Cathedrals and Churches of Tours
Cathedrale de St-Gatien towers over the city of Tours.
Cathedrale de St-Gatien (Tours Cathedral)
The cathedral of Tours, dedicated to Saint Gatien, Tours' first bishop, was begun about 1170 to replace the just-started cathedral that was burnt out in 1166, during the quarrel between Louis VII of France and Henry II of England. The lowermost stages of the west towers (illustration, right) belong to the 12th century, but the rest of the west end is in the profusely detailed Flamboyant Gothic of the 15th century, completed just as the Renaissance was affecting less traditional patrons than bishops, in the pleasure châteaux of Touraine.
La Nouvelle Basilique St-Martin (New Basilica of St. Martin)
The new basilica of St Martin is an extravagant, pseudo-Byzantine church erected between 1886 and 1924. Two towers and a Renaissance cloister are the chief remains of the celebrated old basilica of St Martin built mainly during the 12th and 13th centuries and demolished in 1802. It stood on the site of an earlier and very famous church built from 466 to 472 by bishop St Perpetuus and destroyed together with many other churches in a fire in 998.
