After the early Islamic conquests, Umayyad rulers in the eastern Mediterranean built new religious monuments in regions long shaped by Byzantine art. A key example is the Dome of the Rock in Jerusalem, completed in 691/692, where Byzantine-derived techniques like marble revetment and mosaics were used to express a new Islamic political and religious message.
Between 706 and 715, the Umayyads built the Great Mosque of Damascus, using large mosaic programs and marble paneling that echoed late antique and Byzantine visual languages. This shows how ornament and techniques could move across political boundaries, even as religious identities differed.
Around 720–724, the Umayyad caliph Yazid II is associated in written sources with an order to attack or remove certain images. Later writers sometimes linked Islamic attitudes toward images with Byzantine debates, making this episode part of the wider story of how religious policy and visual culture interacted across borders.
From 726 to 843, Byzantine imperial policy at times opposed the veneration of icons, disrupting the production and display of sacred images. Even where this did not directly “cause” Islamic art practices, it formed an important backdrop for how the two neighboring cultures discussed representation, sacred space, and ornament.
In the 9th–10th centuries, Abbasid potters in Iraq developed and refined lustreware, a technique that creates a metallic shimmer over glaze. Such technical innovation mattered for exchange because ceramics were widely traded, and workshops in later periods adapted and reworked these surface effects in new regional styles.
In the 960s, the Umayyad caliphate in al-Andalus employed Byzantine-influenced gold mosaics for the Mosque–Cathedral of Córdoba, with traditional accounts describing contacts with Constantinople for materials and specialist mosaicists. This episode illustrates how technique and ornament could be transferred through diplomacy and skilled labor, not only through trade in objects.
By the 10th–11th centuries, tiraz-style textiles (honorific cloth often associated with official or courtly contexts) were produced and circulated widely in the Islamic world. Their movement as gifts, trade goods, or captured luxury items helped carry ornamental ideas—like repeating animal or geometric medallions—across the Mediterranean.
Fatimid Egypt (10th–12th centuries) produced highly skilled rock-crystal carvings, including ewers, that later traveled into Europe, often ending up in church treasuries. Their reuse and re-mounting in new settings show how luxury trade and collecting could move Islamic craftsmanship into Christian contexts, where objects gained new meanings.
In April 1204, crusaders captured and looted Constantinople, removing artworks, relics, and luxury materials from the Byzantine capital. The event weakened Byzantine control of Mediterranean routes and redistributed objects into new markets and collections, changing what was available for imitation, reuse, and trade.
From the late 13th into the 14th century, workshops in Syria and Egypt under Ayyubid and then Mamluk rule produced gilded and enameled glass (including mosque lamps and beakers) using complex firing processes. These portable luxury objects were ideal for long-distance trade, making them influential models for other glassmaking centers.
In the 15th century, commercial exchange between Venice and Mamluk Syria and Egypt intensified, moving goods such as textiles, pigments, metals, and glass in both directions. These flows shaped taste and design in Venice, where Islamic-style objects and techniques could be collected, copied, and adapted for new consumers.
On May 29, 1453, the Ottoman conquest of Constantinople ended the Byzantine Empire and reshaped political control of key Mediterranean corridors. The city’s artistic legacy did not disappear; instead, control of workshops, materials, and routes shifted, setting new conditions for how Byzantine techniques and Islamic-Ottoman artistic priorities met in architecture, ornament, and trade.
Byzantine and Islamic Artistic Exchanges: Ornament, Technique, and Trade (7th–15th centuries)