St. Sernin in Toulouse

St. Sernin, Toulouse (1080 AD)

In 1080 AD, the church of St. Sernin in Toulouse was a busy place. Charlemagne had given the church some saints' relics, and many people stopped to pray there when they were on pilgrimage to St. Jacques de Compostela in Spain. But the little old church, built in the 300's AD under Roman rule, was too small and too old now for these crowds. So the Counts of Toulouse decided to build a big new church in the new Romanesque style.

Even though most Romanesque churches are stone, the builders made the church of St. Sernin mainly out of brick, like Late Roman basilicas. But like the Abbaye aux Dames in Caen, which had just been built, the church of St. Sernin has a nave and a transept. The front, on the other hand, looks more like the front of the Pisa Duomo, which was also new at this time.

Elevation of St. Sernin

The walls of the nave are heavy and solid to hold up the barrel vaulted stone roof. There's a tall rounded arch, and then above that a tall gallery. Long brick buttresses support the walls.

While most Romanesque churches have plain, flat apses, at St. Sernin they needed a lot of room for pilgrims to walk around, even while the priest was saying Mass, so there is an ambulatory, an aisle, that goes all the way around the apse of the church.

Bell tower of St. Sernin (and the apse)

As in earlier Carolingian churches in France and Spain, the bell tower rises from the place where the nave crosses the transept, on the roof, instead of standing next to the front door as in the Abbaye aux Dames or as a separate building as at Pisa (The top two floors and the pointy spire were added later).

To find out more about Romanesque architecture, check out these books from your local library or from Amazon:

Oxford Children's History of the World, by Neil Grant (2000). A general history of the world for kids. Good place to start.

Romanesque and Gothic Buildings, by Graeme Chalmers (1998). Specially written for kids.

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