The cultural developments of the long twelfth century, 1050–1250, were so many and so remarkable that it is difficult to say which was the most characteristic of the period. Certainly, achievements in the arts have done much to define the age for future generations. When moderns think of the European Middle Ages, they conjure chansons de geste, like the Song of Roland, romantic heros like Sir Lancelot, beautiful illuminated manuscripts, German minnesingers and their melodies, or perhaps most compellingly the cathedrals and the music and ceremonies that filled these great churches.
Vernacular literature existed in an almost agonistic relationship with Latin writing, which, given the prestige of the latter as the language of the Vulgate Bible, maintained its position as the preferred medium for a large number of genres, especially for official and academic writing. The universal Church also found one of its most effective means of governance in its ability to communicate across linguistic boundaries through the common language of the liturgy and clerical education. Nonetheless, the vernaculars occupied what turned out to be an ever-expanding niche by colonizing new literary genres and by being adopted for older ones. The audience for vernacular writing and recitation was both larger and less strictly clerical in composition than the one to which Latin catered. And even in a few of those areas in which Latin seemed secure, like official documentation, some regional vernaculars, like Castilian in Castile and Flemish in Flanders, began to make inroads before the period we have been calling the ‘Renaissance of the twelfth century’ came to an end.
Among the most remarkable of the new genres was the chanson de geste, which as its name implies was a long poem or song dealing with some heroic action, a geste, usually but not invariably located in the distant past. The deeds of Charlemagne and his close companions, like Hruodland (Roland in French), made particularly attractive themes. Around such deeds songs had undoubtedly been sung for a long time in the various vernaculars. One can compare the Spanish tradition of singing the praises of the eleventh-century adventurer, El Cid, and his struggles with the Muslims long before the epic poem El Cantar de mio Cid was put to parchment. Whether these songs (we might liken them to modern ballads) were then stitched together in the epic poems we call the chansons de geste may be doubted; the poems are more coherent than this would imply. But it seems fairly certain that individual authors, though they usually remain anonymous to us, drew inspiration and raw material from any number of short songs and stories, as well as from what could be found in learned histories, in order to create their epic chansons.
The reference to learned histories in the last paragraph should remind us that the chansons, even if they achieved a certain popularity in aristocratic circles, were not themselves simple folk tales, but the creations of learned men, perhaps clerics. These poems were long; even the short ones, like the Song of Roland, ran to about 4,000 lines. The poets used complex forms in which to express their thoughts. A common pattern was to have lines of ten syllables in length, each of which would have a breath or pause (caesura) after the fourth or sixth syllable. But some poets favoured an eight-syllable line.
The earliest chansons, again like the Roland, whose manuscript tradition does not go back before 1138, consistently use assonance. By the end of the twelfth century, however, fuller rhyme began to displace assonance. Sections of the poems, sometimes called laisses, are difficult to characterize. It is not the case, for example, that a fourteen-line laisse will pick up one sub-theme or one action, and the next, say, twelve-line laisse will then move the poem forward to a different sub-theme or action. There is much overlap between and among laisses. On the other hand, unified by its assonance and sometimes followed by a refrain or other marker, such as the Roland’s cryptic AOI, whose meaning is lost, a laisse does have a kind of poetic integrity and is certainly an aid to memory. As modern investigation of epic story-telling traditions suggests, bards can memorize immensely long poems and yet, having done so, can impart to them their own distinctive style by modifying rhymes, changing well-known words, pausing in unexpected places, and even adding or subtracting from the traditional story in response to the reactions of their audience. If, as seems likely, the deeds of Charlemagne and Roland were spoken or chanted around crusader campfires, among other places, particular moments of poignancy in the tales would have been stressed on different occasions, in response at least in part to the recent experiences of the crusaders.
It has also been argued with vigour that poems of this sort served to introduce aristocratic boys to the culture of heroism which they were expected to sustain throughout their whole adult lives. A word on the ‘epic blow’ will help clarify this assertion. The epic blow is a mounted hero’s downstroke of his sword by which, in the chanson de geste tradition, he inflicts horrifying injury on his opponent. The hero’s sword may be described as cleaving the helmet, the skull and brain, the teeth, the shoulders and the torso of the enemy, indeed going right through him to cleave his steed as well. Any adult warrior would know that this was impossible and that glancing (sideways) blows were the preferred form of using the sword while mounted. A boy, who had never yet been blooded in war, might well have none of this knowledge; the amazing picture of the epic blow would have seized his imagination. He would have wanted to be the hero – or so the argument goes – and he would have understood that it was his duty to achieve that status.
This is not to say that these elaborate poems were only intended for boys. As today, men who have been in war still enjoy good and even bad action movies in which the heroes achieve totally impossible, indeed superhuman feats. Nor is it to argue that women and girls were excluded from the audience or failed to enjoy the poems. Presumably they accepted the culture of heroism into which their sons, brothers and husbands had been or had to be socialized. Perhaps, too, like the men and boys they were easily moved by scenes like the death of Roland or the occasional word portrait of a woman caught by the terrifying events described in the chansons. Few people can come upon the horrific scene of the burning of the nuns of Origny in the Song of Raoul de Cambrai and remain unmoved. Even the knights themselves, as depicted in the chanson, ‘could not help weeping for pity’ (Raoul de Cambrai, 1936, pp. 43–44). All of which is to say that the chansons de geste served multiple purposes in medieval culture.
The chansons whetted the appetite for heroism. There was plenty of time to introduce boys and young men to the ‘realism’ of war. In northern Europe the invention of the tournament is a case in point. These started out as real mêlées, two large groups of knights that, seemingly ruleless or under the sanction of very few rules, beat each other up until one side gave in or was declared the winner. These were dangerous blood sports; the description of some, slightly fictionalized, became themselves episodes in epic stories. However, it was not long before the old mêlées were refashioned into the highly rule-bound and ritualized tournaments that moderns imagine they always were, individual jousts between beplumed human opponents, often separated by a low wall, or the tilting at non-human targets as a show of skill, all in front of an audience of great knights and beautifully attired aristocratic ladies.
In addition to the epic poetry of heroism, the period produced an abundance of much shorter vernacular work, including fables and lais (short rhymed tales) and lyrical and love poems. The most famous fable collection, amounting to 102 stories and existing in more than a score of manuscripts, was composed by a woman, Marie de France, who flourished in the latter half of the twelfth century, and was the author not only of fables but of lais and a long, profoundly allusive 2,000-line fiction on St Patrick and the persuasive power of Purgatory to transform sinners’ ways of life, the Espurgatoire Saint Patrice.
Much has been conjectured and almost nothing is known of Marie’s origin except that she was French and had noble, even royal patrons. Her fables are brought together from several sources, although she adds numerous touches of her own, effectively making many of them new creations. They are didactic stories, whose allegories are capable of wide interpretation, constrained, however, by the morals the author provides. The themes are traditional: the evils of exploitation, abuse of power, pride, injustice. Yet they reinforce social norms; they do not subvert them. Power justly resides in an implicit or allegorized aristocratic elite. What is bad is not this siting of power, but its misuse by those who otherwise deserve having the power.
Contemporary with Marie de France, and writing perhaps in England, where she too may have written, was the Jewish author, Berechiah ha-Nakdan, Berechiah the Punctuator. The collection of stories he put together was in Hebrew, therefore not strictly speaking in the vernacular which Jews spoke in common with their Christian neighbours. It is known as the Mishle shu’alim or ‘Fox Fables’. Many of these use the same storylines as those found in Marie de France’s tales, and only one of Berechiah’s stories, it has been argued, is entirely, that is separately, Jewish in origin, a fact that testifies to at least one facet of literary taste shared by Jew and Christian in literature of this period.
Marie de France, as mentioned above, was also the author of lais, each line of which is ordinarily eight syllables in length. The plots for these brief and succinct narratives were drawn ostensibly from Breton lore and were apparently creative adaptations of sung short stories. They share themes with the heroic genres, blending tales of prowess and affection in a short space. Like the fables they are thoroughly, though delicately, moralized. A reader or listener would have come away with a clear basis for rational behaviour, a reason (reisun) for moral action.
Some 2,500 or so pieces of lyrical and love poetry have survived in the Provençal language alone. They, too, like the epics, served multiple purposes in medieval culture. Many of them (just for a moment concentrating on the Provençal material) were composed for the consumption of aristocratic courts and were meant to be sung by troubadours and jongleurs in performance. Some, a small but significant minority, were written by women, The vast majority of them, however, assume the male authorial voice. Many are in praise of the Virgin, and a fair number of others, which describe a knight’s love for a distant, idealized lady, employ metaphors that clearly evoke Marian devotion.
Other love poems, however, seem more secular, and these have provoked lively controversies. A group of poems and songs known as pastourelles constitutes one such set of works. The first pastourelle seems to have been written in the early twelfth century by a singer and composer named Marcabru, a confessedly low-born Gascon hanger-on at aristocratic courts in Spain and southern France. The early pastourelles describe knights who spy innocent, if pert, shepherdesses whom they take for sexual pleasure and then abandon. Modern readers have sometimes interpreted these as both a reflection and an endorsement of male aristocratic predatory behaviour. But this is questionable (Paden, 1998). A reflection of behaviour they certainly are not, at least if we concentrate simply on the treatment of shepherdesses. Some knights were certainly guilty of rape, but not of shepherdesses, for the simple reason that the medieval world had almost none; shepherding was a male monopoly. One could still argue that the shepherdess stood for all innocent and unprotected women, but a problem would remain as to whether the poems endorse or celebrate the knights’ behaviour. The cluster of associations with idealized shepherdesses in other literary texts, like the life of St Margaret of Antioch, suggests that the medieval listener was supposed to censure the knights’ actions. Later pastourelles forestall some of the problems of interpretation in that they dampen the violence; sometimes they do little more than describe knights who have stopped to observe idyllic scenes of shepherdesses and other country folk at play.
Equally controversial are the love poems that have often been situated along with romances in the so-called ‘courtly love’ tradition. Courtly love purportedly describes the championing by medieval aristocratic men and women of an ideal of adulterous love. That is to say, medieval aristocrats allegedly valued adulterous love as more genuine than the sentiments binding married couples in that aristocratic world of arranged marriages. Although scholars have never been limited to using terms that were current in the periods they study, it is a bit disconcerting to learn that the phrase ‘courtly love’, characterizing such a radical world view of an otherwise devout aristocracy, was invented in the nineteenth century during the Romantic revival. The Romantic revival was a period of general mythologizing about the Middle Ages. It was Romantics who imagined medieval people gripped by the ‘Terrors of the Year 1000’, with virtually no proof that they knew the dating system that made it the year 1000 or, if they did know the date, cared about it or its supposed terrors at all. (Serious students of millenarian feeling, of which there certainly was some around the year 1000, continue to be burdened by the backlash against Romantic exaggerations.) It was also Romantics building on the Enlightenment critique of feudalism who popularized the notion that medieval feudal lords had the right to sleep with their serfs’ brides on their wedding nights, which universalizes almost the rarest of abusive practices.
The scholars who invented the term ‘courtly love’ were hardly unschooled dreamers. They judged that they had good grounds for believing courtly love was characteristic of medieval aristocratic culture, for there is a longing for unrequited love expressed in many texts of the period. The closest medieval term to courtly love may be fin’amors and actually means something like ‘unblemished love’ – love which, because it cannot or should not be fulfilled, achieves a certain purity and poignancy. Of course, in the poetry and more so in the romances, good stories demand conflict, the conflict, in this case, between accepted Christian prescriptions and the weight of emotional life. In these fictions, failure occurs repeatedly. Adultery undermines purity. Depicting it allows the authors to celebrate the joys of (even illicit) consummated love, but adultery in itself does not compete with decency as an ideal. And there is much more parodic intent in the literary sources which have usually been marshalled in defence of the existence of courtly love than the defenders of the term ordinarily acknowledge. But the debate still rages.
Romance, as noted above, has also been placed in the courtly love tradition, a positioning that has engendered the same vigorous opposition. Romance was a new poetic genre, the medieval version of the modern novel, although not every literary scholar would endorse this comparison. In any case, romance emerged in the first decades of the twelfth century. Romance authors, like Chrétien de Troyes, drew abundantly on folk legends, especially, as in the case of the verse lais, those originating in the Celtic lands or flourishing in them, wherever they may have originated. To these Celtic stories, often with King Arthur at the centre or in the background, were added material drawn from the love poetry, emerging ideas about ideal knighthood, and ethical material or at least ideas drawn from the Bible and classical texts.
Sometimes the borrowing from the classical tradition was wholesale, although there were always peculiarly medieval christianizing twists. The author of the twelfth-century version of Virgil’s Aeneid, the Enéas, will not allow the melancholy Dido to be unforgiving (unchristian) with regard to her heartless treatment at Aeneas’s hands when he abandons her to found Rome. She utters no curse as in Virgil’s original. Instead, the reader is treated to an ideal Christian-like Dido who wishes her callous lover and his city of the future god-speed.
Very brave and wise was I until love gave me rage, and I would have been lucky had he not come to my land – the Trojan who betrayed me, for whose love I lose my life.… I pardon him here my death; and in the name of agreement and peace, I kiss the garments on his bed. I pardon you, Sir Eneas. (Cormier, 1973, pp. 86–7)
It was people’s struggles to achieve virtue even in terrifying ethical dilemmas that ordinarily provided the moving force to the sub-plots and overall plots of the stories.
It is very difficult, however, to generalize about romances. Medieval writers recognized the genre by its characteristic formal features, but as to content, they acknowledged a multitude of themes. The Troy legends or ancient matter in general and the Arthurian legends (the matter of Britain), of which the Grail legends were a subset, were two important categories. There were also romances set in more or less contemporary settings. And there was, finally, the Romance of the Rose, the work of two French authors (Jean de Meun finished Guillaume de Lorris’s poem), which was a didactic and heavily allegorical work with a number of decidedly misogynistic themes.
The characteristic feature of these romans, a name attested already by 1150, was their vernacular language. The French may have set the standard, but composition in other vernaculars soon followed. These novels in other languages either developed plots already common in French romances, like that of the tragic love story of Tristan and Isolde or the heroic quest for the Holy Grail, or they created entirely new plot lines based on local legends. The German Nibelungenlied, which reworks strange tales of love, jealousy and wandering adventures associated with early Burgundian aristocrats and their consorts, is an example of the latter.
With a few exceptions, the standard presentation in the earlier romances took poetic form. Rhymed lines of eight syllables were typical, although by no means unique to romance. Later on, prose began to displace rhyme. What seems clear is that whether in rhyme or in prose, romance differed from the other vernacular genres discussed, except possibly fables, in that it was meant to be read or recited, never sung. These highly polished novels also frequently proclaimed their authorship in their prologues, which is certainly not the case with the chansons de geste but is sometimes a feature of shorter poems and songs.
All told, then, it can be said that there was an explosion of vernacular literature in the twelfth century. Of course, the foregoing discussion has hardly covered all aspects of this phenomenon. The immense outpouring of sagas and poetic material in the Germanic languages of the north is a case in point. Not quite romances or chansons de geste, the sagas in particular nonetheless shared some features with them, including representation of the past as heroic. In most cases, the audience for the new genres of poetic and prose composition were aristocratic men and women, although the audiences for the sagas, including, as they probably did, wealthy farmers, may have been wider in social composition from the beginning. In France, it was the courts, like those of the count of Champagne and the duke of Aquitaine, that were especially favoured venues for authors of poems and romances to seek patrons and to have their works sung and read. Here, too, because the themes of the poems and stories these authors wrote were in part drawn from those circulating already, there was no hard and fast division between aristocratic and ‘popular’ culture. Moreover, some singers and story-tellers were really street-corner performance artists who added juggling and acrobatics to their bag of tricks in the emerging urban cultures of Latin Europe. Whether low-born folk or high-born folk down on their luck, they provided a link between the culture of the aristocratic courts and that of the bourgeois and villager.
Part of the deeply moving transformation of medieval religious devotion, namely, the growth of pilgrimage to the principal sites of Rome, Canterbury, Cologne, Compostela and the Holy Land, is reflected in the romance tradition discussed above. The quest for the Holy Grail, most notably, draws on and develops themes of pilgrimage and unites these with episodes of righteous violence. The ideal knight, the knight of chivalry, is in some sense a crusader; his violence is necessary and altogether virtuous; he is on a pilgrimage, metaphorical or real, which has as its goal his eternal salvation.
There were thousands of shrines that pilgrims could visit, sites where they could venerate the relics of saints or drink miracle-working waters. Some of these were nothing more than roadside crosses, maybe with tiny statues, catering to occasional passers-by and local villagers. But some had achieved regional importance and were lucky enough to be located near major roads that ran from great cities or already flourishing pilgrimage sites to other famous shrines. If they did enjoy favourable locations on major pilgrimage routes, it is likely that, over time, such shrines benefited from pilgrims’ offerings as well as from local and regional aristocratic patronage, which helped to expand or rebuild churches to accommodate the pilgrim worshippers. Nearby there would also grow up pilgrims’ hostels; at the more attractive international shrines perhaps more than one hostel might exist, each of which catered to a different linguistic group of travellers. One of King Stephen of Hungary’s main devotional acts was the founding of pilgrims’ hostels.
A relatively small number of the original pilgrimage churches survive in their eleventh- and twelfth-century form or with eleventh- and early twelfth-century elements still intact. Almost none of the other buildings do. Nonetheless, it is fairly certain that the hostels and an array of other structures shared with the churches a common architectural style. That style is known as Romanesque, from the fact that it incorporated and developed several features common to ancient Roman architecture.
Romanesque was distinguished by relatively massive masonry construction and also by the use of rounded arches. According to engineering studies, the rounded arch is structurally weaker than the pointed arch characteristic of Gothic buildings and so Romanesque walls had to support a higher proportion of the weight than the simple pointed roof. This, in turn, dictated the construction of heavy walls and only a limited number of windows (see Figure 1). There is sometimes, indeed, a fortresslike quality to some of these churches, which could be used to advantage. The Anglo-Norman version of Romanesque, characteristic of some building in England after the Norman Conquest and most vivid in Durham Cathedral (see Figure 4), served as an imposing symbol of authority to the conquered English in the north as well as a warning to the Scots. But it goes too far to write, as one popular textbook did, that ‘the Norman cathedrals [in England] show us the huddling together of wretches crazed by fear of the outside world, its murder and rapine’, while High Gothic, on the contrary, ‘express[es] the relation of free men in a free world, bound together by the love of God’ (Harvey, 1961, p. 44).
Rounded arches framed the portals in Romanesque buildings. Above the portals of some of the most famous Romanesque churches were half-circles of relief sculpture, the tympana (see Figures 2 and 3). Despite the vivid scenes depicted in the tympana, like the Last Judgement or Christ in majesty or the marriage feast at Cana, exterior decoration of Romanesque churches was otherwise relatively simple. Of course, the emphasis here has to be on the word relatively, and as usual the comparison is with High Gothic. Nonetheless, some examples of Italian Romanesque on the pilgrimage route through sun-drenched Tuscany to Rome have rich sculptural façades, many of them depicting scenes from the life of Christ, including the favourite pilgrimage and crusader-art scene, Jesus’s triumphal entry into Jerusalem on the first Palm Sunday.
The sculpture in and on Romanesque churches employed straighter lines than would become characteristic in the Gothic period (see Figure5). This, too, has given rise to invidious comparisons with Gothic. Romanesque sculpture in traditional interpretations is said to be lacking in expressiveness or to have an air of gravity about it which crosses the boundary into an almost depressing solemnity.
Romanesque churches as a whole have also been categorized as ponderous and gloomy, an impression strengthened by their relative lack of height, compared with that of High Gothic churches, and the limited amount of interior light from their typically few and small round windows (see Figure 6). It is true, on the latter point, that in the absence of artificial light most Romanesque churches were dark, but so were even most tall well-windowed Gothic churches, at least until yellow glass began to be used in preference to multicoloured stained glass in the very late Middle Ages. But the important point is that artificial light was available. Oil lamps and numerous, often silver, candelabras adorned churches; the lamp- and candle-light played on the metallic objects of devotion, especially reliquaries, and on the walls. The walls seem often to have been adorned with narrative paintings or with various set biblical and hagiographical scenes which were meant to be illuminated by the lamp- and candle-light. It has been a real scholarly effort to try to recover something of the content of these marvellous paintings from the very few fragments that have come down to us. During the various processions and ceremonies, additional great candles or tapers filled the church with supplemental light that bathed the sanctuary and reflected off the pillars and ribbed vaulting of the interior (see Figure 7). Here and there scenes drawn from (christianized) myth and even local folklore – as it were, vernacular art – would be illuminated for the delighted eyes of the worshippers. Combined with the chant that reverberated in the veritable echo chambers that the sanctuaries constituted and the heavy aroma of incense, a worshipper’s impression must have been striking.
None of this is to say that contemporaries were unwilling to modify or experiment while remaining loyal to Romanesque design and composition. Architectural historians recognize that some features of what would emerge as the new and more fashionable cosmopolitan style, Gothic, were already being employed in some Romanesque buildings. Even so, some builders did break more decisively with the past. It is still generally accepted that this occurred, in terms of the emergence of Gothic as a distinct and more than embryonic style, during the remodelling of the abbey church of St-Denis, north of Paris, dedicated in 1140. The breakthrough will forever be associated with the heroic efforts of Abbot Suger, who found the existing church too small and cramped and spared no effort to enhance it. He was in a fine position to do so. The chief adviser of King Louis VI, a confidant of Louis VII and regent of the kingdom during the latter’s absence on crusade, Suger was also the head of the most important royal monastery in France. It was there that much of the regalia of the monarchy was treasured, like the oriflamme, the royal battle flag. It was there that the official history of the Crown and kingdom was inscribed. And it was the abbey church that became the royal necropolis, at least for the male dynasts. In the event, Suger’s remodelling of St-Denis turned out to be a virtual rebuilding of the church.
However, the church at St-Denis now is not Suger’s church; there were subsequent rebuilding campaigns. Thus, much of what we know about Suger’s new church is based on the putative remnants of the twelfth-century building, Suger’s own description of the abbey and its treasures, and the learned but imaginative mental reconstructions of generations of art and architectural historians. One other thing ought to be borne in mind: Gothic did not come into the world fully developed. The categories known as Early Gothic, High Gothic and Late Gothic encompass a vast number of differences within each period. Indeed, it is with some misgivings that these terms are retained at all; some scholars would like to get rid of High Gothic in particular, with its implication of a perfected style, especially since there are other words and phrases that more accurately describe the edifices: rayonnant (meaning ‘radiating out’), for example, for the late, twelfth- and thirteenth-century buildings for which the radiant rose window is a key motif (see Figure 8). For convention’s sake, we will adopt the more traditional usages here.
Early Gothic is not known for particularly tall buildings or for the rose window, which are much more characteristic of thirteenth-century or High Gothic. Nor is Early or even High Gothic characterized by the elaborate vaulting known as fan vaulting or, as we have seen, plain yellow glass; these are features of Late Gothic. Common to all Gothic buildings, however, are pointed arches, complex cross-vaulting and relatively large windows. Sculptural façades are elaborate, and the sculptural figures themselves often have more decisively curved bodies than in Romanesque sculpture, although Romanesque styles continued to flourish alongside the newer Gothic ones.
By the 1190s, when the High Gothic period may be said to have begun with the commencement of the construction of Chartres Cathedral (although the centrality of Chartres as a model monument was exaggerated by the Romantics), builders both incorporated and refined older ideas and introduced new ones. Height became an obsession in some quarters, but this preoccuption does not define High Gothic (that is, it is not High because many of the buildings were themselves lofty). Nevertheless, it is striking to a modern observer how the passion for height manifested itself not only in the interior elevation of some of the great cathedrals but also in the desire to augment their façades with great towers or spires. To sustain walls of such height, the pointed arch alone was insufficient. Buttressing was already known before the Gothic period, but flying buttresses intended to deflect the weight of the roof away from the walls became more and more common in monumental buildings (see Figures 9 and 10).
Who paid for these edifices and for the other treasures of Gothic art, like the richly illuminated manuscripts for liturgical use, stained glass windows, golden and bejewelled reliquaries (see Figure 11) that adorned the sanctuaries and which were often cast in the form of miniature Gothic churches? In France, where the style started, the answer is relatively easy to give. To some extent worshippers’ oblations provided the money. But since many of the greatest buildings were cathedral churches and therefore located in towns, rich bourgeois patrons were also major donors. Guilds, for instance, frequently endowed windows that allegorically celebrated or commemorated their crafts. But the greatest patrons continued to be the aristocracy and the Crown. Aristocrats richly endowed rural churches and urban churches that were close to the seat of their power. The Crown favoured Paris and the churches of numerous other cities as well as a number of great rural monasteries. So much did the building campaigns come to depend on noble and royal largesse that the construction teams which travelled around the country would shrink in number or disband entirely when large numbers of nobles or the king withdrew financing in order to accomplish some other important task, like launching a crusade.
As the Gothic style spread far beyond France, indeed throughout Christendom, similar modes of financing were adopted in other regions. It is probably the case, however, that the mix among donors varied from place to place. In Italy the cities, because of the erosion of imperial power, had been thrown on their own resources. In many of them the dominant voice in the construction of urban monuments was that of the non-noble patriciate, even though aristocrats more often lived in towns in Italy than in northern France. Economic considerations shaped but did not entirely determine what elements of Gothic less wealthy communities could support: there is many a Gothic church in Europe that has a rose window and no spires or small spires and no rose.
Whatever the sources of the funds, even the small buildings put enormous demands on the coffers of medieval communities. Interruptions of building campaigns could leave unfinished buildings – from cathedrals to parish churches – dangerously liable to decay. Resumed campaigns, five, ten or fifty years after suspension, had both to compensate for the damage and respond to new demands from donors and patrons and to new styles. Were spires still in? The asymmetric character of so many of the buildings that have survived to our own day testifies to this. So we see one tower where two were once planned; two towers but in different styles; vacant tympana; different strata of stone; apparently strange intrusions of ‘foreign’ styles or artifacts brought back from the East by a crusader-turned-donor who insisted on their incorporation into the building, and so on. Yet, in the end, despite the difficulty in bringing the projects to completion (some, like Cologne, were not completed until the nineteenth century), the wondrous array of Gothic monuments stands as extraordinary testimony to the dynamism and capacity for creative accomplishment of medieval society in the long Renaissance of the twelfth century.