Islamesque: the forgotten craftsmen who built Europe’s medieval monuments
Diana Darke, Hurst, £25

THIS is a wonderful book, fully and colourfully illustrated. Diana Darke is an Arabist and cultural expert who has lived and worked in the Middle East for over 30 years. She describes beautifully hundreds of cathedrals, churches, monasteries, palaces and castles.

She challenges the conventional wisdom that only Rome could be the source of Christian architecture. The accepted idea is that the “Romanesque” style simply emerged between 1000 and 1250 across the whole of Europe, making it the first pan-European architectural style since Imperial Roman.

But no architectural style appears magically out of nowhere. All the key innovations attributed to “Romanesque” – rib vaulting; the use of decorative frames; ornamental details like blind arcades, Lombard bands, blind arches, lesenes, Venetian dentil, and zigzags — and the use of fantastical beasts and foliage in sculpture — can be traced back to origins in the Muslim East.

So, Darke contends that “it is time to create a new word for the 21st century, Islamesque, in recognition that what we have hitherto dubbed ‘Romanesque’ owes its sudden genesis not to classical Rome, but to master craftsmen schooled in the Islamic tradition.”
 
Indeed, Christopher Wren also thought we should acknowledge that the Gothic style derived from the Islamic East: “This we now call the Gothick manner of architecture... I think it should be with more reason called the Saracen style.”

What happened between 1000 and 1250 is that a highly skilled new workforce entered Latin Christendom, bringing with it knowledge of the advanced building techniques of the Islamic East. Some came to Latin Europe seeking new commissions after the collapse of the Cordoba caliphate in Spain in 1031, others were brought by returning Crusaders as prisoners of war. This was when “Romanesque” monuments suddenly appear across Latin Europe.

In both England and Italy the first rib vaulting began within 10 years of the fall of Toledo in 1085, where Islamic Spain had been developing the technique for well over a century. Durham cathedral’s vaulted ceiling, the world’s first, was built just five years after the First Crusade. Tradition has it that Moorish masons brought as prisoners of war imported the vaulting techniques.

The earliest pointed arches and the earliest ribbed vaulting are found first in north Africa, Sicily and Spain, and only later in Europe’s more northerly countries. Pointed arches made arches into active parts of buildings, opposing vault to vault, thrust to thrust, reducing thrust by about a fifth, and thus creating the method of construction of all succeeding architecture. It was the key long-lasting innovation of the “Romanesque” period, which led directly to Gothic and all future architectural styles.

This expertise did not exist anywhere in Europe in the indigenous population, only in the skills of craftsmen working in the Islamic world, and in particular its stonemasons and carpenters. In Spain and Sicily, Muslims had a near monopoly in building trades, including high-level construction, masonry, stone sculpture, brickwork, carpentry, stucco carving, painting, plastering and engineering. 

Craft guilds were deeply rooted in medieval Muslim society. Cairo’s guilds had their own form of unemployment and sickness benefit to which all members subscribed. They were interconfessional, with Muslims, Jews and Christians all admitted on equal terms, sharing a moral and aesthetic code taught to all.

Stone craftsmen, for instance, were divided into quarrymen, rough hewers, cutters, sculptors and assemblers. This specialisation enabled them to achieve great technical ability and to work at speed. Quality of production was paramount and closely supervised by the master craftsman.

This is a fascinating and eye-opening book, thoroughly recommended.