <Wikipedia> has made for some interesting investigation. The one thing I didn't get from Wagner's book on Philip the Good was any real connection to the religious side - excusable for a historian. The library has two versions (MS 6406; MS 10980) of Vie de soeur Colette, about the woman who founded the Colettine version of the Poor Clares, and was supported by the rulers of Burgundy. There is also an older text (MS 10419), Discours sur le tyrannicide, written by Jean Petit, as justification for the Burgundian assassination of Louis d'Orleans.
One of the more visually unusual is MS II 239 A 1460s copy of a text that was a century old.