These were the days of Chivalry, of the Crusaders; the days when men were rich in high and lofty ideals; when those knightly mystics, Wolfram von Eschenbach and Vogelweide, sang of the Parsival and the Quest of the Holy Graal, of songs of love and chivalry, of deliverance from wrongs, and of many stirring and tuneful themes.
Though Charlemagne never learned to read or write, he thoroughly appreciated the value of learning. He gathered together learned men, architects, and artists, and established a school of religious music. He built many churches, palaces, and bridges, and collected many statues from Rome and elsewhere for the adornment of his great church at Aix-la-Chapelle; he organized and encouraged the professions and trades of his towns and cities.
The great tomb-church at Aix-la-Chapelle—or Aachen—was built by Charlemagne, and became the prototype of all subsequent churches erected in the Romanesque style in Germany.
It was in the region bordering on the Rhine that the great church building activity was developed in Germany. The cities of the powerful bishoprics rivalled each other in pomp and splendour, as we see in such buildings as the Doms of Spiers, Mayence, and Cologne, and in the Romanesque churches of Swabia, Franconia, Westphalia, and Lower Saxony. The Romanesque style is also found in the churches or Doms of Bamberg, Brunswick, and Osnabruck; the Godehardi and Michael’s churches at Hildesheim, the carving in which excels that in the churches of the Rhineland.
The distinctive characteristics of the German Romanesque are the great octagonal dome-like towers that arise from the crossing of the nave and transept, and the flanking towers at each end that are sometimes united to the central tower by an outside western gallery or façade. A fine modern church, built in the Romanesque style, is that of the Cathedral of Fourvière, on the hill overlooking the city of Lyons in France.
Fig. 368.—Round Arch Frieze.
369.—Intersecting Blind Arcade.
Some German Romanesque churches have a western as well as an eastern apse, and the church known as the Apostelkirche in Cologne has the transept, both of which features are disturbing elements in any church where the chief attention should be directed to the culminating point where the choir, reredos, or altar are usually found—in the apse or chancel, and at the eastern end only.