powerful external buttressing sharply contrasting with the delicacy of the ethereal upper level. Here all is open space, flooded with coloured light from its renowned thirteenth-century stained-glass windows. Atop it all, its thirty-three-metre spire (made from cedar in the nineteenth century, an exact replica of the medieval original), springs boldly skywards, a masterpiece of refinement visible from almost every vantage-point in Paris.
In 1257, under Saint Louis’s confessor, Robert de Sorbon, the University of Paris now gained its enduring name of the “Sorbonne.” By the end of the thirteenth century, it had attained the constitutional form that would carry it through the rest of the Middle Ages, and a century later it had as many as forty colleges. Robert de Sorbon started off the University library with a bequest of sixty-seven volumes; thirty years later the collection numbered 1,017 titles, all painstakingly written on parchment and often exquisitely illuminated. Of these only four were in French, the remainder still in Latin.
If gown took it out on town from time to time in medieval Paris, it was perhaps not surprising. The students, aged between fifteen and thirty, had a pitiably hard life. Often their backs bore the signs of heavy beating, inflicted by less amiable masters than Abélard. Bitterly cold in winter, with only one much patched garment to their name, they would lodge:
in a poor house with an old woman who cooks only vegetables and never prepares a sheep except on feast days. A dirty fellow waits on the table and just such a person buys the wine in the city … After the meal, a student sits on a rickety chair and uses a light, doubtless a candle, which goes out continually and disturbs the ideas.
The next day’s lectures would began at 5 a.m. Receiving no stipend, the scholar would often have to pay extortionate rents for these meagre lodgings himself—as well as find a way of paying his master’s wages, for, likewise receiving no regular salaries, each professor had the right to teach for whatever fees he could extract from such students as he could persuade to come to his lectures.
The Saint-King’s pious achievements, however, could not in the end save him. Against the counsel of the Pope and his own family, helmeted in the searing heat of high summer in 1270, Louis rashly set off from Aigues Mortes on a new crusade, the Eighth. In Tunisia, his army was decimated by sun and plague at Carthage, and he himself, aged fifty-six, succumbed. There was widespread mourning across France. He left the country with unprecedented prosperity, and a moral prestige which carried inestimable weight in foreign affairs. For the next two centuries the landed gentry would clamour for a return to “the good customs of Saint Louis.” Louis’s saintly moral standards were to lead the kingdom inexorably towards an absolute monarchy, with all its attendant strengths and weaknesses. By the end of his reign, medieval France had created for herself a civilization that was identifiably entirely her own. Saint Louis left behind him a capital that was to “change no more,” for “All the organs of public life, like those of a living body had come into existence, had found their place and, on the whole, were to retain it.”
Houses might be built and rebuilt, but Paris would remain the same, growing “concentrically like a tree”—first of all to fill out the undeveloped areas embraced by Philippe Auguste’s protective wall.
A NEW HARSHNESS
Louis’s heir, Philippe III—otherwise known as “Le Hardi”—ruled for only fifteen years and indeed made little impact on Paris. He spent most of his reign away from the capital campaigning, notably in the disastrous war with Aragon. His greatest dynastic success was to marry his second son to Joan of Navarre, the independent kingdom down on the Pyrenees. It was Navarre which, several centuries later, was to provide France with perhaps the greatest of all her kings,
In 1257, under Saint Louis’s confessor, Robert de Sorbon, the University of Paris now gained its enduring name of the “Sorbonne.” By the end of the thirteenth century, it had attained the constitutional form that would carry it through the rest of the Middle Ages, and a century later it had as many as forty colleges. Robert de Sorbon started off the University library with a bequest of sixty-seven volumes; thirty years later the collection numbered 1,017 titles, all painstakingly written on parchment and often exquisitely illuminated. Of these only four were in French, the remainder still in Latin.
If gown took it out on town from time to time in medieval Paris, it was perhaps not surprising. The students, aged between fifteen and thirty, had a pitiably hard life. Often their backs bore the signs of heavy beating, inflicted by less amiable masters than Abélard. Bitterly cold in winter, with only one much patched garment to their name, they would lodge:
in a poor house with an old woman who cooks only vegetables and never prepares a sheep except on feast days. A dirty fellow waits on the table and just such a person buys the wine in the city … After the meal, a student sits on a rickety chair and uses a light, doubtless a candle, which goes out continually and disturbs the ideas.
The next day’s lectures would began at 5 a.m. Receiving no stipend, the scholar would often have to pay extortionate rents for these meagre lodgings himself—as well as find a way of paying his master’s wages, for, likewise receiving no regular salaries, each professor had the right to teach for whatever fees he could extract from such students as he could persuade to come to his lectures.
The Saint-King’s pious achievements, however, could not in the end save him. Against the counsel of the Pope and his own family, helmeted in the searing heat of high summer in 1270, Louis rashly set off from Aigues Mortes on a new crusade, the Eighth. In Tunisia, his army was decimated by sun and plague at Carthage, and he himself, aged fifty-six, succumbed. There was widespread mourning across France. He left the country with unprecedented prosperity, and a moral prestige which carried inestimable weight in foreign affairs. For the next two centuries the landed gentry would clamour for a return to “the good customs of Saint Louis.” Louis’s saintly moral standards were to lead the kingdom inexorably towards an absolute monarchy, with all its attendant strengths and weaknesses. By the end of his reign, medieval France had created for herself a civilization that was identifiably entirely her own. Saint Louis left behind him a capital that was to “change no more,” for “All the organs of public life, like those of a living body had come into existence, had found their place and, on the whole, were to retain it.”
Houses might be built and rebuilt, but Paris would remain the same, growing “concentrically like a tree”—first of all to fill out the undeveloped areas embraced by Philippe Auguste’s protective wall.
A NEW HARSHNESS
Louis’s heir, Philippe III—otherwise known as “Le Hardi”—ruled for only fifteen years and indeed made little impact on Paris. He spent most of his reign away from the capital campaigning, notably in the disastrous war with Aragon. His greatest dynastic success was to marry his second son to Joan of Navarre, the independent kingdom down on the Pyrenees. It was Navarre which, several centuries later, was to provide France with perhaps the greatest of all her kings,
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