Page:A History of Architecture in All Countries Vol 2.djvu/516

500 SARACENIC ARCHITECTURE. Part III. of prayer; and, then, by a natural growth of style, they gradually elaborated a new style of details and new arrangements, in which it is often difficult to trace the source whence they were derived. In Egypt the wealth of ancient remainS; in j^articular of Roman pillars, rendered the task easy; and mosques were enclosed and palaces designed and built with less thought and less trouble than had occurred almost anywhere else. The same happened in Barbary and in Spain, In the latter country, especially, a rearrangement of Roman materials was all that was required. It was only when these were exhausted, after some centuries of toil, that we find the style becoming original ; but its form was not that of Syria or of Egypt, but of Spanish birth, and confined to that locality. When the Turks conquered Asia-Minor, their style was that of the Byzantine basilicas which they found there, and when they entered Constantinoj^le they did not even care to carry a style with which they were familiar across the Bosphorus, but framed their mosques upon a type of church peculiar to that city, of which Sta. Sophia was the crowning example. It is true that, after centuries of practice most of these hetero- geneous elements became fused into a complete style. This style pos- sesses so much that is entirely its own as to make it sometimes difficult to detect the germs, taken from the older styles of architecture, which gave rise to many of its most striking peculiarities. These, however, are never entirely obliterated. Everywhere the conviction is forced upon us that originally the Moslems had no style of their own, but adopted those which they found practised in the countries to which they came. In other words, the conquered or associated people still continued to build as they had built before their conversion, merely adapting their former methods to the purposes of their new religion. After a time this Mahomedan element thus introduced into the styles of different countries produced a certain amount of uniformity, — increased, no doubt, by the intercommunications arising from the uniformity of religion. In this Avay at last a style was elaborated, tolerably homogeneous, though never losing entii'ely the local peculiarities due to the earlier styles out of which it rose, and which still continue to mark most distinctly the various nationalitiei that made up the great Empire of Islam.