Here almost every French king was crowned over the course of 1000 years

Here almost every French king was crowned over the course of 1000 years. The Cathedral of Notre-Dame de Reims is the cathedral of the city of Reims, built in the 13th century on the site of a more ancient church.

Although the cathedral, in the style of the High Renaissance, was built later than Notre-Dame of Paris, long before the Gothic building was raised it had been the centre of the region's Christian life. To this day the cathedral of Reims contains a slab commemorating the fact that it was here that Saint Remigius, Bishop of Reims, baptised Clovis I, the first king of the Franks.

The coronation of Charles VII, attended by Joan of Arc, took place in Reims Cathedral. It was also the home of the Holy Ampulla, the vessel of sacred oil with which the French kings were anointed. The vessel was smashed by revolutionaries in 1793, but by a miracle one fragment of it survived, with a drop of the sacred liquid, and became a relic in its own right.

But the holy object of greatest interest to us that is connected with Reims Cathedral is the Reims Gospels, written in Church Slavonic. On it the French kings swore their oath upon accession to the throne, right up to the Great French Revolution. There are several versions of how a Church Slavonic book came to be in the treasury of the French kings. The principal one holds that it was brought to France by Princess Anna Yaroslavna when she married Henry I. There is evidence, however, that the mysterious eastern manuscript reached Reims several centuries later, in the 16th century, under Henry II and Cardinal Charles of Lorraine, as an enigmatic Christian artefact, a half-magical ancient book lending weight to the antiquity of a thousand years of French history. It is known for certain that some French kings swore on this richly adorned manuscript, with its relics and precious stones, as on a special sacred object. However that may be, the content of the text remained undeciphered for centuries, until Russian scribes read it