Influence of Byzantine Art in Sicily, Byzantine art has also left traces which show its influence through the rule of the Moors even to that of the Normans. Thus the Church of S. Giovanni degli Eremiti at Palermo (pl. 16, fig. 16) is a Byzantine design, and the domed Church of Martorana (fig. 13), built in the first half of the twelfth century, exhibits a completely Byzantine plan, the vault resting on four columns, while the interior is enriched with marble decorations and gold mosaics.
Byzantine Art in the Eastern the structures erected in the Eastern Empire between the eleventh and fifteenth centuries may be named the following: the Church of Agios Pantokrator, of the twelfth century, at Constantinople; the Katholikon (pl. 16, figs. 12, 13), the Bishop's Church, the churches of S. Taxiarchis (fig. ir), St. Mary in the great convent, St. Theodorus, St. Nikodemus, and St. John, at Athens; St. Taxiarchis on Cythnos; the conventual Church of Daphne near Thebes (fig. ro); that of the Blessed Virgin at Mistra, in the Morea, etc. To the beginning of the thirteenth century, when Trebizond was an independent empire, belong some churches at that place, of which Sta. Sophia, having a baptistery and a bell-tower, is the most important.
While in Greece church-architecture continued unaltered until Turkish rule brought it to an end, it spread also northward into the neighboring lands—that is, into the Christian kingdoms upon the lower Danube— where it underwent certain modifications without any material change of the original plan. Thus, while in Greece the complete ground-plan forms
a square, in these more northern churches the cruciform shape is apparent, and the arms end in polygons, like the eastern apse. An example of this arrangement, of very small dimensions, is shown in Figure 14, which represents the little Church of St. Mary on a height outside Semendria.
Powerful as was the Turkish sway, it did not extirpate Christianity among the conquered peoples: it only robbed them of the possibility of a progressive development and kept them for centuries sunk in ignorance, until finally, as in Greece, Roumania, and Servia in modern times, civili zation took a new start. The restrictions under which Turkish domi nation held these peoples had yet the effect of preserving many elements of the pre-Turkish period through the intervening centuries; so that Byzantine church-architecture, though deprived of nearly all traces of its ancient originality, has come down to our time in the hands of rude masons, until latterly the invading Western civilization obliterated the last remains of the ancient style. In many districts the Turkish domi nation seems to have brought a certain development, as is shown by the church at Kurte-Ardshish (pl. 2r, fig. 3), which displays a wealth of charming Mohammedan ornamentation and an execution which betrays the hands of workmen who had practised upon imposing Mohammedan mosques.