Vézelay Abbey

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Vézelay, Church and Hill*
UNESCO World Heritage Site

State Party	France
Type	Cultural
Criteria	i, vi
Reference	84
Region†	Europe and North America
Coordinates	47°27′59″N, 3°44′55″ECoordinates: 47°27′59″N, 3°44′55″E
Inscription history
Inscription	1979 (3rd Session)
* Name as inscribed on World Heritage List. † Region as classified by UNESCO.

Vézelay Abbey (now known as Basilique Sainte-Marie-Madeleine) was a Benedictine and Cluniac monastery in Vézelay in the Yonne département in Burgundy, France. The Benedictine abbey church of Ste-Marie-Madeleine (or Basilica of St. Mary Magdalene), with its complicated program of imagery in sculpted capitals and portals, is one of the outstanding masterpieces of Burgundian Romanesque art and architecture, though much of its exterior sculpture was defaced during the French Revolution. The church and hill at Vézelay were added to the UNESCO list of World Heritage Sites in 1979.

[edit] History

The Benedictine abbey of Vézelay was founded,^[1] as many abbeys were, on land that had been a late Roman villa, of Vercellus (Vercelle becoming Vézelay). The villa had passed into the hands of the Carolingians and devolved to a Carolingian count, Girart, of Roussillon. His two convents were looted and dispersed by Moorish raiding parties in the 8th century, and a hilltop convent was burnt by Norman raiders. In the ninth-century, the abbey was refounded under the guidance of Badilo, who became an affiliate of the reformed Benedictine order of Cluny. Vézelay also stood at the beginning of one of the four major routes through France for pilgrims going to Santiago de Compostela in Galicia, in the north-western corner of Spain.

About 1050 the monks of Vézelay began to claim to hold the relics of Mary Magdalene, brought, they related, from the Holy Land either by their 9th-century founder-saint, Badilo, or by envoys despatched by him. A little later a monk of Vézelay declared that he had detected in a crypt at St-Maximin in Provence, carved on an empty sarcophagus, a representation of the Unction at Bethany, when Jesus' head was anointed by a woman of Bethany, assumed in the Middle Ages to be Mary Magdalene. The monks of Vézelay pronounced it to be Mary Magdalene's tomb, from which her relics had been translated to their abbey. Freed captives then brought their chains as votive objects to the abbey, and it was the newly-elected Abbot Geoffroy in 1037 who had the ironwork melted down and reforged as wrought iron railings surrounding the Magdelen's altar. Thus the erection of one of the finest examples of Romanesque architecture which followed was made possible by pilgrims to the declared relics and these tactile examples demonstrating the efficacy of prayers. Mary Magdalene is the prototype of the penitent, and Vézelay has remained an important place of pilgrimage for the Catholic faithful, though the actual relics were torched by Huguenots in the 16th century.

Floorplan of Vézelay shows the adjustment in vaulting between the choir and the new nave.

To accommodate the influx of pilgrims a new abbey church was begun, dedicated on April 21, 1104, but the expense of building so increased the tax burden in the abbey's lands that the peasants rose up and killed the abbot. The crush of pilgrims was such that an extended narthex (an enclosed porch) was built, inaugurated by Pope Innocent II in 1132 to help accommodate the pilgrim throng.

Saint Bernard of Clairvaux preached there in favor of a second crusade at Easter 1146, in front of King Louis VII. Richard I of England and Philip II of France met there and spent three months at the Abbey in 1190 before leaving for the Third Crusade. Thomas Becket in exile, chose Vézelay for his Whitsunday sermon in 1166, announcing the excommunication of the main supporters of his English King, Henry II, and threatening the King with excommunication too. The nave, which had burnt once, with great loss of life, burned again in 1165, after which it was rebuilt in its present form.

Tympanum of the basilica of St. Madeleine in Vézelay

Vézelay was a plum. Its litigious monastic community was prepared to defend its liberties and privileges against all comers:^[2] the bishops of Autun, who challenged its claims to exemption; the counts of Nevers, who claimed jurisdiction in their court and rights of hospitality at Vézelay; the abbey of Cluny, which had reformed its rule and sought to maintain control of the abbot within its hierarchy; the townsmen of Vézelay, who demanded a modicum of communal self-government.

The start of the decline of Vézelay coincided with the well-publicized discovery in 1279 of the body of Mary Magdalene at Saint-Maximin-la-Sainte-Baume in Provence, given regal patronage by Charles II, the Angevine king of Sicily. When Charles erected a Dominican convent at La Sainte-Baume, the shrine was marvellously found intact, even with an explanatory inscription stating why the relics had been hidden. The local Dominican monks soon compiled an account of miracles that these relics had wrought. This discovery seriously undermined Vézelay's position as the main shrine of Magdalen in Europe.

After the Revolution, Vézelay stood in danger of collapse. In 1834 the newly-appointed French inspector of historical monuments, Prosper Mérimée (more familiar as the author of Carmen), warned that it was about to collapse, and the young architect Eugène Viollet-le-Duc was appointed to supervise a massive and successful restoration, undertaken in several stages between 1840 and 1861, during which his team replaced a great deal of the weathered and vadalised sculpture. The flying buttresses that support the nave are his.

Since 1920 it has carried the title basilica.

[edit] Notes

^ The primary source for the history of Vézelay is a codex compiled in the twelfth century, containing the abbey's annals, a cartulary, a history of the early counts of Nevers, and much besides, in the Bibliothèque municipal, Auxerre, MS 227; it was edited by R. B. C. Huygens, in his magisterial Monumenta Vizeliacensia: Textes relatifs à l'histoire de l'abbaye de Vézelay (Corpus Christianorum) Turnhout, Belgium, 1976.
^ This occasioned the compiling of the codex now at Auxerre.