48. Notre Dame, Part 1

by Diana S. |
Medieval Notre Dame

“Great edifices, like great mountains, are the work of the ages.”

― Victor Hugo, The Hunchback of Notre Dame

This week we’re paying tribute to Notre Dame Cathedral. I’ll be skipping around to the most important interactions between Notre Dame and her hometown. At each point, I’ll try to paint a picture of Paris as she was at that time, and the Notre Dame she would have known: change by change, disaster by miracle, making our way up to now, to the Notre Dame we have, smoking and injured and beautiful and beloved, as we dream and plan of the Paris, and the Notre Dame that will be.

Episode 48: “Notre Dame, Part 1”

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Notre Dame through the ages

Notre Dame, as viewed in the Middle Ages.

Transcript

Bienvenue and welcome back to The Land of Desire! I’m your host, Diana, and like the rest of the world I woke up on April 15th to the sight of Notre Dame Cathedral burning. I had some other ideas in mind for my next podcast episode, but after the entire world seemed to stop to watch the world’s most famous cathedral crumble, it seemed absurd to want to talk about anything else. But I wasn’t sure how to approach it – there was so much I didn’t know. I’ve been to Notre Dame, of course, and took the opportunity to climb up to the bell tower. My favorite spot in the whole city was the little park right behind Notre Dame. When I first moved to France as a 19 year old girl, there were lonely afternoons when I’d sit on the swings in the park and listen to the lonely tolling of the bells. Notre Dame Cathedral has always been a given, an assumed part of the landscape, an anchor of stability in a changing world. It wasn’t until I began digging into the history of Notre Dame that this vision began to change. What I’ve learned reshaped my understanding of Notre Dame, and brought me great peace while I think about the cathedral’s future. As you’ll learn in the episodes to come, Notre Dame herself has always been a patchwork quilt. Every cathedral on earth, by its very nature, is a series of accretions, of historical deposits building up on top of one another like so many layers of sediment in a canyon. Weather erodes, history disrupts, violence injures, peace rebuilds. What stands out more clearly than ever is that Notre Dame de Paris is truly that: of Paris. More so than the Catholic Church, more so than the nation of France, Notre Dame is bound up in the fate of her home city. So for the next few episodes, we’ll be traveling through time, taking a bit of an unorthodox journey.  Rather than droning through 800 years of architectural history I’ll be skipping around to the most important interactions between Notre Dame and her hometown. At each point, I’ll try to paint a picture of Paris as she was at that time, and the Notre Dame she would have known. Change by change, disaster by miracle, making our way up to now, to the Notre Dame we have, smoking and injured and beautiful and beloved, as we dream and plan of the Paris, and the Notre Dame that will be.
 
 
In the spring of 1051, Princess Anna of Kiev sailed to Paris to meet her future husband. Anna was the favorite daughter of Yaroslav the Wise, a great and learned leader of the East, and she represented the best that European civilization had to offer at the dawn of the 2nd millennium. In an age of limited literacy, Anna was sophisticated and well-educated: she could read and write, discuss world history and mathematics, she was an accomplished artist and she could speak several languages fluently. In order for Yaroslav to part with his most beloved child, any suitor would have to be hot stuff. For the last 400 years, the former territory of Gaul had been more attractive to marauding bands of Visigoths and Vikings than it had been to world leaders. Every 50 years or so, just as the area recovered from the last invasion and rebuilt its burned out huts and sacked cities, another invader would arrive, ready to sack, pillage, burn and move on. But at long last, it seemed the area’s luck was turning. A series of dimwitted, crude but stationary leaders had managed to fend off the Vikings and unite the loyalty of what leadership there was. After establishing this bare minimum of stability, these leaders were phased out and replaced by a different kind of leader: a reasonably educated and civilized warrior, with a new title that implied a new kind of people: the King of the Franks. Note that we’re not talking about a King of France here – there was no such thing as ‘France’ just yet – just a buncha territories, centered around a series of islands nestled in the banks of the Seine river. But there was promise – or else Anna of Kiev’s father would never have sent her over. Anna’s fiance, Henry I, seemed like a man on the rise. His grandfather was the first King of the Franks, and he had helped unite all those squabbling local territories into a single kingdom. Henry’s father, Robert II, had reigned for 35 years, most of which had been spent acquiring more and more lands. The Frankish territory was the kind of land you’d call ‘full of potential’ – a fixer-upper with good bones. But Anna, raised in the flourishing, sophisticated courts of Eastern Europe, was unimpressed. Surveying the swampy marshland of her new home, she wrote to her father, “France is a barbarous country, where the houses were gloomy, the churches ugly and the customs revolting.” But the times were a-changing. Like Princess Anna herself, the rest of Europe was getting to know Paris, her leaders, her trade routes, and her customs. The land may have been swampy, but it was only because it was surrounded by so much water, carrying in people, goods and ideas from around the known world. These people, goods and ideas would transform the little Gallic outpost of Paris into the capital of a new, thriving Western European civilization. Within 100 years of Princess Anna’s arrival, this barbarous country would stake its claim for cultural relevance with a daring, innovative, awe-inspiring project: a cathedral fit for a king.
 
Even before the Romans arrived and founded the first stable little colony on its banks, the Ile de France always attracted attention. The Seine is a remarkable river. It’s connected to the Channel. It’s also connected to a vast network of other rivers flowing in every direction you’d ever want. But most importantly, the Seine is deep, with flat bottoms, making it easy for even really heavy ships filled with goods to float downstream without running aground. The Ile de France, right in the middle of those deep waters, quickly became a center of a vast trading network, and the home of all those who participated in that network. When Princess Anne arrived, the Ile de France was already growing, and made up the center of the city of Paris. A few decades later, Paris was bursting at the seams. Walking around the Ile de France, a Parisian would have seen merchants, loading and unloading the arriving ships, abbots and monks from the nearby churches, students arguing and getting drunk, fishmongers yelling from market stalls, blacksmiths hammering out horseshoes, bakers struggling not to burn down the neighborhood, prostitutes, beggars, and butchers chasing wild pigs down the street. All of these people and more came together in an impossibly loud, impossibly smelly crowd. Parisians completely overwhelmed what municipal resources there were, and any major event was cause for alarm, because someone always got crushed by the crowds. It’s little wonder, then, that in 1147, Princess Anne’s great-grandson, Louis VII, craved a little fresh air.
 
 
Louis was never supposed to be king. His older brother, Philip, was heir to the throne, and acted like it. Philip was the golden child, definitely his dad’s favorite, and he grew up into a spoiled brat. As he began taking on some of the burdens of the aging king, Philip let his growing powers go straight to his head As one 13th century historian wrote, “Philip…by his overweening pride and tyrannical arrogance, made himself a burden to all.” Louis, on the other hand, was a quiet, reserved, and very devout young man who wanted nothing more than a life of contemplation in the church. But they don’t call it ‘the heir and the spare’ for nothing. In 1137, Philip and his friends were riding around in a busy marketplace area which is now occupied by the Hotel de Ville. In a truly medieval moment, a big black pig rooting around in a dung heap wandered into the path of Philip’s horse. Taken by surprise, Philip’s horse freaked out, and Philip flew into the air, and was dead the next morning. All of a sudden, Louis’s plans for peaceful reflection went out the window, and he found himself crowned King of the Franks. 
 
On paper, Louis VII had everything going for him. As one historian summed things up, “Louis VII inherited from his father a united kingdom, at peace with itself and abroad, sound finances, and skilled administrators.” A pretty far cry from the bands of small time warriors fighting with one another and everyone else, only a few hundred years ago. All Louis needed to do was maintain his father’s legacy of sound, educated ruling, with a focus on developing his abilities to support the nation through common resources and peace. He’d been well educated, and he had the good sense to hang on to his father’s wise old advisor, the Abbot Suger. There was only one problem: Louis was a quiet, mild-mannered young man with a strong religious bent, and he had just married the most unsuitable woman in Europe: Eleanor of Aquitaine.
 
I could spend hours talking about Eleanor of Aquitaine – she’s one of those truly great women of history whose personality shines through even the most boring illuminated manuscripts of the past. When she was born, Eleanor was the duchess of Aquitaine, which was then a separate territory in the southwest and definitely not subject to the King of the Franks. Aquitaine was dazzlingly rich, and Eleanor was one of the wealthiest, most powerful women in Europe at the time. But it isn’t her money keeping her in the history books nearly a millennia later – rich people are usually pretty boring. Eleanor was hungry. She was hungry for knowledge, and art, and real, independent power, and she was hungry for control over her own affairs. Remember Louis’s great-grandmother, Princess Anna of Kiev? She would have gotten along with Eleanor real well. Eleanor’s education represented the beginning of a miniature renaissance sweeping the continent: Eleanor knew math, astronomy, history, embroidery and weaving, playing the harp, riding horses, hunting with hawks, and she was well-read in a variety of languages. She came from a long line of artistic patrons – if you remember my past episode on the language of Oc, I read a few lines of poetry composed by Eleanor’s grandfather, William IX, the ‘troubadour’ duke. More importantly, Eleanor was, by every account of the age, a pip. She was a firecracker. She had a mind of her own and wasn’t afraid to use it. Unfortunately for Eleanor, she was destined to marry Europe’s most eligible dishrag.
 
When Eleanor was around 12 years old, her father went off on a trip. Before he left, he made a will in case something terrible happened, like in case he ran into one of those murderous pigs roaming free, terrorizing the nobles. Back in the 1100s, an eligible bachelorette like Eleanor was a target for kidnappers: anyone lucky enough to spirit away the heiress would gain control over her lands. You wouldn’t believe how many years – and daughters – it took for Europe to change their inheritance laws to fix that. To keep the target off of young Eleanor’s back, her father specified that, should anything happen to her, Louis VI, King of the Franks, would be in charge of her marriage and inheritance. Well, when Eleanor’s father died and his men arrived to tell the King of the Franks the good – er, terrible – news, it’s said that he managed to keep from cheering until just after the messengers left the room. In only a few months, Eleanor and the king’s son, Louis VII were wed in an elaborate ceremony. There was an important clause in their wedding vows: Aquitaine was still technically an independent territory. When Eleanor and Louis’s oldest son became king, only then would Aquitaine officially become part of the Frankish territories. Spoiler alert: Louis is gonna regret that pre-nup. Anyway, a few weeks later, Eleanor and Louis’s honeymoon is interrupted by the death of the king. The brand new king and queen moved down to Paris to begin what looked to be a rich and glorious rule.
 
Right from the beginning, Eleanor drove the courts insane. If any of you watch Game of Thrones, think Ellaria Sand from Dorne making her way into King’s Landing. Here comes this highspirited woman from the South, bold and independent and apparently a scandalous dresser. All the old men of the church disapproved of her deeply, and it’s not hard to figure out why: within a few years of their marriage, it became clear that Richard was leaning on his most capable wife’s shoulders for advice instead of their own! The young king, who had always been known as a retiring type, all of a sudden began making uncharacteristic moves. When Eleanor’s younger sister wanted to make a very, very troublesome marriage, King Louis VII approved it. When Eleanor hated the cold, draft palace, Louis poured money into it. And most fatefully, Louis began trying to take power and control away from the church officials, only a few years after he dreamed of being a priest himself! Eventually, the pious Louis managed to get himself into a fight with the Pope, and after a series of terrible, stupid, unsuccessful wars, Louis felt guilty about the whole mess. He’d spent a lot of money, he’d broken the peace he’d inherited from his father, and to top things off, Eleanor had recently given birth to their first child: a daughter. This being the twelfth century, if you were a king in a bit of a pickle with the Pope, there was one natural way to make things right again: it’s time to lead a crusade.
 
When you’re leading a crusade, you need a leader with a fiery spirit, a clear sense of purpose, a willingness to get hands dirty, and a strategic, military mind. The Franks marching to the Middle East had a leader with all of these qualities: Eleanor. Eleanor carried golden crosses through Europe, raised her own troops from Aquitaine and led them to the battle, and dazzled the courts of Constantinople. She attracted attention, praise, awe and envy across most of the known world. And then there was Louis. Imagine someone who spent his entire life in his older brother’s shadow, quietly studying for the priesthood, thrust into the front of a crusading army halfway around the world. He performed as well as you’d expect: he was a mess. He blew it on the battlefield a hundred times over. Louis’s Crusade brought misery and suffering, and not just to the locals.
 
Is there any greater stress test for a relationship than a long journey? By the end of the road trip, or the backpacking excursion, you’ve gotten to know your partner more intimately than you ever wished to, and you’re either bonded for life or you’re actively plotting one another’s death. Guess which one applied to Louis and Eleanor? Returning to Paris basically empty-handed and embarrassed, with nothing to show for all that money and trouble but an enormous number of dead crusaders, the royal couple called it quits. As soon as Louis and Eleanor returned to Paris, they asked the Pope to annul their marriage. He refused, and forced them to sleep in the same bed – a pretty tall order for a couple who’d just sailed back from the Crusades on separate ships. All they got out of it was – you guessed it – another daughter. Everyone threw up their hands, the marriage was annulled, and Eleanor flounced out of Paris, taking the vast riches of Aquitaine with her and presumably high-fiving her lawyer on the way out. Eleanor was strong-willed and rich, she didn’t suffer fools, and she had big dreams that needed the right kind of king to see them through. In a major flex, Eleanor crossed the English Channel, evaded not one but two lords trying to kidnap her for her lands, and married Louis’s greatest rival: Henry, the future king of England. Henry was a good-looking ginger who was full of energy, well-educated and ambitious. I couldn’t find a record of Louis VII’s reaction to the marriage, but I assume it involved a lot of Drake albums. But she wasn’t done yet! In a final blow, Eleanor hit her ex right where it really hurts: a year after her wedding, Eleanor delivered a son. He would eventually be the first of not one, not two, not three, not four, but five sons. It’s no surprise the husbands went to war. It was a stupid war, as you’d expect. Paris is cramped, hungry, tired of being asked to fight in crusades, and now they gotta fight the king’s ex-wife? It was a lot of slap-fighting, until Louis eventually returned home with nothing to show for his efforts except a nasty cold. Unsurprisingly, after the failure of his Crusade and the failure of his marriage and the failure of his war against his greatest enemy, Louis decided it was time to spend a little more time with God.
 
The Abbot Suger, leader of the Abbey of Saint-Denis, trusted advisor of Louis VII and his father, is one of those remarkable efficient bureaucrats who pops up throughout history, carefully outlasting all his bosses, managing large-scale projects and pushing his agenda quietly, relentlessly, and effectively. As one tribute put it, the abbot who was “small in physical and social stature, driven by his dual smallness, refused, in his smallness, to be small.” Considering young Louis’s passion for the church, that surprise pig in the marketplace must have been a massive stroke of luck for the Abbot – instead of the arrogant, upstart Philip on the throne, he got pious, malleable Louis instead. Never slow on the uptake, the Abbot was there at Louis’s wedding to Eleanor, and the Abbot was there at the Crusade. During the reign of Louis VI and VII, Abbot Suger used his influence to push for a series of important Church projects, especially the construction of a new cathedral for his abbey in Saint-Denis. 
 
Saint-Denis, located a few miles outside Paris itself, was the most important religious site in the Frankish lands. The abbey housed the fanciest religious relics in Louis’s kingdom, and the abbey served as school and burial site of every King of the Franks since the 10th century. Each time another king was buried on the grounds of Saint-Denis, the link between the church and the state grew stronger. Louis VI went so far as to declare Saint Denis the patron saint of the Frankish kingdom. Well, the Abbot suggested, if this is your kingdom’s patron saint, why not give him the church he deserves?
 
Because the abbey of Saint-Denis was a mess. Chaos reigned. Abbot Suger wrote of “the inadequacy we often felt on special days such as the feast of the blessed Denis, the fair, and many other times, when the narrowness of the place forced women to run to the altar on the heads of men…with great anguish and confusion.” When women weren’t riding piggy back to the altar, they were fainting during services. When the monks brought out holy relics, the crowds would press so close the monks would have to climb out the window to escape. Receiving the go-ahead, the visionary Abbot Suger set to work creating an awesome vision, a church which incorporated all the newest ideas about architecture then floating around in educated circles, ideas which would eventually coalesce into the most famous architectural style to emerge from France: Gothic.
 
Abbot Suger didn’t just need more room on the ground for his parishioners – he needed more room overhead for God. In the 12th century, influential church leaders believed that any kind of light was equivalent to God’s own divine light. The more light you could fit in your church, the more blessed it would be. Drawing on all the architectural advancements of the age, Abbot Suger built a cathedral which was tall, grand, and most importantly, full of light. In 1144, Abbot Suger hosted a lavish dedication ceremony for his new cathedral, and invited every other bishop to look upon his masterpiece and feel jealous. Imagine: all the pomp and circumstance the church and state can muster. A building taller than anything else in the city. Music from an ethereal choir floating up into a ceiling that feels a million miles away. And the sunlight! Streaming in through enormous windows, dazzling a bunch of men who spend most of their days in rooms lit by candle light. The new cathedral must have felt truly miraculous to 12th century believers. Abbot Suger’s plan worked – all those bishops went back home and started building Gothic cathedrals of their own, each one grander than the last. As the bishop of Seville instructed his architect: “Build a church so great that those who come after will deem us mad to have attempted it.” Imitation was the sincerest form of flattery and soon a new imitation would break ground right in the heart of Paris.
 
Back when Anna of Kiev first landed on the swampy shores of Paris, the power of the church was concentrated in the countryside, where vast monasteries produced scholars, leaders and agricultural goods. But Louis VII grew up in an age of urban wealth, where the docks and the marketplace held sway, and the city’s bishops held more power than the countryside’s abbots. Louis VII had attended Abbot Suger’s dedication of Saint-Denis shortly after his marriage to Eleanor. Like everyone else, the newlywed king had been amazed by the Gothic style, with all its glittering, holy light. Twenty years later, the Abbot Suger had passed away, power had concentrated in the cities, and the Abbey of Saint-Denis was too far from the action.
 
By the end of Louis’s marriage to Eleanor, Paris’s population hovered around 100,000. While it was greatly overshadowed by the million residents of Constantinople out East, Paris had grown into the largest city in Western Europe – and it showed. Paris wasn’t only big, it was powerful. Louis’s ancestors did such a great job acquiring lands and establishing political stability that Paris was finally able to exploit her trade routes to their fullest, on land and water. Business was booming, the population was growing, and the most powerful political and religious leaders in Louis’s realm spent more time than ever in the capital city. If the Abbey of Saint-Denis had been crowded, the churches on the Ile de France were about to explode. It was the perfect opportunity for a broken king looking to get right with God.
 
In 1160, two events of note took place: Maurice de Sully was elected the Bishop of Paris, and Louis VII’s second wife, Catherine, died in childbirth having produced two more daughters. With his Crusades, his reputation and his line of succession in ruins, Louis needed a way to atone. He looked out his windows at the filthy, packed streets of Paris and thought, why not start in my own backyard? Louis had successfully cleared the streets of pigs – he wasn’t taking any chances of ending up like his brother – but otherwise every inch of the Ile de France was more crowded than ever, including the island’s oldest church: the ancient, crumbling Church of Saint Stephen.
 
When it was originally constructed around the year 600, the Church of Saint Stephen would have been considered enormous. But after half a millennium of population growth and erosion, Saint Stephen’s was no longer up to the task. A few years earlier, the Pope stopped by Paris to conduct a mass. Louis’s men set out a silk carpet for the Pope’s arrival, only for the Pope’s men to assume it was a gift, for keepsies. In the crowded, overheated, noisy cathedral, the king’s men and the pope’s men argued over the carpet until, according to witnesses, “from words they came to blows, the canons fell upon the pope’s officers so rudely, that several of them were hurt” including Louis himself. It makes sense, then, that when the newly elected Bishop of Paris met with the newly depressed King of the Franks, both of them remembered that day and shuddered. Yes, surely this was guidance from the divine. If a candelabra to the royal forehead isn’t enough to point you in the right direction, what is? Bishop Sully pointed out the glory of Saint-Denis, and the copycat cathedrals it inspired throughout the countryside and said, doesn’t Paris herself deserve such a fine cathedral? Shouldn’t the capital city of your realm display the might of your wealth and power? Shouldn’t Paris be outshining the suburbs? Whatever he said, it did the trick on pious Louis VII, and Bishop Sully received the go-ahead to plan a cathedral of his own on the Ile de France. In the spring of 1163, a new Pope was in town. Eager to wash the memory of that fateful silk carpet from their memory, King Louis VII and Bishop Sully invited the new Pope over to the construction site, where he laid the cornerstone of a great and glorious tribute to Virgin Mary, a cathedral which would declare Paris once and for all a center of Christian faith and pilgrimage, a monument which would get Louis back in literal good graces: the Cathedral of Notre Dame-de-Paris.
 
It worked. Within two years, Louis received a sign that he was finally back in the Lord’s favor. Here’s an excerpt from the diary of a student living in Paris: “The author of this work leaped to the window from the couch on which he had stretched himself and fallen into his first sleep; and looking out, he saw two very poor old women in the street bearing torches and exulting with joy. And when he inquired of them the cause of such commotion and exultation, one of them immediately looked up at him and replied: ‘We have now a king given us by God.’ At long last, Louis’s third wife gave him a son and heir, Philippe Auguste. He would be the leader of the first golden age of Paris, and the world’s very first King of France.
 
Thanks for listening to The Land of Desire. Next week, I’ll post part two of this series, in which Louis’s son, the great Philippe Auguste, first King of France, grows up alongside the new cathedral of Paris. No one will do more to transform the face of Paris than Philippe Auguste, and he’ll set the stage for his grandson, Louis IX, Saint Louis, who will lead Paris through a golden century, before disaster strikes. 
 
Before we wrap up, I’d like to give a thank you to my newest Patreon supporters, Franney, Renee, Amanda, Kathryn and Mike! I’d also like to say hello to all the new fans of The Land of Desire’s Facebook page. You picked a good time to start following us online because I have a very exciting personal announcement: next week’s episode represents an opportunity I’ve never had before. For the first time, I’ll be updating The Land of Desire from Paris! That’s right, your podcast host is taking her biggest fan on a tour of Paris. After listening to every episode and being a very good cheerleader, I figured it was time my mother got to experience Paris for herself. We’ll be waving to a number of familiar sights from previous episodes, so keep an eye out on The Land of Desire’s Facebook page and Twitter. We’ll say hello to Napoleon’s portrait in the Louvre. We’ll eat snails – yes, Mama, we’ll eat snails – at a brasserie. And of course, we’ll pay our respects at Notre Dame, still standing strong. Until next time, au revoir!

Further Reading

  • This series gave me an excuse to pick up my favorite single volume history of Paris, Alistair Horne’s The Seven Ages of Paris. I first read this book at 19. Like the Hermione Granger that I am, I figured how better to prepare for moving abroad than studying? This book helped me understand how to move through an ancient city properly, and it’s still my #1 recommendation when anyone asks for a book to read before visiting Paris for the first time.
  • Also, duh, it’s time to re-read Victor Hugo’s The Hunchback of Notre Dame if you haven’t done so already. It’s dramatic! It’s outrageous! It’s really a lot more medieval architectural history than you were expecting! It’s the reason we have any Notre Dame at all and not a Haussmann apartment block!
  • An interesting undergraduate thesis: How Much did the Gothic Churches Cost? An Estimate of Ecclesiastical Building Costs in the Paris Basin between 1100-1250, Amy Denning
  • On The Roof of Notre-Dame, Before It Burned, Lauren Collins
  • Building A Cathedral, Nicolas Kemper – I was halfway through the script when this essay was published. It’s startling how much it crystallizes exactly what I was struggling to say! A tremendous essay and one I hope I can pay reasonable tribute to.

Sources

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