Chartres Cathedral facts and architecture: the fire of 1194, 26 years to rebuild, 176 windows of medieval glass, the labyrinth, the two spires and the relic that built it

Architecture · 4 September 2026

Chartres Cathedral, Notre-Dame de Chartres, 50 miles south-west of Paris, was rebuilt between 1194 and 1220 after a fire destroyed the Romanesque cathedral, in a single campaign of about 26 years, which is why it is the most unified great church of the Middle Ages: the first cathedral designed from the ground up with flying buttresses, so that its walls could be almost all glass, and the one that kept its glass, 176 windows of the 12th and 13th centuries, more than any other building, along with the sculpture of its three portals, some 4,000 figures, the 13th-century labyrinth in the nave floor and, in the crypt, the relic that paid for it all, the tunic said to have been worn by the Virgin at the birth of Christ. Its two spires do not match, one of 1160 and one of 1513, and its blue glass has a colour no one has reproduced. Below: the relic and the fire, the rebuilding and who paid, the architecture and what it invented, the glass, the sculpture, the labyrinth and the spires, the later history and the cleaning dispute, the numbers and visiting, and the legends, with the style in Gothic architecture and the building process in how the cathedrals were built.

The relic and the fire

Chartres had a cathedral from the 4th century and, from 876, when Charles the Bald gave it, the Sancta Camisia, a length of silk believed to be the tunic or veil the Virgin Mary wore at the Annunciation or the Nativity, which made the town one of the great pilgrimages of France, with four fairs a year on the Virgin's feasts and a cathedral school under Fulbert that was the best in Europe around 1000. Fulbert's Romanesque cathedral of 1020 burned in 1134 and was given the present west front, the Royal Portal and the two towers, between 1134 and 1160; on the night of 10–11 June 1194 lightning, or a fire in the town, burned everything but the west front, the towers and the crypt, and the town believed the relic lost with it. Three days later the clergy brought it out of the crypt, where they had sheltered, and the papal legate preached that the Virgin had allowed the fire so that a greater church could be built for her; the money began at once, the chapter giving its income for three years, the bishop his, and the king and the nobles of France, Blanche of Castile and the Count of Chartres among them, their gifts, which the windows record. Chartres Cathedral.

The rebuilding, 1194–1220

The unknown master mason, working on the old foundations and the surviving crypt of Fulbert, laid out a church 130 m long with a nave 16.4 m wide, wider than any before it, a wide transept with its own portals, and a choir with a double ambulatory and radiating chapels, all in the local limestone from the quarries of Berchères 8 km away; the nave was vaulted by about 1210, the choir by 1220, the transept portals finished by about 1230, and the church was consecrated in 1260, though the building was done by 1220 and the glass by 1235. The speed, for a building of this size, was unheard of and has been explained by the money, by the relic's pull, and by the story told by Abbot Haimon of Normandy in 1145 of the "cult of carts", nobles and townspeople harnessing themselves to wagons of stone and food and dragging them to the site in silence, which was reported of the 1145 towers and is assumed to have happened again; the masons were paid, and the accounts are lost. The plan kept Fulbert's crypt, the largest in France, and the 12th-century west front, which is why the building has a Romanesque face on a Gothic body.

The architecture: what Chartres invented

• Flying buttresses from the start. At Notre-Dame de Paris the flyers were added to a building already up; at Chartres the master designed them with the building, three tiers of them on the nave with arcades of radiating spokes like wheels, which let him drop the gallery that Paris and Laon had needed as a brace and open the whole upper wall as windows.
• The three-storey elevation. Arcade, triforium and clerestory, with no gallery: the formula every High Gothic cathedral followed, at Reims, Amiens and Beauvais, with the clerestory as tall as the arcade, 14 m each, and the triforium a band between.
• Rectangular bays. One four-part vault per bay, with alternating round and octagonal piers, instead of the six-part vaults over double bays of the 12th century; the nave reads as a march of identical bays to the altar.
• Piliers cantonnés. Piers with four attached shafts, one running unbroken from the floor to the vault, which pull the eye up and make the wall a frame; a Chartres invention, taken to Reims and Amiens.
• Height. The vault is 37 m, against 33 at Paris and 42 at Amiens, and the nave is 16.4 m wide, so the space is broad as well as high, the proportions of the Romanesque churches of the Loire kept in Gothic terms.
• The plan for nine towers. The master planned two towers on the west, two on each transept, two on the choir and a crossing tower, nine in all; only the western two were built, and the stumps of the others are on the transepts.

The glass

Chartres has 176 windows, 2,600 square metres of glass, of which about 150 are original, of 1145–55 in the west front, the three lancets under the rose and the "Blue Virgin", Notre-Dame de la Belle Verrière, and of 1200–35 in the rest, made by workshops that came from Paris, Laon and Sens and set up in the town; it survived the Revolution, which broke little here, and both world wars, when the windows were taken down and stored, in 1918 and 1939, which is why it is here when Reims and Rouen lost theirs. The great roses are 13 m across, the west of 1215, the north of about 1230 given by Blanche of Castile with the fleur-de-lis and the castles of Castile, the south of 1225 given by the Count of Dreux; the lower windows tell the lives of the saints and the Bible in medallions read from the bottom up, and 42 of them show the guilds that gave them, the bakers, furriers, wheelwrights, wine merchants and stone masons at their work, in the corners. The blue of the 12th-century glass, "Chartres blue", made with cobalt and sodium in a lime-and-soda glass that has stayed clear while the potash glass of the 13th century has corroded, is the colour the building is known for; the reds are copper, the greens iron. The glass is set in the wall so that the church is dark, deliberately, and the windows glow.

The sculpture

The Royal Portal of the west front, of 1145–55, is the first Gothic sculpture: three doors with Christ in Majesty, the Ascension and the Virgin above them, and on the jambs the column figures of the kings and queens of Judah, elongated, still, carved as parts of the columns, with faces so calm and individual that the sculptor is thought to have looked at real people; nineteen figures, the first of the type that Paris, Reims and Amiens developed into the standing statues of the 13th century. The transept porches, of 1205–35, carry the rest, some 3,000 figures: the north for the Old Testament and the Virgin, with the Coronation of the Virgin and the figures of Melchizedek, Abraham, Moses and the patriarchs on the jambs, and the south for the New, with the Last Judgement, the martyrs and confessors, and St Theodore as a knight of 1230 in the armour of the time. Inside, the choir screen of 1514–1789, with 40 scenes of the lives of the Virgin and Christ in Renaissance sculpture that took 275 years, and the 16th-century astronomical clock.

The labyrinth and the spires

• The labyrinth. Set into the nave floor about 1200–1220, 12.9 m across, a single path in eleven rings of blue-black and white stone turning 34 times to reach the centre, 261 m long, the largest and best preserved of the medieval church labyrinths; its meaning is disputed, a pilgrimage in miniature for those who could not go to Jerusalem, a Lenten dance, or a figure of the world, and the brass plate at the centre, which showed Theseus and the Minotaur, was melted for cannon in 1792. It is covered by chairs except on Fridays from Lent to All Saints, when pilgrims walk it.
• The south spire. The old tower, of 1145–60, 105 m, a plain octagonal stone spire on a square tower, the finest Romanesque spire in France, which Fulbert's masons' successors built and the fire of 1194 spared.
• The north spire. The old north tower had a wooden spire that burned in 1506; Jehan de Beauce rebuilt it in Flamboyant Gothic stone in 1507–13, 113 m, in lace, so that the two spires, 350 years apart, do not match, and the town has never wanted them to.
• The roof. The timber roof burned in 1836 and was replaced by an iron frame with copper covering, one of the first, which is why the roof is green.

Later history and the cleaning

The cathedral survived the Wars of Religion, when Henry IV was crowned there in 1594 because Reims was held by the League, and the Revolution, when the committee that ordered its demolition was told the rubble would block the streets and gave up, and the Virgin's tunic was cut into pieces, one of which is in the treasury. In 1944 an American officer, Welborn Griffith, disproved the report that the Germans were using the towers as observation posts by climbing them himself, and the order to shell the cathedral was cancelled; he was killed the same day. UNESCO listed it in 1979. Between 2009 and 2017 the state restored the interior, cleaning the black grime of centuries from the stone and repainting the vaults and walls in the cream and ochre with white joints that traces showed were the 13th-century finish, with the Belle Verrière and other windows cleaned; the result, a bright church where there had been a dark one, was attacked by critics in the United States and Britain as a falsification and defended by the French as a return to the medieval building. The argument is unresolved; the church is lighter than any living person had seen it.

The numbers and visiting

• Size. 130 m long, 32 m wide across the nave and aisles, 64 m across the transepts; the nave 16.4 m wide, the vault 37 m; the floor area 5,300 square metres; the crypt 220 m long.
• Towers. South 105 m, north 113 m; 300 steps to the north tower's platform.
• Glass. 176 windows, 2,600 square metres, about 150 windows original, with 5,000 figures; three roses of 13 m.
• Sculpture. About 4,000 figures on the three porches; the Royal Portal 19 column figures.
• Time. 1194–1220 for the building, 26 years; consecrated 1260; the north spire 1507–13.
• Visitors. About 1.5 million a year; free entry, the towers and crypt by ticket, and the guided tours in English by Malcolm Miller, given daily since 1958, are the classic way to read the glass; an hour from Paris by train from Montparnasse, and the cathedral is visible from the wheat fields 20 km away.

Versions and theories

• The tunic is the Virgin's. The silk has been dated to the 1st century and comes from Syria or Palestine; whether it was hers is a matter of faith. It was a veil rather than a shirt, 5.5 m long, of which a piece survives.
• The cult of carts built Chartres. The story is of 1145, for the west front and towers, from letters of Abbot Haimon and Robert of Torigni; it may have happened again in 1194, but the cathedral was built by paid masons with the chapter's money.
• Chartres blue is a lost secret. The recipe is known, cobalt in a soda-lime glass, and can be made; what cannot be made is 800 years of weathering and the light through the 13th-century windows beside it, and the modern copies look wrong for that reason.
• The labyrinth was walked on the knees. No evidence; medieval sources describe a dance on it at Easter by the clergy, with a ball, at Auxerre; pilgrims walk it today.
• The cathedral was built on a Druid shrine. A 17th-century story of a well and a pagan statue of a virgin who would give birth, taken up by esoteric writers; the well in the crypt is real and Gallo-Roman, the Druids are not in the record.
• The cleaning ruined it. The stone was cleaned and the walls painted in the colour and pattern found beneath the dirt; the objection is to taste and to touching an original surface, and the medievalists on both sides agree the 13th-century church was pale. The dispute is aesthetic, and honest.

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