All these rough and inchoate attempts at the beautiful, prepared the
world for the acceptance of the Arabic influence, which is said to
have been imported at the end of the eleventh century by the
Crusaders, to whose pious enterprise some attribute the whole of the
splendid Gothic art of the three succeeding centuries. But the marking
characteristic of the Arabic arch is wanting; the ogee shape is seldom
to be found in Christian architecture;[485] and the pointed arch so
naturally results from the intersection of the round arches, that we
cannot but look upon these causes as co-incident.

I have elsewhere remarked how often in art different causes co-operate
to form a style. The father and mother are of different nationalities,
and the result shows the characteristics of its double parentage. The
learned antiquaries, who draw their arguments mainly from the form of
the arch, must settle whence and how Gothic art in stone came into
Europe. It was doubtless the effect or result of more than one cause.

But in as far as it influenced textile art, we have come to the period
when it must be studied in Sicily, the half-way house and
resting-place of the Crusaders on their highroad to the Holy Land.

Sicily, which had succeeded to Constantinople as being the great
manufacturing mart during the Middle Ages, was, in the hands of the
Moors, the origin and source of all European Gothic textile art. Yet
even at Palermo and Messina they were controlled by the traditions of
the schools of Greece, ancient and modern, and by Babylonian, Indian,
and African forms and symbolisms.

Byzantium furnished many of their designs, which were sometimes of
very remote date, though pressed into the service of the new style and
the Church.

These and all the streams of ecclesiastical decoration throughout
Europe flowed towards Rome, and were re-issued with the fiat and seal
of the Central Church, which also afterwards presided over the art of
the Renaissance.[486]

By studying what remains to us of fragments and records we know all
the materials which clothed the primitive and mediaeval Church, and we
find that there was but little originality in textile decoration or in
the forms of dress, which either resembled those of the priests in the
Jewish synagogue or those of the heathen temples; and were adapted
from traditional patterns.

The constant repetition of the cross and the signs of the Passion,
with the emblems of saints and martyrs, w