THE REGIONAL SCHOOLS OF PRANCE
two transepts (as later became the rule in English cathedrals), each with
an octagonal tower over the crossing. The moreimportant of these, the
one farther west, had octagonal towers to the right and left of the cross-
ing as well (one of these survives), and two eastern apses to each arm.
The eastern transept had four apses too. Moreover, the chancel apse had
an ambulatory with five radiating chapels. Thus one saw looking at the
church from the east (pi. xm) a graded development in many carefully
proportioned steps from the low radiating chapels over the ambula-
tory, the main apse, the chancel roof, the tower over the eastern
crossing, to the tallest tower farther west—a structure so complex,
so polyphonous, as earlier centuries in the West could not have con-
ceived, and the Greeks would have detested, but the ideal expression
no doubt of that proudest moment in mediaeval Christianity, when
the Reform had conquered the throne of the popes, asserted the
superiority of the papal tiara over the imperial crown, and called up
the knights of Europe to defend the Holy Land in the first Crusade
(1095)-
Of the architectural elements of Cluny, it was especially the tunnel-
vaulted naves with galleries (pi. xnb) and the stepped-up east ends
which appear in the great churches of the Order and on the pil-
grimage route: St. Stephen's in Nevers, St.Martial's in Limoges (de-
stroyed), St. Faith in Concjues, St. Sernin in Toulouse (the grandest
in its exterior, pi. xiv) and Santiago itself. The motif of the radiating
chapels, it need hardly be added, had been used at Tours long before
any of these churches took it over. Regional modifications of this pil-
grimage style make the individual churches all the more fascinating.
Of the main regional characteristics only a few can here be men-
tioned. Of Normandy withits basilicas, flat-roofed or with plain cross-
vaults or rib-vaults, and with galleries, we .have already spoken (pi.
xna). The school of Provence Hked tunnel-vaulted churches without
any aisles, or occasionally with aisles the same height as the nave. In
Poitou the same height for tall naves and tall narrow aisles was the rule
—a proportion very different from that of the South and Provence.
In Auvergne aisles are also as a rule as high as the nave, but they do
not look it, because they have galleries. Burgundy (in accordance
with her geographical position between Provence, the North Italian
sphere of influence and the Rhineland) kept to the basilican tradi-
tion and used for vaulting either tunnel-vaults or cross-vaults. Cluny
belonged to the first kind; V6zelay, begun in 1096 and completed,
it seems, in 1132, is the supreme example of the second (pi. xvn).
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