posed by the acceptance of Latin translations of Aristotle and the difficulties raised by the urgent need to reconcile biblical revelation with pagan science. And all of them wrote their treatises and conducted their disputations in the dog Latin, distinguished by its precision though rarely by literary grace, which provided a common language for medieval Europe and the understanding of which everywhere divided the literate from the user of the uncultivated vernacular.
The lay world was in some respects separate from the clerical, but here too we find widespread evidence of a common culture. One of the most remarkable creations of the twelfth century was romance poetry. The stories of Arthur, of Charlemagne, and of Tristan were read and heard in every country in Europe in the thirteenth century. The literary dominance of French was facilitated by the use of the language by the knightly aristocracies of England and Sicily. The stories elaborated by French romancers were repeated in other languages as well. The literary dominance of romance was assisted by the prevalence of knighthood and chivalry, also partly French in their origins but spread everywhere in the medieval world. A knight could recognize his social equal anywhere in Europe just as a priest or a bishop could.
The pan-European expansion of forms of culture found its most obvious--and still surviving--expression in Gothic architecture. Any modern tourist can see that the cathedrals of Salisbury or Florence belong in a general way to the same architectural genre as the central masterpieces of Chartres and Notre Dame. The invention of the Gothic style in France in the mid-twelfth century was followed by an extraordinary spread to every part of Europe to replace the more localized Romanesque taste which it had replaced. It would not be misleading to take the basilica of St Francis at Assisi--a Gothic church built in Italy in the mid-thirteenth century in imitation of French models above the tomb of a saint whose order spread throughout the western world under papal patronage--as a visual symbol of the European unity of the high Middle Ages.
In the last centuries of the medieval world between 1300 and 1500, with the decline of crusading activity, the devas-
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