A fascinating Journey through the Middle Ages and the Beginnings of Europe!
Come and travel with us the Routes of TRANSROMANICA! You´ll visit Highlights of the European Romanesque style and encounter a fascinating époque: The Middle Ages!
It was around the year 1000 in medieval Occident that a common language of art spread for the first time through out Europe: the Romanesque style. Artists from all over Europe were inspired by Roman and early Christian tradition. Using local traditions gave them a regional character.
Therefore, the Romanesque style is the first common language of the old continent: It is a language inspired by myths and legends, a fascinating language whose forms of expression reflects the geographic characteristics and a variety of semantic features of medieval Europe over a period of 300 years. The church with its impressive cathedrals and abbeys was accepted as moral, but also social and economic authority. Yet it was more and more opposed by the upcoming cities as secular centres.
Societies in medieval Europe and the Romanesque style
We know today that the European medieval societies were extremely mobile despite the difficulties involved in travelling. Thousands and thousands of travellers journeyed on the water and through the countryside, rode with their horses over mountains, travelled with wagons across the land, with ships along the shore and across the seas, on rafts down the rivers and most of the time they travelled on foot.
A common way of thinking and shared values became manifest in architecture as well as in fine arts, music, poetry and science, still persisting to date. Romanesque style cathedrals were the focus of urban life. They were like books carved in stone using frescos, sculptures and engravings that appealed to poor people and scholars alike.
Scientific knowledge in medieval times
People of the Middle Ages already thought of our planet as a globe, depicted by nearly all medieval illustrations that show Jesus Christ with a sphere in his hand – as a symbol for the earth. Also prominent theologians like Albertus Magnus or Thomas of Aquin shared this assumption. When Nikolaus Kopernikus removed our earth from the centre of the universe much later on, he relied on a medieval scientist named Johannes de Sacrobosco. In spite of a very small privileged group of educated people, the first European universities were founded already in the 12th Century. Lectures were held under the open skies, in squares, in front of churches, in cloisters and on the open road.
Despite obvious differences between people, traditions and cultures, this “first” Europe, which has its origin in the Middle Ages, incorporated values that united the continent and reflect the origins of today’s Europe: Unity in diversity.
The Romanesque era is an enchanted world full of allegory and regulation, power and imagination, deformation and order and it stands for the Middle Ages. Romanesque style means TRANSROMANICA!
As veritable descendants of those medieval travellers and pilgrims and for your TRANSROMANICA trip we offer you the ancient, still valid motto for the ‘Peregrine’, the pilgrims: “Ultreia – Carry on!”