The twin towers, more than two hundred and fifty feet high, which were without spires, were none the less impressive. The north portal contained statues of the Bishops of Rheims from Clovis down, and there was here a doorway walled up containing a Gothic tympanum of the Last Judgment, the figures of which, however, with the exception of the Christ, were greatly mutilated.
History states that Rheims was known at the time of the Roman invasion as Durocortorum. Briefly, about the year 352 a. d. the worthy SS. Sixte and Sinice came here to preach Christianity, and converted the consul Jovinus, whose cenotaph is in the archevêché. The Vandals arrived forty years later, and captured the town, murdering St. Nicaise on the very steps of the cathedral which he had founded. The See of Rheims was occupied for seventy-five years after the Conquest of Champagne, by Clovis, by St. Remi, or Remigius, who was already a bishop at the age of twenty-two. He it was who baptised Clovis in the cathedral, which act gave such renown to the place that thereafter the kings came to be consecrated with the oil, which according to tradition was brought by a snow white dove in a holy phial (ampoule) for the baptism of the first Christian king, and was thereafter preserved in the Abbey of St. Remi.
Rheims was taken in 563 by Chilperic, and in 720 by Charles Martel, despite the great courage and resistance by the Bishop, St. Rigobert, who was exiled. Here took place, too, the interview of Pope Stephen III and Pepin, and Charlemagne and Leo III. Also the coronation of Louis le Debonnaire by Stephen IV in 816.
In the following years the Archbishops of Rheims became world famous, for instance the Scholar Hincmar, and Gerbert, who was afterwards Pope Sylvester II, and who as a simple monk under the great Adalbéron attained great celebrity for his lectures.
Until the fourteenth century Archbishops had temporal power over Rheims, coining their money and ruling as sovereigns.
Calixtus II in 1119 held here a council to excommunicate the Emperor, Henry V.
In 1429 Rheims was delivered from the English yoke by Jeanne d'Arc, who personally gave the keys of the town to Charles VII and assisted at his coronation in the Cathedral.
Lubke, writing of the sculptural details of the Cathedral, says, "All the dignity and grace of the style here reaches a truly classical expression. Nevertheless, even here, in one of the master works of the time, we find a great variety in the mode of treatment. There are heavy stunted statues with clumsy heads and vacant expression, like the earlier works of Chartres; others are of the most refined beauty, full of nobility and tenderness, graceful in proportion, and with drapery which falls in stately folds, free in movement and with a gentle loveliness or sublime dignity of expression; others again are exaggerated in height, awkward in proportion, caricatured in expression, and affected in attitude."