Saint-Maximin-la-Sainte-Baume

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Conservative 13th century Gothic in Provence: Basilica of Mary Magdalene, Saint Maximin la Sainte Baume.

Saint-Maximin-la-Sainte-Baume is a commune of southeastern France, forty km east of Aix-en-Provence, in the westernmost point of Var département. It is located at the foot of the St. Baume mountains: baume is the Provençal equivalent of "cave".. The town's basilica dedicated to Mary Magdalene was the site where Mary Magdalene was rehabilitated in the thirteenth century and remade as the sinning figure of perfect penitence and the co-patron, with the Virgin Mary, of the Dominican Order.

St.Maximin-la-Sainte-Baume is not to be confused with Sainte-Maxime further east on the Côte d'Azur.

The Roman Villa Lata, remains of which have been identified beneath Place Malherbe in the center of the town, was one among numerous agricultural working Roman villas in the plain that was traversed by the via Aurelia. The Abbey of Saint Victor at Marseille had deopendencies in the neighborhood: Saint-Maximin, Saint-Jean, Saint-Mitre, Sainte-Marie, of which the Romanesque parish church dedicated to Saint Maximin was demolished in the final stages of constructing the basilica. In the twelfth century, Raymond I Berenger, count of Provence, established Saint-Maximin as a town uniquely under his care. In 1246, following the death of Raymond IV Berenger IV, Provence passed through his younger daughter to Charles d'Anjou, brother of Louis IX of France. The tenuous Anjou presence was fiercely contested by the seigneurs of Baux among other local leaders,

The little town was transformed by the well-published discovery, 12 December 1279, in the crypt of Saint-Maximin, of a sarcophagus that was proclaimed to be the tomb of Mary Magdalene, signalled by miracles,^[1] and by the ensuing pilgrim-drawing cult of Mary Magdalene and Saint Maximin, assiduously cultivated by Charles II of Anjou, King of Naples, the patron who founded the massive Gothic Basilique Ste. Marie-Madeleine in 1279(?), with the blessing of Boniface VIII, who placed the basilica under the new teaching order of Dominicans.

The founding tradition held that relics of Mary Magdalene were preserved here, and not at Vézelay, ^[2] and that she, her brother Lazarus, and Maximin, one of the Seventy Disciples, fled the Holy Land by a miraculous boat with neither rudder nor sail and landed at Saintes Maries-de-la-Mer, in the Camargue near Arles. She then came to Marseille and converted the local people. Later in life she retired to a cave in the Sainte-Baume mountains and had been She was buried in St.Maximin, which was not a place of pilgrimage in early times, though there is a Gallo-Roman crypt under the basilica. Sarcophagi are shown, of St Maximin, Ste. Marcelle, Ste. Suzanne and St. Sidoine (Sidonius) as well as the reliquary, which is said to hold the remains of Mary Magdalene.

Construction of the basilica, begun in 1295 was complete as to the crypt, consecrated in 1316. In it were installed a Gallo-Roman funerary monument&mdash'of the fourth century in fact—and four marble sarcophagi, whose bas-reliefs permit a Christian identification. The Black Death in 1348, which carried away half the local population, interrupted the building campaign, which was not taken up again until 1404, but found the sixth bay of the nave complete by 1412. Work continued until 1532, when it was decided to leave the basilica just as it was, without a finished west front or portal or belltowers, features that it lacks to this day. The plan has a main apse flanked by two subsidiary apses. Its great aisled nave is without transept. The nave is flanked by sixteen chapels in the aisles.

Population: 12,633
Area: 64.13 km²
Altitude: 318 m

[edit] Notes

^ The Dominican Bernard Gui, claimed in his chronicle, written early in the following century, that a sweet spicy fragrance emanated from the sarcophagus' contents, and that a green shoot was found to be growing from the Magdalen's tongue. (Jansen 2000)
^ Other alleged burial places are at Ephesus (now in Turkey) and the Temple Mount in Jerusalem (it is said that her remains were later moved to Europe).