At the time of the Hundred Years’ War, the church evolved into a military citadel-an impregnable fortress in the sea-the only spot in Normandy that never fell to the English. It was also a major center of medieval learning, with a rich library and scriptorium. The abbey atop the Mont became both a major pilgrimage site-there were even souvenirs sold here in the Middle Ages-and a locus of ecclesiastical and political power. Two centuries later, the Duke of Normandy gifted the site to the Benedictine monks, who began building an ambitious abbey church under the patronage of William the Conqueror-the expression of a richer, more confident era as the Normans (former Vikings) were about to set out on not only the conquest of England but also of Sicily and Southern Italy. It was originally the hopeful assertion of Christianity in a Europe that was still part pagan and vulnerable to Viking raids on the northern coasts of what is now France. Mont-Saint-Michel has been so many different things in the course of its long life, since its founding in the early eighth century, when the Bishop of Avranches built a church dedicated to the archangel Michael on a rock of granite in the sea.
Mont-Saint-Michel has gone through several major transformations since Adams’ time and is in the midst of another one now that will change its meaning or meanings once again. And that was more than a hundred years ago. “One needs to be eight centuries old to know what this mass of encrusted architecture meant to its builders,” wrote Henry Adams in his book Mont-Saint-Michel and Chartres. The choir is “far more charming than the nave,” Henry Adams once wrote, comparing it to a beautiful woman. No tours are permitted when monks and nuns hold services in the abbey’s flamboyant Gothic choir.
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