portal to the Roman past.
Detail of one of the triumphal arches showing the entablature with an eagle and a watchful guardian lion – surely calculated to remind travellers of the power of Rome.
CHAPTER TWO
PIETY AND POLITICS
The Pont de Valentré, Cahors, France, started in 1308. A very rare and beautiful example of a medieval bridge with fortifications intact including three towers and cutwaters containing fighting platforms and narrow windows from which passage of the river could be effectively controlled.
IN MEDIEVAL CHRISTIAN EUROPE, BRIDGES WERE built as pious works pleasing to God, as things of utility and of beauty, as part of the defence system, and of course, as routes of trade or conquest. The early fourteenth century Pont de Valentré, across the River Lot at Cahors is all of these things. I well remember, decades ago, my first glimpse one summer evening of this tall-towered, stone-built bridge. It was like something in a fairy tale: fantastic in form, pale, ethereal. The bridge adjoins Cahors, indeed formed a key part of its walled defences, but I saw it not against the town as its backdrop. It strode purposefully and elegantly across the wide and sluggish river against the background of seemingly unchanged rolling and sun-bleached countryside. It was utterly entrancing and, with its mesmerizing silhouette of tall pyramidal-topped towers and pointed arches, it seemed to sum up so many of the architectural and engineering aspirations and achievements of the age in which it was built.
The twelfth and thirteenth centuries marked the great age of masonry-built bridges in the medieval Kingdom of France and in the English possessions in Aquitaine and Gascony. In the late twelfth century, almost the entire western half of France, from the English Channel to the Pyrenees was in the possession of, or under the control of, the English King Henry II, the first monarch of the Plantagenet dynasty.
The Pont de Valentré, Cahors, France, started in 1308. A very rare and beautiful example of a medieval bridge with fortifications intact including three towers and cutwaters containing fighting platforms and narrow windows from which passage of the river could be effectively controlled.
This was a time before the modern concepts of European nationalism were forged. The Plantagenets were a branch of the French Angevin dynasty, and the English royal court was an outpost of French culture. As well as being the King of England, Henry was also the Duke of Normandy and Gascony, and Count of Anjou, Maine and Nantes. Indeed in this feudal world, popular allegiances and identity lay with the regions, rather than with the larger world or the kingdom of which the duchies or counties formed part.
The complex balance of power and land ownership in France fluctuated constantly, and by the time the bridge at Cahors was started in 1308, English possessions in the west and south had dwindled to the area around Bordeaux and to western Gascony. But the situation remained fluid, particularly during the Hundred Years War that started in 1337. During these decades of intermittent territorial and dynastic conflict, control of vast areas of the land regularly changed hands with a dramatic – if relatively short-lived – increase in English possessions in the north and northwest following Henry V’s victorious Battle of Agincourt in 1415.
The Pont de Valentré at Cahors, France, photographed in 1851, revealing its state before the restoration of the 1870s when, among other things, battlements were reinstated to the tops of the cut-waters.
Due to the wars that flared and smouldered in France, Cahors, although under French control, remained for most of the fourteenth century a more-or-less beleaguered frontier town. And the threat came not just from invasion by the English or by their French allies, but from the hordes of freebooting mercenaries and brigands that the decades of conflict and chaos in France had unleashed upon the land. So when the decision was taken to build the Pont de Valentré, it was natural that it should not only be fortified to deny passage across it to the enemies of Cahors, but also that it should be incorporated into the town’s defences. To conceive it as a barbican or redoubt would greatly enhance the military power of the town.
The designer of the Pont de Valentré, and those raising finance for its construction, would have learned well the lessons offered by other great masonry bridges constructed in southwest and central France during the previous 150 years. The most influential would have been the mighty Pont Saint-Bénezet, across the Rhône at Avignon (better known as the Pont d’Avignon, and made famous by the fifteenth-century nursery rhyme ‘Sur la Pont d’Avignon’) and the bridge over the Loire at Orléans. Both had been started within a few years of each other in the 1170s and both were seen as great works for the glory of God and the benefit of mankind.
The Pont Saint-Bénezet at Avignon had a near mythic origin that reveals the sacred nature of bridges in the medieval mind. They were seen as examples of the way in which the righteous and religious-minded could – with divine support and blessings – harness nature and command the elements. As with the Paradise Gardens of Islam (see page 118), bridges were, to medieval Christians, a means of realizing heaven on earth, of creating beauty, wealth and harmony. They were works that were pleasing to God and links not just between places on earth, but between this world and the next. In addition, bridges had an even deeper meaning for medieval Christians. In their faith, water was an important agent of transformation from the material to the spiritual. At baptism, holy water washes away sins and is part of the ritual of initiation into the Christian Church. Christ himself, perceived by Christians as the Son of God, had at his own request been baptized in the River Jordan and this action had pleased God (Matthew 13: 1–3). Given water and rivers are central to the Christian faith, so too is the means by which they are bridged.
‘Donating money towards the construction of a bridge was deemed to be a noble deed that would reduce the time that, after death, the soul would have to suffer in purgatory.’
Repeatedly in medieval France, clerics aided the construction of bridges in the same way that they aided the construction of churches and charitable institutions. In Toulouse, a testament of 1251 stated that money should be left to ‘churches and hospitals and bridges and other pious and poor places’, while in 1308, the year the bridge at Cahors was started, Pope Clement V granted for seven years an indulgence of 100 days ‘to those faithful who, truly penitent and confessed, stretched forth a helping hand to the fabric of the bridge the Dominicans were building near Nîmes’.29 So in certain circumstances, donating money towards the construction of a bridge was deemed to be a worldly action that would reverberate through the afterlife. It was a noble deed that would reduce the time that, after death, the soul would have to suffer in purgatory. In this way, it was equal to making donations to churches and to charities or to founding hospitals, almshouses or colleges.
The origin of the bridge at Avignon reflects the spiritual purpose of bridge construction, or so it is alleged. In the mid-twelfth century, a young shepherd named Bénézet is said to have had a vision in which God directed him to go to Avignon and inspire the building of a bridge across the dauntingly wide Rhône. The enterprise seems to have taken on the characteristics of a battle between good and evil, God and the Devil. When Bénézet arrived in Avignon and started to preach his crusade against the dark and turbulent waters of the Rhône, promoting the construction of a bridge, he was jeered and rejected. He is said to have then performed a miracle by casting a vast stone into the river to help form the foundation for the first pier of the bridge. Whether this story is true or not is hardly the point. The fact that it has been told through
