Coat of Arms of Cluny Abbey:
"Gules, two keys in saltire, the wards upwards and outwards, or. Overall, a sword in pale, argent".
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The Cluny library was one of the richest and most important in France and Europe. It was a storehouse of numerous very valuable manuscripts. During the religious conflicts of 1562, the
Huguenots sacked the abbey, destroying or dispersing many of the manuscripts. Of those that were left, some were burned in 1790 by a rioting mob related to the excesses of the
French Revolution. Others still were stored away in the Cluny town hall.
The French Government worked to relocate such treasures, including those that ended up in private hands. They are now held by the
Bibliothèque nationale de France at Paris. The
British Museum holds some sixty or so charters originating from Cluny.
In the fragmented and localized Europe of the 10th and 11th centuries, the Cluniac network extended its reforming influence far. Free of lay and episcopal interference, responsible only to the papacy, which was in a state of weakness and disorder with rival popes supported by competing nobles, Cluniac spirit was felt revitalizing the Norman church, reorganizing the royal French monastery at
Fleury and inspiring St
Dunstan in England. There were no official English Cluniac priories until that of
Lewes in Sussex, founded by the Anglo-Norman earl
William de Warenne c 1077. The best-preserved Cluniac houses in England are
Castle Acre Priory, Norfolk, and
Much Wenlock Priory, Shropshire. It is thought that there were only three Cluniac nunneries in England, one of them being
Delapré Abbey at
Northampton.
Until the reign of
Henry VI, all Cluniac houses in England were French, governed by French priors and directly controlled from Cluny. Henry's act of raising the English priories to independent abbeys was a political gesture, a mark of England's nascent national consciousness.
The early Cluniac establishments had offered refuges from a disordered world but by the late 11th century, Cluniac piety permeated society. This is the period that achieved the final Christianization of the heartland of Europe.
Well-born and educated Cluniac priors worked eagerly with local royal and aristocratic patrons of their houses, filled responsible positions in their chanceries and were appointed to bishoprics. Cluny spread the custom of veneration of the king as patron and support of the Church, and in turn the conduct of 11th-century kings, and their spiritual outlook, appeared to undergo a change. In England,
Edward the Confessor was later canonized. In Germany, the penetration of Cluniac ideals was effected in concert with
Henry III of the Salian dynasty, who had married a daughter of the duke of Aquitaine. Henry was infused with a sense of his sacramental role as a delegate of Christ in the temporal sphere. He had a spiritual and intellectual grounding for his leadership of the German church, which culminated in the pontificate of his kinsman,
Pope Leo IX. The new pious outlook of lay leaders enabled the enforcement of the
Truce of God movement to curb aristocratic violence.
Within his order, the Abbot of Cluny was free to assign any monk to any house; he created a fluid structure around a central authority that was to become a feature of the royal chanceries of England and of France, and of the bureaucracy of the great independent dukes, such as that of Burgundy. Cluny's highly centralized hierarchy was a training ground for Catholic prelates: four monks of Cluny became
popes:
Gregory VII,
Urban II,
Paschal II and
Urban V.
An orderly succession of able and educated abbots, drawn from the highest aristocratic circles, led Cluny, and three were canonized: Saints
Odo of Cluny, the second abbot (died 942);
Hugh of Cluny, the sixth abbot (died 1109); and
Odilo, the fifth abbot (died 1049). Odilo continued to reform other monasteries, but as Abbot of Cluny, he also exercised tighter control of the order's far-flung priories.
Cluny and the Gregorian reforms
Cluny was not known for its severity or asceticism, but the abbots of Cluny supported the revival of the papacy and the
reforms of
Pope Gregory VII. The Cluniac establishment found itself closely identified with the Papacy. In the early 12th century, the order lost momentum under poor government. It was subsequently revitalized under Abbot
Peter the Venerable (died 1156), who brought lax priories back into line and returned to stricter discipline. Cluny reached its apogee of power and influence under Peter, as its monks became bishops, legates, and cardinals throughout France and the Holy Roman Empire. But by the time Peter died, newer and more austere orders such as the
Cistercians were generating the next wave of ecclesiastical reform.
Outside monastic structures, the rise of English and French
nationalism created a climate unfavourable to the existence of monasteries autocratically ruled by a head residing in Burgundy. The
Papal Schism of 1378 to 1409 further divided loyalties: France recognizing a Pope at Avignon and England one at Rome, interfered with the relations between Cluny and its dependent houses. Under the strain, some English houses, such as
Lenton Priory,
Nottingham, were naturalized (
Lenton in 1392) and no longer regarded as alien priories, weakening the Cluniac structure.
By the time of the
French Revolution, the monks were so thoroughly identified with the
Ancien Régime that the order was suppressed in France in 1790 and the monastery at Cluny almost totally demolished in 1810. Later, it was sold and used as a quarry until 1823. Today, little more than one of the original eight towers remains of the whole monastery.
Pope Gregory VII was once a monk at Cluny
Modern excavations of the Abbey began in 1927 under the direction of
Kenneth John Conant, American architectural historian of
Harvard University, and continued (although not continuously) until 1950.
Decline and destruction of the buildings.
Starting from the 12th century, Cluny had serious financial problems, caused mainly by the construction of the third abbey. Charity given to the poor increased the expenditure. The influence of the abbey weakened gradually as other religious orders rose (
Cistercians in the 12th, then
Mendicants in the 13th century). Bad management of the grounds and unwillingness of the subsidiary companies to pay the annual taxable quota helped to lessen Cluny's revenue. Cluny raised loans and ended up being involved in debt to its creditors, who were merchants of Cluny or Jews of
Mâcon.
The conflicts with the priories multiplied and the authority of the pope became heavier. To the 14th-Century, the Pope frequently named the abbots. The crises at the end of the Middle Ages and the wars of religion in the 16th-Century weakened the abbey a little more. The monks lived in luxury and there were not more than about 60 monks in the middle of the 15th-Century. With the
Concordat of Bologna in 1516, overseen by
Antoine Duprat, the king gained the power to appoint the abbot of Cluny.
The years following the
French Revolution were fatal to all the monastic buildings and its church. In 1793, its archives were burned and the church was delivered to plundering. The abbey estate was sold in 1798 for 2,140,000 francs. Until 1813, the abbey was used as a stone quarry to build houses in the town.
Today, there remain only the buildings built under the Old Mode as well as a small portion of Cluny III. Only the Southern Transept and its Bell-Tower still exist. The remaining structure represents less than 10% of the floor area of Cluny III, which was the largest Church of Christendom, until the construction of
St. Peter's Basilica in Rome, five centuries later.
In 1928, the site was excavated and recognized by the American archaeologist
Kenneth J. Conant with the backing of the
Medieval Academy of America.
THIS CONCLUDES THE ARTICLE ON CLUNY ABBEY
