During the Middle Ages the silent Burgundian valley was a busy hive of arts and crafts[272] with goldsmiths’ work, illuminating, carving in ivory and in stone, foundering of bells, and the making of stained glass. All that went toward the adornment of God’s house was fostered in Cluniac schools, but above all was the master art of the builder honored. In bands of twelve the monks carried not only the Gospel, but the arts to every part of Europe, and even farther afield, for there were houses of the Order on Mount Tabor, in Nazareth, and in Bethany. No uniform Cluniac building lore was followed; it was the usual custom for the monks to conform to the local traditions in each different country.[273]
It was natural that the big abbey church at Cluny proper should have been Burgundian Romanesque. Hazelon, a monk of Cluny, was the master-of-works, a learned man who had once occupied a high position in the world; he is said to have himself worked here with trowel and mortar. The tunnel vaulting was braced by transverse ribs that were slightly pointed; clearstory windows were opened in the upper walls. The channeled pilasters were a heritage from the classic traditions of the region; near by, in Rome’s former capital of Autun, were many monuments of antiquity.
Cluny’s abbey church of St. Peter was the largest in the world, and covered an area about equal to that of the present St. Peter’s at Rome. It was over five hundred and fifty feet long; the cathedral at Paris is not four hundred feet in length. There were double aisles and double transepts. St. Hugues of Cluny, the sixth abbot, “a man of God greatest among the great,” “the pupil of the papacy’s eye,” ruled the Burgundian mother house during the sixty years that Cluny guided Christendom (1049 to 1109). No flattery, no subtlety could turn him from pure justice. Under him were trained Hildebrand, the future Gregory VII, who led the forces of church reform. “The giving up of justice is the shipwreck of the soul,” said Gregory VII. Abbot Hugues trained also Urban II, who preached the First Crusade. Among the houses he founded were St. Martin-des-Champs at Paris, and St. Pancras at Lewes; in England there were thirty-five Cluniac establishments in the time of Henry VIII.
Twice St. Hugues went into Spain, where his niece was the Queen of Castile, engaged in substituting the liturgy of the Church universal for the Mozarabic rite. To the town of Cluny he granted a commune, and he built two of its parish churches, Notre Dame and St. Marcel.[274] When he felt death approaching, he had himself carried before the altar of St. Marcel, there to breathe his last on a bed of ashes, and a few days earlier than the Easter Tuesday of 1109 on which he passed away, his dear friend and frequent visitor at Cluny, St. Anselm of Canterbury, died, being privileged, he said, to go to meet his Saviour in time for the blessed Easter feast. Those two great men of the cloister by their ethical and intellectual leadership laid the basis for the Gothic cathedrals.
The choir of St. Peter’s, at Cluny, was blessed by Urban II, in 1095, when he came into France to preach the First Crusade. He passed a week in his old home, after which he and his beloved master, St. Hugues, proceeded to the historic gathering at Clermont. The nave of St. Peter’s was carried forward by succeeding abbots of Cluny, and many a pope was to watch the edifice rising. Paschal II passed the winter of 1106-07 in Cluny, and his successor, Gelasius II, died there in 1119; he had recently consecrated the new Romanesque cathedral of Pisa.[275] On the site of the wing of the cloister where he lodged now stands a XIV-century building called by his name. On his death the cardinals at Cluny held conclave, electing as pope a member of the ducal house of Burgundy, the bishop of Vienne, who took the name Calixtus II; in Cluny church he canonized the great Abbot Hugues.
St. Hugues’ successor, Pons de Melgueil, after an estimable career, was led by pride to a downfall. On his resignation, Pierre de Montboissier, an Auvergne noble, known in history as Peter the Venerable, became the ninth abbot (1122-56). At that time he was but thirty years of age. Pons returned, seized Cluny abbey, and in the ensuing disorders the vaulting of the new nave collapsed. Abbot Peter restored the stone roof, and Innocent II dedicated the completed church in 1131.
The capitals then carved are to be seen in the town’s Museum. Some of them personified the eight tones of liturgical music, for Cluny excelled in song, and every twenty-four hours her vast basilica echoed to the chanting of the entire book of Psalms; never, says the old chronicle, was there pause in the saintes clameurs, the laus perennis started by Irish Columbanus in the valleys of Burgundy. Some of the capitals from the abbatial are contemporaries of the statuary at Vézelay, where Peter the Venerable had been prior, and where his brother, Pons de Montboissier, was abbot. Vézelay was a pilgrimage church, so that its imagery was made of more popular character than that of Cluny, where worshiped an intellectual élite.
Cluny began the carving of the Bible for the Poor. The Burgundians were the first to develop the imaged portal which the Gothic cathedrals were to elaborate into their sumptuous triple entrances. While Cluny was building, a monk in the monastery composed a poem of some thousand lines, opening with a vision of the heavenly Jerusalem. Bernard of Morlaix must have found inspiration in his own Burgundian basilica, which we know to have contained over three hundred windows of translucent mosaic. He dedicated his poem to his beloved abbot, Pierre de Montboissier.
Peter the Venerable was no Puritan in art, as was his friend St. Bernard, with whom he had many a skirmish, owing to their temperamental differences and the rivalship of their respective Orders. The abbot of Cluny never wavered in his reverence for the “fellow citizen of angels,” as he called the abbot of Clairvaux, and Bernard saw in Peter, man of the world though he was, “a vessel of election full of truth and grace.”
Like Abbot Suger, Pierre de Montboissier was the type of the liberal culture of the Benedictine, and he was to live again in the XVII-century scholars of the St. Maur reform, even as Bernard’s uncompromising spirit reappeared then in De Rancy and his Trappists, a reform of Cîteaux. Like Suger, Peter the Venerable was a quoter of the classics, and a literary man. “To write was for an abbot of Cluny a hereditary tradition,” said a XII-century historian. He had Arabic taught at Cluny for mission purposes. Journeying in Spain, he was the first to have the Koran translated for Europe; he held it to be Islam’s best refutation. Very modern appears this old-time abbot in the zest with which he set out to travel, to inspect the houses of his Order. When he died in 1156, he was ruling over two thousand establishments, in every part of Christendom.