Few architectural styles are as familiar to European eyes as the Romanesque. Although there are many different regional variations, you are never very far from an identifiably Romanesque building, no matter where you live. Most of us can probably pick out the essential characteristics: rounded arches, massive walls and so on – all things that we associate with the legacy of Rome. But is it really as ‘European’ as it seems?

In this book, Diana Darke sets out to defamiliarise this most familiar of styles. She begins with a puzzle. Why did Romanesque architecture suddenly appear, ‘fully formed’, in the period 1000–1250? ‘What was it that happened in those critical years’, she asks, ‘that could account for such a phenomenon and … for its remarkably shared characteristics?’ The answer, it turns out, is simple. Since such a drastic transformation could not possibly have originated with a ‘local source’, she reasons that it must have been due to the influx of a ‘highly skilled new workforce’ of ‘Muslim masons and craftsmen’. Boasting technical skills far in advance of anything their Christian brethren could muster, she suggests, they were eagerly sought out by rulers and prelates to build monasteries and churches. They brought their own architectural traditions with them. ‘All the key innovations of Romanesque’ that have no clear precedents in Roman architecture – from blind arcades and Lombard bands to Venetian dentils and foliage-filled capitals – thus ‘found their way onto European soil via the Islamic world’. Consequently, Darke suggests, the ‘Romanesque’ should more properly be known as the ‘Islamesque’. 

There is certainly something in this. There was undoubtedly vigorous cultural exchange between Christians and Muslims in the period 1000–1250, especially in the ‘frontier zones’ of Spain, Sicily and southern Italy. The Holy Roman Emperor Frederick II appears to have spoken at least some Arabic. Buildings such as the