Islamesque: The Forgotten Craftsmen Who Built Europe’s Medieval Monuments

Historian Darke (The Ottomans) offers a meticulous and piercing reassessment of the origins of the “Romanesque” style in medieval architecture. The Romanesque—long meant to evoke the revival of classical Roman traditions that brought an end to the Dark Ages and heralded the coming of the Renaissance—should more rightly be called Islamesque, according to Darke. Dismissing the theory of a Romanesque period as the product of 19th-century imperial powers’ self-identifying with the Roman empire, Darke turns to contemporary scholarship, which has confirmed, she asserts, that “all the key innovations attributed to Romanesque—new vaulting techniques, the use of decorative frames... ornamental devices... and the use of fantastical beasts and foliage in sculpture—can be traced... eastwards.” The “master craftsmen” responsible for these innovations were undeniably Muslims who settled in Europe and “brought... a multitude of design details,” Darke writes. She follows the trails of these design details like clues in a detective story, beginning with the enigmatic zigzag patterns on her own house in Damascus, which she discovers replicated on Norman churches in England and France. As her narrative unfolds, the accumulation of such small details coheres into what feels like the uncovering of a historical conspiracy—Darke portrays a medieval Europe home to thriving Muslim communities that left a deep and lasting, but long overlooked, legacy. The result is a revelatory work of scholarship. (Jan.)