Notre-Dame de Chartres

At least five cathedrals have stood on the site since the Diocese of Chartres was formed in the 4th century. The first was burned in 743 on the orders of the Duke of Aquitaine, the second set alight by Danish raiders in 858, rebuilt by Bishop Gislebert and destroyed by fire in 1020. After that fire Bishop Fulbert, who held the see from 1006 to 1028, resolved to build anew; he appealed to the royal houses of Europe, receiving among other donations a gift from Cnut the Great, king of Norway, Denmark and England. Fulbert also founded the cathedral school that drew John of Salisbury and other theologians. The work went on in phases for a century, culminating in 1145 in the outburst known as the Cult of Carts, in which, it was claimed, more than a thousand penitents dragged carts of stone, timber and grain to the site.

Fire devastated the cathedral on the night of 10 June 1194, leaving only the crypt, the towers and the west façade. A papal legate was in Chartres and spread the word; money came from royal and noble patrons across Europe and in small donations from ordinary people, and rebuilding began at once, the surviving towers and Royal Portal worked into the new church. Contemporary accounts of the devastation may have been exaggerated; the lead cames holding the west windows together survived intact.

The south porch and most of its sculpture were installed by 1210, the north porch and west rose window by 1215, and the roof was in place by 1220, though the choir's high vaults waited until the last years of the 1250s. It was re-consecrated in October 1260 in the presence of Louis IX.

The cathedral acquired the Sancta Camisa, believed to be the tunic Mary wore at Christ's birth, in 876 as a gift from Charles the Bald. By the end of the 12th century Chartres was one of the most important popular pilgrimage destinations in Europe, with four great fairs timed to the Marian feast days.

The building also worked as a kind of marketplace: textiles were sold around the north transept, food and fuel at the south porch, and money-changers set their benches near the west portals and in the nave, where wine sellers traded to avoid tax until a 13th-century ordinance moved them into the crypt. The cloître around the cathedral was in effect a free-trade zone whose taxes went to the church authorities, and it brought repeated, often violent disputes; in 1258, after bloody riots instigated by the count's officials, the chapter won the king's permission to seal it and lock its gates each night.

Lightning destroyed the north spire in 1506, and Jean Texier rebuilt it in Flamboyant style between 1507 and 1513, then raised a rood screen between choir and nave. Henri IV was crowned in the choir on 27 February 1594 rather than at Reims, both Reims and Paris being held by the Catholic League.

Early in the Revolution a mob began destroying the sculpture of the north porch and was stopped by a larger crowd of townspeople. The local Revolutionary Committee resolved to blow the cathedral up and asked a local architect where to set the charges; he saved it by pointing out that the rubble would clog the streets for years. The building passed to the French State and worship stopped until the time of Napoleon.

On 16 August 1944 the cathedral was saved from destruction by the American colonel Welborn Barton Griffith Jr., who questioned an order to target it; the Americans believed its steeples and towers were being used as a German artillery observation post. Griffith went with a volunteer to check, found the cathedral empty, and had its bells rung as a signal not to shoot; the American command rescinded the order to fire. He was killed in action the same day at Lèves, near Chartres, and was decorated posthumously by France and the United States.

The cathedral is owned by the French State and remains the seat of the Bishop of Chartres; it was classified a historical monument in 1862 and inscribed on the UNESCO World Heritage list in 1979. The exterior and its sculpture were cleaned between 1997 and 2018; in 2009 the Ministry of Culture's Monuments Historiques division began an $18.5 million programme painting the interior masonry as it may have looked in the 13th century. The New York Times critic Martin Filler called the work "a scandalous desecration of a cultural holy place" and held that it breached the 1964 Charter of Venice, while Isabelle Paillot, president of the Friends of Chartres Cathedral, defended it as necessary to stop the building crumbling.