Cluny Abbey

A charter drawn up at Bourges on 11 September, in 909 or 910, founded a Benedictine house at Cluny. Its author was William I the Pious, duke of Aquitaine, count of Auvergne and count of Mâcon, who granted an estate near Mâcon to Berno, abbot of Baume-les-Messieurs and Gigny in the Jura and already a figure in the movement to reform Benedictine monasticism. Berno chose the site and raised the first conventual buildings with twelve monks brought from Gigny and Baume. In the monasteries of that country the sixth-century Rule of Benedict of Nursia was no longer kept to the letter, lay patrons appointing abbots loyal to them and controlling the estates through them.

The deed of gift covered vineyards, fields, meadows, woods, waters, mills, serfs and land both cultivated and uncultivated, and required that hospitality be given to the poor, to strangers and to pilgrims. A patron of that period normally installed his kinsmen as abbots; William instead renounced his rights, left the election of the abbot to the monks, and freed the house from every obligation to himself and his family except prayer. Cluny was placed under the apostles Peter and Paul and under the direct protection of the papacy, then held by Sergius III, and made answerable to no local authority, lay or ecclesiastical. Even the pope could not seize its property, divide it, give it away or appoint an abbot without the consent of the monks. The deeds made the abbey's assets sacred, so that to take them was sacrilege. With the papacy on the far side of the Alps, the practical effect was independence.

In 926, a few months before his death, Berno named as his successor Odo, who went from monastery to monastery consolidating the reform. In 931 Pope John XI granted Odo the right to reform other abbeys and recognised Cluny as the head of an order, though few houses yet gave up electing their own abbots. Under Odo the abbey obtained the right to mint coinage, opened its schools and established its library, seeded with books he brought from Saint-Martin de Tours. By his death in 942 Cluny's influence had spread on the patronage of the high aristocracy, the emperor, the king of Burgundy, the counts and the bishops.

Aymard continued the work but went blind in 948 and appointed a coadjutor, Majolus, who directed Cluny from 954 until 994. In 973 Majolus was kidnapped by Arab Muslims from Fraxinet, who demanded a large ransom for his release, and in the same year he refused the papal office. Nicknamed the arbiter of kings, he was a friend of the future king of France Hugh Capet, who paid for his funeral, and he was beatified shortly after his death and later canonised. His ties with the Holy Roman Empire opened the order's expansion eastward, and by the end of his abbacy some thirty houses stood under the central authority of Cluny. Recorded donations rose across the abbacies, twenty-one under Berno, eighty-two under Odo, 272 under Aymard, 620 under Majolus, 613 under Odilo and 786 under Hugh of Semur; mills, a reliable source of income, accounted for 44 per cent of all gifts made between 910 and 1156.

Odilo of Mercœur became abbot in 994 and led the house for 55 years. In 998 he obtained from Pope Gregory V independence from the bishopric of Mâcon, a right extended to all Cluniac abbeys by Pope John XIX in 1024, and from these concessions came the ecclesia cluniacensis. Pope Benedict VIII had already decreed in 1016 that Cluny's privileges be extended to its subordinate houses. Odilo no longer relied on the protection of the high aristocracy but came to terms with the lesser lords, and he supported the Peace and Truce of God; at his death there were seventy houses in the order. Hugh of Semur, abbot from 1049, completed Cluny's integration into the feudal system, and around 1075 the hierarchy was relaxed so that powerful and proud Benedictine abbeys such as Vézelay could join. Pope Stephen IX confirmed the abbey's monetary privilege on 6 March 1058, and on 25 October 1095 Urban II proclaimed the ban sacré, a zone of peace around the abbey. The order spread into Spain, Italy and England and counted 10,000 monks, the number of houses paying it allegiance being put at 314 across Europe by the twelfth century in some counts and at 1,184 Cluniac monasteries at the order's height in others. Four monks of Cluny became popes, Gregory VII, Urban II, Paschal II and Urban V, and the first six abbots were all canonised.

Berno began the first abbey church, Cluny I, in 910; it was finished under Odo and consecrated before 927, and the church already standing on the site became a chapel of the Virgin. Nothing of it survives, having been pulled down for its successor. The second church was built for Majolus to replace a building that had grown too cramped, and was consecrated in 981; the start of the work is dated to 963 by some accounts and to the middle of the 950s by others, after the Hungarian raids of 953.

A third and far larger church was made possible by Spanish money. Ferdinand I of León, ruler of a united León-Castile, established an annual census for Cluny at some point between 1053 and 1065, fixing the sum at 1,000 golden aurei. Alfonso VI re-established the payment in 1077, confirmed it in 1090 and doubled it in that year. It was the largest annuity the order ever received from a king or any layman; the annual grant of 100 marks of silver made by Henry I of England from 1131 looked slight beside it. When the payments in aurei later lapsed, the order fell into a financial crisis that crippled it through the abbacies that followed.

The expansion of the order, the ever-growing number of monks attending the offices and the imposing building works under way at rival abbeys had made Majolus's church obsolete; the Life of Saint Hugh written by Geilon around 1115 describes it as a narrow and decrepit sheepfold. Work on a third church began around 1080 under Hugh of Semur. A first stone was laid symbolically in 1088, and in the same year Hézelon de Liège was called in as architect. In 1095 Urban II consecrated two altar stones and three chapels in the middle of the works. The nave was closed and consecrated in 1130, though the north arm of the transept, the towers and the narthex were at best begun by that date; work stopped during the second half of the twelfth century, resumed early in the thirteenth, and the immense Gothic narthex was completed in 1220 under Abbot Rolland I of Hainaut. The finished church was 187 metres long, and it remained the largest church in the West for three centuries, until the rebuilding of St Peter's in Rome began in 1506.

After the abbacy of Hugh II, which lasted only a few weeks, Pons of Melgueil was elected in 1109. He took an active part in ending the Investiture Controversy and pressed on with the order's policy of grandeur, including the third abbey church, which swallowed every donation that came in, among them a substantial gift from Castile. Charity to the poor added to the outlay, and the abbey met its first serious financial troubles and the opposition they bred. Its supremacy within the reform movement was challenged too, by the foundation of the more austere Cîteaux in 1098 and the Cistercian order that grew from it. His abbacy was marked as well by internal crises within the Cluniac order, brought on by the competition of eremitism and of the new orders, the Cistercians and the Carthusians. Pons resigned after a meeting with Pope Callixtus II. Peter of Montboissier, known as Peter the Venerable, replaced him in 1122 and then faced the unexpected return of Pons in 1126 from a pilgrimage to the Holy Land; Pons retook Cluny by influence and armed force and was finally excommunicated before Peter regained control, with the finances in a lamentable state after the violence and mercenaries having been paid with gold from the treasury.

Peter restored peace and re-established discipline after the laxity that had set in, and attempted sound estate management with the help of Henry of Blois, bishop of Winchester, while Cluniac monks became bishops, legates and cardinals across France and the Holy Roman Empire. He enlarged the hospice and the infirmary, and in his time the library, recorded at 570 works in its great catalogue, was larger than that of Monte Cassino. The rise of the Cistercians in the twelfth century and of the mendicant orders in the thirteenth steadily weakened Cluny's standing. Poor management of the estates and the unwillingness of the subsidiary priories to pay their annual quotas cut the revenues; the abbey raised loans against its assets, borrowing from merchants of Cluny and Jews of Mâcon, and saddled itself with debt. Conflicts with the priories multiplied, and in the fourteenth century the popes frequently appointed the abbots themselves. Through the later Middle Ages the monks never numbered more than sixty, though they lived in relative luxury.

From 1458 Abbot Jean de Bourbon attempted a great restoration of monastic discipline across the order, with mixed success: Cluny itself was revitalised, while other houses opposed the reforms and some seceded entirely. The abbey was ravaged by the forces of Charles the Bold during the Burgundian Wars. Under the Concordat of Bologna in 1516, overseen by Antoine Duprat, Francis I gained the power to appoint the abbot of Cluny, and over the following two and a half centuries the abbey never regained its position in European Christianity. During the religious conflicts of 1562 the Huguenots sacked it and destroyed or dispersed many of its manuscripts. On 29 July 1789 a band of revolutionaries who had burned seigneurial houses in the neighbourhood arrived to burn the abbey and were driven off by the townsmen's militia, but a decree of 28 October 1789 required the children being raised at the abbey to be returned to their families, the decree of 2 November 1789 placed church property at the disposal of the state, and that of 13 February 1790 suppressed the congregations and religious orders. The monks had to leave in 1791; mass was said in the abbey church for the last time on 25 October 1791, and some of them were imprisoned and deported.

The buildings were left without upkeep, and the bells were taken down in 1793, the tombs and statues of the abbey church were vandalised, and the wooden statues, the paintings and the archives were burned, the library sacked and the church given up to plundering; a few manuscripts were stowed in the town hall of Cluny. When public worship was restored in February 1795 the commune and the inhabitants asked that the abbey church become their parish church, but the administration did not listen. Sales began in 1797 and ran to April 1798, and the abbey church was bought for 2,140,000 francs in assignats, worth with inflation about 50,000 francs of 1790, by a bande noire of Mâcon, one of the speculators' associations that bought confiscated monuments cheaply to resell or demolish them. Demolition started in July 1798.

In August 1800 Alexandre Lenoir came to Cluny concerned for the mausoleum of the cardinal de Bouillon, abbot under Louis XIV, and, struck by the scale and singularity of the church, appealed to the interior minister Chaptal for its preservation. Chaptal ordered the prefect to suspend the demolition that November. The demolishers carried on in defiance of a prefect's order renewed in June 1801 and, to make the destruction irreversible, began by driving a street through the nave. On 8 May 1810 the façade and the great portal were blown up, and the ruins served as a stone quarry for the houses of the town. Less than a tenth of Cluny III now stands: the south arms of the great and the lesser transept, the clocher de l'Eau-Bénite, the remains of the Barabans towers that framed the portal and the lower parts of the narthex.

Sentiment turned in the 1830s and efforts began to preserve what was left; a museum opened in the Jean de Bourbon palace in 1886. On the initiative of Victor Duruy, minister of public instruction, a special teacher-training college was installed in the former abbey buildings and opened on 1 November 1866, and since 1901 the site has housed a campus of the École nationale supérieure d'arts et métiers. The American archaeologist Kenneth John Conant began work on the abbey church in the second half of the 1920s, taking up excavations started before the First World War by Edmond Malo, chief architect of historic monuments for Burgundy; funded by the Medieval Academy of America, his digging continued until 1950 and his monograph appeared in 1968. On 11 August 1944 the town was bombed and one bomb cleared the square in front of the narthex. The former abbey had been classified as a historical monument on the list of 1862, and the whole was registered as an archaeological site on 25 March 1941; it holds the European Heritage Label and is managed and opened to visitors by the Centre des monuments nationaux. A copy of the monastic treatise De institutis coenobiorum, made by a Cluny scribe between 1075 and 1100 and lost after the Revolution, surfaced in a Drouot sale catalogue in April 2008 and was restituted to the state. Excavation on the site in September 2017 turned up more than 2,200 silver deniers and oboles, 21 Almoravid gold dinars known as marabotins, a signet ring and other gold objects.