The story of this place
King Louis IX—Saint Louis—built the Sainte-Chapelle in barely seven years, consecrating it in 1248, as a colossal reliquary for the Crown of Thorns and other relics of Christ's Passion, which he had purchased from the Latin Emperor of Constantinople for a sum greater than the chapel itself cost. Its upper chapel is a cage of stained glass: fifteen windows soaring 15 metres tell over a thousand biblical scenes, flooding the space with jewel-like light so that the stone almost disappears. Damaged in the Revolution and restored in the 19th century, roughly two-thirds of the glass is original 13th-century work—among the finest surviving anywhere in the world.