Clugny, or CLUNI, an industrial town in the French department of Saône-et-Loire, on the Grosne, 15 miles NW. of Mâcon by rail. Pop. 3653. The famous Benedictine abbey, founded here in 910 by the Duke of Aquitaine, had two centuries later attained a degree of splendour and influence unrivalled by any similar institution of the middle ages; at its height, Clugny stood second to Rome alone as a chief centre of the Christian world. It was the asylum of kings, the training-school of popes; its abbot took rank above all others, issued his own coinage, and was a power in the political world; it was enormously wealthy, and covered Europe with its affiliated foundations. Two hundred priors of subordinate houses assembled here in the 12th century, and in the 15th century there were said to be over 2000 religious houses that were offshoots of or connected with the abbey in France, Italy, Spain, England, Germany, and Poland; although the alphabetical list of Clugniac foundations in the 15th century, at the end of the Bibliotheca Cluniacensis, represents only 825. In England the extension of the order dates from the Conquest; William and his successors were devoted to Clugny, and numerous foundations were shortly established, of which the priory of Lewes (1077) became the chief. At their ultimate suppression in 1539 these numbered 35, exclusive of such Scottish foundations as Paisley and Crossraguel. In the 16th century, the conventual buildings at Clugny covered upwards of 25 acres. The grand basilica or abbey church, commenced by St Hugh, the eighth abbot, in 1089, and dedicated by Pope Innocent II. in 1131, was, until the construction of St Peter's at Rome, the largest church in Christendom. Of this magnificent and imposing pile one tower and part of the transept alone remain; the site of the nave is traversed by a road. The abbey, over which cardinal-ministers and princes of the blood had once ruled as commendator-abbots (see COMMENDAM), had outlived both its utility and its importance; it was no longer a great seat of learning, and its 300 monks had dwindled to 40, when in 1790 the order to whom Pope Urban II. had said, 'Ye are the light of the world,' was finally suppressed. Its library was the richest and most important in France, and its archives are of the greatest value to monastic history and that of the early Norman kings of England. In 1562 the Huguenots sacked the abbey and scattered its records; but most of this literary treasure was afterwards wonderfully recovered. Many records were burned along with religious books by the mob in 1793, and the library was again scattered; it was generally supposed that nothing had survived, but in 1829 no fewer than 225 folio and quarto volumes of charters and MSS. were discovered in the town-hall, of which many are preserved in the Bibliothèque Nationale, Paris, and some have found their way to the British Museum.
For those relating to England, see Sir G. Duckett's Record-Evidence of Cluni (1886), Charters and Records (1888), and Visitations and Chapters-General (1893). See also works by Pignot, the historian of the order, Lorain, Penjon, Cuchérat, and Champly. The ancient palace in Paris of the abbots became in 1833 a museum of antiquities.