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degenerate Romans, and to find new inspiration through the aid of oriental artists. His conclusion of a treaty of peace with Nushirwan, and the intercourse he carried on with Persia, brought to him many skilful designers from the East, and supplied him with much of that artistic element by means of which he was enabled to make his greatest buildings monuments of beauty, such as have never been surpassed from his time to the present.

The greatest of all the monuments erected by him—the Church of Santa Sophia at Constantinople—differed from all previous structures, from the fact that its beauty was mainly derived from its magnificently vaulted areas, covered internally with the gold grounded mosaics, by means of which he not only decorated his structure but recorded the tenets of his faith. In all subsequent buildings on the soil of Italy, down almost to the present date, the use of this decorative adjunct exercised no unimportant influence. The early Christian church, whether it assumed the type of the ancient basilica, that is, a long parallelogram divided into a nave and aisles by rows of columns and terminated by semicircular apsides at the ends opposite to the entrances, or whether built with vaultings on the principle originated by the Romans in their simple brick structures, alike offered large areas for the introduction of mosaic; and the effect of splendour was obtained by its introduction little less than by the large dimensions and simple recurrence of majestic architectural parts in the lengthened vistas of the early Christian interiors.

Before proceeding to follow the influence exercised by Byzantine architecture proper upon the Mediæval architecture of Europe generally, it behoves us to dwell for a moment (and far too briefly for its interest) upon the readiness with which its leading features were accepted, and yet diversified in the act of acceptance, by the earliest followers of the prophet Mahomet, so soon as their cessation from the immediate