Notre Dame of Paris

This is heart-breaking.  Notre Dame is burning.

The cathedral is 850 years old, having been begun in the 1160s under the direction of the bishop of Paris.  The pope laid the cornerstone.  There had been older cathedrals there since the fourth or fifth century, changed or replaced every century or two, but this one was so large and so beautiful that it was never replaced.  It's built of local limestone.  The roof, now gone, was supported by wooden beams, giant oaks dating from the twelfth century, which would have been very dry and burned very readily.

It's one of the earliest and best-known churches in the Gothic style, a new twelfth-century way of building churches that emphasized height and light.  (The monastery of St.-Denis, on the outskirts of Paris, is now considered the first Gothic church, a generation earlier.)

The church was finished within a generation, but of course it had challenges and issues over the centuries—though nothing like what it is now facing.  The first problem was that the high walls, pierced by high windows, started bowing ever so slightly but very alarmingly.  The flying buttresses were then added to help keep the walls upright at the beginning of the thirteenth century.

During the early eighteenth century, the church lost much of its medieval stained glass, knocked out by the cathedral canons as too "old fashioned."  Then in the late eighteenth century, when France went officially atheistic during the Revolution, the facade was deliberately damaged, the heads knocked off the kings and queens of the Old Testament who were ranged across the front.

It was still however the biggest, most important building in Paris, and when Napoleon was crowned emperor (crowning himself), he held the ceremony in Notre Dame.

The novelist Victor Hugo deplored the dilapidated condition of the cathedral, and in his Notre Dame de Paris (1831), usually translated as The Hunchback of Notre Dame, he inspired Parisians to look at their cathedral and save it.  Extensive renovations were carried out, headed by Viollet le Duc, who put new heads on the Old Testament kings and queens, added gargoyles, and had the whole thing topped off by a spire (flèche in French) at the crossing point of nave and the perpendicular aisles (transept), which spire collapsed today.

Recently the whole church was cleaned of the dirty patina from polluted air and was looking fresh and inviting, as seen in the picture below, taken the last time we were in Paris.  The limestone walls still stand, but it may be an awfully long time, if ever, before the church will be itself again.  (Limestone doesn't actually burn but it disintegrates in intense heat.  It is burned in kilns to form one of the components of cement.)

In the twelfth century, when Chartres cathedral caught fire, the local citizens pounded on the walls and cursed God.  One can see their point.

Added May 6:

Amazingly, much of the interior of the church survived.  There was stone arching (ceiling) below the actual roof, and it held up fairly well.  The biggest damage was at the crossing, where the nave met the transept.  The nineteenth-century spire crashed through there when it fell.

But obviously the church still needs a roof.  There are not 1300 oaks in Europe big enough to replace the 1300 wooden beams (made from oaks already several centuries old in the twelfth century).  And there is concern that, without a roof pressing down and out, the walls, which are pushed in by the flying buttresses, might start leaning toward the center.

Here's an article from the NY Times about how the fire spread--and how it could have been even worse than it is.

The French government has promised restoration within 5 years, in time for the next Olympics (to be held in Paris).  We'll see.  But cathedrals have been rebuilt before.  Reims, in northern Champagne, was blown up in WW I, leaving nothing but the walls, and was rebuilt back to its thirteenth-century glory over 20 years.

© C. Dale Brittain 2019

Charlemagne

Even if a person knows very little medieval history, they have almost certainly heard of Charlemagne.  "He was great or something."  (That's right, the name means "Charles the Great," the great-part from the Latin magnus, as in 'magnum'.)

The real Charlemagne was king of the Franks from 768 to 814, king not only of what is now France but also of much of western Germany and the Benelux countries.  He was also king of Lombardy (northern Italy) in at least his own mind, though the Lombards had doubts.  He is now imagined as "father of Europe," and there is a statue of him at the European Union headquarters.  Given that he became king of all these territories through conquest, and that his biographer was very irritated with the Germans who refused to stay conquered, maybe we shouldn't press this analogy too far.

In the year 800, Charlemagne was crowned Roman Emperor by the pope.  Now you'll recall from earlier posts that the capital of the Roman Empire had moved in the fourth century from Rome to Constantinople (what is now Istanbul, in Turkey).  There were intermittently independent emperors in Rome as well as Constantinople for over a century, but from the 470s on, the Roman Emperors, the heirs to the Caesars, were solely in the Greek East (Constantinople), where they remained until their empire finally fell to the Turks in 1453.

So how did Charlemagne get declared Roman Emperor?  (Usually modern history books call him "Holy Roman Emperor" to keep him distinct both from the Caesars and from the Greek Orthodox emperors in Constantinople, but the term "Holy Roman Emperor" wasn't used until the twelfth century.)

In part the popes owed him one.  Early medieval popes were quite weak and little respected, and the pope of 800 had been having terrible trouble with the Lombards.  He also had decided that the current Emperor in Constantinople was a heretic.  Irene, the emperor, was also a woman, which only made it worse.  She believed that the Ten Commandments forbidding "graven images" meant that one could not have images in the church and was thus an "iconoclast," one who broke up such images.  (This is very depressing to art historians.)  This was not at all how western theologians and the pope interpreted the Ten Commandments.

Feeling that the imperial throne was thus vacant, the pope announced that Charlemagne was the only true emperor and crowned him on Christmas Day 800 in the church of St. Peter's in the Lateran.

On the one hand, this was great, Charlemagne and his descendants (known as the Carolingians, from Carolus, the Latin version of the name Charles) got to call themselves emperors.  But a precedent had been set, that one was not really an emperor until crowned by the pope, which gave the pope power at least potentially.  The bases of the eleventh-century crisis of church and state were laid down.

A thousand years later, Napoleon remembered this all too well and refused to be crowned emperor by the pope, instead snatching the crown from the pope's hands and crowning himself.

Charlemagne himself had doubts about the whole procedure, mostly because he was concerned about the Greek Roman Emperors.  He seems even to have asked Irene to marry him, hoping to resolve it that way.  But she died quickly, and her successor, a man, basically told Charlemagne that if he wanted to call himself emperor in the God-forsaken northern European forests, where they didn't even speak Greek, he was welcome to do so.

The image is from one of his coins.  To the left, behind his head (crowned with laurel like a Roman), you should be able to read his name, Karolus.

© C. Dale Brittain 2014
For more on medieval kings, see my new ebook, Positively Medieval: Life and Society in the Middle Ages.