[198] Montierneuf was founded in 1078 by Guillaume VIII (d. 1086). Only eight of the nave’s eleven bays remain. The chevet was rebuilt in the XIV century. The abbey was sacked in 1562. St. Porchaire’s tower is all that remains of an XI-century church, a contemporary of Notre Dame-la-Grande and Montierneuf. It was to be destroyed in 1843, but luckily some visiting archæologists saved it. From St. Porchaire’s belfry rang the summonses of Poitiers University. De Cherge, “Mémoire historique sur l’abbaye de Montierneuf de Poitiers,” in Mém. de la Soc. des antiquaires de l’Ouest, 1844; Deux étudiants de l’Université de Poitiers, Francis Bacon et René Descartes, 1867, p. 65.
[199] St. Savin lies thirty miles from Poitiers. Its choir and transept belong to the early part of the XII century, and its nave was erected about thirty years after. Its donjonlike tower was crowned later by a spire, the highest in southwest France with St. Michel’s at Bordeaux. Like Etruscan vase ornamentation are its unique frescoes giving Genesis, Exodus, and the Apocalypse. On the route from Poitiers to St. Savin lies Chauvigny, “the pearl of Poitou,” with the ruins of several castles. Its church of St. Pierre has a decorated apse and some eight-branch Plantagenet vaults; its church of Notre Dame possesses some XV-century frescoes.
Another of the chief Poitou-Romanesque churches is at St. Maixent, thirty miles from Poitiers, via Niort. The nave is XII century, the choir, Angevin Gothic, and the tower, Flamboyant; its crypt capitals are noticeable.
The abbey church at St. Jouin-de-Marnes, near Montcontour, has a good façade, a fine Romanesque tower, a transept of the end of the XI century, and a XII-century choir and nave, only three of whose vault sections, however, are the primitive ones. In the XIII century the present elaborate masonry roof was substituted. It belongs to the Third Period of the Plantagenet school, with three lines of keystones. Airvault abbey church, not far away, built a similar much-ramified vault, the prototype for that of Toussaint, at Angers.
Parthenay can be included in the trip from Poitiers to St. Jouin-de-Marnes. In its venerable church took place the scene when St. Bernard rose in majesty at the altar and compelled the giant sinner Guillaume X of Aquitaine to repent.
Three miles from Poitiers lies St. Benoit’s Romanesque church, with a XIII-century spire, and five miles away is Ligugé, where St. Martin, under St. Hilary’s guidance, founded the first monastery in Gaul. Dom Prosper Guéranger restored Ligugé in 1864, and here J. K. Huysmans lived, as he has described in l’Oblat. The XV-century church was rebuilt by that prelate of the Renaissance, Geoffrey d’Estissac, whom Rabelais came to visit.
Congrès Archéologique, 1910, St. Savin; p. 119, Airvault; p. 108, St. Jouin-de-Marnes, and the latter also in the Congrès of 1903; Prosper Merimée, Les peintures de St. Savin (Paris, 1845), folio; Ch. Tranchant, Guide pour la visite des monuments de Chauvigny en Poitou (Paris, 1901).
[200] Probably because of the magistral window at Poitiers, the Byzantine tradition of the crucified Christ lingered long in the art of midland France. Over an altar of the chapel of Bourgonnière, in the parish of Bouzillé, in Angers diocese, is a remarkable XVI-century polychrome image of the Saviour, unwounded, robed, and awake, with arms wide outstretched against the Cross.
[201] In 1106 gathered another council at Poitiers, a holy-war rally, but the war was to be waged on Christian Constantinople. The superb Bohemund, the new prince of Antioch, came to organize the expedition; he had gone on the First Crusade for booty, fierce as a Norman, astute as an Italian, in person like a Greek god, tall beyond man’s normal height, broad-shouldered, and lithe—so the Greek princess at Constantinople saw him. Philip I gave him his daughter, and on Tancred, his cousin, a true hero of the holy wars, not a buccaneer, the king of France bestowed his daughter by the fair Bertrada de Montfort.
[202] E. Lefèvre-Pontalis, Étude archéologique de St. Hilaire de Poitiers (Caen, 1904); also in the Congrès Archéologique of 1903; De Longuemar, “Essai historique sur l’église Saint Hilaire-le-grand de Poitiers,” in Mémoires des antiquaires de l’Ouest, 1856.