Cahors was the birthplace of one of the French Popes of Avignon, John XXII. (who is buried in Notre Dame des Doms at Avignon).
XI
ST. CAPRAIS D'AGEN
Agen, with Cahors, Tulle, Limoges, Périgueux, Angoulême, and Poitiers, are, in a way, in a class of themselves with respect to their cathedrals. They have not favoured aggrandizement, or even restoration to the extent of mitigating the sentiment which will always surround a really ancient fabric.
The cathedral at Bordeaux came strongly under the Gothic spell; so did that at Clermont-Ferrand, and St. Nazaire, in the Cité de Carcassonne. But those before-mentioned did not, to any appreciable extent, come under the influence of the new style affected by the architects of the Isle of France during the times of Philippe-Auguste (d. 1223).
At the death of Philippe le Bel (1314), the royal domain was considerably extended, and the cathedrals at Montpellier, Carcassonne, and Narbonne succumbed and took on Gothic features.
The diocese of Agen was founded in the fourth century as a suffragan of Bordeaux. Its first bishop was St. Phérade. To-day the diocese is still under the parent jurisdiction of Bordeaux, and the see comprises the department of Lot-et-Garonne.
A former cathedral church—St. Etienne—was destroyed at the Revolution.
The Romanesque cathedral of St. Caprais dates, as to its apses and transepts, from the eleventh century.
Its size is not commonly accredited great, but for a fact its nave is over fifty-five feet in width; greater than Chartres, and nearly as great as Amiens in the north.
This is a comparison which will show how futile it is not to take into consideration the peers, compeers, or contemporaries of architectural types when striving to impress its salient features upon one's senses.