Work begins on Notre-Dame de Paris

1160

Maurice de Sully, newly installed as bishop, ordered the old cathedral on the Ile de la Cite torn down and a soaring new church begun in the Gothic manner of Saint-Denis. Construction would continue on and off for the better part of two centuries. The building rose in stages, each generation of masons adding its own innovations in buttressing and tracery to a structure that became a living textbook of Gothic engineering.