At Cattaro the Orthodox Church is on its own ground, standing side by
side on equal terms with its Latin rival, pointing to lands where the
Filioque[14] is unknown and where the Bishop of the Old Rome has even
been deemed an intruder. The building itself is a small Byzantine
church, less Byzantine in fact in its outline than the small churches of
the Byzantine type at Zara, Spalato, and Traü. The single dome rises,
not from the intersection of a Greek cross, but from the middle of a
single body, and, resting as it does on pointed arches, it suggests
the thought of Périgueux and Angoulême. But this arrangement, which is
shared by a neighboring Latin church, is well known throughout the East.

The Latin duomo, which has been minutely described by Mr. Neale,[15] is
of quite another type, and is by no means Dalmatian in its general look.
A modern west front with two western towers does not go for much; but it
reminds us that a design of the same kind was begun at Traü in better
times. The inside is quite unlike anything of later Italian work.

The traveler whose objects are of a more general kind turns away from
this border church of Christendom as the last stage of a pilgrimage
unsurpassed either for natural beauty or for historic interest. And, as
he looks up at the mountain which rises almost close above the east end
of the duomo of Cattaro, and thinks of the land[16] and the men to which
the path over that mountain leads, he feels that, on this frontier at
least, the spirit still lives which led English warriors to the side of
Manuel Komnênos, and which steeled the heart of the last Constantine to
die in the breach for the Roman name and the faith of Christendom.



VIII