CHAPTER III
EARLY MEDIÆVAL DESIGN
THE unequalled grandeur of the Empire as it endured from 50 B. C. to about 350 A. D. is most strongly felt when we think of the Pax Romana—that Roman peace which forbade armed conflicts in the Mediterranean lands in which war had been the rule. To this Peace an altar was erected in Rome by the orders of Augustus. From the Caspian Sea to the Atlantic, and from the shores of the Baltic to the Atlas Mountains a consecutive and orderly government was maintained, fully as beneficent as has ever prevailed in any single nation of the earth, except in very recent years in Western Europe, and immeasurably superior to what has existed in those same regions, taken together during the past dozen centuries. One curiously complete difference existed, however, between the west and east halves of the Empire. In the West, Roman domination brought with it a civilization so superior to that known in those lands before the conquest that Gaul and Iberian must have looked upon the Italian domination as synonymous with all that makes for enlightenment and intellectual advance as well as good order. On the other hand, the peoples of the Balkan Peninsula, Asia Minor, and Syria, must have felt that in yielding to the Italian power they were yielding to a force, which, however beneficial politically, represented a lower intellectual civilization than their own. The business of the Empire was, as we now see it, to develop and hand on to the future, Hellenic civilization. The first dawn of this extended Hellenism must have been to the West a clear intellectual gain: but in the East it was not noticeable. The holders of Greek traditions may have enjoyed the apparent willingness of the conquerors to defer to the mental and moral superiority of the conquered: but they could not have bowed to Rome as the one civilizer known, as did the people of the west of Europe. And so it was that the people of the East took one view of the architectural problem when the Imperial system had fallen, while the Gallo-Romans, Britons and Spaniards took quite another view, which they impressed at once upon their Frankish, Visigothic and Saxon conquerors. The Roman builders left two great traditions, the adornment of the building, the open square, the city with combinations of Greek-seeming colonnades; and the huge interior, arranged for interior effect, vaulted when practicable, flat roofed with massive trabeated construction when the light and open character of the building, as of a huge portico, invited a pure Greek manner of design. The first-named of these traditions was destined not to be very boldly or very generally followed until after the Middle Ages. (See Chapters VI, VII, VIII.) The other prevailed at once: the needs of the Christian church were served by it; and the Westerners followed it in one way, the Easterners in a very different way. The people of Italy, Gaul, Spain, Germany and Britain developed Romanesque[33] architecture, the people of the Eastern Empire—which held together for centuries the Greeks, Albanians, Macedonians, Syrians, Phrygians—created Byzantine[34] architecture. The Romanesque is not ill-named: it is indeed quasi-Roman, Roman as near as the poor and scattered communities could make it. The Byzantine is a mixture of Persian and Roman habits and rules, and is the very finest thing that ever came out of such an almost conscious mixing of diverse element. It could not have been created but for the Roman Peace, which still held sway over the Eastern seas and lands after Italy and the West had gone back to pristine barbarism: but under that domination it spread all over the Balkan Peninsula with Greece, over southern and western Italy and Sicily, Syria, Egypt, and the coast regions of Asia Minor.
Now it so happens that both of these great styles were superseded in their turn by other and very vigorous styles: by the Gothic in Europe and the Saracen or Mohammedan in Asia: and therefore it is that we have only churches, and not many of them, from which to judge Romanesque and Byzantine architecture. At least, however, these are erect and complete, not too much altered, roofed and floored as of old, with window-openings and doorways, porches and apses in working order. It is with the present chapter, then, that we begin to study buildings which we can see complete. And, after all, the church was much the most important structure of the time. Here and there a ruined palace, like Barbarossa’s at Gelnhausen and the Hebdomon at Constantinople, makes us regret what we have lost: but these also prove the truth of our assumption that it was the Church Building in which was determined the growth of architecture. Indeed that was to be the march of events until the fifteenth century: only then did the residence and the house of state come to the front.
The earliest western churches are the Basilicas, buildings of a form and style derived partly from the Roman civic basilica[35], and partly from the well known peristyle or garden-like court of the large Roman house, with its pillars supporting the roofs of open galleries on three or four sides. The buildings of this character built or adapted for Christian uses were themselves basilicas—Christian basilicas or post-classic basilicas. They were flat roofed, without vaulting, imitating in this the majority of the older, classical basilicas. A good example of these buildings is seen in the still existing church in Rome, the Liberian basilica called commonly St. Mary the Greater (S. Maria Maggiore). Plate XV gives the interior of this building as drawn by Gutensohn for the great work of Bunsen: the late alteration which spoils the uniformity of the colonnade on either side being ignored. The columns of this colonnade are entirely antique, excepting repairs and slight alterations. It is probable that in this as well as in many similar structures the ancient pillars of a great outdoor portico, such as are described in Chapter II, were taken bodily for the interior of the church. The clergy of the fifth century cared much less for the beauty and completeness of the city outside than for, each, his own special dominion—the church which he controlled; and there was no municipality to prevent such spoliation. The plan of the church is easy to understand from the plate itself; apart from the numerous
