Saint-Maximin-la-Sainte-Baume: Guide, Hotels, Map & Photos
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EUR 84 - 120 Logis Hotel De France
 Hotel De France is located in the centre of Saint-Maximin-la-Sainte-Baume, a 5 minute walk from the basilica. Private parking is available.
Each room… MoreEUR 49 - 275 Hôtel Le Couvent Royal
 This hotel is located in Provence, less than 30 minutes’ drive from Aix-en-Provence. The 13th-century Gothic building offers spacious rooms with vie… More | ||||||||||||
Saint-Maximin-la-Sainte-Baume: Guide
Saint-Maximin-la-Sainte-Baume is a commune in France|commune of southeastern France, forty km east of Aix-en-Provence, in the westernmost point of Var (département)|Var Départements of France|département. It is located at the foot of the St. Baume mountains: baume is the Provençal equivalent of "cave". The town's basilica dedicated to Mary Magdalene was the site where Mary Magdalene was rehabilitated in the thirteenth century and remade as the sinning figure of perfect penitence and the co-patron, with the Virgin Mary, of the Dominican Order.
St.Maximin-la-Sainte-Baume is not to be confused with Sainte-Maxime further east on the Côte d'Azur.
The Roman Villa Lata, remains of which have been identified beneath Place Malherbe in the center of the town, was one among numerous agricultural working Roman villas in the plain that was traversed by the via Aurelia. The Abbey of Saint Victor at Marseille had dependencies in the neighborhood: Saint-Maximin, Saint-Jean, Saint-Mitre, Sainte-Marie. The Romanesque parish church dedicated to Saint Maximin of Trier was demolished in the final stages of constructing the basilica. In the twelfth century, Berenguer Ramon I, Count of Provence, established Saint-Maximin as a town uniquely under his care. In 1246, following the death of Raymond IV Berenger, Provence passed through his younger daughter to Charles I of Sicily|Charles d'Anjou, brother of Louis IX of France and sometime king of Sicily. The tenuous Anjou presence at Saint-Maximin was fiercely contested by the seigneurs of Baux among other local leaders.
The cultus of Mary Magdalene
The little town was transformed by the well-published discovery, 12 December 1279, in the crypt of Saint-Maximin, of a sarcophagus that was proclaimed to be the tomb of Mary Magdalene, signalled by miracles,The Dominican Maximin, assiduously cultivated by Charles II of Naples|Charles II of Anjou, King of Naples, the patron who founded the massive Gothic Basilique Ste. Marie-Madeleine in 1295, with the blessing of Boniface VIII, who placed the basilica under the new teaching order of Dominicans.
The founding tradition held that relics of Mary Magdalene were preserved here, and not at Vézelay, Other alleged burial places are at Ephesus (now in Turkey) and the Temple Mount in Jerusalem, whence, it is said, her remains were later removed to Europe. and that she, her brother Lazarus, and Maximin, one of the Seventy Disciples, fled the Holy Land by a miraculous boat with neither rudder nor sailFor the literary topos in hagiography of the miraculous boat, compare the legends of Mac Cuill and the voyages of Hui-Corra and of Mael Duin, and in religious legend Brendan of Clonfert, Saint Tathan who was carried to Britain in a rudderless boat, the three Irishmen carried to King Alfred in an oarless boat (Anglo-Saxon Chronicle, year 891), the birth of Saint Kentigern, all instanced by Hares-Stryker, 1993. Celidoine is swet adrift in a rudderless boat in the Estoire de Saint Graal. The translation of Saint James the Great in a rudderless boat to Hispania might be added. and landed at Saintes Maries-de-la-Mer, in the Camargue near Arles. She then came to Marseille and converted the local people. Later in life, according to the founding legend, she retired to a cave in the Sainte-Baume mountains. She was buried in Saint-Maximin, which was not a place of pilgrimage in early times, though there is a Gallo-Roman crypt under the basilica. Sarcophagi are shown, of St Maximin, Ste. Marcelle, Ste. Suzanne and St. Sidoine (Sidonius) as well as the reliquary, which is said to hold the remains of Mary Magdalene.
Construction of the basilica, begun in 1295, was complete as to the crypt when it was consecrated in 1316. In it were installed a Gallo-Roman funerary monument—of the fourth century in fact—and four marble sarcophagi, whose bas-reliefs permit a Christian identification. The Black Death in 1348, which carried away half the local population, interrupted the building campaign, which was not taken up again until 1404, but found the sixth bay of the nave complete by 1412. Work continued until 1532, when it was decided to leave the basilica just as it was, without a finished west front or portal or belltowers, features that it lacks to this day. The plan has a main apse flanked by two subsidiary apses. Its great aisled nave is without transept. The nave is flanked by sixteen chapels in the aisles.
Population: 12,633
This "Travel Guide" section is drawn from the Wikipedia article "Saint-Maximin-la-Sainte-Baume". We hope you will edit and improve it. It is available under the terms of the GNU Free Documentation License.
Area: 64.13 km²
Altitude: 318 mNotes
Further reading
Katherine Ludwig Jansen, The Making of the Magdalen: Preaching and Popular Devotion in the Later Middle Ages (Princeton University Press) 2000.
Hares-Stryker, Carolyn, 1993. "Adrift on the seven seas: the medieval topos of exile at sea", Florilegium 12 ()External links