By the year 1000, many of the Mediterranean's cultural patterns - not least Christianity, literacy and building in stone - were also spreading north and east. Politically, this was caused by the emergence of larger and more solid state formations in the old northern hinterland, as exemplified by the Moravians, but the pattern was not limited to politics. Not only had Slavic-speakers replaced Germanic-speakers as the dominant force over much of barbarian Europe, and some Germanic-speakers replaced Romans and Celts in some of the rest, but, even more fundamentally, Mediterranean dominance had been broken. Move forward a thousand years, and the world had turned. This was, in fact, the ancient world in western Eurasia: a dominant Mediterranean circle lording it over an undeveloped northern hinterland.
The further east you went, the simpler it all became: fewer iron tools, less productive agricultures and a lower population density. Much of it was dominated by Germanic-speakers, who had some iron tools and weapons, but who worked generally in wood, had little literacy and never built in stone. Otherwise, apart from some bits west of the Rhine and south of the Danube which were already beginning to march to the tune of a more Mediterranean beat, the rest of Europe was home to subsistence-level farmers, organized in small-scale political units. This world had philosophy, banking, professional armies, literature, stunning architecture and rubbish collection. The circle of the Mediterranean, newly united under Roman imperial domination, hosted a politically sophisticated, economically advanced and culturally developed civilization.
“When this story opens at the birth of Christ, the European landscape was marked by extraordinary contrasts. Rome Resurgent: War and Empire in the Age of Justinian For Christianity, the apse worked nicely for the sacred space of the altar, and the basilica was a building form essentially designed for meetings, which worked, too, as a space for church services” It had long been used for town council buildings and audience chambers across the Mediterranean world, with the apse being occupied by the presiding figure of power (or indeed the emperor in the case of a palace audience chamber). This was a rectangular, shallow-vaulted building, usually equipped with aisles around an elevated central nave and an apse at one end. In the fourth century, therefore, as imperial patronage and ongoing processes of conversion caused large numbers of specialist churches to be built for the first time, the religion took over an old form of public building from the Graeco-Roman world: the basilica. Local Christian communities met in converted houses, and especially in the face of periodic imperial persecution, the religion had developed no specific architectural forms of its own. “When Constantine converted to Christianity, there basically was no Christian architecture.
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