Page:The Normans in European History.djvu/148

134 roll shows him expending 2650 pounds Angevin in a single year. These castles, remains of many of which are still standing, were typical of the best military architecture of their age, but they were inferior in strength and scientific construction to the great fortresses of Christian Syria, such as Krak or Margat, which seem to have gone back to Byzantine and even Persian models. A keen warrior like Richard had not spent his two years in Palestine without gaining an expert knowledge of eastern methods in the art of war, and we are not surprised to find that he had Saracen soldiers and Syrian artillery-men with him in his Norman campaigns, and that he made large use of oriental experience in strengthening his defences. His masterpiece, of course, was Château Gaillard, the saucy castle on the Seine controlling the passage of the river and its tributaries in that region of the Norman Vexin which was the great bone of contention between the Plantagenets and the French kings. Having first expropriated at great expense the lord of the region, the archbishop of Rouen, he fortified the adjacent island of Andeli and laid out a new town on the bank. This he surrounded with water and rëenforced with towers and battlements, protecting the whole with a stockade across the river and outlying works farther up. Then on the great rock above he built the fortress, with its triangular advance work, its elliptical citadel, and its circular keep surrounded by a "fossé cut almost vertically out of the rock." There was no dead angle,