Romanesque architecture

Romanesque architecture took shape in Europe around the year 1000 and lasted until the Gothic style replaced it in the 1100s and 1200s. Its churches have thick stone walls, round arches, heavy piers and small windows, and are often covered by barrel vaults of stone instead of wooden roofs. Carved capitals and portals, full of Bible scenes and demons, taught the stories of the faith to people who could not read. The name was coined in the early 1800s by scholars who saw in it a debased descendant of Roman building.¹

After the collapse of Roman rule, large stone building had largely vanished in western Europe. By about 1000, the raids of Vikings and Magyars were fading, population and trade were growing, and monasteries, bishops and lords had money to build. The Benedictine abbey of Cluny, founded in 910, grew into a network of hundreds of monasteries whose great third church, begun in 1088, was the largest in Christendom. Pilgrims traveling to holy places, above all the shrine of Saint James at Santiago de Compostela in Spain, needed large churches with wide aisles, and the roads they followed were lined with them.²¹

The style looked different in different places. Normans built massive cathedrals such as Durham, begun in 1093, in England; Speyer in Germany, the pilgrim church of Saint-Sernin in Toulouse and Pisa's cathedral are further famous examples. Builders learned how to carry stone vaults on piers and buttresses, and this experience led directly to the pointed arches and soaring ribbed vaults of the Gothic, first seen at Saint-Denis in 1144. Romanesque was the first building style shared across most of Latin Christian Europe since the Roman Empire.¹