The Restoration of Notre Dame

 In April of 2019, the roof beams of Notre Dame cathedral in Paris caught fire.  The flame roared through the 900 year old oak beams that supported the lead roof, sending particles of lead throughout the neighborhood and threatening to collapse the whole structure.  As Parisians watched in horror, the nineteenth-century spire that had risen above the crossing crashed down through the church's stone vaulting.

 

At the time there was fear that it might never be restored or might, like Reims cathedral (bombed in World War I) take decades to repair.  President Macron promised it would be rebuilt in time for the 2024 Olympic Games, to be held in Paris.  The restoration efforts didn't quite make the Games, but the cathedral has now reopened, just in time for Christmas 2024.

It helped that the church was not nearly as badly damaged as Reims had been.  Other than at the crossing, where the spire had come down, the stone vaulting (the ceiling you might call it, with all the oak beams and the roof above it) had mostly survived.  The church's interior was damaged by smoke and water but was mostly still there, unlike at Reims, which had been left as a shell after the bombing.

It also helped that a concerted search through Europe's forests (including eastern Europe) was able to find and obtain enough tall oaks to replace the twelfth-century beams.  (Many had been planted two centuries ago with the thought that they would become ships' masts, but steam replaced sail before they were used.)  In spite of some talk in 2019 of redoing the cathedral with an exciting new 21st-century "look," the decision was made to restore the church more or less to how it had been before the fire.  That meant not only using oak beams rather than steel but repairing the stonework (including the vaulting) using medieval techniques.

A major role here was played by craftsmen who had been working on Guédelon Castle.  As I've noted before, this is a project where modern people are attempting to build a medieval castle using medieval techniques and finding it more of a challenge than they anticipated.   But some medieval techniques they've worked out via trial and error, looking at how real medieval castles are put together, others they've found in late medieval handbooks.  At any rate, craftsmen who've developed a good feel for wood and stone played a major role in Notre Dame's reconstruction.

 

Notre Dame reopened in a grand ceremony attended by international dignitaries.  The interior especially looks strikingly different than it did six years ago, being limestone white rather than smoke-stained gray (from centuries both of candle smoke and more recently coal residue from the heating system).  One can see why thirteenth-century visitors to Paris were stunned by the cathedral.

But other aspects have been restored to the nineteenth-century standard,  including a new spire to replace the one erected by Viollet-le-Duc that crashed through the vaulting, and also including the gargoyles and the rather insipid heads of the queens and kings of the Old Testament, depicted on the front.  Some new things have been added, like the sprinkler system (good idea!).  But overall one can now enter the church and imagine oneself back in the thirteenth century.

© C. Dale Brittain 2024

For more on churches and other aspects of life in the Middle Ages, see my book, Positively Medieval, available from Amazon and other ebook platforms.  Available both as an ebook and in paperback.

Barbarians and Romans

 As I discussed back when I started this blog, the idea of Rome falling to hordes of barbarians, like a tsunami sweeping up the beach and inland, used to be a standard part of history.  In recent decades it has been rejected, because it is unsupported by the evidence.  Yes, there were major changes between the fourth and seventh centuries, but a process that takes three centuries is hard to characterize as a "fall."

The only place where Germanic peoples and their culture essentially overran the Romanized Celtic peoples of the Roman Empire was England, where Roman cities disappeared and Christianity moved to the margins.  But even there a great deal of melding between Roman and Anglo-Saxon culture occurred, and British scholars named the following centuries the Dark Ages not because they were evil but because we know so little about them.

And England of course is not the model for all of Europe and the Mediterranean basin, as much as the English would like you to believe it.  In fact on the European Continent in the fourth and fifth centuries a lot of Germanic people were welcomed into the Empire, serving in the Roman armies, settling in various territories.  There was friction of course and the occasional sacking of a city, like Rome itself in 410, but the Empire continued on.

The biggest changes to the Empire were the disasters of the sixth century, several "years without a summer" which broke down trade routes and nearly emptied the cities, as lack of harvests meant no food for the cities to buy, coupled with the first outbreak of the Black Death.  Then in the seventh century the rise of Islam meant that Mediterranean basin, the Middle East, and North Africa became Arabic-speaking and predominantly Muslim, rather than Greek and Latin speaking and predominantly Christian, and no longer answered to the Emperor.

But how did Romanized populations react to the Germanic people settling among them in western Europe?  The Romans were not impressed with those they called barbarians, a term they coined because they said those who didn't speak Latin just said "Ba bar ba barg" or the equivalent.  But the Germanic peoples were impressed by Roman culture and, on the Continent, jettisoned their religion and language like a hot potato.  That's why Spanish, Italian, and French are all descended from Latin, in spite of the Visigoths, the Ostrogoths, and the Franks.  Even Romanian is a Latin-derived language.  East of the Rhine and in Scandinavia, however, where the Empire had never extended, and in Anglo-Saxon England, Germanic languages persisted (as they still do).

In practice, Romans and Germanic peoples quickly started to intermarry, meaning their descendants had a shared ethnic identity.  Archaeologists who have tried to determine whether a burial represents a Gallo-Roman or a Frank, for example, have been confused by both Roman and Germanic artifacts in the same grave.  Names still had cultural overtones, but parents might name a son Siegfried who they hoped would rise to power as a warleader, while naming a different son Peter who they hoped would end up as a bishop.

The so-called barbarian kings, who established kingdoms within the old Empire with the favor of the Emperor (now in Constantinople), kept much of the old imperial governance structure.  The Empire had been divided into administrative units, each called a pagus, centered on a city.  The pagi became first Christian dioceses (by the fourth or fifth century) and then (by the sixth or seventh century) the counties into which the kingdoms were divided.  Even some of the old Roman taxation system remained, although the collected money went not to Rome or Constantinople but rather to the king.

Interestingly, the Germanic people settled in the old Empire all wanted to assert their own thnic identity.  The Franks were the first to start writing down their old, traditional laws, writing them in Latin, in imitation of Roman law.  These so-called Salic Laws inspired similar written lawcodes from other Germanic peoples, including laws written for the Goths, the Bavarians, the Burgundians, and so on.  This is an indication that even as "German" and "Roman" were in the process of being fused into what would become a (sort of) general medieval culture, the "barbarians" were proud of their heritage and didn't want to forget it.

© C. Dale Brittain 2024

For more on medieval social and political history, see my book, Positively Medieval:  Life and Society in the Middle Ages, available on Amazon and other e-tailers, either as an ebook or in print.