In 1254, when St. Louis was returning from his unsuccessful crusade, he paused in Clermont, to replenish his depleted treasury. Ten years later he presented windows to the cathedral, on the occasion of his son Philippe’s marriage there to the daughter of Jaime el Conquistador of Aragon. The lights in the Lady chapel show the fleur-de-lis and the donjons of Castile, and are apparently the work of Paris craftsmen, who controlled the vitrine art of the later XIII century. That unskilled local workers set them in place would seem to be indicated by the armature bars which do not follow the contour of the medallions, as was then the custom. In the choir’s clearstory are the single figures and grisaille that were in vogue during the next century.
Jean Deschamps made the plan of Clermont Cathedral. He may have studied in the north, since certain traits of Picardy appear here, but the spirit of the work is regional. His windows do not fill the entire upper space between the active members. Under Bishop Guy de la Tour he directed the building of the cathedral for almost forty years, till 1287. Perhaps he designed the cathedral of Limoges, in west-central France, since its plan and details closely resemble those of Clermont. Bishop Aymar de Cros, who carried on the works in Auvergne’s capital, was another of the schoolmen who were builders of churches; such was his intellect that St. Thomas Aquinas willed to him his manuscripts in the hope that his Summa might be completed.
Under Bishop Aubert Aycelin de Montaigu a new master-of-works took charge—Pierre Deschamps (1287-1325), the son probably of Jean who had made the plans. He erected the four westernmost bays of the choir, the transept, and the easternmost bay of the nave in its lower parts. From 1340 to 1359 the master-of-works was Pierre de Cabazat, who added three more bays to the nave, and was employed in those same years in making, with Hugues Morel, the abbey church of La Chaise Dieu in the Forez mountains across the plain from Clermont.[208] An Avignon pope, Clement VI, was the patron who undertook that gaunt granite structure, as full of sorrow as the times that produced it. Clement had been abbot at La Chaise Dieu, so naturally he contributed toward the erection of the cathedral of Auvergne as did his successor at Avignon, Innocent VI (d. 1362), a former bishop of Clermont.
The city was fortunate to have one of the notable D’Amboise family for its prelate in the late-Gothic day, Jacques d’Amboise (1505-16), who as abbot of Cluny had built at Paris the stately residence called the Hôtel Cluny. Close to his Auvergne cathedral he set up the Fontaine d’Amboise, now on the Cours Sablon. The eloquent Massillon was a later bishop of Clermont (1717-42); he founded its town library and bequeathed his fortune to the sick poor of the Hôtel Dieu. Before the French Revolution had turned to violence and destruction, in Clermont Cathedral gathered the people, with hearts beating high with generous desire for reform, for the blessing of their National Guard banner, embroidered by a community of nuns. With all too tragic swiftness came the day when in the same church were lighted bonfires for the destruction of vestments and missals. Among the precious things then wrecked was a portrait statue of Louis IX, made while his friend Guy de la Tour was bishop. Only by chance did the cathedral itself, riddled with bullets, escape annihilation.
The see of Clermont has gone by various designations; so ancient is this city that it has been called successively by five different names. Here where is more Celtic blood than in any other region in France, save Brittany, the Celtic hero, Vercingetorex, inflicted on Cæsar his sole defeat. When Gaul became Christian, Clermont continued to be important. Her first bishop, St. Austremonius, was one of the seven whom Gregory of Tours says were sent into Gaul in 250 by Pope Fabian, with St. Denis of Paris, St. Martial of Limoges, St. Saturninus of Toulouse, St. Just of Narbonne, St. Trophimus of Arles, and St. Gatien of Tours. At the close of the V century Clermont’s bishop, the celebrated Caius Apollinaris Sidonius, poet and scholar, son-in-law of an emperor, made his stand for Latin culture against Teutonic submersion. Dearly he loved his own enlightened Lyons, but of Clermont he said, “Such an horizon would make a stranger forget his native land.” A generation later another outstanding Gallo-Roman bishop of Clermont was St. Gall, uncle of Gregory of Tours, who was so just to all that even Jews marched with lighted tapers at his funeral. Some twenty-six of Clermont’s bishops have been canonized.
The third cathedral of the city, and that which immediately preceded the present one, was consecrated in 946 by Bishop Étienne II. Clermont had suffered grievously by Saracen invasion, followed by the Northmen inroads. After the second Norman sacking the ruined houses smoldered for a month, and in the streets corpses lay unburied, for the population in terror had fled to the countryside. The bishop called back his flock to remake their homes. In his new church was a precocious use of ambulatory and radiating chapels, a disposition which was to lead to the chief beauty in the Gothic cathedrals of the land, but which made its appearance in the Ile-de-France only in the XII century. Bishop Étienne’s Carolingian cathedral became the prototype for the Auvergnat-Romanesque school.
In the good Étienne’s church prayed the first crusaders when by papal bidding there gathered at Clermont a mighty council at whose tenth and last session was preached the First Crusade. Nature herself seemed to have prepared the people’s minds for some vast enterprise, for all the chroniclers of western Christendom describe the sublime shower of astral stars, thick as snowflakes, which whirled in the sky. So in this same primeval Auvergne, some six centuries earlier, at the break-up of Rome’s empire before the invading Barbarians, there had for three years been earthquakes and fiery volcanic eruptions.
Tradition says that the momentous gathering of 1095 took place in what is now the Place Delille and the adjacent Cours Sablon. Many of our building friends were present—Bishop Odo from Bayeux, Bishop Ives from Chartres, Bishop Hoël from Le Mans, the abbots Geoffrey of Vendôme, Jarenton of St. Bénigne, and St. Hugues of Cluny, and from Spain came the great Bernardo who ruled the see of Toledo. For the people of Clermont to-day, November 28, 1095, is as vivid a reality as any of the revolutions of yesterday. A statue of Urban II stands outside the cathedral. Even so he stood, said a witness, as one having authority, high above the vast throng, on one side of him the stunted Peter the Hermit of Picardy, and on the other the Norman-Italian Bohemund of Taranto, a veritable Greek god in build and feature. From end to end of France Urban journeyed to arouse the people. Now he used persuasion, now invective; sometimes he appealed to idealistic motives or propounded colonial policies very like modern ideas. Europe had good cause to be apprehensive. The Almoravids had advanced into Spain. The Seljukian Turks were a menace more serious than the Saracens. Urban understood the peril and raised his voice in warning. “Cease to be a terror to peaceful citizens,” he exhorted the gathered barons. “Turn your arms to the defense of the soil trod by the King of Kings, of the tomb over which rose the sun of the Resurrection.... The great cities of Asia Minor have fallen a prey to the Mussulman, who has planted the crescent by the Hellespont, whence he menaces Europe.... Nation of the Franks, set beyond the mountains, nation cherished and chosen of God, as clearly your high deeds prove, nation distinct from others by your situation, by your faith, by your respect for Mother Church, to you I address my plea.... Who should right these wrongs but you who have received from on high agility of body, the training of arms and grandeur of soul?... Cease these mutual wars!... Jesus Christ died for you. You should be willing to die for him.” And a great answering cry rose from the hundred thousand gathered there, “God wills it,” to be the rallying call of the crusades.
Thus in the heart of France a French pope initiated the cosmic ventures which were to change European ways of life, ventures in which Frenchmen played a leading part so that to this day a European is called a Frank by a Mohammedan. One can easily see in the crusades only their failures and their crimes, one can sneer at them with Voltaire—who sneered at Jeanne d’Arc. Europe’s aggression was needed then to save Christianity from Asiatic immobility. The benefits of the crusades outweigh their delinquencies.
Gesta Dei per Francos a monk called his chronicle of the First Crusade. And while those feats by God through the men of France in the East went on, other feats for God were ventured in France, the raising of Gothic cathedrals, sister movements that gave wings to the soul, purifying and molding the faith and the genius of those virile and faulty generations. Already the movement was stirring. On his way to Clermont, Urban II had seen Verona Cathedral building and S. Ambrogio’s at Milan. He had blessed S. Abondio at Como. In France he blessed the new choir of St. Sernin at Toulouse and the material gathered for the cathedral at Carcassonne. Cluny’s new choir he dedicated, and various other Romanesque churches. Before the Second Crusade set out Suger had built St. Denis.