Here we see a somewhat later image of medieval Paris by the painter,
Jean Fouquet, who lived in the 15th century.
Note the peaceful boat that has replaced the fierce Viking warships.
And on the left side of Jean Fouquet's painting,
the towering presence of the Cathedral of Notre-Dame which
dominated not only the skyline but the life of the medieval city.
One gets some idea of the importance of the cathedral to the hand of
God that descends in the middle of the top of the painting alongside the church.
Together, they ward off evil in the form of hideous demons circulating in the sky.
Paris had long been a religious site going back to pre-Christian times.
Pagan shrines and a Gallo-Roman wall stood on the Île de la Cité,
in the heart of the Roman settlement of Lutetia.
Here we see some of the archaeological vestiges of Paris
of the fourth and fifth centuries which were only discovered
in the 1960s when the French began to build
an underground parking lot under the plaza in front of the Cathedral of Notre-Dame.
An early basilica stood where Notre-Dame now stands.
Built in the fourth century when the bishop of Paris assumed
a certain religious authority as the result of
Emperor Constantine's making Christianity the official religion of state.
A Merovingian church here seen in a visual recreation was built in Paris in
the sixth century possibly under the reign of
the Frankish King Childebert who died in 558.
The Church of St. Stephen stood on the side to the west of
the current Notre-Dame when the present cathedral was
begun in the second half of the 12th century.
Under the guidance of the Bishop of Paris, Maurice de Sully,
the cornerstone of the choir of Notre- Dame was laid
in 1163 in the presence of Pope Alexander the third.
As the building of the choir of the church progressed,
within a matter of 20 years,
a wall unlike any other that had ever been seen was erected along its south side.
This wall is still standing as we see in
the picture of Notre-Dame from the left or south bank of
the Sen and we see why it's still standing
from this cross-sectional drawing by the great architect and builder,
Eugène Emmanuel Viollet-le-Duc who restored Notre-Dame in
the middle of the 19th century to the state in which it still stands today.
This wall which was partially inside of the main structure and
partially outside was known as a flying buttress and was
meant to offset the extraordinary lateral pressure exerted by
a very wide ceiling vault which had not yet been put into place and which,
otherwise, would not have been able to stand.
So new and so innovative was the great high structure of Notre-Dame,
the flying buttress, but at least one astonished witness,
a Norman monk and chronicler by the name of Robert of Torigni,
exclaimed that if it is ever completed,
nothing will be able to compare with it.
Others were terrified and saw in a building so high a violation of the law of God.
The distinguished Parisian theologian, Peter the Chanter,
wrote in the year 11 A.D. that it is a sin to
build this kind of church which is being built nowadays.
It is a sickness of epidemic proportions.
The choir or eastern end of Notre-Dame was
completed along with a high altar and consecrated on May 19,
1182 by the Papal Legate.
Here, we look down the nave or the central part of the cathedral toward the altar which
stood at the center of the cathedral between
the nave or the western most part and the choir.
In May, 1185, Heraclius,
archbishop of Caesarea and Patriarch of
Jerusalem declared the Third Crusade on the steps of Notre-Dame.
And by the time the Western façade which we're looking at
now and the nave were built over the course of the next 50 years,
its spectacularly high walls supported by flying buttresses had set a style,
and was for a time,
but only a time,
the world's tallest church with its vault of 32.8 meters or 107 feet from the ground.
In relatively short order however,
the great churches at Noyon, at Sens,
at Chartres, Bourges, Amiens, Laon,
Le Mans and Beauvais all surpassed Notre-Dame de Paris in height.
Chartres overtook Notre-Dame de Paris in 1194 with a vault of 120 feet.
The vault of Reims reached almost 125 feet in the year 1212.
And the one at Amiens,
139 feet in 1221.
Each new city tried to outdo the others in the height of its cathedral.
Begun in 1225, Beauvais outdid them all with a choir vault so high,
157 feet, that it collapsed in the year 1284.
All the cities adopted the high style of the high wall in the great wave of
cathedral building that swept from
the Parisian Basin to the rest of France and eventually,
to all of Europe.
In the decade surrounding the erection of
the great new wall in Notre-Dame, innovation itself,
the appreciation of what is new,
came to constitute a core value in a world
which had until then valued, principally, the past.
Theologians, clergymen, statesmen, great feudal princes,
the knights in their service and the common people had all
been convinced that the world would end around the year 1000.
A belief in the process of the last days in the phrase of the Norman monk, Raoul Glaber.
A belief that the world was about to end
may have curtailed building big and building high.
But when the world did not end,
it is as if the survivors of the cataclysm that never
came were forced to recognize that the present was here to stay.
Building increased, as again in the phrase of Raoul Glaber,
"The earth became clothed in the white robes churches."
Howard BlochSterling Professor of French
