CHAPTER I

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SARACENIC ARCHITECTURE IN CHRISTIAN COUNTRIES; OR, BYZANTINE SARACENIC.

NOTE.—In consequence of the re-arrangement of the work, as explained above, by which all the Indian chapters are taken out of it and put together in a separate volume by themselves, the third part of the original work is reduced to very limited dimensions. It consists in the first place of those styles of Saracenic art which are in any way connected with the European styles, and which consequently must be studied together with them in order to be understood. But all the Indian developments of the same style are omitted; first, because they have no real or direct connection with the Western styles; and, secondly, because their affinities are much more intimate with the local styles of Hindostan than with those of Europe. When, however, this great branch is cut off, the Saracenic styles west of the Indus do not occupy a very important place in a general history of architecture—nothing that can compare with the great Christian or classical styles, and hardly even with those of Assyria or Egypt.

As the Indian styles necessarily include the Cambodian, Chinese, Japanese, &c., the only styles that remain to be described are those of the New World. Their connection with other styles is at present so hazy and indefinite that they may be arranged anywhere; but in order to avoid any appearance of prejudging any hypothesis, it may be as well to place them in this part of the work, in juxtaposition with a style with which they cannot be suspected of having any connection.

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INTRODUCTION.

THE first century of the Hejira forms a chapter in the history of mankind as startling from the brilliancy of its events as it is astonishing from the permanence of its results. Whether we consider the first outburst of Mahomedanism as a conquest of one of the most extensive empires of the world by a small and previously unknown people, or as the propagation of a new religion, or as both these events combined, the success of the movement is without a parallel in history. It far surpassed the careers of the great Eastern conquerors in the importance of its effects, and the growth of the Roman Empire in brilliance and rapidity. From Alexander to Napoleon, conquests have generally been the result of the genius of some gifted individual, and have left, after a short period, but slight traces of their transient splendour. Even Rome’s conquest of the world was a slow and painful effort compared with that of the Arabians; and though she imposed her laws on the conquered nations, and enforced them by her military organization, she had neither the desire nor the power to teach them a new faith; nor could she bind the various nations together into one great people, who should aid her with heart and hand in the mission she had undertaken.

It was, indeed, hardly possible that a poor and simple, but warlike and independent, people like the Arabs, could long exist close to the ruins of so wealthy and so overgrown an empire as that of Constantinople, without making an attempt to appropriate the spoil which the effeminate hands of its possessors were evidently unable to defend. It was equally impossible that so great a supervision of Christianity as then prevailed in Egypt and Syria could exist in a country which from the earliest ages had been the seat of the most earnest Monotheism without provoking some attempt to return to the simpler faith which had never been wholly superseded. So that on the whole the extraordinary success of Mahomedanism at its first outset must be attributed to the utter corruption, religious and political, of the expiring empire of the East, as much as to any inherent greatness in the system itself or the ability of the leaders who achieved the great work.

Had it been a mere conquest, it must have crumbled to pieces as soon as completed; for Arabia was too thinly populated to send forth armies to fight continual battles, and maintain so widely extended an empire. Its permanence was owing to the fact that the converted nations joined the cause with almost the enthusiasm of its original promoters; Syria, Persia, and Africa, in turn, sent forth their swarms to swell the tide of conquest and to spread the religion of Islam to the remotest corners of the globe.

To understand either Mahomedan history or art it is essential to bear this constantly in mind, and not to assume that, because the first impulse was given from Arabia, everything afterwards must be traced back to that primitive people: on the contrary, there was no great depopulation, if any, of the conquered countries, no great transplantation of races. Each country retained its own inhabitants, who, under a new form, followed their old habits and clung to their old feelings with all the unchangeableness of the East, and perhaps with even less outward change than is usually supposed. Before the time of Mahomet the Sabean worship of the stars was common to Arabia and Persia, and a great part of the Babylonian Empire. The Jewish religion was diffused through Syria and parts of Arabia. Egypt, long before the time of Mahomet, must have been to a great extent Arabian, as it now wholly is. In all these countries the religion of Mahomet struck an ancient chord that still vibrated among the people, and it must have appeared more as a revival of the past than as the preaching of a new faith. In Spain alone colonization to some extent seems to have taken place, but we must not even there overlook the fact of the early Carthaginian settlements, and the consequent existence of a Semitic people of considerable importance in the south, where the new religion maintained itself long after its extinction in those parts of Spain where no Semitic blood is known to have existed.

So weak, indeed, in the converted countries was the mere Arabian influence, that each province soon shook off its yoke, and, under their own Caliphs, Persia, Syria, Egypt, Africa, and Spain soon became independent States, yielding only a nominal fealty to that Caliph who claimed to be the rightful successor of the Prophet, and, except in faith and the form of religion, the real and essential change was slight, and far greater in externals than in the innate realities of life.

All this is more evident from the architecture than from any other department—without, at least, more study than most people can devote to the subject. The Arabs themselves had no architecture, properly so called. Their only temple was the Kaabah at Mecca, a small square tower, almost destitute of architectural ornament, and more famous for its antiquity and sanctity than for any artistic merit.

It is said that Mahomet built a mosque at Medina—a simple edifice of bricks and palm-sticks.[457] But the Koran gives no directions on the subject, and so simple were the primitive habits of the nomad Arabs, that had the religion been confined to its native land, it is probable that no mosque worthy of the name would ever have been erected. With them prayer everywhere and anywhere was equally acceptable. All that was required of the faithful was to turn towards Mecca at stated times and pray, going through certain forms and in certain attitudes, but whether the place was the desert or the housetop was quite immaterial.

For the first half century after the Mahomedans burst into Syria they seem to have built very little. The taste for architectural magnificence had not yet taken hold of the simple followers of the Prophet, and desecrated churches and other buildings supplied what wants they had. When they did take to building, about the end of the 7th century, they employed the native architects and builders, and easily converted the Christian church with its atrium into a place of prayer; and, then, by a natural growth of style, they gradually elaborated a new style of details and new arrangements, in which it is often difficult to trace the source whence they were derived.

In Egypt the wealth of ancient remains, in particular of Roman pillars, rendered the task easy; and mosques were enclosed and palaces designed and built with less thought and less trouble than had occurred almost anywhere else. The same happened in Barbary and in Spain. In the latter country, especially, a re-arrangement of Roman materials was all that was required. It was only when these were exhausted, after some centuries of toil, that we find the style becoming original; but its form was not that of Syria or of Egypt, but of Spanish birth and confined to that locality.

When the Turks conquered Asia Minor, their style was that of the Byzantine basilicas which they found there, and when they entered Constantinople they did not even care to carry a style with which they were familiar across the Bosphorus, but framed their mosques upon a type of church peculiar to that city, of which Sta. Sophia was the crowning example.

It is true that, after centuries of practice most of these heterogeneous elements became fused into a complete style. This style possesses so much that is entirely its own as to make it sometimes difficult to detect the germs, taken from the older styles of architecture, which gave rise to many of its most striking peculiarities. These, however, are never entirely obliterated. Everywhere the conviction is forced upon us that originally the Moslems had no style of their own, but adopted those which they found practised in the countries to which they came. In other words, the conquered or associated people still continued to build as they had built before their conversion, merely adapting their former methods to the purposes of their new religion. After a time this Mahomedan element thus introduced into the styles of different countries produced a certain amount of uniformity,—increased, no doubt, by the intercommunications arising from the uniformity of religion. In this way at last a style was elaborated, tolerably homogeneous, though never losing entirely the local peculiarities due to the earlier styles out of which it rose, and which still continue to mark most distinctly the various nationalities that made up the great Empire of Islam.

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