In Aquitaine an entirely different system of vaulting was accidentally introduced, and threatened at one time to spread itself over the whole of Southern Gaul. The story of the importation of this style, and the various modifications arising out of it, is somewhat strange and remarkable. Owing to the pirates who infested the Straits of Gibraltar, the trade from the Levant with the West of France and Britain, was carried on by means of caravans, which conveyed the goods across the country, from the Mediterranean to the Bay of Biscay. The goods landed at Marseilles or Narbonne were thus carried by Limoges to La Rochelle and Nantes, where they were again shipped for the North of France and Britain. The town of Perigueux, situated in the centre of Aquitaine, at that time probably the richest country in Gaul, became the head-quarters of the Venetian merchants, by whom this traffic was chiefly carried on. These Venetians, as they had in the tenth century imported the plan and decorations of St Mark’s at Venice, from the East, so they soon afterwards resolved to carry the same model with them into Aquitaine. At Perigueux they erected a church exactly after the plan of St Mark’s, being in the form of a Greek cross, crowned with one dome over the central crossing, and four domes over the four arms of the cross. The general idea of this church of St Front at Perigueux is undoubtedly borrowed from St Mark’s, but the execution seems to have been entrusted to a native artist; for, although the conception is Eastern, the style of workmanship, is that of the locality. In the original the arches and domes are spherical, while here they are polygonal and pointed, which we have seen was the Provençal system of construction. The pendentives which fill up the angles under the domes are rudely executed in horizontal corbelling, not dressed as portions of a spherical vault, as they would have been by a scientific Eastern architect.