The story of this place
Founded in 910, the Benedictine Abbey of Cluny became the most powerful monastery in medieval Europe, head of an order of over a thousand houses and virtually a state within the Church, answering only to the Pope. Its great abbey church, 'Cluny III', completed in the 12th century, was the largest church in Christendom—187 metres long—until the new St Peter's in Rome surpassed it centuries later. Cluny shaped Western monasticism, art and the Gregorian reform. But the Revolution suppressed the abbey, and from 1798 the colossal church was sold off and quarried for stone, leaving barely a tenth standing. The surviving south transept still hints at its vanished immensity.