What style came before Gothic in much of medieval Western Europe?

The story behind the answer

Across much of Western Europe in the 11th–12th centuries, the dominant church-building style featured thick masonry walls, rounded arches, sturdy piers, barrel and groin vaults, and relatively small windows. This heavy, modular approach provided the structural lessons that later enabled Gothic experiments with pointed arches, rib vaults, and flying buttresses.

Fueled by monastic networks (especially Cluny) and pilgrimage routes to Santiago de Compostela, it unified regional aesthetics from Italy to England; in Normandy and England it’s often called Norman, a regional branch. By contrast, Byzantine flourished in the eastern Mediterranean, and Carolingian was an earlier 8th–9th-century revival. This progression maps the medieval shift from solidity to soaring light.