ABSTRACT
The relationship of church and burghers was no more cordial at Lyon than it had been at Toulouse though the antagonism was played out on different planes. The church of Lyon’s income, though substantial, was not enormous and something was bound to suffer because of the extraordinary disbursements. Final attachment of the great province to the royal domain was incalculably facilitated by the support of an important internal ally, Lyon’s bourgeoisie. The fact that the church of Lyon had been forced to surrender its temporal sovereignty, a calamity in feudal terms, was salutary in other respects. The evidence seems formal: Lyon’s citizens continued as they had in the past to play a very minor role in the cathedral’s construction history. While from the viewpoint of church-building, Lyon’s pervading cult of death no doubt diminished the total accomplishment, in other ways it served an aesthetic goal itself.
