Episode Details

In August 1944, American commanders suspected Germans were spotting artillery from the towers of Chartres Cathedral and ordered it destroyed. Colonel Welborn Barton Griffith Jr. instead slipped behind enemy lines with one volunteer, climbed the towers, found them empty, and rang the bells to call off the strike. He was killed in combat later that day in a nearby town. The cathedral he saved dates to a fire on the night of June 10, 1194 that destroyed the earlier Romanesque church. Priests carrying the Sancta Camisa, a tunic believed worn by the Virgin Mary and given to Chartres in 876 by Charles the Bald, hid in the crypt and emerged alive three days later, and donations poured in from across Europe.

The rebuild took about 25 years and set the standard for High Gothic: flying buttresses, four-part rib vaults, and clustered piers freed the walls for glass, and more than 150 original 12th and 13th century windows survive, including the Blue Virgin window saved from the fire. The mismatched western towers tell the building's long story, a plain south tower from around 1160 and a flamboyant north spire finished in 1513 after lightning in 1506. Medieval Chartres was also loud and commercial, with money changers in the nave, merchants dodging the Count of Blois's taxes, and riots in 1258. A 2009 restoration that repainted the soot-dark interior in cream and fake marbling split the art world.

• How church leaders framed the 1194 fire as a sign that Mary wanted a grander house
• The debate over whether shoemakers and other tradesmen shown in the windows actually paid for them
• Why interior capitals look rough: hard, brittle local stone inside versus soft limestone for the portal statues
• The 230 meter crypt, the largest in Europe, and its 33 meter Well of the Strong Saints
• Market zoning at the porches, wine sold in the crypt to avoid taxes, and iron gates after the 1258 riots