CHAPTER XXI.
BYZANTINE AND ROMANESQUE ARTS.
When Constantine rebuilt the city which we still call Constantinople as a new Rome in the East, doubtless mixed methods in architecture were resorted to. The more important buildings of his official architects must have been in the current Roman manner. Secondary buildings and ordinary dwellings would, however, have been constructed according to local customs, and a modified style must soon have resulted here, as earlier had been the case in Alexandria, and in other Greek and Roman cities of the East. The later Roman architecture became more and more changed through these contacts with the East, not only in structure but in the decorations and the underlying ideals which governed both. It is this mixed product which formed the Byzantine architecture, and has been so named by modern students from the old name of the new capital of the Empire.
As through recent explorations we come to know more of the building modes practised in Egypt, North Africa, Syria, Asia Minor and Mesopotamia, that is, throughout eastern Christendom, it becomes increasingly difficult to cover them all with the one narrow word Byzantine. In Syria, for instance, the builders had much fine stone at command, but little or no brick or timber, and here, in consequence, everything architectural tended to be turned to stone. In Constantinople the common stone was a good, easily cutting, white marble, and this was liberally used in association with excellent burnt bricks of thin flat shape. In Egypt there was a little fine limestone and much mud for bricks, which were frequently, for secondary purposes, used in an unburnt condition.
The term Byzantine properly applies to the style of building developed in the new imperial capital, but some such word as Byzantesque seems to be required to describe inclusively those many varieties of building practised in the Christian East, which were yet more or less the members of a common tradition.
In the fourth century, when the new capital was built, the style was still Roman and the point of view was mainly pagan. Byzantine architecture developed step by step as the Empire became Christianised; and two hundred years later, during the reign of Justinian, the Byzantine style was fully established. We may put the emergence of the style
