Gothic cathedral: Nave of Rouen cathedral (1200s AD) Northern France gets rich enough to build cathedrals In the late 1100s and early 1200s AD, the kings of France, Philip and his son Louis, [...]
Early Gothic architecture: Notre Dame of Paris (1160s AD) What came after Romanesque? After the Romanesque period in architecture, around 1100 AD, architects in western Europe gradually started to build Christian churches and palaces in [...]
Cloister at Moissac (ca. 1100 AD, southern France) Where do cloisters come from? Cloisters were a medieval kind of building that developed out of Greek and then Roman peristyles. What is [...]
Medieval cathedrals: Façade of Amiens cathedral in France What is a cathedral? A cathedral is any Christian church where a bishop has his headquarters. No matter how big a church is, if there's [...]
The Romanesque Abbaye aux Hommes, in Caen (about 1050 AD) Vikings settle in Caen Caen is a port town in north-western France, on the Atlantic Ocean. When the Vikings invaded France in the 700s AD, [...]
Caen - Abbaye aux Dames What is the Abbaye aux Dames? Matilda of Flanders ordered her architects to build this Christian church about 1050 AD in her capital at Caen. (Find out why.) The Abbaye [...]
Aachen cathedral (begun 792 AD) One of the first ambitious buildings in Western Europe after the fall of Rome was Charlemagne's chapel at his capital of Aachen (now in northern Germany) about 792 [...]
Al-Azhar Mosque, Cairo (Egypt, 900s AD) Fatimids built new mosques As soon as the Fatimid dynasty took over ruling Egypt, in 908 AD, the new rulers of Egypt needed to show how [...]
Osian Sun temple, 700s AD Two styles of temples: north and south By the 700s AD, after the collapse of the Guptan Empire, there were two different styles of temple-building in India, [...]
Hagia Irene in Istanbul (ancient Constantinople) What is an apse? An apse is a rounded end of a building. You most often find an apse in a basilica or a [...]
