Lagny Abbey

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Lagny Abbey

The Saint-Pierre Abbey in Lagny-sur-Marne was founded around 645/650 and abolished during the French Revolution .

abbey

After St. Fursa , an Irish monk, came to the Frankish Empire in the 640s , he had the Saint-Pierre monastery built on the Villa Latiniacum estate , which King Clovis II and Queen Bathilde had given him. It was devastated by the Normans in the 9th century , leaving Lagny in ruins by the end of the 10th century.

During this time, Lagny was owned as a separate church by the Carolingian Counts of Meaux : Heribert II († 943), Robert († 967), Heribert the Younger († 995) and Stephan († 1021), who was also buried here. It was the last two counts who had the abbey rebuilt between 990 and 1018. In 1019 the new abbey was consecrated in the presence of King Robert II . The king donated the point of a nail, supposedly from the Holy Cross , which was lost in 1567 during a pillage by Huguenots .

After Count Stephen's death, Lagny fell to Count Odo II of Blois as Count of Troyes and Meaux, i.e. the Champagne. It remained in the possession of the Counts of Champagne until Count Theobald II († 1152) withdrew to the military protective function for the abbey. Theobald II was also buried in Lagny. He left an illegitimate son, Hugo, who was Abbot of Lagny from 1163 to 1171.

town hall

The monastery was closed during the French Revolution and some buildings were sold in 1796. In the 19th century, the remains were converted into a military hospital - the inscription "Hôpital Militaire" is still on the triangular pediment of the main gate. Since 1842 the abbey has housed the Lagny town hall. Two buildings of the abbey still exist today: the fortified entrance and the abbey chapel from the 13th century, the Notre-Dame-des-Ardents church , which was declared a monument historique on July 12, 1886 .

Council of Lagny

In the early 1140s, King Louis VII proposed to his cousin, Seneschal and absentee ruler Rudolf von Vermandois, to marry Alix Petronilla of Aquitaine , the sister of his own wife, Eleanor of Aquitaine . For Rudolf this meant the dissolution of his marriage to Eleonore von Vermandois, the sister of Count Theobald II. Both divorce and a new marriage were consummated in 1142. Count Theobald II held a council in Lagny in the same year in the dispute that broke out over it, which ended positively for him, but led to a conflict with the king until the Pope forced a peace treaty in 1143 that forced the king to withdraw from the Champagne forced. This conflict with the king meant that Theobald was largely inactive in the face of the English civil war that broke out at the same time and the accompanying invasion of Normandy by Count Gottfried von Anjou , which led to the loss of Normandy by 1144. In return, this development promoted Theobald's reconciliation with the king, who saw himself threatened by the Anjous' increase in power and was therefore dependent on strong allies.

Lagny Fair

Associated with the monastery was the Lagny fair, the Foire des Innocents , one of the champagne fairs , and at the beginning of January the first to take place in the annual cycle. The mass became significant in the second half of the 11th century and was a major source of income for the abbey, which in the 13th century could finance the construction of a new abbey church and the construction of a wall surrounding the developing village. Abbot Raoul von Lagny regulated the extensive money exchange transactions that were carried out here from 1124 to 1148, Count Heinrich I of Champagne († 1197) liberalized the trade fair operations again in 1154 at the insistence of the abbey, which his predecessors had restricted to ten days a year. In the 13th century traders from Flanders and Brabant met here with traders from the Franco-Italian Mediterranean region ( Languedoc , Provence , Lombardy , Tuscany ). At the turn of the 14th century, the fairs then lost their importance. The decline, which was completed around 1320, is due, among other things, to the shift of the main trade routes to the east, increasing tensions between the Capetians and the Flemish counts and the boom in Italian cloth production.

literature

Coordinates: 48 ° 52 '39.1 "  N , 2 ° 42' 21.3"  E