that subservience, often through
violence: harassment, segregation,
sometimes assault and murder –
and, in this case, book burning.
Indeed, the Christian judges
agreed that the Talmud was
blasphemous and should be
banned, its copies burnt. So in June
1242, hundreds, if not thousands,
of manuscripts were brought to the
Place de Grève, stacked in a pile,
and set alight. The fire likely burned
so high it may have reflected off the
stained glass of Notre Dame across
the river. Rabbi Meir of Rothen-
berg, who himself witnessed the
event, would lament later in the
13th century, that “Moses shattered
the tablets, and another one then
repeated his folly/ Burning the law
in flames.../ I witnessed how they
gathered plunder from you/ Into
the centre of a public square... and
burned the spoils of God on high.”Rabbi Meir, in anguish, related that the
fire that burned so high, so brightly in the
City of Lights, that it paradoxically “leaves
me and you in darkness”.
More than seven and a half centuries later,
across the ocean in Missouri, these and other
acts of persecution were much on the mind
of the protesters who wanted to take down
the king’s statue. His defenders, though,
weren’t thinking of burning books, but of
light streaming through glass windows.
Both are part of the history, though the
beauty of the latter does nothing to offset
the horror of the former.Christ comes to Paris
And what Louis built was indeed beautiful.
As he took the throne early in the 13th
century, Notre Dame was slowly rising into
its full medieval shape, enabled by the new
“gothic” style. It was an architectural ap-
proach that soared, with ceilings in the nave
of churches towering above everything else in
their medieval cities. Pointed arches and
exterior supports, known as “flying buttress-
es,” relieved the weight of the ceiling and
distributed it outwards allowing the walls to
move from solid and fortress-like to ethereal
and light. In a world made of wood, stone
impressed; but for a world before electricity,
more important was light. This wasn’t a
world lit only by fire, but one illuminated by
the sun. Allowing sunlight inside, allowing
an interior to gleam, was to capture some-
thing of the divine. So, heavy stone walls
were replaced by translucent and radiant
coloured glass.
Notre Dame was one example but that
belonged to the bishop of the city, and the
king wanted something grander. Even before
the building was completed, King Louis
needed a new kind of sacred space – not a
cathedral for an archbishop or a palace to
glorify a king, but a home for the King of
Kings himself. In that year, Louis had scored
a coup, purchasing relics of the Passion in a
complicated debt-relief deal for the belea-
guered Latin empire of Constantinople, itself
a hybrid realm in a Byzantine empire torn
apart by civil war and threat of invasion. And
so by helping the Latin emperors financially,
Louis IX acquired the most sacred objects in
Christendom, first and foremost among them
the Crown of Thorns.
It wasn’t unusual for relics, even impor-
tant relics, to be transferred or translated
from place to place. But the translation of the
Crown of Thorns, wood of the True Cross,
and other relics associated with the Passion,
exceeded these traditions by an order of
magnitude. Medieval Christians, perhaps
like all people, lived not only in the physical
world, but also a bigger imaginary geography3
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