Diana Darke, Islamesque: The Forgotten Craftsmen Who Built Europe’s Medieval Monuments (Hurst & Company 2024), vii, 480pp.
A prominent part of the cultural mythology of Western Europe for centuries has been the idea of it being the descendant of Roman civilization. It is not a proposition that can bear much weight when the complexities of social development are considered, but cultural history has absorbed it as an uninterrogated assumption. Hence, the foundational architectural style of Western European civilisation, flourishing between the tenth and twelfth centuries, came to be known as ‘Romanesque’ in the nineteenth century. A resemblance to Classical architecture is there, of course, but the name was also an ideological assertion of civilisational continuity from Classical Rome. This required bridging over the supposed ‘Dark Age’ between Rome and the High Middle Ages, carrying along a raft of values and judgements about societies, and what makes them significant or otherwise.
The idea of continuity in architectural style between the Classical period and the High Middle Ages is dealt a major blow by Diana Darke in Islamesque. This is the companion volume to her earlier book, Stealing from the Saracens that demonstrated how the medieval Gothic style, which succeeded Romanesque, derived from Arabic sources and models, rather than springing up on its own from a mysterious source in the north-western European imagination. Islamesque takes on the same project, but for the first High Medieval architectural style, elaborating a brief precis of the argument in the earlier book.
Romanesque architecture, with its rounded arches and stocky columns, did very broadly resemble Classical building, but the style is usually separated from the buildings of the early medieval period after the collapse of the Roman Empire by its extensive repertoire of decorative elements, and by a newly ambitious scale of construction. It was also accompanied by an efflorescence of sculpture and art, which frequently adorned Romanesque churches. The artistic and architectural fashion constitutes a major part of what is termed the ‘twelfth-century Renaissance’, distinguished from the later, more familiar one. Part of what enabled the Romanesque style was the increasing wealth coming into the hands of the ruling class in the eleventh century, derived on the one hand from a revolution in the productivity of agriculture beginning in the tenth century, and a more thorough and heavy regime of exploitation of the peasantry that developed in tandem. The ‘Dark Ages’ were, in contrast, relatively light for the peasantry as a class.
Vectors of artistic change
However, where did the new techniques and styles come from? Here the revival of Western Christendom’s ruling class met and overlapped with the cultures and skills of the Islamic world, which by various routes and means flowed northwards. Two areas of contact were the most important: Spain and Sicily. The First Crusade into the Levant had a much lesser impact. The Normans entered the Mediterranean as mercenaries for the Byzantine Empire, but soon began a conquest on their own account of Sicily, and parts of southern Italy, across the eleventh and early twelfth centuries. The eventual result was the creation of a powerful monarchy in Sicily under Roger II. Despite the violence of its origins, this polity was multi-religious and multi-lingual, and its rulers open to the point of enthusiasm to influences from the more sophisticated court cultures of the Islamic world.
Norman Sicily was in no way some kind of anticipation of modern Western multiculturalism, but it was also not what a superficial understanding of medieval society would expect, combining an oppressive Catholic Christian hegemony with de facto toleration and cultural heterogeneity. Christians could be found with names like Abdullah, Ahmed and Ali, while Muslims often used Greek names. Darke comments that: ‘In today’s world of shrinking horizons and narrow nationalisms it is more important than ever to understand how closely interwoven the world’s cultures are and how much we owe to each other… Much that Europe learnt from the Islamic world in earlier centuries is intangible, like scientific and mathematical knowledge, but buildings are real’ (p.3).
One of the most recognisable motifs in Romanesque architecture, usually called ‘Norman’ in England, is the almost ubiquitous variations on zig-zag decorations surrounding the round arches. It turns out that this form of decoration, which in Europe first appears in Sicily, was taken from the contemporary and pre-dating architecture of the Ismaili Fatimid dynasty of Egypt, who founded Cairo in 973. The wealthy Fatimids in turn appear to have borrowed this form of decoration from Umayyad Syria, if not from earlier iterations (p.14). The Fatimids used the wealth of Egypt and their domination of trade in the Mediterranean ‘to spend lavishly not only on grandiose building projects but also on sponsoring the production of top-quality textiles, ceramics, carved wood, ivory and rock crystal’ (p.15).
The Normans in Sicily not only employed Muslim Sicilian craftsmen for their own building programme, but masons and architects from Egypt as well. As well as the zigzag patterning, other recognisably Fatimid elements included various forms of stylised foliage with animals in sculpture and carving, as well as rib vaulting for ceilings which required ‘a far more advanced understanding of geometry than was present in Europe at that time’ (p.18). Norman Sicily has long been recognised as part of the ‘Fatimid artistic world, which had assimilated its various components from African and Middle Eastern sources’ (p.126). In turn, the Normans brought these techniques and styles, and very likely the craftsmen themselves, into the rest of Europe.
English and other Romanesques
The Norman invasion of England naturally acted as a conduit for the new styles into England. Durham Cathedral, the Romanesque iteration of which was built between 1093 and 1133, abounds in these recognisably Islamic decorative styles (see pp.332-3, for example), as does the Norman part of Canterbury Cathedral. The Norman builder of Durham Cathedral, William de St-Calais, is ‘said to have brought with him from France Muslim masons captured on campaign in Sicily … Beyond zigzags, the sudden simultaneous appearance of fantastical beasts, arabesques and geometric patterns in so-called Romanesque buildings across England at this time, clearly points to the Arab Fatimid influences acquired by the Normans in Sicily’ (p.19). Overall, there is an ‘astonishing common ground between the iconography of the medieval Muslim world and the iconography of the western Romanesque world’ (p.141).
Beaded interlace foliage adorning capitols is another diagnostic element of Islamic style that predates its profusion in European Romanesque. This and other similar elements are particularly prominent in the other avenue by which Romanesque arrived in Europe, on the churches of the major pilgrimage route through France to St James Compostella in Spain. It is likely that the Islamic stylistic influences on the architecture of these buildings are down to Muslim, or Islamic-acculturated, craftsmen flowing into Christendom from Muslim Spain.
The decay and disintegration of the Umayyad state in Spain allowed the small northern Christian kingdoms to expand at its expense, and their conquest of formerly Islamic territory brought them into contact with the sophisticated art, architecture, and craftsmen there. It is known that in Aragon, Navarre and Valencia, free Muslims worked as royal master masons and carpenters (p.78). Such people would have been attracted northwards by the commissions offered by wealthy prelates building all the new abbeys and churches of the period, as the pilgrim route boomed from the eleventh century onwards. While there was massive destruction of mosques and other buildings in Spain (p.185), there was also a great deal of repurposing, and adoption of Islamic styles, so the violence and oppression of the Christian conquest did not prevent a certain flourishing of cultural heterogeneity.
It should be noted that in Fatimid Egypt as well as Muslim Spain, the culture was cosmopolitan and multi-religious, so that the masons and artists bringing their styles and techniques into Europe could just as easily have been Christian as Muslim, but in the former case, they had been absorbed into the larger Islamic culture. Even where evidence of individual craftsmen survives, which is rarely, it is often impossible even to guess at their religious beliefs, although Darke sometimes detects some satirical intent in occasional sculptures.
Alternative transmissions
An alternative origin for some of the motifs of Romanesque decoration has been suggested to be early medieval Irish art, but here again, Darke argues that Irish monks in fact borrowed some of their most distinctive stylisation from Islamic sources via travels to Coptic Egypt (p.48). This is much less securely evidenced than the connections of Sicily and Spain, but it is undeniable that the early-medieval diaspora of Irish monasticism was astonishing in its range and energy, making it not at all implausible that such cultural transmission could have taken place. Indeed, a number of scholars agree that it did. If this seems very surprising, then it’s worth noting that the long-distance connections of early-medieval societies are easily underestimated. Most people would have travelled very little in their lifetimes, but a small minority could regularly connect far-flung regions.
Another putative origin of Romanesque has often been said to be Byzantine architecture. European art historians ‘when confronted with a building in a style they did not recognise, and built in a way they struggled to explain’ attributed it ‘to Byzantium or sometimes “the East” and … leave it at that’ (p.225). However the complex vaulting that emerged in this period cannot be explained by appeal to Byzantium, where it didn’t exist. The same is true of many of the decorative elements which conversely can be found in earlier examples from the Islamic world. One scholar shoehorning the decoration at Moissac Abbey in south-west France into a ‘Byzantine character’ admits that the figure carving ‘is the work of a very different school, which has little trace of either Roman or Byzantine influence’. Darke, however, points to the ‘eight-petalled flowers in the style of eight-pointed stars’ and other unmistakable Islamic motifs, as demonstrating the real source (p.252). Moissac is plumb on the French pilgrimage route to Compostela, along which Darke can point to a wealth of influence from Islamic Spain.
Spain would seem to be the natural route for the Romanesque style to have spread northwards, due particularly to the major pilgrimage route. While that was influential for southern France, it seems that it was in fact Italy which was the real fulcrum for the diffusion of Romanesque into northern Europe. Italy, particularly in the south, was a patchwork of colliding cultures. Historically, a province of Byzantium, with a capital at Ravenna, the region had fragmented under Arab raids and occupations, and then the Norman invasions. Moreover, Italian cities traded extensively with north Africa and the Middle East. It is little surprise, therefore, that Islamic artistic influence spread throughout the peninsula. Despite the example of Norman Sicily, it is in Lombardy where Romanesque is generally agreed to have appeared, quite suddenly, as a distinct style (p.149).
The Lombard tradition
The Lombard ‘tradition’, appearing ‘around 1130-40’, is traditionally identified as being the work of two groups of masons, one known as the ‘Comacini Masters’ from an island in lake Como, and another, the Campioesi masters, from a nearby Italian enclave within Switzerland (pp.150-4). Darke argues that these somewhat mysterious schools of architecture, rather than springing up without precedent, were dependent upon styles coming from the south of Italy and Sicily, perhaps directly through Muslim masons, or masons acculturated by the Islamic world: ‘Every time a new sophisticated feature or technique appears to “pop out” fully formed, like some kind of Virgin birth, it cannot have come from a local source’ (p.137).
One of the most distinctive aspects of the style were rows of blind arcades (windowless series of arches serving only a decorative function). Blind arcading is perhaps most famously seen in Pisa’s twelfth-century leaning tower. Such decoration can be found in Byzantine Ravenna, but ‘structures that were closer in both time and style than Ravenna’ are more likely inspiration, such as the Great Mosque in Kairouan [in today’s Tunisia] as well Sicily (pp.155-7). Pilaster strips as decorated buttressing are another feature supposedly of Lombard Romanesque which can be found earlier in north African mosques, and then Sicilian building (p.157).
Italian, and Sicilian, styles of art and architecture became highly influential in north-western Europe particularly through ecclesiastical connections between Normandy and northern Italy. Archbishop Lanfranc of Canterbury (1070-89), formerly an abbot at Bec in Normandy, before being put in charge of the English Church by William the Conqueror, was in fact from Pavia, and his Lombard connections were of major importance to post-Conquest church architecture. Lanfranc was probably responsible for bringing ribbed vaulting from Pavia to Normandy, and then England. A protégée of Landulf, one Gundulf, is credited with major building projects as Bishop of Rochester, even being referred to as the ‘King’s Engineer’, so probably also imported Lombard masons and artists into eleventh-century England (p.305). Certainly, it’s observable that the distinctive ‘insular’ architecture, and its techniques, were almost entirely eliminated post-Conquest, which points on its own to the importation of a wholly distinct corps of masons and artists.
Cultural migration
Although, as noted, very little evidence survives for the masons themselves, as opposed to the churchmen and aristocrats who commissioned buildings, there are some telling scraps of evidence that Muslim masons were working in eleventh and twelfth-century Europe. Richard I of England is recorded as having employed some ‘Saracens’ around the time he had a castle built between Rouen and Paris, which has notable borrowings from Islamic style, and another castle in Gascony is recorded also as having been built by ‘Saracens’ (pp.82-3). One Muslim mason is recorded by name in a Welsh chronicle. This man, called Lalys, which may have been an anglicisation (or Normanisation) of al-Aziz, was brought by Richard de Grenville from Jerusalem in the mid-twelfth century. He built Neath Abbey, among other buildings, before becoming architect to Henry I (pp.93-4). Darke notes other indications of Islamic craftsmen in England, but the evidence is much later and of uncertain value.
Nonetheless, there are many other indications of Arab craftsmen working in England during the High Middle Ages, even beyond the wealth of borrowings from established Islamic styles of decoration and sculpture. At Wells cathedral, for example, there is the ‘stylistic unity of the 300 sculptures’ indicating that ‘the work was produced in coherent fashion by one workshop over the course of twenty years or so (1220-43)’ in turn requiring there to have been ‘a considerable body of previous work’ which is not at all in evidence in England prior to this point, but can be paralleled in work from monasteries in Catalonia or southern France (pp.307-9).
In the same way that it is deeply unlikely for Lombard Romanesque to have sprung fully formed from a previously unheralded group of masons in Lake Como, so the work at Wells Cathedral points to the importation of styles, and indeed artisans, who had already honed their craft elsewhere. The abundance of stylistic correlation to which Darke is able to point linking Fatimid Egypt and Umayyad Spain to the Romanesque in Europe thus provides a robust circumstantial case for considering Romanesque to indeed be in fact ‘Islamesque’. It can be hoped as well that the book will have an impact on the way that medieval architecture is generally understood, which, as Darke shows, from tourist guides to Unesco listings, is often presented in terms which reinforce a regressive ‘clash of civilisations’ framework (see p.215, for example).
Like Stealing from the Saracens before it, Islamesque is generously illustrated with vivid colour pictures which document the stylistic arguments and illustrate the various architectural and artistic elements being discussed. For those with some familiarity with medieval architecture, this book is a wonderful way to look at the subject with new eyes, but it could serve as an introduction also for the general reader to appreciate the complexity of our history.
Dominic Alexander is a member of Counterfire, for which he is the book review editor. He is a longstanding activist in north London. He is a historian whose work includes the book Saints and Animals in the Middle Ages (2008), a social history of medieval wonder tales, and articles on London’s first revolutionary, William Longbeard, and the revolt of 1196, in Viator 48:3 (2017), and Science and Society 84:3 (July 2020). He is also the author of the Counterfire books, The Limits of Keynesianism (2018) and Trotsky in the Bronze Age(2020).