Gothic, frankish or crusader? Reconsidering the origins of gothic architecture

According to an accepted version of history, in the middle of the XII century, for some reason , the construction style in Northern Europe changed suddenly from Romanesque to Gothic, besides the differences in style it was a revolution in the construction techniques. We propose here a different interpretation: that Gothic architecture originated in Holy Land, and that it had in Cyprus an important experimentation phase before it was imported to Northern Europe. After that Salah Din in 1187 recon-quered the city of Jerusalem, a number of Christians were allowed to leave the city by paying a ransom. A number variable between 30.000 and 6.000 according to different sources, fled from Jerusalem to Acri, Tripoli and Cyprus: it is not a case that two years later, the island passed under the authority of the Templars, and after one more year under the lordship of Guy de Lusignan, former king of Jerusalem. Both these groups, the Templars and the Lusignans had moved to Cyprus after the loss of Jerusalem, in what should be considered a migration. After this event, the architectural prevalent style in Cyprus shifted gradually from middle Byzantine to Gothic. When these groups arrived to Cyprus, they brought to the island a new architectural style, named by historians the Gothic style. Actually, what they could bring with them was the architectural knowledge as it was in Holy Land, following the encounter of Northern carpenters coming from the elastic cultural area, with the local Islamic masons and engineers belonging to a plastic cultural area. The Northern builders used to build with wooden scaffoldings for the construction of arches and vaults as we can see in the Romanesque architecture, and after the first crusade (1099), had to operate in Jerusalem, a different environment where wood was expensive and difficult to find. In continuity with the local building knowledge, they developed a new way of building based essentially on ashlar and masonry without using wooden scaffoldings, importing some models and elements of former Islamic architecture. We are going to illustrate some very early Holy Land buildings featuring the typical characters of the Gothic style: the polylobate pilaster, the lancet arch, the ambulatory choir, the flying buttresses, the groin vault and the rib system.