Europeans are in denial. Against a backdrop of Islamophobia, they are increasingly distancing themselves from their cultural debt to the Muslim world. But while the legacy of Islam and the Middle East is in danger of being airbrushed out of Western history, its traces can still be detected in some of Europe's most recognisable monuments, from Notre-Dame to St Paul's Cathedral. In this comprehensively illustrated book, Diana Darke sets out to redress the balance, revealing the Arab and Islamic roots of Europe's architectural heritage. She tracks the transmission of key innovations from the great capitals of Islam's early empires, Damascus and Baghdad, via Muslim Spain and Sicily into Europe. Medieval crusaders, pilgrims and merchants from Europe later encountered Arab Muslim culture in journeys to the Holy Land. In more recent centuries, that same route through modern-day Turkey connected Ottoman culture with the West, leading Sir Christopher Wren himself to believe that Gothic architecture should more rightly be called 'the Saracen style', because of its Islamic origins. Recovering this overlooked story within the West's long history of borrowing from the Islamic world, Darke sheds new light on Europe's buildings and offers rich insights into the possibilities of cultural exchange.

The decades following the year 1000 marked a watershed in the history of the Iberian Peninsula when the balance of power shifted from Muslims to Christians. During this crucial period of religious and political change, Romanesque churches were constructed for the first time in Spain. Romanesque Architecture and Its Sculptural Decoration in Christian Spain, 1000-1120 examines how the financial patronage of newly empowered local rulers allowed Romanesque architecture and sculptural decoration to significantly redefine the cultural identities of those who lived in the frontier kingdoms of Christian Spain. Proceeding chronologically, Janice Mann studies the earliest Romanesque monuments constructed by Sancho el Mayor (r.1004-1035) and his wife, daughters, and granddaughters, as well as those that were built by Sancho Ramírez, king of Aragon (1064-1094). Mann examines groups of buildings constructed by particular patrons against the backdrop of changing social conditions and attitudes that resulted from increased influence from beyond the Pyrenees, the consolidation of royal power, and intensified aggression against Muslims. An in-depth study of the rise of an architectural style, this is the first book to examine early Romanesque architecture and sculpture of the Iberian Peninsula as it relates to frontier culture.

Reprint of the original, first published in 1877.

BEFORE quitting England for a first visit to Spain in the Autumn of 1869, I made up my mind both to see and draw as much of the Architectural remains of that country as the time and means at my disposal would permit; and further determined so to draw as to admit of the publication of my sketches and portions of my notes on the objects represented, in the precise form in which they might be made. I was influenced in that determination by the consciousness that almost from day to day the glorious past was being trampled out in Spain; and that whatever issue, prosperous or otherwise, the fortunes of that much distracted country might take in the future, the minor monuments of Art at least which adorned its soil, would rapidly disappear. Their disappearance would result naturally from what is called "progress" if Spain should revive; while their perishing through neglect and wilful damage, or peculation, would inevitably follow, if the ever smouldering embers of domestic revolution should burst afresh into flame. Such has been the invariable action of those fires which in all history have melted away the most refined evidences of man's intelligence, leaving behind only scanty, and often all but shapeless, relics of the richest and ripest genius.