Dan Cruickshank’s Bridges: Heroic Designs that Changed the World. Dan Cruickshank
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de Valentré, it was natural that it should not only be fortified to deny passage across it to the enemies of Cahors, but also that it should be incorporated into the town’s defences. To conceive it as a barbican or redoubt would greatly enhance the military power of the town.
The designer of the Pont de Valentré, and those raising finance for its construction, would have learned well the lessons offered by other great masonry bridges constructed in southwest and central France during the previous 150 years. The most influential would have been the mighty Pont Saint-Bénezet, across the Rhône at Avignon (better known as the Pont d’Avignon, and made famous by the fifteenth-century nursery rhyme ‘Sur la Pont d’Avignon’) and the bridge over the Loire at Orléans. Both had been started within a few years of each other in the 1170s and both were seen as great works for the glory of God and the benefit of mankind.
The Pont Saint-Bénezet at Avignon had a near mythic origin that reveals the sacred nature of bridges in the medieval mind. They were seen as examples of the way in which the righteous and religious-minded could – with divine support and blessings – harness nature and command the elements. As with the Paradise Gardens of Islam (see page 118), bridges were, to medieval Christians, a means of realizing heaven on earth, of creating beauty, wealth and harmony. They were works that were pleasing to God and links not just between places on earth, but between this world and the next. In addition, bridges had an even deeper meaning for medieval Christians. In their faith, water was an important agent of transformation from the material to the spiritual. At baptism, holy water washes away sins and is part of the ritual of initiation into the Christian Church. Christ himself, perceived by Christians as the Son of God, had at his own request been baptized in the River Jordan and this action had pleased God (Matthew 13: 1–3). Given water and rivers are central to the Christian faith, so too is the means by which they are bridged.
‘Donating money towards the construction of a bridge was deemed to be a noble deed that would reduce the time that, after death, the soul would have to suffer in purgatory.’
Repeatedly in medieval France, clerics aided the construction of bridges in the same way that they aided the construction of churches and charitable institutions. In Toulouse, a testament of 1251 stated that money should be left to ‘churches and hospitals and bridges and other pious and poor places’, while in 1308, the year the bridge at Cahors was started, Pope Clement V granted for seven years an indulgence of 100 days ‘to those faithful who, truly penitent and confessed, stretched forth a helping hand to the fabric of the bridge the Dominicans were building near Nîmes’.29 So in certain circumstances, donating money towards the construction of a bridge was deemed to be a worldly action that would reverberate through the afterlife. It was a noble deed that would reduce the time that, after death, the soul would have to suffer in purgatory. In this way, it was equal to making donations to churches and to charities or to founding hospitals, almshouses or colleges.
The origin of the bridge at Avignon reflects the spiritual purpose of bridge construction, or so it is alleged. In the mid-twelfth century, a young shepherd named Bénézet is said to have had a vision in which God directed him to go to Avignon and inspire the building of a bridge across the dauntingly wide Rhône. The enterprise seems to have taken on the characteristics of a battle between good and evil, God and the Devil. When Bénézet arrived in Avignon and started to preach his crusade against the dark and turbulent waters of the Rhône, promoting the construction of a bridge, he was jeered and rejected. He is said to have then performed a miracle by casting a vast stone into the river to help form the foundation for the first pier of the bridge. Whether this story is true or not is hardly the point. The fact that it has been told through the years confirms the medieval assumption that bridge building was indeed God’s work and that any structural failures that took place – whether due to the elements, subsidence or faulty workmanship – were probably the work of the Devil. Construction of the bridge started in about 1175 and Bénézet, miracle or not, seems to have become one of the major promoters of the bridge, travelling for years after building began to raise donations, just as if raising funds to build a cathedral or for a crusade against the increasingly triumphant Saladin and the Islamic ‘Saracens’ in the Holy Land.
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