1081–1151

Abbot
Royal advisor
Author

An Influential Abbot.

Given to the abbey of Saint-Denis as a child, Suger, was, as told by his biographer, "small of body and family; constrained by twofold smallness, he refused in his smallness to be a small man." Once elevated to the abbacy in 1122, he set about realizing his childhood dream of refurbishing the church, now nearly 400 years old. After reorganizing Saint-Denis' finances to support the cost of construction, he launched the building campaign in the mid-1130s. Although he was not, as sometimes asserted, the architect of the new church, his travels throughout Europe and France gave him an extraordinarily wide horizon of knowledge of buildings and their decoration. He obviously drew upon his far-flung network of contacts to assemble an international team of masons, sculptors, glass painters, and goldsmiths in the abbey's workshops. He was also clearly a "hands-on" patron, riding out...