Uncharted Territories
These are majestic buildings, so expensive that their cost frequently absorbed all productivity improvements in the surrounding economy.
These decorations told stories about Christianity: Jesus, the apostles, the history of the Church, important local events…
When a service was not in progress, [people] would meet their friends here, bring in their dogs and their hawks, arrange trysts, eat snacks, etc. The poor might even bed down for the night in the gloomy recesses. Stalls clung like limpets to the walls of the building. At Strasbourg, the mayor held office in his pew in the cathedral, meeting burghers there to conduct business. Wine merchants, perhaps employed by the chapter itself, even sold their wares from the nave of Chartres – selling inside the church, they were exempt from the taxes imposed by the count of Blois and Chartres.— Source.
Each diocese wanted a bigger and better cathedral, to show how much better they were than their neighbors. But you can only do that when you have so much power you can control local economic output.
