Marble Past, Monumental Present

The Medieval Mediterranean

Peoples, Economies and Cultures, 4001500

Managing Editor

Hugh KennedySOAS, London

Editors

Paul Magdalino, St. AndrewsDavid Abulafi a, CambridgeBenjamin Arbel, Tel Aviv

Larry J. Simon, Western Michigan UniversityOlivia Remie Constable, Notre Dame

VOLUME 80

Marble Past,Monumental Present

Building with Antiquities in the Mediaeval Mediterranean

By

Michael Greenhalgh

LEIDEN BOSTON2009

Cover illustration: Mihrab, Madrasa Al-Firdaws, Aleppo, 123541. This miracle of marquetry technique re-uses white marble, red porphyry and green diorite, jigsawed in depth. Conceivably the yellow stone has been cut from antique columns (such as those in the courtyard?).Photograph by the author.

This book is printed on acid-free paper.

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication-Data

Greenhalgh, Michael. Marble past, monumental present : building with antiquities in the mediaeval Mediterranean / by Michael Greenhalgh. p. cm. (The medieval Mediterranean ; v. 80) Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN 978-90-04-17083-4 (hardback : alk. paper) 1. Marble buildingsMediterranean Region. 2. Architecture, MedievalMediterranean Region. 3. Mediterranean RegionAntiquities, Roman. 4. MarbleRecyclingMediterranean Region. I. Title. NA1458.G74 2008 720.91822dc22

2008026654

ISSN 0928-5520ISBN 978 90 04 17083 4

Copyright 2009 by Koninklijke Brill NV, Leiden, The Netherlands.Koninklijke Brill NV incorporates the imprints Brill, Hotei Publishing,IDC Publishers, Martinus Nijhoff Publishers and VSP.

All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, translated, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise, without prior written permission from the publisher.

Authorization to photocopy items for internal or personal use is granted by Koninklijke Brill NV provided that the appropriate fees are paid directly to The Copyright Clearance Center, 222 Rosewood Drive, Suite 910, Danvers, MA 01923, USA.Fees are subject to change.

printed in the netherlands

CONTENTS

Preface ......................................................................................... xiOverview ................................................................................. xiLayout of the Printed Book ................................................... xiiThe World Wide Web ............................................................ xiiiThe DVD ................................................................................ xiii

Acknowledgments ....................................................................... xvii

PART ONE

SETTING THE SCENE

Chapter One Introduction ...................................................... 3The Mediterranean: a lake surrounded by marble ............... 3New marble architecture from prestige materials .................. 10Population increase, laziness, cost-accounting and building

with antiquities .................................................................... 15Knowledge and utility of the past ......................................... 17Evidence, documentation and the search for meaning(s) ...... 20Religious and secular uses of marble ..................................... 25But what is marble? ................................................................ 26Geographical and chronological span of this book,

and its layout ....................................................................... 29

Chapter Two Ancient and Early Christian Europe and Byzantium ............................................................................... 33The City of Rome from Augustus to Constantine ................ 33Marble in the later Empire .................................................... 39Beautiful new monuments replace ugly ruins .................... 43The Transformation of the Ancient World ........................... 50Marble in Early Christian Italy .............................................. 52Byzantium ............................................................................... 67Marble new and re-used, colonnades and colour ................. 69Constantinople ........................................................................ 71Ravenna .................................................................................. 79Conclusion: marble and pilgrimage ....................................... 81

vi contents

PART TWO

LOGISTICS AND FASHIONS

Chapter Three Quarrying, Transport and Preparation of Marble in the Middle Ages .................................................... 89Introduction ............................................................................ 89Quarrying in the Middle Ages: the outline argument .......... 90Evidence for mediaeval quarrying ......................................... 93Antique stockpiles of classical marbles .................................. 111Stockpiles of classical marbles made in mediaeval centuries 120Transport by sea ..................................................................... 124Transport by land ................................................................... 131Preparation of marbles ........................................................... 136Conclusion .............................................................................. 138

Chapter Four Looted and Trophy Marble .............................. 141Introduction: another method of acquisition ........................ 141Overview of trophy-looting .................................................... 144Pisa, Genoa and Mahdiya ...................................................... 152Christians and Muslims in Jerusalem ..................................... 159Conclusion .............................................................................. 167

Chapter Five The Marble Hit Parade: Marble Members by Type and Destination ............................................................. 169Introduction ............................................................................ 169Marble, polished and squared ................................................ 170Different sources of re-used materials .................................... 174Different types of re-used materials ....................................... 182Types of buildings using marble ............................................ 212Conclusion .............................................................................. 231

PART THREE

SURVEYS OF THE ISLAMIC AND CHRISTIAN WORLDS

Chapter Six Byzantium ........................................................... 235Introduction ............................................................................ 235Byzantine North Africa .......................................................... 235

contents vii

Constantinople ........................................................................ 239Anatolia and Greece ............................................................... 241Conclusion .............................................................................. 252

Chapter Seven Earlier Islam ................................................... 255Introduction ............................................................................ 255Diffi culties in investigating early Islamic architecture ............ 261Large building projects ........................................................... 266Grandeur and ashes: ruination and re-use ............................ 272Jerusalem from Herod to Islam .............................................. 275Mecca and Medina ................................................................. 288Damascus ................................................................................ 291Crdoba .................................................................................. 296Seville and Granada ............................................................... 310Kairouan, Mahdiya and Tunis ............................................... 313Baghdad and Samarra ............................................................ 321Conclusion .............................................................................. 324

Chapter Eight King, Pope, Emir and Caliph: Europe and the Islamic Building-Boom ..................................................... 327Introduction ............................................................................ 327Building with marble before Charlemagne ............................ 329Charlemagne and marble use ................................................ 333Charlemagne and the Islamic world ...................................... 344Aachen as a response to Islam ............................................... 353Conclusion .............................................................................. 358Appendix: Ambassadorial etc. exchanges East and West ..... 359

Chapter Nine Italy and Sicily ................................................. 363Introduction ............................................................................ 363Early Christian revivals and the Liber Pontifi calis ................ 365Making do, but aesthetically: revivals in Rome

after the millennium ........................................................... 370San Vincenzo al Volturno ...................................................... 375Benevento and elsewhere: marble monuments displayed

on churches ......................................................................... 378Genoa ...................................................................................... 383Modena ................................................................................... 387Sicily: Palermo and Monreale ................................................ 392Amalfi , Montecassino and Salerno ........................................ 400

viii contents

Apulia: Bari and Trani ........................................................... 410Pisa .......................................................................................... 411Venice ...................................................................................... 421The Gate at Capua, and Frederick IIs antiquities ............... 439Conclusion .............................................................................. 442

Chapter Ten Egypt, Later Syria and Seljuk and Ottoman Turkey ..................................................................... 447Introduction ............................................................................ 447Alexandria and marble for Cairo ........................................... 448The Coptic Church and marble ............................................ 452Cairo/Fustat ............................................................................ 454Aleppo and Damascus under Abbasids and Mamluks .......... 468The Seljuks in Anatolia .......................................................... 472Ottoman Bursa, Manisa and Istanbul ................................... 474Conclusion .............................................................................. 481

Chapter Eleven France and Christian Spain .......................... 483Introduction ............................................................................ 483Before the millennium ............................................................ 484After the millennium .............................................................. 494Problems with Glabers White Mantle of Churches ......... 496Christian Spain ....................................................................... 501Santiago de Compostela ......................................................... 508Building with antiquities in Roman France ........................... 510Arles ........................................................................................ 511Narbonne ................................................................................ 518Conclusion .............................................................................. 521

CONCLUSION & BIBLIOGRAPHY

Conclusion .................................................................................. 525The Middle Ages and the ancient landscape ........................ 525Re-used marble and new monuments ................................... 527Food for thought ..................................................................... 528The signifi cance of marble use in the Middle Ages ............. 530

contents ix

Bibliography ................................................................................ 531Abbreviations of frequently cited works ................................ 531The Mediterranean in architecture, war and commerce ...... 534Building materials and techniques (excluding marble) .......... 535Imperial Rome ........................................................................ 536Transformation of the Roman World .................................... 538Pilgrimage and Shrines ........................................................... 540Byzantium and her Empire .................................................... 541Mediaeval Europe ................................................................... 546Mediaeval Rome ..................................................................... 547Egypt ....................................................................................... 551France ...................................................................................... 553Islam (more than one country) ............................................... 557Italian Peninsula ...................................................................... 560Marble and related stones and their Impact ......................... 561North Africa excluding Egypt ................................................ 564Northern Italy except Pisa, Genoa and Venice ..................... 567Pisa, Genoa and Venice ......................................................... 570Southern Italy and Sicily ........................................................ 575Spain ....................................................................................... 580Re-use of Earlier materials ..................................................... 586Syria and the Near East ......................................................... 588Charlemagne to the Hohenstaufen ........................................ 593Travellers Accounts (more than one area) ............................ 596Turkey (excluding Byzantium) ................................................ 597England ................................................................................... 598

INDICES

General Index ............................................................................. 601Index of Marble ......................................................................... 615

Illustrations .................................................................................. 619

PREFACE

Overview

This book surveys the various uses for which marble and antiquities were employed, structurally and decoratively, over the whole of the Mediterranean during the Millennium following the Emperor Constan-tine. It is a broad survey, through the telescope not the microscope.1 Frequently its contents rely on the detailed work of other scholars, and the works timespan has so many broken threads and obscurities that it offers only general rationales about why marble was used, and to what possible political or religious ends. In areas with the heavy footprint of Roman marbleand areas in which the search for sophisticated build-ing supplies paralleled population expansion, marble is a tie, binding Venice to Alexandria, Damascus to Crdoba, and Constantinople to Aachen. Yet more links follow: Jerusalem cannot be dealt with without reference to Rome, Crdoba without Syria, Damascus without Kair-ouan, or Istanbul without Cairo. Its use is a barometer in the Christian world of the continuing workings of Early Christian architecture (and sometimes perhaps of nostalgia for pagan Rome), and in the Muslim world of constructions which in our period outranked most of those in Christendom until c.1100.

Much work over the past few decades has been concentrated on the re-use of antiquities in specifi c sites or cities, but the focus has been on Italy, then France and Germany, with much less attention paid to Byz-antium, Visigothic Spain, or anywhere in the Islamic world. But marble was spread all around the Mediterranean by the Romans, exercising its spell not only in Western Europe, but on the southern and eastern shores of that sea as well. And since marble-rich sites and cities were connected together at various times and in varying degrees by trade,

1 Cf. Skidelsky, Robert, letter in TLS Oct. 20 2006, 17, lamenting the loss of the sense of what is signifi cant about the past . . . Broad survey courses have disap-peared from school and university studies The great interpretative schemes of the past, including Marxism, have withered away. . . . The failure of many of these large intepretative efforts . . . has led academic historians to substitute the microscope for the telescope . . .

xii preface

war and diplomacy, as well as the imperatives of religion, this book views the area as a whole: far from being invidious, such an overview is essential if we are accurately to assess achievement (and perhaps get at least a glimpse of intention) in a period when it is frequently demonstrable that much was known to rulers (mosaic-glitterati?) about what was happening a thousand kilometres away.

Hence a main feature is to attempt an even-handed assessment of how Islam and Christendom use attractive marbles and other antiqui-ties in new buildings, without canting the available evidence (which is usually weak) or reading it backwards from what should have happened. Making available data fi t a theory (rather than vice versa) gives an importance to Carolingian architecture that its remains or accounts of them cannot support, and suggests that Venice must have obtained the materials for San Marco during the Sack of Constantinople, rather than earlier.

Layout of the Printed Book

Some chapters have been grouped geographically (Italy, France), some thematically (Quarrying and Transport, Looting and Trophies), while the two chapters dedicated to Islam necessarily criss-cross the Mediter-ranean, tracking inspiration and infl uence.

The text of the book gives an overview of the topics involved in the study of marble in the Middle Ages and, in order to keep matters brief, the footnotes often try to cite recent studies with good references to the literature rather than attempting full bibliographies for all the features of this very broad survey. When they fi rst appear in the notes, books and papers are cited in full, except for those frequently cited (cf. bibliography), which always appear in their abbreviated form. Books or papers with especially useful bibliographies in their particular area are prefaced by an asterisk. All the works cited in the footnotes appear again in the bibliography; journal-names common in Western art history and archaeology are abbreviated. No Arabic diacritics have been used; spellings for commissioners and architectural terms are generally those found at http://archnet.org. Many of the dates (which on the DVD refer to the building, not the re-used material) are rubbery. Sometimes more than one date is given, to indicate the likelihood of re-use which is a theme of the book.

preface xiii

The World Wide Web

This book routinely quotes material from the World Wide Web, and includes a DVD of images, viewable within a web browser. In its 15 years or so of growth, the web has become a very useful research tool in its own right, not only for images and bibliographies, but also for increasingly substantial quantities of source-texts (including large col-lections such as the Monumenta Germaniae Historica, the Acta Sanctorum and the Patrologia Latina), scholarly articles, which are often advanced preprints, and (digitized) printed books, some completely text-searchable. To present this book without such digital references would be to look at the subject with an obscuring eye-patch, since the reader as well as the author benefi ts from the ability to search what are now enormous collections online,2 and which could be used to extend the reach of some of the topics I discuss. Hence this books references and bibliog-raphy include web URLs of collections. However, readers should bear in mind that the web is a protean being, and it cannot be guaranteed that material in existence at the end of an URL when last checked by the author will necessarily still be drawing digital breath when the reader clicks the same hotlink.

The DVD

To access the DVD, which should appear as marble_past under the drive letter allocated to your CD/DVD drive, click the icon to open, and then click on the fi le click_here.html. This will give you the top-level menu, from which both the discussions and images on the disk can be accessed.

The majority of monuments mentioned in the body of the text (but not necessarily in the footnotes) are illustrated or referenced on the DVD, which contains over 5000 images. Usually these are images of which I hold the copyright (which I waive for re-use for any academic or scholarly purpose by readers of this book). Other images are out-of-copyright because of age or because they have been explicitly placed in the public domain. Occasionally there are images for which I have received permission from the copyright holders. The great capacity of a DVD means that many of the monuments discussed in the book are

2 Some germane ones listed in dvd_electronic_databanks.doc.

xiv preface

illustrated by multiple imagesand some monuments that are relevant to the broader picture but are not discussed are also included, since the topic is broader than my printed text. And since the book is about the continuing fascination with the beauty of the material, the DVD also contains images of marble samples, which illustrate the wide variety of colours, veinings and effects available to builders and re-builders. Generally, I offer only a restricted number of images from well-known monuments, and have included a greater quantity from less-well-known monuments or sites. I thank the following for permission to include their images: Katherine Branning;3 Dick Osseman;4 Mauro Piergigli;5 Frederik Questier;6 and the UCLA 3D Modelling Lab,7 and various authors on Flickr, for placing their images under the Creative Com-mons licence.8 In a very few cases, I have been unable to locate the copyright owners.

Most of the images are of high quality, but many were taken under far-from-perfect conditions. The long-and-narrow thumbnails are usu-ally panoramas, and users should note that the projections used distort straight lines (such as entablatures) into curves. All images are intended for viewing using a web browser, which will show the image full-size or reduced to the browser window dimensions. The bibliography includes occasional picture-books, to compensate for the diffi culty of getting images of certain buildings, or gaining access to them.

The images on the DVD are all in one database, and may be exam-ined according to any of the following groupings which are simply different views of the same data:

1. Complete, all countries Algeria to Turkey;2. By individual country;3. By monument-type, viz. baptisteries, bases, campanili & minarets,

capitals, columns, fl oors, fortresses & city walls, funerary, marble, mihrabs, mosaics, palaces, porphyry, pulpits, sarcophagi, temples and veneer. Evidently, several of these categories overlap; and I have not thought it worthwhile to include such broad ones as church or mosque.

3 http://www.turkishhan.org/.4 http://www.pbase.com/dosseman.5 http://www.italiamedievale.org.6 http://questier.com/Photos/.7 http://www.ats.ucla.edu.8 http://www.fl ickr.com/photos/. I have retained the original fl ickr image numbers.

preface xv

Just as the printed book stands alone, so the DVD might also be treated as a survey of the marble horizons which the book covers. But it also serves as a companion to the printed text, because I have included on the DVD several discussions dealing with some of the monuments and problems addressed only in general terms in the printed book. Were they to have been addressed there, they would have overbalanced the text. Each of these is fl agged in the footnotes, beginning dvdsuch as dvd_ibn_khaldun_extracts.doc.

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

I am grateful to the following individuals and institutions for various kinds of help in the preparation of this book: Nesli Atusay-Effenberger; Fabio Barry; Claudia Barsanti; Mary Beard, Irene Bierman; Ross Burns; Simonetta Ciranna, Robert Coates-Stephens; Janet Coleman, Okasha El Daly; Jerrilynn Dodds; Arnold Esch; Clayton Fant; Diane Favro; Moshe Fischer; Barry Flood; Laura Foulquier; Marco Franzini; Tarek Galal; Andrew Gillett; Alessandra Guiglia; James Harrell; Yitzhak Hen; Richard Hodges; Stephen Kay; Simon Keay; Thomas Kitchen; Alick McLean; Robert Mason; John Mitchell; Alastair Northedge; David Pea-cock; Frank Peters; Mauro Piergigli; John Pryor; Tony Reed; Mariam Rosser-Owen; Alan Walmsley; David Whitehouse; Chris Wickham; Olwen Williams-Thorpe, Mark Wilson-Jones; and Georgia Wright. I have been helped in many libraries and archives: Canberra: Library of the Australian National University; Cremona: Archivio di Stato, Biblioteca Statale; Istanbul: American Research Institute in Turkey; London: British Library, National Archives, SOAS, Warburg Institute; Narbonne: archives; Paris: Archives Nationales, Bibliothque Nationale de France, Institut du Monde Arabe, Service Historique de la Dfense; Pisa: Library of the Dipartimento di Storia delle Arti, Universit degli Studi; Rome: British School at Rome; Istituto Storico Austriaco; Stato Maggiore dellEsercito, Uffi cio Storico, Archivio; Simancas: Archivo General. The map blanks originated on the Interactive Ancient Medi-terranean Web site (http://iam.classics.unc.edu), and have been reused with permission under the terms of IAMs fair use policy. (Copyright 1998, Interactive Ancient Mediterranean, UNC-Chapel Hill).

Michael Greenhalgh

PART ONE

SETTING THE SCENE

CHAPTER ONE

INTRODUCTION

The Mediterranean: a lake surrounded by marble

The title of this book indicates two foci which are really one: works of monumental architecture (including monuments in the funerary sense) are an important product of ancient civilization since long before the Greeks. What the Greeks added, geography meeting aesthetics, was the building of monuments in marblea practice enthusiastically adopted by the Romans. The Greeks and the Romans prized marble for a variety of reasons, as we shall see. The Romans left behind them many more marble monuments than the Greeks because they had a far-fl ung empire, a policy of conquest and assimilation, and an indus-trial and commercial infrastructure to deliver materials and workmen where they were needed. The oft-quoted aphorism that Augustus found Rome a city of brick and left it a city of marble has its heart in the right place, but it is probably too late by a couple of generations; for the Romans gained a taste for marble long before Augustus was born. Indeed, marble and travertine were necessary to protect the tufo used beneath them, and they had far greater compressive strengths than tufo, as Vitruvius remarks.1 When the Empire in the West collapsed, and quarrying stopped (perhaps by c.500 in the West, and c.600 in the East), many of its aesthetic preferences moved east, to Byzantium, and then south to the newly forming Islamic world, which conquered large tracts of the erstwhile Roman Empire and, eventually, the whole of the Byzantine Empire as well. By 800, Islam had more Roman ruins within its domains than either Byzantium or the West, and that proportion increased over time, due to Ottoman encroachments.

Durliat reminds us that the object of commerce was to procure indis-pensable items that were lacking locally.2 This book will study marble,

1 Jackson, M.D., et al., The judicious selection and preservation of tuff and trav-ertine building stone in ancient Rome, Archaeometry 47.3, 2005, 485510: see 506, 507ff.

2 Durliat, Jean, Les conditions du commerce au VIe sicle, in Hodges, Richard, & Bowden, William, eds., The sixth century: production, distribution, and demand, (Leiden 1998), 88117.

4 chapter one

an eternal stone,3 as a valuable material to be traded, appropriated or looted. Today it is more popular than ever.4 One of the books themes is that some of the extravagancies of post-fi rst-Millennium architecture in the West, so well seen in Pisa and Venice, probably owe some of their interest in grand architecture to the example of a monumentally confi dent and marble-saturated Islam (although of course the argument is necessarily slanted by what survives). The Pisans prized Islamic lands for silk, but also for ceramics, granite and marble for their monuments. The message of the book is that a proper consideration of several architectural developments in mediaeval European architecture, and especially those concerned with size, ornamentation and marble (or its surrogates) should be set in the context of Islamic example in order fully to be understood. This is not a startling idea since other elements of the heritage of the antique world are transmitted to the West via Islam, and architecture forms a part of that bigger pool.

The Middle Ages within the area of the Roman Empire lived on top of and surrounded by the detritus of marble, brick and mosaic Antiquity, which provided ordinary building materials5 and high-qual-ity marble elements,6 as well as inspiration for various stylistic revivals. Often the choice of re-usable marble varieties was wide, because of energetic Roman export practices,7 fashions and thirst for exotic variet-ies. To take but one type, marble from Iasos, called cipollino rosso, is found reused at Kairouan, Cairo, Oea (Tripoli),8 Patmos, Jerusalem, Damascus and Salerno, as well as in late Quattrocento contexts in Venice and Ravenna.9 Quarries with spoilheaps and stockpiles sur-

3 Giusti, Anna Maria, ed., Eternit e nobilit di materie: itinerario artistico fra le pietre policrome, (Florence 2003) for a broad overview.

4 http://www.worldstonex.com/en/marble.asp for 1130 available marbles, with colour images, and a searchable database.

5 http://www.archaeology.org/interactive/sagalassos/fi eld05/survey15.html for Marc Waelkens study of re-use at Sagalassos.

6 http://www.archaeology.org/interactive/sagalassos/fi eld06/apollo3.html: for Marc Waelkens investigation of the Apollo Klarios sanctuary at Sagalassos, where Trajanic capitals were used in the Middle Byzantine basilica.

7 Dodge, Hazel, Decorative stones for architecture in the Roman Empire, OJA 7.1 1988, 6580, for main sources of stones, and maps of their distribution by type.

8 A city rich in re-use: cf. Ciranna, Simonetta, La citt mediterranea: archeologia e spolia nella Medina di Tripoli, Ricerche di storia dellarte, 86 2005, 5360.

9 Lazzarini, Lorenzo, Cancelliere, Stefano, & Bierbon Benoit, Raffaella, Il marmo di Iasos: cave, uso, caratterazzione e indagini archeometriche, La parola del Passato LX 2005 (Iasos e la Caria, Nuovi Studi e Richerche), 32031; fi g. 2 for spread of primary and secondary use.

introduction 5

rounded the Mediterranean.10 The new religion of Christianity and the newer one of Islam created new styles of architecture, often re-using the building-blocks of Rome, sometimes brought from afar, sometimes imitating pseudo-Roman characteristics. This, then, is a book for those interested in the relationship between architecture and the antique in the mediaeval centuries, and in the mechanics of trade, travel and build-ing. Avoiding ongoing debates about Braudel,11 and acknowledging the changing fashions in how the period is viewed,12 it provides an overview of the Mediterranean-wide popularity and re-uses of a prestigious material. It omits except in passing any consideration of small objects in prized stonescups, vases, jarswhich were certainly admired in the Middle Ages, and survive from church treasuries and secular col-lections (Saint-Denis, Lorenzo deMedici), and which are proof of a fascination with polish, pattern and colourthe miniature version, as it were, of larger marble church, mosque and palace fi ttings.

Such a focus has the obvious danger of breadth rather than depth, but compensating for this is a treatment which includes the Islamic and Byzantine worlds as well as that of Western Christianity. This is simple logic because, not surprisingly, marble often got re-used in areas to which the Romans had so strenuously carried it for their monumental buildings. Knowing the cross-fertilising effects of pilgrimage and trade, can one really study the Palatine Chapel at Aachen separately from the Holy Sepulchre in Jerusalem, or from the Dome of the Rock? Indeed, marble in churches is often intended to evoke the Heavenly Jerusalem, as well as the Holy Sepulchre and other pilgrimage sites.13 But is it not noteworthy that there are no contemporary churches of a size or magnifi cence to bear comparison with the mosques of Kairouan,

10 A quick if incomplete tour de bassin by Perrier, Raymond, Gisements de roches ornementales de lEurope mditerranenne (Grce, Italie, France, Espagne), at http://perso.orange.fr/roches-ornementales/Europmedit.html.

11 Cf. Hordern, Peregrine, Mediterranean excuses: historical writing on the Medi-terranean since Braudel, History and Anthropology 16.1, March 2005, 2530. For a book concerned with defi nitions, networks, cultures and identities cf. Malkin, Irad, ed., Mediterranean paradigms and classical antiquity, (London and New York 2005), e.g. 929: Purcell, Nicholas, The boundless sea of unlikeness? On defi ning the Mediterranean. Sant Cassia, Paul, Review article: Navigating an anthropology of the Mediterranean: recent developments in France, History and Anthropology, 2003 14.1, 8794.

12 Ward-Perkins, Bryan, The fall of Rome and the end of civilization, (Oxford 2005), 169ff. for a sceptical overview.

13 *Bonnery, Andr, et al., Jrusalem. Symboles et reprsentations dans loccident mdival, (Paris 1998); 133ff. for representations of the city and its monuments.

6 chapter one

Damascus or Crdoba? Reasons for the disparity range from a lower popularity and lack of manpower, to a temporary loss of the civic mentality that had occasioned large monuments in earlier centuries. The disparity between Christians and Muslims was surely evident to mediaeval travellers, whether pilgrims, traders, ambassadors or schol-ars. When antique columns were hauled to Aachen, Montecassino, or Pisa, was this indeed a spin-off of the current revival of the antique (artifi cial barriers to periodise a continuum), or perhaps emulation of what the Moslems were doing to the East, West or South? Scholars are comfortable with the Rome-Constantinople axis, but few acknowledge the size and splendour of Islamic structures which make Aachen look like a well-equipped garden shed. The disparity raises the question of whether Christianity sometimes attempts rivalry with the achieve-ments of Islam, rather than being constantly in thrall to some vague awakening to the glories of the Roman past. Was Islam perhaps the main motor of marble-building for centuries, in imitation of Byzantines and Romans before them, and hence with the West playing catch-up later? Certainly, a characteristic mentality useful for the theme of this book is a desire among both Christians and Moslems always to count, measure and compare so that, if we often lack details of structures, especially vanished ones, the number of columns in them is often availableor the number of bricks in the Round City of Baghdad, the number of bricks per course, and so on.14 Just as writers measured interest by quantity, so too they considered distance to be an explicit measure of virtue. This accrued (especially on pilgrimage) in propor-tion to distance traveled.15

To introduce the subject, this chapter considers the implications of the Roman marble footprint, and gives some brief account of the relationship between population levels and the retrieval (and destruction) of earlier structures,16 evidence of which is often visible in archaeologi-cal digs.17 It bemoans the scarcity of reliable documentation which can

14 Kennedy, Hugh, When Baghdad ruled the Muslim world: the rise and fall of Islams greatest dynasty, (Cambridge, MA 2005), 135.

15 Calasso, G., Les tches du voyageur: dcrire, mesurer, compter, chez Ibn Jubayr, Naser-e Khosrow e Ibn Battuta, Rivista degli studi orientali LXXIII/14, 1999, 69104; see 77, 79; 93ff. for Ibn Jubayrs measuring of Mecca.

16 Frey, Jon Michael, Speaking through spolia: the language of architectural reuse in the fortifi cations of late Roman Greece, PhD, (UC Berkeley, 2006), chaps 13 for a survey of research.

17 Milanese, Marco, Processi di spoglio e riuso in eta postclassica. Osservazioni

introduction 7

detail how marble was reused, and with what end in view. It underlines marble scarcity by introducing the frequent marble substitutes from limestone to stucco (often made with powdered marble) and painted walls, as well as the various latitudinarian concepts of what marble actually is. Finally, it summarizes the geographical and chronological plan of subsequent chapters.

Marble is a brilliant material (Greek: marmiro = to shine), and its prestige is multi-valent. It lies in the material itself, for its beauty, solidity and longevity, its colours18 and polishes,19 and its ability to refl ect light,20 so that Paschals apse inscription for his restoration of S. Ceciliain Trastevere (81724) reads This spacious house, built of varied materials, shines.21 In Alexandria, a 12th-century Arab commentator tells us that Solomon built a room with pillars of marble in which one could see the people behind ones back, so pure was the marbles refl ection.22 For Thvenot, the marble paving slabs in the courtyard of

su recenti documenti archeologici, in Giannattasio, Bianca Maria, ed., Atti X giornata archeologica: Il passato riproposto: Continuit e recupero dallantichita ad oggi, (Genoa 1999), 13172.

18 *De Nuccio, Marilda, & Ungaro, Lucrezia, eds., I marmi colorate della Roma imperiale, (Venice 2002), passim.

19 Cagnana, Aurora, Archeologia dei materiali da costruzione, (Mantua 2000); 30 for polish-ing. Masudi maintains that at Alexandria awnings of green silk were hung over the streets to relieve the dazzling glare of the marble: cf. Butler, A.J., The Arab Conquest of Egypt, (1902), rev. ed. by Fraser, P.M., Oxford 1978, 370.

20 Procopius, Buildings I.1.2930: Haghia Sophia abounds exceedingly in sunlight and in the refl ection of the suns rays from the marble. Indeed one might say that its interior is not illuminated from without by the sun, but that the radiance comes into being within it. Bramon, Dolors, El mundo en el siglo XII: estudio de la versin castellana y del original rabe de una geografa universal, El tratado de al-Zuhri, (Sabadell 1991), 1523 for the salon at Madinat al-Zahra: sus paredes eran doradas y de cristal grueso y trasparente y tenia tejas de oro y plata. Al entrar el sol por dichas puertas, sus rayos se refl ejaban en el techo y en las paredes del salon, convirtiendo la luz en algo tan brillante que heria la vista. For fables about marble, and magic, cf. *Julien, Pascal, Marbres de carrires en palais, (Manosque 2006), 19ff.

21 *Goodson, Caroline J., Material memory: rebuilding the basilica of S. Cecilia in Trastevere, Rome, Early Medieval Europe 15.1 2007, 234; Desiderius, abbot of Montecassino, was cardinal here and, like Paschal, lavished old marble on his own restorations.

22 Ferrand , G., Les monuments de lEgypte au XIIe sicle daprs Abu Hamid Al-Andalusi, Mlanges Maspro, III, Cairo 19351940, 5766; see 60. Edition as Al-Gharnati, Voyages, 568 for the marvels of Alexandria, including une salle daudience difi e par les djinns pour Salomon et reposant sur dincomparables colonnes de marbre . . . La salle possde une porte de marbre alors que la marche, le seuil et les deux montants sont galement de ce marbre rouge, qui a la beaut du jaspe de premire qualit. Il est lisse comme un miroir: quand on y regarde, on voit ce qui vient pied, derrire soi, depuis Alexandrie. This is a topos: cf. Al-Harawi, Guide, 160 for the Great Mosque

8 chapter one

the Umayyad Mosque at Damascus shine like mirrors.23 Use of marble is proof of competence in fi nding, transporting and erecting it, and underlines awareness that it was a diminishing resource, eagerly sought by others. It also has a money-in-the-bank attraction, as something to be hoarded and deeded. Finally, its God-created and bejeweled beauty, and its manifold connections with heavenly cities and Paradise itself, make it the subject of admiring writing and the primary material for the beautifi cation of mosques and churches.24 All these elements fas-cinated the Middle Ages as they had the Romans.25 Such a sensuous material was probably intended to be touched or caressed, especially as part of the package of the senses brought into play in Byzantine architecture.26 Finally, its connections with the pastthe Roman and Early Christian past for the Westwere well known, and it is surely no accident that the prevailing metaphor for the power of saintly relics was that of light27just as it was for the marble within which they were privileged to reside. For Islam, not often interested in any classical tradition,28 any connection was perhaps of superiority through conquest, and certainly the Muslim architectures developed with marble look much more un-Roman than those of their Christian competitors. Although some structural and decorative elements were often rehearsed (such as doorways, altars,29 ciboria, and in MS illumination), the West rarely attempted, except for a few city gates and the Tempietto del Clitunno (perhaps a Lombard court product of the 78th century?), to resurrect pagan Roman architecture either. They were much more

at Samarra: son revtement de verre ressemble un miroir ou lon voit, lorsquon fait face la qibla, quiconque entre et sort du ct nord.

23 Thvenot, Andr, Relation dun Voyage au Levant, (Paris 1664), 435. 24 Colli, Agostino, La tradizione fi gurativa della Gerusalemme celeste: linee di

sviluppo dal sec. III al secolo XIV, in Gatti Perer, M.L., editor, (exhibition); *La dimora di Dio con gli uomini: immagini della Gerusalemme celeste dal III al XIV secolo, Milan 1983, 11944; see 12933 for La Gerusalemme celeste come citta gemmata.

25 Chardron-Picault, P., et al., eds., Les roches dcoratives dans larchitecture antique et du haut Moyen ge, (Paris 2004), passim.

26 James, Liz, Senses and sensibility in Byzantium, Art History, 27.4, September 2004, 522537, especially 526f.

27 Crook, Cult of saints, 33: the power of relics seemed to obey the inverse square law that has been long familiar to physicists as governing electromagnetic radiation.

28 Raby, Julian, Nur Al-Din, The Qastal Al-Shuxaybiyya, and the classical revival, Muqarnas 21 2004, 289310.

29 Many altars were reused in Roman churches: Marangoni, Delle cose gentilesche, 16586; 186ff. for funerary altars.

introduction 9

interested in the tradition of the Early Christian basilica, and it was this that made them such avid customers for re-usable marble.

What we can only guess at across Europe and the East is the rate of spoliation. What evidence we have suggests that it accelerated dur-ing the later Middle Ages, to build new cities in the West and also the cities of the Islamic and Ottoman Empires. An alert (if late) observer is Cyriacus of Ancona, who made two visits to Cyzicus, the site of the huge temple at Marmara (destroyed by an earthquake in the 11th century), in 1431 and 1444/5. He bemoaned the rapid loss of materi-als, with only one of the thirty-one columns seen in 1431 surviving, with a reduced part of the epistyleand marble walls in the nearby town.30 On his second visit, he sweet-talked the local Bey, persuading him to forbid further destruction, lest all trace of the building be lost to posterity . . . the still-standing walls, columns and architraves of this spectacular monument.31 But to no avail, and no later author men-tions so much as a single columns standing.32 At this date, the re-usable marble was going to Bursa.33 Nor was this just an eastern problem, for antiquities disappeared in Europe during the centuries of antiquarian-ism and museums.34 Indeed, the destruction of monuments is as old as their re-use. For example, following the Athenian desecration of religious monuments at Sardis in 499 BC, the Persians at Old Paphos (Cyprus)

30 Bodnar & Mitchell, Cyriacus of Anconas journeys, 28, 30. 31 Bodnar, Edward W., & Mitchell, Charles, eds., Francesco Scalamonti: Vita viri cla-

rissimi et famosissimi Kyriaci Anconitani, Trans Am. Phil.Soc 86.4 1996, 127, para 81. 32 Hasluck, Frederick William, Cyzicus: being some account of the history and antiquities of

that city, etc., (Cambridge 1910), 10. Similarly Pococke mentions an agora and a Corin-thian porticoall gone when Texier visited in 1835: cf. Texier, Asie Mineure, 6971: the amphiteatre was clearly in good condition, but only in parts: Sil reste encore quelques vestiges de ce monument, comme des murailles, on doit lattribuer uniquement la nature des matriaux, qui ntaient pas propres tre utiliss, soit pour les construc-tions modernes, soit pour fabriquer des boulets . . . Le temple . . . occupait une espace immense et slevait sur de vastes galeries souterraines . . . Il est bien diffi cile de juger aujourdhui de lensemble des constructions; mais, dapres les dbris pars de corniches et de chapiteaux, on peut tre assur que la fi nesse de la sculpture ne rpondit pas la majest de lensemble . . .

33 Robert, Louis, Un dcret de Cyzique sur le Bosphore, in his Documents dAsie Mineure, (Paris 1987), 14856; see 151.

34 Stenhouse, William, Ancient inscriptions (The Paper Museum of Cassiano dal Pozzo), London 2002: Cassiano (d.1657) records 213 inscriptions (of which a fair proportion are fakes), and 30 recorded by his day are now losti.e. over 15%.

10 chapter one

in 498 BC destroyed an extramural sancuary and used the materials to make a mound for positioning their siege machines.35

New marble architecture from prestige materials

This book studies how new architectures were created in the Middle Ages, reusing elements of the classical past, especially column-shafts and capitals. It cannot study the transport and re-erection of classical buildings, because this simply did not happen, even in Rome. And so the Hephaesteion, bijou-size, marble and perfectwould have been easy to dismantle and re-use, yet remains intact in Athens to this day. This surely has to do with aesthetics rather than any transport diffi cul-ties. (In the same period, for example, the Japanese frequently moved centuries-old wooden temples, some of the members of which would have weighed much moreand been much more unwieldythan a four-metre marble column.) The book naturally looks at those entities we have been schooled to think of as the inheritors of Roman archi-tecture (the West and Byzantium), but it also examines the Islamic world around the Mediterranean, because from the birth of the new religion until perhaps 1100 the Moslems probably used more marble than the West, and that use had repercussions for the West, as we shall see. Re-use is probably a constant in human affairs, from literature and law, documents, names and historiography to the architectural and decorative materials that interest us here.36

I emphasize at this point that this book is focused on marble rather than specifi cally on re-use, for which other works should be consulted,37 although most such works are narrowly focussed.38 Since the majority of the marble used during the Middle Ages was indeed re-used, the

35 Wright, G.R.H., & White, D., Siegecraft and spoliation, c.500 BC: a tale of two cities, Libyan Studies 36 2005, 2142.

36 These categories and others treated in Toubert, Pierre, Pratiques du remploi au Moyen ge dans les pays de la Mditerrane occidentale (X eXIII e sicles), (Colloquium, Madrid, Casa de Velzquez, March 2006), not yet published. Details at http://www.casadevelazquez.org/factpres.htm.

37 Overview in Settis, Salvatore, Les remplois, in Furet, Franois, ed., Patrimoine, temps, espace: patrimoine en place, patrimoine dplac: Entretiens du patrimoine, (Paris 1997), 6786. His Remplois. Usage et connaissance de lAntique au Moyen ge will be published by Macula.

38 Frey, Speaking through spolia, abstract: the majority of recent work tends to concen-trate on a small set of monuments mainly located on the Italian peninsula.

introduction 11

various assertions about the contemporary value(s) placed on spoliation cannot wholly be ignored, and these are considered on the DVD.39

Although much has been written on the re-use of antiquities in the West, the same cannot be said for points East and South, with Con-stantinople being the exception. Italy and France provide foci for several studies, which is logical for Westerners who see the Roman Empire as a Western affair. But what happened elsewhere? Although an obvious place to start for anyone with a European background, it is myopic to restrict ones attention to the Italian peninsula and points West, when a majority of the greatest classical monuments are to be found to the East, in present-day Turkey, and on the eastern and southern shores of the Mediterranean. The low populations in such areas allow us much better opportunities to examine how the monuments were treated, and re-used. Nevertheless, much has disappeared from (for example) Tur-key in the past two centuries, whether for building, or railway or road ballast. In 1811 Beaufort states he saw 200 columns at Pompeiopolis (even if only 44 were standing), and a ruined wall with towers sur-rounding the city; while at Side he saw many of the columns were rounded into balls, such as the Turks use in their immense cannon at the Dardanelles and at Smyrna.40 Little remains today. Of Roman funerary urns catalogued in the CIL on the Amalfi coast, 48 have since disappeared (mostly from churches), and 46 survive, six of these in the Cathedral of Ravello.41 The same is the case in Tunisia, where a French army report of 1885 notes plenty of long-abandoned Roman quarries, of ruins scattered over the landscape, and of carved blocks of all dimensionssuch resources that they can seem inexhaustible, if the needs of the population stay the same.42 But they didnt, and now little remains in this areaa story repeated across Tunisia and Algeria, as the colons took the easy route to building.

Naturally, I exclude consideration of the fortuitous re-use of materials, where builders have simply employed what is lying around just because it is to hand. This, of course, includes the great majority of pieces throughout the Middle Ages, when quarrying and transport diffi culties, not to mention manpower shortages combined with the large quantities

39 dvd_spolia_a_defi nition_in_ruins.doc.40 Beaufort, Francis, Karamania, or a brief description of the south coast of Asia-Minor and

of the remains of antiquity, 2nd ed., London 1818, 31. 41 Bracco, Vittorio, Le urne romane della costa dAmalfi , (Amalfi 1977), 79f. & 83ff. 42 SHAT, MR1332 Tribu de Feriana, 13th May 1885, 1920.

12 chapter one

of disused and ruinous buildings, militated in favour of such re-use. This we may call economic re-use. It would be courageous to deduce any aesthetic meaning at all for the Frankish Tower on the Acropolis at Athens,43 or from the rooms fi tted out in the Propylea,44 or anything other than practicality and low-grade tidiness when the 1311 contract for the construction of (some new) city walls at Rieti stipulated that the outer face be lapides aptati, i.e. squared, and the inner face lapides non aptati.45 But there are some tricky middle cases. At Athens, again, the Beul gate precisely reuses the doric frieze of the Nikias monument as its architrave, and recent work in the Library of Hadrian fi nds that the spolia walls passing through that complex even copy the mouldings & string courses of the older monument. How lucky were the inhabit-ants of Miletus, who could construct the exquisite Ilyas Bey mosque completely from ancient marblealthough it would have been much easier to re-use old bricks from the site (which was thriving in the 6th and 7th centuries)! Both bricks and marble were freely available, so what should we read into the decision to use marble? The general solution was one used in Rome: old bricks for the shell, and old marble for the furnishings. Throughout, we should bear in mind that anything useful gets re-used (the same word): the best example is pottery, for which Pea lists 27 types of re-use, excluding both repackaging amphorae and recycling them.46

Indeed, the proof of the prestige of the new (if sometimes revivalist) marble architecture of the Middle Ages is not only that it holds sway over all the lands where the Romans left their imprint, Christian and Muslim, but also that it enables the construction of signal monuments which in many Western-oriented studies are routinely left outside the European focus. As already intimated the Muslims, from the Dome of the Rock to the Millennium, used much more marble than the

43 Lock, P., The Frankish tower on the Acropolis at Athens: the photographs of William J. Stillman, Ann. Brit. Sch. Athens 82, 1987, 1313; Tomlinson, R.A., The Acropolis of Athens in the 1870s: the evidence of the Alma-Tadema photographs, ibid., 297304, especially 301 & plate 48.

44 Relation du plerinage Jerusalem de Nicolas de Martoni, notaire italien (13945), Revue de lOrient Latin III 1895, 566669; see 6501: De castro Acthenarum et sala ipsius: there is a sala magna with 13 columns. Supra quas columpnas sunt trabes longi pedibus triginta, et supra ipsas trabes sont tabule marmoree: magnum et mirabile opus videtur.

45 Leggio, T., Le fortifi cazioni di Rieti dallalto medioevo al rinascimento, Quaderni di Storia Urbana e Territoriale, 4 1989, 14.

46 Pea, J. Theodore, Roman pottery in the archaeological record, (Cambridge 2007), 119208.

introduction 13

Christians, but carried no baggage of classical tradition, renovatio or whatever to colour their appreciation of it. Hence to the usual art-historical axis of Europe-Byzantium we should add Europe-Islam and Islam-Byzantium. Scholars have certainly not ignored the manifold infl uences from Islamic decorative arts upon the arts of Europe, but there is a continuing tendency at least in Art History to compart-mentalizeso that to examine Charlemagnes Palace Chapel in the context of Islam would seem unnatural, but to do so in the context of Byzantium would seem obviousand this in spite of the fact that all the large-scale and expensive contemporary architectural ventures are Islamic not Byzantine.47 If, given the frankly disappointing nature of much early mediaeval architecture (one or two churches in Brescia, Benevento, Spoleto and 9th-century Rome and Milan excepted), we caricature early mediaeval Westerners as sitting despondently in their shack-like homes waiting for the next renovatio to come along, the true picture in the Moslem world is far different, thanks to the three pursuits of commerce, war and pilgrimage. In Spain (Crdoba), Tuni-sia (Kairouan) and Syria (Damascus), to take but three examples, the Moslems erected sumptuous buildings in a new style, affi rming their architectural precedence over the rest of the Mediterranean. They established a standard which would profoundly affect Western re-use of marble, seen in the cathedrals at Pisa and Salerno, the Basilica of S. Marco in Venice, large numbers of smaller religious structures marbled inside, outside or both, and perhaps numbers of long-vanished palaces and civic buildings of which we know little.

The lack of such a suitably broad perspective in some scholarship is apparent in the great Italian encyclopaedias (Italy, the country of Leone Caetani and Michele Amari) such as to make even a cynic believe that Edward Said had a point about the unfortunate consequences of orientalism. The Enciclopedia dellarte medievale (12 vols, 11,000 illustrations, 10,500 pages) is hymned on the Treccani website for its coverage, but this largely excludes Islam.48 The bibliographical collec-tion Medioevo Latino (XXVII 2006) has 15,491 entries, of which a

47 Hen, Yitzhak, Charlemagnes Jihad, Viator 37 2006, 3351; see 51: It is time to question our bold tendency to dismiss instantly any Muslim infl uence on the cultural, religious and political history of early medieval Francia.

48 Lesplorazione di una vastit che non conosce precedenti: dal VI secolo alla fi ne del XIV, lEnciclopedia dellArte Medievale illustra e analizza ogni tipo e forma di creazione artistica prodotta dallOccidente medievale o in esso circolante. And where are the articles on quarries, and marble? But a six-volume Enciclopedia Archeologica is in preparation.

14 chapter one

mere 47 appear under the rubric Islamica, rapporti con la cultura. Similarly the Acanthus colloquium in 199049 devoted less than 10% of the 398-page publication to the most attractive, accomplished and innovative examples, namely those of Islam in the West.50 In another fi eld, an excellent colloquium on spolia would have profi ted from a full Islamic dimension.51 Perhaps things are changing: Antiquity, with its world scope, devoted space to a Focus on Islam in its 2005 issues.

Terminology often carries too much baggage. This enquiry generally ignores the over-used terms renaissance and renovatio which, as I have hinted, are often retro-fi tted wishful thinking. It would also be help-ful to un-invent the term romanesque, which in terms of typology is much too broad, and promises much more than it delivers in terms of Roman-relatedness. The term obscures the innovations (often marble-related) which distinguish many of the buildings of the period it covers, and corrals within the club of Rome structures (especially in Pisa, Lucca and Venice) which are startlingly newand Roman only in some construction techniques, and in their re-use of materials in marble and other stones. The perspective provided by our Mediterranean view52 will help demonstrate that such structures are in competition not only with each other but also with prestige structures of their trading and warring partners in Byzantium and Islam. So let us observe that some church faades built between 1000 and 1200 might be part-inspired by Roman triumphal arches (as well as by the scenae frontes of theatres), just as some contemporary sculpture is inspired by Roman sarcophagi. We can then examine them from the point of view of antique column-shafts, capitals, bases and veneer, and attempt to match these with newly-made and cheaper materials when original antiquities were lacking. In the later Middle Ages, antique relief sculpture is sometimes refl ected in new productions, such as Nicola Pisanos pulpit in the Baptistery (from sarcophagi around the Duomo), or Fredericks Gate at Capua (from keystone busts in the amphitheatre). In both cases inspiration is certain, but we can ask the same question for sculpture as for architecture. Are the exemplars imitated solely for aesthetic reasons? Or do such imita-tion and re-use carry messages?

49 Acanthus Colloquium, passim. 50 Cf. Capiteles Corintios.51 Poeschke, Antike Spolien. 52 Abulafi a, David, ed., The Mediterranean in History, (London 2003), for a broad

overview; see especially the editors What is the Mediterranean? 1127.

introduction 15

Some good studies have been written on some aspects of marble use in Islam, Europe and Byzantium. It takes its rightful place in Glru Necipoglus admirable 2005 The Age of Sinan: Architectural Culture in the Ottoman Empire, and readers will fi nd plentiful examples in my bibliog-raphy. But much remains to be done for points east. Mediaeval western authors frequently display their interest in marble and its beauties,53 yet the Mediterranean see-saw fi nds a reviving and expanding Carolingian Europe far behind Islam in building achievements, importing luxury goods from the Islamic world, especially ceramics, textiles and marble. For few Islamic cities (Crdoba and Damascus are exceptions) saw the periods of rapid population growth which helped obliterate ancient monuments in Europe, the more so since many such cities were founded in new locations. Consequently we can tour Islamic lands today to see what Rome abroad really looked like. But we must remember that what we see are often the skeletons of discardslimestone columns, fi gured sarcophagi and the restleft behind when the shining marble columns and veneers were removed for mosques, palaces and churches.54

Population increase, laziness, cost-accounting and building with antiquities

The imbalance in marble use was partly due to an imbalance in town-based population. Population in the early mediaeval West is much lower than in Antiquity, and fewer people meant bad building maintenance of an often grandiloquent building stock, little reconstruction, and no quarrying. There is a very low incidence of new building, except in prestigious locations such as Rome, Ravenna or Ephesus, where re-use of antiquities fl ourishes.55 Cities shrink, trade declines, and luxury goods are scarce. But re-use follows the cadence of population, and after the Millennium the very rise of population levels eventually destroys the source materials, just as the use of the same materials had destroyed the source buildings.56 In many cases this was laziness or convenience,

53 Weigel, Thomas, Spolien und Buntmarmor im Urteil mittelaltericher Autoren, in Poeschke, Antike Spolien, 11751; and from Weigels useful overview of sources we must assume that marble meant old stock, even though this is seldom mentioned.

54 Siraj, Ahmen, Les villes antiques de lAfrique du nord partir de la description de Jean Lon lAfricanus, LAfrica Romana IX, 1991, II, 91938. See 927: Leo (14851554) notes inscriptions in several locations where thus far none have been found.

55 Leggio, Ida, Valenza del reimpiego: il case di Efeso, in Lavan Luke, & Bowden, William, eds., Theory and practice in late antique archaeology, (Leiden 2003), 35981.

56 Ward-Perkins, Bryan, From Classical Antiquity to the Middle Ages. Urban public building

16 chapter one

because cost-accounting demonstrated how cheap re-use was compared with quarrying and transport costs. Hence we fi nd Venice still spoliat-ing Pola (conveniently on the sea) at the end of the 15th century.57 Town improvement (involving the demolition of walls and the driving or widening of roads through the urban fabric to introduce light, air, health, and sanitation) was the big killer in the 19th and 20th centu-ries, symbolized by Mussolini with a pickaxe (and an agenda) helping demolish large tranches of mediaeval Rome so as to get down to those important, imperial layers. But it also happened in North Africa, where El-Atrun was being quarried for road-building materials in the 1950s.58 Before the Second World War, impatience with mediaeval layers joined disdain for re-used materials, seen as a sure sign of decadence. Louis Bertrand, writing about the Byzantines at Dougga, is typical.59 In other words, post-antique building using classical materials were viewed until recently as awkward and barbaric.

In Moslem lands in the earlier Middle Ages, in contrast to Christian Europe, populations rise, settling in sometimes newly-founded cities, or profi ting from existing local materials, such as Gafsa60 and Hims, the latter paved and with fountains by the 9th century.61 The rise in population produced from the 7th to the 11th centuries a prodigious increase in the variety of consumer goods,62 and this prosperity some-times included a passion for often grand-scale building. For centuries

in Northern and Central Italy A.D. 300850, (Oxford, 1984), 203ff.: Spoliation and reuse of unwanted buildings.

57 Letts, Malcolm, ed., The pilgrimage of Arnold von Harff Knight from Cologne, through Italy, Syria . . . [in 14969], (London 1946), 745: on the right hand outside the town is an ancient and splendid palace built of great stones [i.e. theatre of Julia, of which only the hole it left in the hillside now remains]. Thiry men could not move one of the stones from its place . . . the Venetians are now causing the palace to be broken up and are building their palaces in Venice therewith.

58 Christian monuments of Cyrenaica, 232, for a coastal road from Marsa Susa to Derna.

59 Bertrand, Louis, Les Villes dOr: Algrie et Tunisie romains, Paris 1921; cited in Prin-gle, Denys, The defence of Byzantine Africa from Justinian to the Arab Conquest: an account of the military history and archaeology of the African provinces in the sixth and seventh centuries, (Oxford 1981), 6: la hte avec des matriaux demprunt . . . ces btiments parasites et misrables, qui symbolisent en quelque faon le rtrcissement de lEmpire arriv lextrme priode de sa dcadence.

60 Fagnan, Afrique septentrionale, 6971 for a description of her ancient remains. 61 E.g. Al-Baladuri 206, writing of Hims; or Al-Yaxqubi (d.897?) writing of fountains

and paved streets in Gafsa; cf. Wiet, G., ed., Description du Maghreb en 276/389 extrait du Kitab al-Buldan, (Algiers 1962), 17. Aleppo has had a public toilet near the Khan al-Sabun, fi tted out in marble, since the 12th century.

62 Citarella, Armand O., Il commercio di Amalfi nellalto Medioevo, (Salerno 1977), 38.

introduction 17

Islam led, and Europe followed. Much of our period is too early for any scholarly study of population in Europe; but Ibn Khaldun (born 1332), in his Muqaddimah (chapters 3 & 4), explains the mechanics of the rise, fall and ruination of cities, and the place of marble therein.63 Dynasties rise and fall, and the monuments of a given dynasty are proportionate to its original power.64 In other words, the Middle Ages thought it natural to measure power via monuments.

Knowledge and utility of the past

In many areas of knowledge, the past was imbued in mediaeval times with recognised authority.65 The builders of mediaeval structures surely knew that much of the material they were using was originally pagan or Early Christian, although probably in many cases not which was which. If they had such knowledge, would they have cared? Of course, the waters are muddied by the Christianisation of the Empire, the building of churches which in construction and decoration followed the general style of pagan basilicas, and the continuation under the Byzantine Empire of nearly the same range of monumental activities of pre-Christian dayshippodromes and theatres, basilicas and baths, statues and mosaic fl oors, sarcophagi, coins and metalwork. The only modes which drop almost out of sight are narrative relief sculpture (monumental and otherwise), and 3D sculpture. There are attested early examples of pagan statues and reliefs being hammered to negate their numen, and it is not known when the practice ceased. An easier method was somehow to convert such statues.66

Here, architectural members are probably more innocent than free-standing sculpture. Except for the (exceptional) case of Constantine furnishing his new capital from the treasures of the Empire, I know of no evidence for the deliberate re-use of such pagan sculptures (of any dimensions) when known to be pagan. Free-standing Christian

63 dvd_ibn_khaldun_extracts.doc.64 Muqaddimah, Book 3.16; on the web in Franz Rosenthals edition at http://www

.muslimphilosophy.com/ik/Muqaddimah/.65 Sansterre, Jean-Marie, Lautorit du pass dans les socits mdivales, (Rome 2004),

passim.66 Franzoni, Claudio, Presente del passato: le forme classiche nel medioevo, in

Castelnuovo, Enrico, & Sergi, Giuseppe, eds., Arte e Storia III (Milan 2004), 32959; 3412 for a table of reuse of images; 33947 on the conversio of images.

18 chapter one

sculpture of any kind is of course rare before the 11th century, so we might tentatively posit a lack of interest in the form. Again, although there were certainly plenty of pagan sculptures above ground through-out the Middle Ages, they do not appear as so much as a blip on the radar. Antique architecture is a different matter, and there are several examples of Christian inscriptions added to converted temples to under-line their new purity. The most prized element of pagan and ruined Christian structures was their columns, which were precious enough to be re-used even when severely damaged. Thus churches in almost any Italian town (especially from Rome to points south, and further north on the seabord), and any early mosque in Syria or North Africa, will demonstrate sometimes painstaking efforts to patch old columns, to match them carefully (as for example at S. Agnese fuori le Mura in Rome).67 Frequently, bases and impost blocks have to be introduced to disguise the fact that disparate shafts have been employed. Sighting along the bases of the nave columns of SM in Trastevere, Rome, or along the capitals of Pisa Duomo, proves the point. That marble was indeed precious is demonstrated, as Deliyannis observes, by the use of that term (or indeed very precious) to modify the noun marble every time such patronage is mentioned in Agnellus mid-9th century Book of Pontiffs of the Church of Ravenna.68

There are also plentiful examples of the re-use of earlier Christian pieces, so that we might believe their careful incorporation into a new setting indicates at least the veneration of the Christian past (and not just a shortage of materials?). A good example are the transennae in S. Clemente, Rome. While we have no knowledge of just how old the re-builders believed these remnants of the Guiscards sack to have been, they occupy the same place of honour in the later basilica as they had done in the earlier (though why some of the splendid antique columns from the lower basilica were not put to use in the upper rebuildstructural reasons, perhaps?we do not know. The display of 8th-century transennae in the 5th-century S. Sabina indicates that new pieces would also be carved to grace an existing setting. Of a nearby example, that of the building of S. Nicola in Carcere re-using

67 Ciranna, Simonetta, Spolia e caratteristiche del reimpiego nella Basilica di San Lorenzo fuori le Mura a Roma, (Rome 2000), 1025 & fi gs 958.

68 Agnellus, Pontiffs, passim, and under marmor in the glossary.

introduction 19

standing antique column suites (and adding spectacular coloured shafts69 from somewhere else for the nave), the most we can say is that the pre-existing structures did not frighten away the Christians. In this case we cannot even be defi nite that the mediaeval builders knew these were once pagan temples. Many such temples were converted into churches, not many in the earlier centuries, but laterwhen perhaps any folk-memory had vanished.70

For mediaeval people, living in once-Roman cities, familiarity with Roman buildings was constant; they often lived in them, stored their grain or animals in them, and sometimes dismantled them for building materials. But with the cleared and sanitized archaeological sites in the West today, it is diffi cult to grasp that this was indeed the natural way to make use of the past. Elsewhere they still do: at Heraklea under Latmos (Turkey) the school playground is the Hellenistic agora with a lower storey of shops; the scenae frons of the theatre at Alabanda is part of the farmyard with the farm attached. In the same village the wall to the Moslem cemetery is made with Roman sarcophagus slabs; and a tomb-terrace has been converted into a wall by simply up-ending the sarcophagi.71 At Aizanoi, blocks and slabs litter the Roman river port, and many house and farm-walls are built of piled-up antiquities. At Uzancaburc, column drums make farmyard walls. In Bosra (Syria), the schoolchildren walk to school on the Roman cardo, and some of them live on it, remnants of its colonnade built into their houses. Elsewhere, scholars still do their work by studying farm walls, in which myriad inscriptions have been built.72 200 years ago such cityscapes were common. At the ancient and still-inhabited city of Mut, Leake easily saw the plan of the ancient city: Its chief streets and temples, and other public buildings, may be clearly distinguished, and long colonnades and porticoes, with the lower parts of the columns in their original places. Pillars of verd-antique, breccia, and other marbles, lie

69 Bosman, Lex, The power of tradition. Spolia in the architecture of St. Peters in the Vatican, (Hiversum 2004) 526 for the start of the conspicuous Christian interest in coloured marbles and granites.

70 Marangoni, Delle cose gentilesche, 2568 for Rome; 268ff. for an A-Z listing, mostly in Italy.

71 Fellows, Travels, 268: but much has gone, for Fellows found the positions of four important gates are now marked by lines of sarcophagi on either side of the road, from the walls into the plains; those to the east and west extend for more than a mile.

72 Levick, B., et al., Monuments from the Aezanitis, (London 1988): cf. the fi ndspots for funerary stelae (cats 73190) and doorstones (cats 191532).

20 chapter one

half-buried in different parts, or support the remains of ruined mosques or houses.73

Evidence, documentation and the search for meaning(s)

But what did he mean by that? Metternichs immortal remark on the death of Talleyrand brings us an eternal truth, which is that not all actions necessarily have meanings, whether they happen to be documented or not. The problem is complicated by re-use, so that we must wonder whether the defi nitions in the 1994 Venice Charter for the Conservation and Restoration of Monuments and Sites74 can ever apply to structures with re-used materials, since a monument is Imbued with a message from the past (Preamble), and is inseparable from the history to which it bears witness and from the setting in which it occurs (Article 7 ). Movement surely destroys meaning, and except when faced by evidence it must always be a moot point whether the resurrection of elements into a new structure exudes any kind of osmosis from the old. Statements such as Although in the past architects had sometimes reused older materials for economic reasons, from Constantines age on, such marble re-use came to signal continuity with Romes great past would be more comforting were they supported by coherent and datable evidence.75

Even in Antiquity, when we do have documents of some kind, it is not always easy to know exactly how to interpret them, so that frequently we might chorus with Westermann-Angerhausen that The basis . . . in the written sources is more laconic than the conclusions drawn from them.76 Thus when Barbarius Pompeianus proclaims that he repaved Avella (Campania) silicibus e montibus excisis non e dirutis monumen-tis advectis, this could be a defensive response to the various edicts forbidding the pilfering of monuments, or even some refl ection of local quarrying prosperity. Yet when Socrates Scholasticus complains of the repairs to the walls of Chalcedon subsequent to theft of sections of

73 Leake, William M., Journal of a tour in Asia Minor, (London 1824), 1089. 74 Smith, Laurajane, Uses of heritage, (New York 2006) 88ff. 75 Kessler, Herbert L., & Zacharias, Johanna, Rome 1300: on the path of the pilgrim,

(New Haven 2000), 17. 76 Westermann-Angerhausen, H., Did Theophano leave her mark on Ottonian

sumptuary arts?, in Davids, Adelbert, ed., The Empress Theophano: Byzantium and the West at the turn of the fi rst millennium, (Cambridge 1995), 24464; see 245.

introduction 21

them by Valens (375 AD), Whence it is that in the present day one may see in certain parts of the wall very inferior materials laid upon prodigiously large stones, forming those unsightly patches which were made on that occasion, this is certainly in part an aesthetic response.77 However, the Chalcedonians were far from happy with Valens, and hence the more likely to be hyper-critical. Needless to say, the Papacy knew plenty about pilfering.78

But in the Middle Ages, Delogu half-jokingly describes the work of the Dark Ages historian as a doubtful narrative, based on ten-dentious oral traditions and scanty written records.79 What is more, textual history is a collection of half-truths waiting to be demolished by the wrecking-ball of archaeology.80 A more moderate position is surely reasonable: for example, Wickham tends to disbelieve narrative sourcesbut I have presumed that they refl ect a rhetorical fi eld.81 He is surely correct, and the label of rhetoric is not necessarily derogatory. Interest in tall stories and the miraculous is very old indeed; and many assertions in the fl ourishing mirabilia literature of the Middle Ages (and not just dealing with Rome) are certainly fantastical or provably incorrect, as with a persistent Islamic tradition about the Colossus of Rhodes.82 But they give us some insight into the workings of mediaeval minds, as does the tendency to mix both the original and the borrowed in written accounts just as in building.83

77 Both examples cited in Coates-Stephens, Robert, Epigraphy as spoliathe reuse of inscriptions in early medieval buildings, PBSR LXX 2002, 27596; see 280.

78 Lanciani, Wanderings, 260: Clement VIII Aldobrandini (15921605) had the two columns nearest the altar of the near-ruinous S Agnese (pavonazzetto and portasanta) removed for his family chapel in SM sopra Minerva.

79 Delogu, Paolo, Transformation of the Roman world: refl ections on current research, in Chrysos, Evangelos, & Wood, Ian, eds., East and West: Modes of communica-tion, (Leiden 1999), 24357; see 247.

80 A view which has no room here, writes Lavan in the introduction to his Lavan Luke, & Bowden, William, eds., Theory and practice in late antique archaeology, (Leiden 2003), XI.

81 Wickham: Framing, 8; and for rhetoric not accuracy, cf. Zanna, P., Descriptiones urbium and elegy in Latin and vernacular in the early Middle Ages, Studi medievali series 3, 32, 1991, 52396; e.g. 573: for Hildebert of Lavardin, Archbishop of Tours (10561133), the citys structures are immortal, and cannot be erased by time, or any other natural or human forces.

82 Conrad, Lawrence I., The Arabs and the Colossus, JRAS series 3 6 1996, 16587: the multiple stories about its destruction by the Arabs can be traced to one unreliable source, so is a legend originating in an apocalyptic metaphor.

83 Stansbury, Mark Jackson, Collected works. Spolia and Latin textual culture, 500900, PhD (Boston College 2002), 16 for the disentangling of Bede, and 6ff for the relation-ship of such writing to architectural re-use.

22 chapter one

One of the problems throughout this book is the dearth of contem-porary documentation on matters architectural or even just construc-tional. Mediaeval drawings of antiquities are nearly non-existent (apart from those of the 13th-century Villard de Honnecourt). Accounts of antique cities and their monuments are in short supply, as are detailed accounts of contemporary buildings which we know re-use antiquities.84 It is easy to guess why (in general terms) Justinian built Haghia Sophia or Charlemagne Aachen, but impossible to know why they used the materials they did. Even when we possess authored texts, we can derive little information from them about intention. So that in spite of his writings,85 we do not know what Abbot Suger thought about marble use, column sources, or the aesthetics of re-use and their place in church regenerationany more than it is clear just what Bernard of Clair-vaux did not like about trends in sculpture in his age. If, as Del Bozzo affi rms,86 the same red and grey brecchia found in Haghia Sophia is also to be seen in fonts in S. Marco and in the Duomo in Lucera, was the sophisticated mediaeval connoisseur of marble expected to draw some message from such parallels? There is no evidence that this ever hap-pened, although todays historians continue to read meanings without evidence. Indeed, for Tronzo contemporary expectations with regard to the medieval frame of reference are too high, for mediaeval accounts never allude to the kind of national cultural and artistic characteristics which are commonly assumed today.87 Trade documentation is much more plentiful,88 but usually restricted to the specifi cation of regular commodities, including slaves. Other legal documents tend to be very general and formulaic. The temptation is therefore to backtrack from the monuments to how the marble got there to embellish them. Pisa, for example, imported a lot of marble for her Duomo (and proclaims

84 Gerola, Giuseppe, Larchitettura deutero-bizantina in Ravenna, Ricordi di Ravenna Medioevale per il sesto centenario della morte di Dante, (Ravenna 1921), 17112; 21: bemoans la quasi assoluta mancanza di fonti storiche dirette.

85 Tronzo, William, Regarding Norman Sicily: art, identity and court culture in the later Middle Ages, RmJbuch 35 2003/2004, 101114; see 110: he makes no refer-ence to the cultural or historical origins of any of the precious vessels he acquired. The Treasury did have materials from Iran and Byzantium, so perhaps he was not equipped for such forensic enquiry.

86 Del Bufalo, Marbres de couleur, 112. 87 Tronzo, Regarding Norman Sicily, 110. 88 *Friedman, John B., & Figg, Kristen M., eds., Trade, travel and exploration in the Middle

Ages. An encyclopedia (NY/London 2000), with a useful preliminary list divided by topic (e.g. architecture, crusades, economics, marvels & wonders, technologies).

introduction 23

its excellence in inscriptions) but, except in a few instances, we know little about where it came from. The same dilemma applies to Venice, where the gaudy trappings for S. Marco are simply not documented, their erection dated, or their beauty hymnedand this by a Republic which constructed a careful and largely spurious antique heritage for itself into which such a monument would surely have fi tted very well. Historians therefore fall on what references have survived (such as Glabers white mantle of churches after the Millennium), and often force more out of phrases than they can plausibly bear. Furthermore, the earlier the monument we wish to study in the West, the less we fi nd. For, as Brown points out, we know less about earlier mediaeval churches than we do about Middle Eastern ones, because in the West later, usually bigger, ones were often built on top, destroying evidence, so that It is hard to conjure up the very real solidity of their original grandeur89which takes us back to Wickhams rhetorical fi eld.

Archaeological remains are a type of document, of course. But although matters have certainly improved over the past few decades, there are many sites once capable of yielding important databut which were dug before anyone had much interest in mediaeval archaeology. It was normal to dig down to the classical layers and ignore the rest. Hence we know less than we might about the mediaeval occupation of the Roman Forum, or of a large number of important Roman villa sites. Excavators at Haidra (Tunisia) rejoiced in the systematic excavation of two churchesbut complained that before the Second World War fi ve others were emptied without any record being made.90 Given the natural superiority some archaeologists would like to assume as scientists, it is worth underlining that it is earlier archaeologists as much as the inhabitants who have destroyed the evidence for much of North Africa,91 as elsewhere. For our knowledge of Islamic layers of occupation over classical remains, the problem is particularly acute, with inadequate reporting, because once again diggers have been more interested in what was underneath.92 As David Kennedy writes, so

89 Brown, Peter, The rise of Western Christendom: triumph and diversity, A.D. 2001000, 2nd ed., (Oxford 2003).

90 Baratte, Franois, & Bejaoui, Fethi, Eglises urbaines, glises rurales dans la Tunisie palochrtienne: nouvelles recherches darchitecture et durbanisme, Acadmie des Inscriptions et Belles-Lettres, Comptes Rendus, Nov.Dec. 2001, 144797; see 1454.

91 Leone, Anna, Late Antique North Africa: production and changing use of build-ings in urban areas, Al-Masaq, 15.1, March 2003, 2133; see 21.

92 Walmsley, Alan, Production, exchange and regional trade in the Islamic east

24 chapter one

much that is visible is inadequately recorded and analysed, and so much of what is recorded is unpublished.93 As a result too little is known about Islamic occupation at Baalbek, Miletus, Ephesus,94 or Carthage, or for that matter about Delos, Delphi, Athens or Chios. Another, later Procopius would be very useful. His work, although that of a master of the topos, has proved accurate, and verifi able from other sources,95 its explication involving an exemplary comparison of document and monument.96 A study such as this should encourage art historians to take a broader view of their material, to recognize that historians and archaeologists approach re-use differently,97 but that all approaches should be used in an area where hard evidence is so scarce.

An irony is that the general practice of stripping sites back to some original can be as misleading as trying to refl ect their various trans-formations. So that the innocent tourist might view the Mausoleum of Augustus in Rome as a marbled site unchanged since the Emperors day, not realising that it has previously served as both bullring and auditorium.98 Yet the diffi culties sometimes facing archaeologists in dealing with the mediaeval centuries are starkly illustrated by a stan-

Mediterranean: old structures, new systems, in Hansen, Inge Lyse, and Wickham, Chris, eds., The long eighth century, (Leiden 2000), 265343; see 266.

93 Kennedy, David, The identity of Roman Gerasa: an archaeological approach, in Identities in the Eastern Mediterranean in Antiquity, (Canberra 1997), Mediterranean Archaeology 11, 1998, 3969; see 66; Vernoit, Stephen, The rise of Islamic archaeol-ogy, Muqarnas 14 1997 110.

94 Ward-Perkins, Bryan, Urban survival and urban transformation in the eastern Mediterranean, in Brogiolo G.P., ed., Early Medieval Towns in West Mediterranean, (Man-tua, 1996), 14353; see 151: at Ephesus the excavators who, at the beginning of this century, cleared the great Arkadiane and Embolos colonnaded streets, did not even bother to excavate the shops which lined them on both sides.

95 Rouch, Charlotte, Carri, Jean-Michel, & Duval, Nol, De Aedifi ciis: le texte de Procope et ses ralits, LAntiquit tardive 8 2000, especially 81104; Feissel, Denis, Les difi ces de Justinien au tmoignage de Procope et de lpigraphie; 3143: Rocques, Denis, Les constructions de Justinien de Procope de Csare; and 5966 Whitby, Michael, Pride and prejudice in Procopius Buildings: imperial images of Constantinople.

96 Squatriti, Paolo, Mohammed, the early medieval Mediterranean, and Char-lemagne, (review of The Corrupting Sea), in Early Medieval Europe 11.3 2002, 26379; 274: notes a basic s