The Nave's Roman Basilica Origins

The nave derives directly from the Roman basilica, a secular building type used for law courts, markets and civic assembly under the Roman Empire, consisting of exactly the long hall, side aisles and clerestory arrangement that Christian builders adopted once the faith gained legal toleration under Constantine in the early fourth century. Choosing the basilica rather than the temple as a model was itself significant: Roman temples were relatively small structures meant to house a cult image, with worship taking place outdoors around an altar in front of the building, an arrangement unsuited to a religion whose central rite required gathering a congregation indoors, while the basilica was already built to hold and orient large groups of people toward one end of a long hall.

Early basilical churches such as Old Saint Peter's in Rome and Santa Sabina established the nave-and-aisles template that would remain the basic organizing plan of Western church architecture for well over a thousand years, surviving essentially intact in concept through the Romanesque and Gothic periods even as vaulting, height, window size and structural technique changed dramatically. The word nave itself comes from the Latin navis, meaning ship, a term some medieval commentators connected symbolically to the church as a vessel carrying the faithful, though the architectural form itself predates that etymology's religious interpretation.