THE ROMANESQUE STYLE C. IOOO-C, I20O
ment of art and architecture in the early nth century. It was the
years of Ottonian and Salian power, the years before the Emperor
Henry IV had to humiliate himself before a Cluniac pope. There is
nothing in the arts of Italy or France to emulate the bronze doors of
Hildesheim Cathedral. Similarly, in architecture the introduction of
yet another key element of the Romanesque (and Gothic) style
seems to be due to Germany: the two-tower facade. Its first ap-
pearance is at the cathedral of Strassburg in its form of 1015. Then,
however, the motif was at once taken up by the most active province
of France: by Normandy; and from Jumi&ges (1040-67), and the
two abbeys of William the Conqueror at Caen (Holy Trinity and
St. Stephen's, c. 1065-80), it reached Britain.
Perhaps we should not speak at all of France concerning the nth
and 12th centuries. The country was still divided into separate terri-
tories fighting each other, and consequently there was no one uni-
versally valid school of architecture, as, thanks to the Norman
kings, there already was in England. The most important schools in
France are those of Normandy, Burgundy, Provence, Aquitaine
(or rather, broadly speaking, the whole South-West), Auvcrgnc
and Poitou. Their comparatively static customs were crossed by a
strong current from the North and West of France right down to
the far North-West of Spain, the current of the principal pilgrimage
routes. Pilgrimages were one of the chief media of cultural com-
munication in the Middle Ages, and their effects on church planning
are evident. They can be seen from Chartrcs via Orleans, Tours,
Poitiers, Saintes to Spain; from V£zelay via Le Puy, Conques, or via
Perigueux to Moissac and on to Spain; and from Aries to St. Gilles
and Toulouse and then to Spain. The goal was Santiago de Compos-
tela, a sanctuary as celebrated as Jerusalem and Rome. The Cluniac
Order had much to do with the development of the pilgrimage
routes, and characteristics of Cluny can be found in the chief monas-
teries all t;he way along. What these were, we can read from die
many surviving Cltrniac houses—the Order, according to Dr. Joan
Evans's calculations, possessed some 1,450 priories at the height of its
power—and also from the excavations and reconstruction of Cluny
itself, carried out for the Mediaeval Academy of America by Pro-
fessor Conant.1 Cluny, as rebuilt at the end of the nth century and
early in the izth and destroyed by the French themselves in 1810, had
1 I am greatly indebted to Professor Conant for allowing me to illustrate his
reconstruction.