Dan Snow's History Hit - Stealing from the Saracens: Islam and European Architecture

Episode Date: August 17, 2020

From Notre-Dame Cathedral to the Houses of Parliament, European architecture is indebted to the Muslim world. Diana Darke joined me on the pod to discuss how medieval crusaders, pilgrims and merchants encountered Arab Muslim culture on their way to the Holy Land. This early artistic interaction continued a long history of arrchitectural 'borrowing' and cultural exchange, including Sir Christopher Wren’s inspirations in the ‘Saracen’ style of Gothic architecture.Subscribe to History Hit and you'll get access to hundreds of history documentaries, as well as every single episode of this podcast from the beginning (400 extra episodes). We're running live podcasts on Zoom, we've got weekly quizzes where you can win prizes, and exclusive subscriber only articles. It's the ultimate history package. Just go to historyhit.tv to subscribe. Use code 'pod1' at checkout for your first month free and the following month for just £/€/$1.

Hi everyone, welcome to Dan's Notes History. I'm currently in the kitchen of an incredibly brave woman. She was a Dutch resistance fighter during the Second World War. She was a young Jewish girl and she was eventually transported to a concentration camp, Ravensbrück, where she was very, very lucky indeed to survive. I'm recording her for the History Hit podcast, for the History Hit TV channel. It's a huge honour and she is one of the last, although truly remarkable, generation of resistance fighters who fought against the Nazis in Holland. But this episode of History Hit has nothing to do with that. This episode of History Hit features Diana Dark. She has written a book tracing how ideas and styles of architecture came from the Middle East over to

Western Europe. The Islamic Empire in the early Middle Ages, the force of Islam, had conquered much Persian and Byzantine Roman territory. In doing so, they'd inherited a hugely impressive, incredibly rich architectural tradition. They enlarged on that, they developed that. In return, visitors from Christendom took back those ideas with them. So against a backdrop of fairly widespread Islamophobia in the world at the moment, this is such an interesting time to talk about Islamic contribution to art and architecture. If you want to go onto History Hit, my TV channel, and listen to back episodes of this podcast without any ads, no ads at all, feel free, do so. You can get a History Hit TV. If you use

the code POD1, P-O-D-1 in the voucher box, you will get a month for free and in one month for just one pound euro or dollar. So head over to HistoryHit.TV, use the code POD1 and you can get all of that. In the meantime, everybody, enjoy Diana Dark. I'm going to go and talk to Selma. Diana, great to have you on the podcast. Well, thank you very much for inviting me. Now tell me, Diana, what sort of period are you talking about? When is this sort of peak time when there was this gulf in architectural engineering ability between Western Europe and the Middle East, the Levant?

Well, the peak period really is in what we call the Gothic period, the Middle Ages. This is where so much misinformation crept in. And it's difficult at this distance to know whether it was willful or just genuine ignorance, because you may know that the beginning of Gothic architecture was the person responsible was an abbot at the monastery of Saint-Denis, just north of Paris. He is now recognised as the sort of father of Gothic architecture. Saint-Denis is the very first sign of Gothic was based on the disciple of Paul, who was called Dionysius in those days, so Dennis today. And he claimed that this disciple of Paul had written this book called The Celestial Hierarchies, which is all about Neoplatonism and the philosophy of

light, and Gothic architecture is all about letting in light. However, much later, it was established that this was a case of mistaken identity. The so-called Dennis was in fact pseudo-Dennis, a Syrian early 6th century monk who was pretending to be the first Dennis. And then this all became conflated with the identity of martyr. I mean, you go to Saint-Denis in Paris, where they buried some of the medieval kings of France, it does feel very Eastern Mediterranean, doesn't it? Even a novice like me can tell there's something a bit fishy about how that didn't just burst out of nowhere. What was going on in the Eastern Mediterranean, now Syria, which enabled that transmission? I mean, it must have been a very lively architectural culture of building and design over there. Well, of course, that's right. The thing that's so

surprising, actually, in my research is to discover how much people moved around. So all these abbots were busy traveling all over the place. And of course, pilgrims were traveling. And one of the biggest shrines in the fifth century was actually in Syria, that St. Simeon Stylites, the basilica that was then later built there, became a huge pilgrimage site, the biggest in the world at the time. I mean, before Hagia Sophia was built, 50 years after that, it was the biggest church space, if you like, in the world. So this was a huge draw to pilgrims who were busy traveling over there and merchants. And of course, when the abbots then started to travel, so the abbot of Monte Cassino travelled over to Amalfi to try to buy a gift, actually, of lavish silks as sort of a bribe, if you like, for the future king of the

Roman Empire. When he was in Amalfi, he noticed that their cathedral had these pointed arches, and he thought, oh, I like those. So he said, you know, I want some in my monastery. So he actually ordered the same ones, the same craftsmen, the same materials to all be shipped to him. So that then was built at Monte Cassino. And then the abbot of Cluny, which is the most powerful Benedictine monastery at the time, he went over to Monte Cassino, saw the arches and thought, oh, I like those too. So he then ordered exactly the same thing. And so once Cluny, the most powerful monastery at the time, had these pointed arches, of course, suddenly everybody wanted them. And so the

transmission originally that the Amalfi merchants had copied that, the pointed arches on their cathedral, from the mosque of Ibn Tulun in Cairo, which is where their merchants were doing an awful lot of trade. A huge amount of trade basically was coming in into the Italian coast, all of those Italian cities. And the extraordinary thing is that the more I started to dig even further back than that, the more you find. So Ravenna, for example, you know, where there is a lot of early Christian architecture and people say, oh, it's Byzantine. So people think, oh, it's Greek. Therefore, of course, you know, religion architecture and people say, oh, it's Byzantine. So people think, oh, it's Greek. Therefore, of course, you know, Europe is in some way responsible. Whereas in fact,

there's a huge Syrian backstory to Ravenna and every single bishop of Ravenna up until the year 425 was Syrian. And the patron saint of Ravenna, Santa Polinaris, was a native of Antioch who was meant to have been sent to Ravenna to preach Christianity by the Apostle Peter from Antioch. And I've just been to Ravenna, actually. I mean, during July, I've had the chance to travel, you know, by car quite a lot across Europe, revisiting some of these sites. And it's just really hit me, you know, you step into these buildings, and I can just see that Syrian influence everywhere. I mean, I recognise the colours because it's so similar to early Syriac churches and monasteries, only a handful of which still exist and only a handful of which still have their original mosaics. And in fact, those ones are in the region known as the Tur Abdin in southeast

Turkey. Just a few there still have it. So a lot of the rest has just been lost, of course, over the course of history. It's funny, now that you're saying this, it makes total sense because I know a bit more about the military fortifications. In the 11th century, the Crusaders turn up in the Levant, the Holy Land, and they find these gigantic fortifications, obviously Constantinople itself, but, you know, Antioch, Edessa, Antioch, you mentioned Tyre and Jerusalem. And they were way in advance of anything that was existing in the West at that time. And obviously those technologies and craftspeople, as you say, were brought back to the West.

So the same thing's going on with religious buildings as well. But why were they so far ahead? Was it the legacy of the Greeks, the Romans, the Eastern Empire that had gone before? What was going on in the Islamic world that made them so advanced? Several things were going on, basically. For a start, in Syria, there's so much stone scattered all over Syria. Syrian stonemasonry, you know, it's been famed for ages. So you may have heard of the dead cities in Syria. They actually were only made a UNESCO World Heritage Site in June of 2011, you know, just a

few months after the war in Syria began. So they've only recently been recognised. But scattered over the hills there of northwest Syria, what is now Idlib province, are the remains of over 2,000 stone churches. And these are what represent, if you like, the transition from the sort of Roman pagan tradition into the early Romanesque. I mean, the earliest Romanesque building that has been identified there is a building called Calb Lausi. And if you like, that is the ultimate ancestor of Notre Dame in Paris, the idea of the twin towers flanking a monumental entrance. And that ties in to what I mentioned earlier about St. Simeon's Dialytus, because this church, Calb Lausi, is on the route, is on the pilgrim route, and this design of the two towers with the monumental arch was to receive the pilgrims into the key way stations on the way to the major shrine. So that's one of the reasons,

the skill of the stonemasonry. And then, of course, the early Omeyads, the first dynasty of the Omeyads, they had a natural sort of effusiveness in the way that they carved. So that sort of very flowery carving with man intertwined with nature which is what Gothic architecture then takes from there. And then on top of that you've got all the scientific advances of the geometry and the vaulting system. This is where they first learnt to build complex vaulting systems and this was under the Abbasids in the Islamic golden age of science and so the skill that they already had with stone combined with their understanding of geometry and how to hold up buildings of course they realised very early on that the pointed arch is actually stronger than the round romanesque arch so as they realized that the strength of those vaults then which of course are all pointed when you look up at a vaulted ceiling and the ribs are what are holding

it all up and it's a very very complex geometry it was that combination actually that is what really worked on it and just just while i think to mention it, actually, you referred to the military transferences, if you like, that is also incredibly clear to see. I mean, I mentioned this in the book as well, the military borrowings. And it was Richard the Lionheart, when he returned from the Crusades, having seen their advanced technology, if you like, with their machicolation boxes, you know, and the building different shapes, sort of rounded shapes. He came back and built Chateau Gaillard overlooking the Seine and used all those new technologies there, built it incredibly fast within two years. And although it's heavily ruined now, you can still go there

and see it. I actually saw it just last week. You know, once your eye is attuned to all these Islamic influences, you can really pick them out. I mean, it's a wonderful thing because you learn to see all these buildings with different eyes and it actually enriches your experience of it. You get to understand the backstory because all these buildings have got colossal backstories, a lot of which is political and tied in with the religion of the day. I mean, I think of it as a sort of giant circular jigsaw is how I came to think of the whole thing as I was putting this book together. I love Chateau Gare. It's one of my favourites as well. From there, does it develop a life of its own and convenient for Western Europeans to ignore their roots in the Levant? Yes. The other, of course, major way in which all these influences came in way before the Crusaders is through Spain, of course. And again, I found it actually deeply shocking last year when I went to Cordova to visit the Mesquita there.

And having studied it as a building, I was just absolutely shocked to see how the Spanish have sort of airbrushed the whole Islamic backstory of that building, you know, out of history, basically. So they don't talk about the Umayyads. They don't talk about the fact that the person who built that mosque in the first place was a Syrian. I was going to Cordova looking for Damascus. And I found it, of course, I knew what to look for, but it was not mentioned in any of the literature there. You know, the whole backstory, the Syrian backstory of that is very, know downplayed in Spain so there in the Cordova Mosquito you can see rib vaulting which is incredibly early this is 9th century rib vaulting because this was built in an extension by the later caliphs there's the most what they call now they call it a chapel

because of course the mosquito so-called is dripping with crucifixes and cherubs and playing holy music the whole time you know christian music is being completely culturally appropriated it's quite jarring actually for somebody like me to go into a building of that sort but this what they call the chapel villa viciosa just recently two or three years ago some scholars got permission architects to go in and examine the vaulting of that chapel. And what they found astonished them. They said it was the most perfect piece of engineering they had ever seen,

and it had never required structural repair in 1,500 years. And they just marveled at the degree of precision of geometry that the masons doing this building were capable of then and of course because it was then in Spain and then that all feeds into what was happening with the Reconquista and a pilgrimage route to Santiago de Compostela so what happened then was that those early Islamic buildings in the vaulting systems were copied basically and found their way then into early churches along the route of the Santiago de Compostela and this ties back into Cluny because of course Cluny was funding that pilgrimage route and it was building Cluniac shrines all the way along it

in order to obviously you know get money out of the pilgrims coming along I mean the whole thing is a huge sort of money-making enterprise. And so this is how, incrementally, all those features, all those Islamic features, appear in European architecture. And ultimately, by the time you then get to the Gothic, what we call Gothic, I mean, this in itself is ridiculous, because the term Gothic only appeared in 1550, when it was used by an Italian art historian guy called Giorgio Vasari and he also coined the term Renaissance. He was the first person to write those terms in a book but before that it was called Opus Frankigenum, the work of the Franks and that's what it was known as, the work of the Franks, because it was the French who

first using that, if you like, thanks to all these links to their abbeys, their pilgrimage routes. And so it spread out, obviously, from France. So yes, these terms themselves, you know, that we now use are also ridiculous, because nothing could be further from Gothic, if you like, which one thinks of as sort of heavy and clumping than the Gothic cathedral. And that's why Christopher Wren, you know, 300 years ago, in his own studies, notes and memoirs, he wrote that the Gothic style should rightly be called the Saracen style. And, you know, he was so right. And he explains why he thinks that. And so one of the things I do in the book is actually start off with Christopher Wren and say, look, this is what he, after a lifetime study of all these buildings, this is what he concluded. And he indeed used the vaulting system, the Saracen vaulting system, he calls it, in the dome of St. Paul's because he recognized it was the best.

Paul's because he recognised it was the best. So, you know, he openly acknowledges his debt to Islamic architecture and to their skill in vaulting systems specifically. I mean, obviously, St Paul's, as it is today, is not a Gothic building, but he used it in the dome. He used the Saracen technology, you know, to use his phrase, and he even draws diagrams explaining why it is the best system. But of course, you know, more obvious Gothic buildings that we've got in London, for example, you know, Big Ben, the Houses of Parliament is all part of the Gothic revival. You look at Big Ben, I mean, it's full of trefoil arches, pointed arches, ogee arches, all of which come from the Islamic world, without a shadow of a doubt, nobody can possibly deny that. But it's not just those architectural features.

I mean, pretty much every single feature of what we call Gothic architecture, apart from the flying buttresses, originated in the Middle East and is either very, very early Christian and then taken over by Islamic architecture. Because again, it's all blended. This is the point, you know, everything builds on everything else. So it's a very, very slow process. I mean, one of the things I learnt was how slowly architecture does actually change. It moves very, very slowly.

So, for example, with the pointed arch, professors of architecture have done studies of all the arches across the Islamic world and tried to work out a dating system for them. And they discovered that the arch becomes one degree more pointed roughly every 25 years. I mean, that's how long it takes for the technology and the skill to just move that little bit further, to advance that little bit more. It's a very, very slow process. That's so fascinating. Diana, lastly, why is it important that people like you acknowledge the debt that Western European architecture owes to the Islamic world? Why does it matter? Well, it matters because, sadly, we've arrived at the point at the moment where

most people think, you know, nothing good ever came out of the Middle East. You know, they're just associated with war and terrorism and chaos. And it's so deeply tragic to me that that should be what most people's reaction to the Arab world and the Middle East is, and to Islam. You know, I mean, there's a lot of Islamophobia around at the moment. And I just think it actually is important to understand what a huge cultural debt we do owe to that part of the world and how much we've taken from them, which is borrowed from them, if you like, built on ideas and styles and techniques that they originated. And so we should understand and appreciate that.

And so when we go to look at a building like Notre Dame, Saint-Denis, Westminster Abbey, any of these buildings, we should learn to recognise things in them. So, I mean, for instance, even the glass, you know, the stained glass, the glass itself, I mean, Syria was the leader in the world glass industry. And so all the original early glass in the Gothic cathedrals, the raw materials are from Syria. And the reason for that is it was the best, you know, and the early stained glass has got this magical quality because they use this organic plant ash, which grows in the salt marshes. And it makes the glass very, from a technological point of view, people would say

it was impure, but it's precisely those impurities that make it have this almost magical spiritual quality because, you know, the surfaces aren't straight, there are bubbles inside because you know the surfaces aren't straight there are bubbles inside you know and all of that when the sun shines through gives this sort of magical quality to the colors which you lose once all these things have been restored with modern glass it's gone it's gone it's finished it's lost all of that atmosphere and I felt that very strongly just now revisiting some of the gothic cathedrals in France France. So most of that early glass has been lost. Just a few fragments are left. But my goodness, you can really see the difference.

It's amazing. Well, Diana, thank you so much for coming on the podcast. Tell everyone what the book's called. It's called Stealing from the Saracens. And the reason for the title, apart from the Saracens business linking into Christopher Wren and the Gothic style, the word stealing is the origin of the word Saracens.

The derivation of it is it means people who steal in the original Arabic, is what we call. So we called them the thieves, the stealers, when we're in fact stealing from them. That's the sort of slight play on the title. Very clever. I like it. OK, Diana, thank you very much for coming on. It's been a pleasure. Thank you, Dan.

I feel the hand of history upon our shoulders. Okay, Diana, thank you very much for coming on. Been a pleasure. Thank you, Dan. Hi, everyone. It's me, Dan Snow. Just a quick request. It's so annoying, and I hate it when other podcasts do this, but now I'm doing it, and I hate myself. Please, please go onto iTunes, wherever you get your podcasts, and give us a five-star rating and a review. really helps basically boosts up the chart which is good and then more people listen which is nice so if you could do that i'd be very grateful i understand if you don't subscribe to my tv channel i understand if you don't buy my

calendar but this is free come on do me a favor thanks