The Middle Ages
The Church builds: from Byzantine domes through Romanesque walls to Gothic light.
For a thousand years Europe built above all for God. From the domes of Byzantium via the fortress-like churches of the Romanesque to the luminous Gothic cathedrals of France, England, Germany and Spain – and out in the villages thousands of parish churches that are still in use.
Byzantine architecture gathers the space beneath a dome; the Western church is a long basilica.
Romanesque builds with round arches and thick walls; Gothic with pointed arches, rib vaults and flying buttresses.
The choir of Saint-Denis, consecrated in 1144, is regarded as the first Gothic building.
Monastic orders and pilgrimage routes spread architectural ideas across Europe.
English Gothic became long and low, with fan vaults; Italian Gothic broad and bright, with marble in several colours.
In Spain Islamic and Christian architecture met: the mosque of Córdoba, the Alhambra and the cathedrals of Burgos and León.
Brick Gothic spread along the Baltic with the Hanseatic League: stepped gables, blind panels and large medieval bricks.
Towns acquired town halls, guild houses and walls; Carcassonne and Visby still have their circuits of walls.
Cologne Cathedral was begun in 1248 but not completed until 1880.
Byzantium. When the Western Roman Empire fell in the 5th century, the eastern half lived on, centred on Constantinople, for another thousand years. In 532–537 the emperor Justinian had Hagia Sophia built to designs by Anthemius of Tralles and Isidore of Miletus. The church embodied a new idea: a vast space gathered beneath a dome resting on four arches and pendentives, spherical triangles that transfer the round form of the dome to a square base. A ring of windows at the foot of the dome makes it seem to float. The walls were faced with marble in several colours and the vaults with gold mosaic. The dome collapsed after an earthquake in 558 and was rebuilt, higher. After the Ottoman conquest in 1453 the church became a mosque and acquired its minarets, and it became the model for the great Ottoman mosques. Byzantine churches are often plain brick buildings outside and overwhelming within. Later the cross-in-square church, with a central dome and four equal arms, became the most common form. The forms spread to Russia and the Balkans and, via trading cities such as Ravenna and Venice, into Western Europe; San Vitale in Ravenna, consecrated in 547, and St Mark’s Basilica in Venice are the clearest examples.
Charlemagne and the monasteries. Around the year 800, when he was crowned emperor in Rome, Charlemagne tried to revive the Roman Empire in the West. His Palatine Chapel at Aachen, consecrated around 805, is an octagonal centrally planned building modelled on San Vitale in Ravenna, and columns were brought there from Italy. The imperial throne stood in the gallery, opposite the altar. The Carolingians also added the westwork, a mighty block with towers at the west end of the church that housed chapels and a gallery for the emperor or prince; Corvey in Germany has a surviving one from the 870s. The monasteries became centres of learning and agriculture. The Plan of St Gall, a drawing on parchment from around 820, shows an ideal monastery with church, cloister, dormitory, refectory, library, scriptorium, infirmary, guesthouse, workshops, stables and gardens – a whole small town, arranged around the cloister. It is one of the oldest surviving architectural drawings in Europe. Under the Ottonian emperors of the 10th and 11th centuries the tradition continued in churches such as St Michael’s in Hildesheim, with a regular alternation of piers and columns and heavy tower masses at both ends. Here lie the roots of the Romanesque style.
Romanesque. Around the year 1000 people began building on a large scale in stone again throughout Western Europe. Churches were basilicas with a tall nave and lower aisles, with round arches, barrel or groin vaults and thick walls that carried everything. Windows were small and interiors dim, almost like fortresses. The space is often divided into regular units, bays, giving a clear rhythm. Speyer Cathedral, begun in the 1030s as the burial church of the German emperors, was vaulted over the entire nave at an early date. In Normandy and England the Normans built powerful churches; at Durham, begun in 1093, rib vaults are used early on, pointing towards the Gothic. Heavy west towers, sculpted portals with Christ in a tympanum above the door and capitals with fabulous beasts and biblical scenes belong to the style. In Burgundy and southern France sculpture is especially rich, as at Vézelay and Moissac. On the outside you recognise Romanesque by the arched corbel tables beneath the eaves, lesenes – shallow pilaster strips – and a simple, closed volume. The name refers to the kinship with Roman building and was first used in the 19th century.
Pilgrims and monastic orders. The pilgrimage routes to Santiago de Compostela, Rome and Jerusalem placed new demands on churches. Pilgrims had to be able to walk around the choir and see the relics without disturbing Mass. The solution was the ambulatory, a passage behind the altar with a ring of chapels, and wide transepts. The churches along the route through France to Santiago, such as Sainte-Foy at Conques and Saint-Sernin in Toulouse, therefore resemble one another. From 1088 the Benedictine abbey of Cluny in Burgundy built a church that was the largest in Christendom until the new St Peter’s; it was almost entirely demolished after the French Revolution. The Cistercian order, founded in 1098, responded with the opposite. Under Bernard of Clairvaux they sought to get away from excess: churches were given flat-ended choirs, no large towers, only a small roof turret, and almost no sculpture. Monasteries were placed in remote valleys near water, and the monks were skilled in agriculture, water power and building technology. Fontenay in France is a well-preserved example. The order spread quickly across all of Europe, from Portugal to Scandinavia. Later came the mendicant orders, which built simple town churches.
The light of Gothic. In the 1140s Abbot Suger built a new choir for the abbey church of Saint-Denis outside Paris, consecrated in 1144. There the pointed arch, the rib vault and large stained-glass windows were combined into a whole for the first time. The idea was to channel the thrust of the vaults to a few points and on into buttresses and free-standing flying buttresses, so that the walls between the supports could be opened up to light. The pointed arch could moreover be made in different widths at the same height, allowing freer plans. Notre-Dame in Paris was begun in 1163; the cathedral burned in 2019 and was reconsecrated in 2024. Chartres, largely built after a fire in 1194, retains most of its stained glass. Reims, where the French kings were crowned, and Amiens pushed the height further, and at Beauvais the choir collapsed in 1284. The Sainte-Chapelle in Paris, consecrated in 1248, is almost nothing but glass between slender supports. Later Gothic became more decorative: in France the Flamboyant style, in England the vertical Perpendicular style with fan vaults, and in Germany hall churches with aisles of equal height. Cologne was begun in 1248 but finished only in 1880. The word Gothic was originally a term of abuse from the Renaissance, which saw the style as barbaric, “Gothic”.
The High Gothic cathedrals. Within a hundred years of Saint-Denis the cathedrals of northern France were becoming ever higher and brighter. Chartres, rebuilt after a fire in 1194, received a system that became the norm: three storeys with an arcade, a narrow triforium and tall clerestory windows, supported by flying buttresses outside. Its stained glass, most of it from the early 13th century, survives as in few other churches. Reims, where the kings of France were crowned, has a façade with hundreds of sculptures, and at Amiens the vaults reached about 42 metres. Beauvais tried to go higher still, but its vaults collapsed in 1284 and the church was never finished. The Sainte-Chapelle in Paris, consecrated in 1248, is almost entirely glass between slender piers, built to house the Crown of Thorns that King Louis IX had bought. The cathedrals were often built over several generations, and the style changed as the work went on. Recognise High Gothic by the three storeys of the nave, the four-part rib vaults and the rose windows of the façades.
England. After the conquest of 1066 the Normans brought a great campaign of building cathedrals and castles. Durham Cathedral, begun in 1093, has some of the earliest rib vaults over a nave in Europe. English Gothic then developed differently from French: long, low churches with square east ends, often set among lawns and trees within their own precinct, the close. Salisbury was built almost in one campaign in 1220–1258 and in the 14th century received the tallest spire in England. In the late Middle Ages came Perpendicular, a style with straight vertical window mullions that divide the walls into panels, and fan vaults in which the ribs spread out like fans from the piers. King’s College Chapel in Cambridge, with vaults from the 1510s, is the high point of the style. English Gothic can be recognised by its long plans, its broad west fronts that are often screens rather than reflections of the space behind, and its rich vaults.
Italy. In Italy Gothic never took the same hold as north of the Alps. The ruins of antiquity were everywhere, the sun did not call for large windows, and the cities wanted broad, bright spaces. Pisa Cathedral, begun in 1063, with its baptistery and leaning bell tower, is built in striped marble in a Tuscan Romanesque. In Venice, with its close ties to Constantinople, St Mark’s received five domes and gold mosaics. The city-states built town halls with tall towers, such as the Palazzo Pubblico in Siena, and cathedrals with façades of white, green and pink marble, as in Florence and Siena. The Doge’s Palace in Venice, which largely took its form in the 14th and 15th centuries, rests a heavy upper storey on two storeys of pointed arcades. Milan Cathedral, begun in 1386, is Italy’s most northern-looking Gothic, with a forest of pinnacles that was only completed in the 19th and 20th centuries. Recognise the Italian Middle Ages by coloured marble, free-standing bell towers and broad spaces with few but large vaults.
Spain. On the Iberian Peninsula Islam and Christianity met for almost eight hundred years. The mosque of Córdoba, begun in 785 and extended in stages over the following two centuries, is a forest of columns with double arches in red brick and white stone. After Córdoba was conquered in 1236 the mosque became a church, and in the 16th century a cathedral was built in the middle of it. The Alhambra in Granada, the 14th-century palace of the Nasrid dynasty, gathers its rooms around courtyards with water and covers walls and ceilings with stucco in geometric patterns and script. In the north the churches of the Christian kingdoms were built: Santiago de Compostela, the goal of the pilgrimage route across northern Spain, received a great Romanesque cathedral, and in the 13th century the cathedrals of Burgos, León and Toledo were built on French models; León is famous for its stained glass. Mudéjar is the name of the style in which Muslim craftsmen worked for Christian patrons, with patterns in brick, tiles and wooden ceilings. Medieval Spain can be recognised by horseshoe arches, rich stucco patterns and tiles – and by cathedrals that are broader and darker than the French ones.
How a cathedral was built. A cathedral was directed by a master mason who was at once architect, engineer and site manager, and who had often learned the trade as a stonecutter. Around the building site was a lodge, a workshop and community where stonecutters, masons, carpenters and smiths worked. Details were drawn at full scale on plaster floors or on boards, and wooden templates were transferred to the stone. Many stones bear masons’ marks, which showed who was to be paid. The work was done with treadwheel cranes, wooden scaffolding anchored in holes in the wall, and arches built over wooden centring, and the master masons worked with geometric rules rather than calculations. Villard de Honnecourt’s sketchbook from around 1230 shows how a master mason thought: plans, machines, figures and animals side by side. Construction was paid for by donations, indulgences, the income of the bishop and chapter and gifts from guilds, and it could stand still for decades when the money ran out or war intervened. Cathedrals were therefore often built in stages, with the choir first so that Mass could begin. If you look closely you can see where the style changes between different parts, since taste had time to change during construction. A tower could be completed several hundred years after the choir.
Castles, walls and towns. Medieval Europe was full of castles and walls. After the conquest of England in 1066 the Normans first built simple wooden castles on earth mounds and then stone keeps, such as the White Tower in London. The Crusades brought new ideas about defence from the Middle East, and castles such as Krak des Chevaliers in Syria were given several rings of walls one inside the other. From the 1280s King Edward I built such concentric castles in Wales, among them Harlech and Beaumaris. Towns grew from the 11th century onwards and were surrounded by walls with towers and gates. Carcassonne in southern France is the best known, but its present appearance owes much to the restoration under Viollet-le-Duc in the 19th century. Inside the walls rose town halls, guildhalls, market halls and burghers’ houses, often gable end to the street on narrow, deep plots. Around the Baltic and the North Sea the merchants joined together in the Hanseatic League, with Lübeck as its centre. There the Marienkirche and the Holstentor city gate were built in brick, and the Hanseatic towns became models for towns around the Baltic and the North Sea, from Bergen to Riga.
Brick Gothic. In northern Germany, Poland, the Baltic lands and Denmark good building stone was scarce, so people built in brick. The medieval brick was larger than today’s and was laid in a bond in which one header alternates with two stretchers. Brick created its own world of forms: smooth wall surfaces, stepped gables and whitewashed blind panels – recessed fields that resemble windows – and ornament of moulded brick. The Marienkirche in Lübeck, built from the 13th century, translated a French cathedral plan into brick and became the model for a long series of churches in the Hanseatic towns. The castle of the Teutonic Order at Marienburg, today Malbork in Poland, is one of the largest brick buildings in the world, and Stralsund, Wismar, Gdańsk and Toruń still have whole townscapes of Brick Gothic. The style also spread to Scandinavia, where Roskilde Cathedral is an early masterpiece. A stepped gable with white blind panels on a church or a town hall is a sure sign of the late Middle Ages around the Baltic.