Mont Saint Michel

Mont Saint Michel is one of the most photographed places in the world, a stunning combination architecture and setting. 

I have chosen to write about the place even though all of you surely know it because I have a lifelong fascination with towns that consist of a single steep hill covered with buildings. I began trying to draw such towns when I was no more than seven and I doodled them during boring college lectures. I believe my obsession started with this picture, the cover art to Return to the Happy Islands by James Kruss; the Happy Islands Behind the Winds books were great favorites of mine when I was just learning to read.

This small island half a mile off the Normandy coast is just the sort of place early medieval monks sought out, and there may have been a monastic community here by the sixth century. At that time it was known an Mount Tombe. It soon became a place of pilgrimage. 

It was renamed Mons Sancti Michaelis in periculo maris – Mount Saint Michael at the peril of the sea – in 708. In that year an oratory was erected to Saint Michael by bishop Saint Aubert of Avranches. Monastic lore tells us that Saint Michael visited Aubert in his sleep and ordered him to do this. When nothing was done after the first two visitation, the archangel returned a third time and gave new emphasis to the order by pressing his thumb into the bishop's skull. What is supposed to be the bishop's skull is displayed at the Saint-Gervais d'Avranches basilica with a thumb-sized scar on it; nineteenth-century sculptor Jean-Baptiste Barré's vision of this miracle is shown above.

The monastery attracted patronage from important nobles, including the Viking Rollo after he converted to Christianity and settled down as Duke of Normandy. William I, who was duke from 927 to 942, gave lavishly to the monastery and had it converted to the Benedictine Rule. The story goes that most of the monks left rather than accept that decision. Benedictine writers said that was because the monks were dissolute and corrupt, but it might have been because they were Bretons who followed a Celtic rule they did not wish to exchange for a system imported from Rome.

Building of the great abbey began in the early 1000s. The architect was William of Volpiano, an Italian who had already designed other churches for the Norman dukes.

This was a Romanesque and in fact quite Roman-looking building.

William made the daring choice to place the huge church on the very top of the hill, even though the crest was not big enough for it. You can see in this profile that the outer walls of the church are supported by other buildings below them, which were constructed with massive arches to bear the weight.

I can't find out anything about this sculpture of Saint Michael weighing souls, but it looks Romanesque.

That big new 11th-century church appeared in the Bayeux Tapestry.

The abbey includes many other medieval structures besides the church. This is the refectory.

The scriptorium.

The complex geometry of the hilltop generates lots of spaces like this.

In 1204 the abbey was besieged and the church was damaged. The French king and other nobles donated generously for the reconstruction, which led to the apse being rebuilt in a gothic style.

Mont Saint Michel and 16th and 17th centuries

For a long time there was nothing on the island but the monastery, but during the Hundred Years War the island was first fortified and then used as a prison. In 1433 the English attacked it, but such is the strength of the place that a small French garrison easily held them off. Fortifications require people to defend them, and people require places to live and so on, so a small town gradually grew up on the slopes between the monastery and the walls.

Views of the town.

To lift supplies up to the abbey the monks had a treadmill crane, which still survives.

By the time of the French Revolution the abbey was nearly empty, so the government took it over and used it as a prison for its clerical opponents.

In the nineteenth century it became what it is today, a place for tourists to be awed by the glories of the past.