Suger

Today I want to talk about Suger, one of the most important political and ecclesiastical figures of twelfth-century France (c. 1081-1151).  And no, his name is not Sugar, it's Suger, pronounced soo-zhay.  Here's an image of him from a stained glass window.

Suger is best known now as a counselor and biographer of King Louis VI (1108-1137) and as abbot of the monastery of St.-Denis.  He was a lifelong friend of the king, because back when Prince Louis was attending school in Paris, young Suger was also.  Schools were run by churches, and although the majority of the young men attending expected to have a career in the church, lay people might also attend as day students, as did Louis.

Suger became a monk at the abbey of St.-Denis, located not far outside of Paris.  (You can get there on the metro.  Be sure to get off at the "basilica" St.-Denis stop, not the "stadium" St.-Denis stop.  France's biggest soccer/football stadium is right down the road from the old abbey.)  This was considered a royal monastery, and many kings and queens of France were buried there, going back to the Merovingians.

It was dedicated to Saint Dennis, the supposed first bishop of Paris way back around the second century, who had been beheaded by the Romans for refusing to worship the pagan gods.  He was martyred on Montmartre ("mountain of the martyr") but then, to everyone's surprise, he picked up his head and started walking.  He'd gotten out to the suburbs before collapsing.  The abbey was built over his remains.  (One doubts he had gone out to catch one last football game.)

When the old abbot of St.-Denis died, Suger was elected abbot in 1122, presumably with some friendly hints from the crown.  Although the monastery was never known for its austerity, unlike the new monastic orders such as the Cistercians, it was free from scandal, and the monks prayed and were serious, even if well-fed.

Suger's major accomplishment as abbot was to rebuild his abbey's church.  He described the process proudly, including his miraculous discovery of enough old-growth oaks for the roof beams, when everyone told him there were no big trees left in the region.  (Notre-Dame, built a generation later, had to get their roof beams--burned in 2019--from all over and float them down to Paris.)  St.-Denis is considered the first Gothic church, marked by tall, thin walls and pointed (rather than rounded) arches.  It was dedicated in the presence of the king in 1144.    (Suger actually just rebuilt the western facade, seen below, and the choir at the opposite end, leaving the eighth-century nave in place, to finally be rebuilt a century later.)  His abbey church looks rather sad today, but it went through a lot in the French Revolution (including having all the kings and queens buried there dug up and tossed out).

After the death of Louis VI, Suger wrote an admiring biography of his old friend, usually translated today as "Deeds of Louis the Fat."  Well, it's not quite fair to think of Louis only in terms of his weight, because he was indeed a very effective and beloved king.  His father, Philip I, had toward the end of his life been said to be too fat to ride a horse, which is something.  Philip had also repudiated Queen Bertha, Louis's mother, because he said she was "too fat."  Hormones.  Louis didn't stand a chance.

When Louis VII (king 1137-1180), son of Louis VI, decided to go off on Crusade in 1147, Suger became regent of France.  At this time usually wives acted as regents for absent husbands, but Louis VII's wife, Eleanor of Aquitaine, accompanied him to the Holy Land.  But that's another story.

When Suger died, he had started a biography of Louis VII, obviously not completed as the king outlived him by almost thirty years.  But Suger's name was permanently associated with the French kings.

© C. Dale Brittain 2020

For more on monks, kings, and other aspects of life in the Middle Ages, see my ebook, Positively Medieval, available from Amazon and other major ebook platforms.  Also available in paperback!

Vézelay

Today I want to talk about a monastery that, unlike the ones I've been discussing recently, never became the head of a monastic order.  But it was and is an extremely significant one:  the Burgundian monastery of Vézelay.

It was a Benedictine monastery for men for most of the Middle Ages, but it began, interestingly enough, as a nunnery.  Count Girard and his wife, named Bertha, decided in 858 to found two monastic houses in Burgundy, one for men (Pouthières) and one for women (Vézelay).  The couple was buried at Pouthières (which you don't need to worry about, because it always stayed small and obscure).  The nuns at Vézelay soon decided life in a rural monastery was too scary and moved to town, being replaced permanently by monks.

By the eleventh century Vézelay was associated with the highly esteemed monastery of Cluny, but it always retained its own abbot, unlike many other houses in Cluny's order.  It really gained attention when it started asserting that it had the bones of Mary Magdalene.  Supposedly the "three Marys" (the Virgin, the Magdalene, and Mary sister of Martha) had all gotten in a boat after the Resurrection and headed west through the Mediterranean.  They got as far as the mouth of the Rhône, along the Riviera, and Mary Magdalene hopped out.

Though she died there in Provence, the monks of Vézelay wanted everyone to know, she was not happy with how she was treated by Provençal locals and appeared in a vision to the monks, asking to be moved to their monastery.  They were happy to oblige.  The house became a great pilgrimage center, both a place to revere the relics of Mary Magdalene and to begin the long pilgrimage to Santiago in Spain.

The church, built in the first half of the twelfth century, is considered one of the glories of Romanesque architecture.  One of its interesting features is that it is lined up along the axis of the sun, so that on the summer solstice light coming in the high side windows shines right along the church's central aisle, making a path of light.

In the image above, you can see that the choir end of the church, the part at the far end where the altar would have been, is just slightly crooked from the orientation of the nave (the main part of the church).  This is because the choir end was built first, and then the architect realized he needed a slightly different angle for the light-down-the-aisle effect.

At the winter solstice, the light instead would illuminate the capitals, the carvings of Bible scenes at the tops of the pillars.  Vézelay is noted for its striking capitals, as in the scene above showing the death of the rich man in the Dives and Lazarus story.

Vézelay was also the place where the Second Crusade was preached.  The Cistercian abbot Bernard of Clairvaux persuaded King Louis VII to go on what turned out to be a disastrous effort to retake part of the Christian Kingdom of Jerusalem that had recently been retaken by the Muslims.  Pilgrims still flock to Vézelay's hill today, though few seem inclined to take off for the Holy Land.  (Many however head for Spain.  I hear there's a bus.)

© C. Dale Brittain 2018


For more on monasticism, church architecture, and other aspects of medieval history, see my ebook Positively Medieval, available on Amazon and other ebook platforms.