Germany, it is pretty well proved, got the seed of her glorious Gothic from France or Italy, and nourished it right royally. But the pointed arch is much more ancient than German Gothic. It is to be seen in the tomb of Atreus at Mycenæ, in an Etruscan tomb at Tarquinii, and even in the subterranean gallery at Antequere in Mexico.[129] The pointed arches in the Mosque El Haram on Monte Morea date from Caliph Omar's time, between 637 and 640. The Mosque of Amrou, with its curious combination of pointed and horse-shoe arches, dates from 640. The church of St. Francis at Assisi (1226) has generally been accepted as the first instance in Italy, and it was soon followed in the design for the church of S. Antonio at Padua five years later; but there are two little churches annexed to the monastery of Subiaco on Monte Telaso, which were built, so say the chroniclers, one in A.D. 981, the other in 1053, in which some arches are round and others acute.[130] Hope[131] quotes examples of this mixture of round and acute arches in the ninth and tenth centuries at Cluny, 1093-1134; the Abbey of Malmesbury in England, which is in Lombard style; St. Mark's at Venice, 976-1071; Subiaco, 847, and others. "But," as Selvatico remarks,[132] "these are isolated instances determined by static reasons, and do not point to a system." The Arab used the pointed arch as a decorative principle, as well as for stability. As the style spread in Europe it got modified, some countries keeping to the ancient type, and others changing its proportions. So the Arab arch became in the eleventh century the germ of the ogival arch, and in the twelfth expanded in the North into the most glorious forms of ecclesiastical Gothic architecture. The Comacines made their first steps towards a more florid style, about the end of the eleventh century. The change, as in all such growths of circumstance, was a gradual one. First, a little more ornamentation, then a slight change in the forms of arches; next, a less fixed ground-plan of the churches, a mingling of the Greek cross with the square-walled Basilica. After these slight trials of their wings, came flights of imagination, and endless variety of form and ornamentation; that variety which could only spring from the ideas of many minds, united in one work. To see the earliest signs of a wider scheme of design we must go to the region of Parma. Here in a little town called Borgo S. Donnino--the ancient "Fidentia Julia"--about fifteen miles north of Parma, is one of the finest early Romanesque churches in Italy. It was a great place for pilgrimages in the Middle Ages, as it contained the tomb of S. Domninus, who was martyred in the persecutions of Maximian. Great miracles were worked at his shrine, and religious fervour rose to such a height in the eleventh and twelfth centuries, that the devotees collected money enough to build a church, which they desired should be the finest and most majestic of those times.