Marks of Opulence: The Why, When and Where of Western Art 1000–1914. Colin Platt
– the Carthusians and Tironensians, the Gilbertines, Premonstratensians and Grandmontines – was that both in the quality of their recruitment and in the largesse of their friends, support was very rapidly falling off. To meet their continuing building commitments – and Aelred’s hugely expanded Rievaulx was only one of many white-monk houses already rebuilt almost entirely before 1200 – Cistercian abbots everywhere had begun accepting those very properties, from feudalized lands to parish churches and their tithes, which their predecessors had on principle rejected.36 Those earlier abbots had invariably made sure that their houses were sufficiently endowed. And few Cistercian communities ever ran much risk of the wretched poverty felt, for example, by the hermit-monks of Grandmont, struggling to maintain themselves on a mountain-top so ‘stern and cold, infertile and rocky, misty and exposed to the winds’ that even ‘the water is colder and worse than in other places, for it produces sickness instead of health’.37 Yet from the mid-century already, the very success of the Cistercians had begun to cost them dear, losing them the respect and loyalty of just those powerful men and women for whom the soldierly discipline of Abbot Bernard’s troops had always been their principal attraction.
Bernard had communed easily with princes. However, the West’s most affluent patrons – bishops as well as dynasts – were beginning to find other homes for their money. One major beneficiary would be the Friars Mendicant, who arrived with the new century. But before that fresh distraction, the rebuilding of Europe’s cathedrals had entered a new phase, driven at least in part by popular piety. ‘We have begun the construction of a larger church [at Aix-en-Provence]’, promised Archbishop Rostan de Fos’s encyclical of 1070, addressed to all the faithful of the diocese, ‘in which you and other visitors will have space enough to stand … We ask each of you to give what he can, so as to receive from God and us a full remission of his sins … [then] for everything you give, you will receive a hundredfold from the Lord in the day of Judgement.’38 And it was pilgrims again, drawn to Chartres Cathedral by the Virgin’s shrine, who had contributed to its rebuilding after the great fire of 1020. At Chartres, the chief attraction was an ancient image of the Virgin ‘about to bring forth’, with the Tunic she was wearing at childbirth. And there were already some lone voices – among them that of Guibert, Abbot of Nogent – who spoke out eloquently against the folly of such cults.39 Yet there is no mistaking the furious passion of those Chartres citizens who, as their new cathedral neared completion in 1145, ‘in silence and with humility … [and] not without discipline and tears’, dragged waggon-loads of stone and wood to aid the works. ‘Powerful princes of the world’, wrote Abbot Haimon of that same scene, ‘men brought up in honour and wealth, nobles, men and women, have bent their proud and haughty necks to the harness of carts, and, like beasts of burden, have dragged to the abode of Christ these waggons loaded with wines, grains, oil, stone, wood, and all that is necessary for the wants of life or for the construction of the church’.40 But already Haimon’s emphasis was on the high birth of his devout penitents, and it was from the rich that the works received their funding. Thus when, on 10 June 1194, Chartres Cathedral burnt down again, what made another start feasible was not the Sisyphean labours of the city’s ardent poor but the solid wealth of its prudhommes and their friends.41
Cathedral-building is almost always long-term. And those great twelfth-century programmes at Laon and Notre-Dame de Paris, at Norwich and Canterbury, at Zamora and Salamanca, at Tournai, Worms and Mainz, all took generations to complete. Cologne Cathedral, the most ambitious yet, although begun at a fine pace in 1248, was not finished until the late nineteenth century. However, the mere fact that so many ambitious projects were launched at the same time says much for the health of the economy. Rhineland Cologne, always a minting capital, was at the centre of a revival which, after more than a century of bullion shortages, took off again in 1168 with the chance discovery of an important new silver source at Christiansdorf (later Freiberg), in Meissen. In less than twenty years from that first opening of Freiberg’s seams, the circulation throughout the West of hundreds of millions of silver pfennigs had transformed its trading economy.42
For cathedral-building bishops everywhere, the fact that this new wealth was largely created in the towns gave them whatever assurances they still needed. With population on the increase and labour cheap and plentiful, the ideal context had been established for daring programmes of new works characterized by leap-frogging ambition. Silver-rich Cologne remained for generations the most insanely ambitious project of them all. However, a seductive target had been set. And Cologne’s challenge, taken up first in 1386 by Gian Galeazzo Visconti, tyrant of Milan, was then accepted by the canons of Seville. It was one of those canons who, in 1401–2, made the famous boast: ‘We shall build a cathedral so fine that none shall be its equal … so great and of such a kind that those who see it completed will think that we were mad.’43
And that, in just a century, is what they did.
CHAPTER TWO Commercial Revolution
Europe’s commercial revolution is now sometimes seen as beginning at the Millennium, with that ‘birth of the market’ and ‘transformation of town/country relations’ which Guy Bois has located within a few years of 970.1 However, most historians would date it later, and all agree that it was in the long thirteenth century – from the 1150s (or a little earlier) to the 1340s (or a little later) – that genuine surpluses built up, to result in the huge cathedrals of today. Cologne was only one of many Western cities which grew spectacularly in the twelfth century, adding two new circuits of defences; Rheims, at least doubling its size, was another. Both then began cathedrals – Rheims in 1211, Cologne in 1248 – on a scale so vast that nobody could have known how they would end. ‘Spend and God shall send’, the cathedral-builders told each other; ‘God loves a glad giver’, they advised their friends. But prayer was not the only funding strategy they employed. Abbot Suger, in the previous century, had shown the way. Before beginning on the rebuilding of his abbey church at Saint-Denis, Suger’s first priority had been to set about the recovery of his rents. Only after that, he reported, ‘having put the situation to rights, I had my hands free to proceed with construction’. Even so, he had been concerned about the future: ‘[but] when later on our investments became more substantial, we never found ourselves running short, and an actual abundance of resources caused us to admit: “Everything that comes in sufficient quantities comes from God”.’2 Yet in 1148, when Suger told his story, a more reliable source of funding was the rising rent-roll of his abbey, having all the wealth of Paris on its doorstep.
With the economy speeding up and money no longer tight, one circumstance especially favoured large-scale building. ‘Thou shalt not lend upon usury’, ran the ancient teaching of the Church, whether ‘usury of money, usury of victuals, [or] usury of any thing that is lent upon usury’ (Deuteronomy 23: 19). And while frequently disregarded from the thirteenth century if not earlier, that doctrine remained unchanged throughout the Middle Ages, holding back the evolution of money markets. It was not, for example, until late in the seventeenth century that London developed fully the sophisticated banking and commercial systems which helped make it into Europe’s largest city. And before that time, the unresolved problem of the urban rich was where – if not in land or treasure – to keep their money. In compensation, towns before the plague were good places to live: they were free, well-protected, and expanding quickly. But where fully a third of Europe’s cultivable land-space was already alienated to the Church, and where most of the remainder was locked away in the protected family holdings of the nobility, what was left sold only at a premium. Confident in their own abilities and anticipating little profit from the