IN 1194 A RAGING FIRE BURNED most of the town of Chartres, in France, including its cathedral. Worried citizens feared that their most prized relic, the sacred tunic worn by the Virgin Mary when Christ was born, had gone up in flames as well. Had the Virgin abandoned the town? Suddenly the bishop and his clerics emerged from the cathedral crypt carrying the sacred tunic, which had remained unharmed. They took it as a sign that the Virgin had not only not abandoned her city but also wanted a new and more magnificent cathedral to house her relic. The town dedicated itself to the task; the bishop, his clerics, and the town guilds all gave generously to pay for stonecutters, carvers, glaziers, countless other workmen, and a master builder. Donations poured in from the counts, dukes, and even the king of France. The new cathedral was finished in twenty-six years—a very short time in an age when such churches usually took a century or more to build. Its vault soared 116 feet high; its length stretched more than 100 yards. Its western portals, which had been spared the flames, retained the sculptural decoration—carved around 1150—of the old church: three doorways surrounded and surmounted by figures that demonstrated the close relationship between the truths of divine wisdom, the French royal house, and the seven liberal arts—grammar, rhetoric, logic, arithmetic, geometry, music, and astronomy. The rest of the church was built in a new style: Gothic.

The rebuilt cathedral at Chartres sums up in stone the key features that characterized the period from 1150 to 1215 and would mark the rest of the Middle Ages. Its Gothic style—with its high vault, flying buttresses, and enormous stained-glass windows—became the quintessential style of medieval architecture. The celebration of the liberal arts on one of its doorways mirrored the new schools that flourished in the twelfth century and culminated in the universities of the thirteenth. The twenty-four statues of Old Testament figures flanking its western portals were meant to prefigure the kings of France; they demonstrate the extraordinary importance of powerful princes in this period, when monarchies and principalities ceased to be the personal creation of each ruler and became permanent institutions, with professional bureaucratic staffs. The outpouring of popular support that culminated in the building of the cathedral is evidence of a vibrant vernacular (non-Latin-speaking) culture, which expressed itself not only in stone but in literature as well. Finally, the emphasis at Chartres on the divine wisdom echoes the age’s fervor about Christian truths, a zeal that led to the creation of new religious movements even as it stoked the fires of intolerance.