About Charroux Abbey

Charroux Abbey, a Benedictine monastery founded in 785 by Roger, Count of Limoges, grew to oversee as many as 213 affiliated abbeys and priories at its height. The abbey became particularly influential when it hosted the Council of Charroux in 989, where an assembly of clergy, under the patronage of William IV, Duke of Aquitaine, founded the Pax Dei (Peace of God) movement — an early and significant medieval effort to limit private warfare and protect non-combatants through ecclesiastical sanction. The abbey’s most extraordinary and controversial claimed possession was the Holy Prepuce, said to have been given to the monks by Charlemagne himself, who reportedly received it during his own journey to Jerusalem before donating it to Charroux. The relic was displayed to a church council at Charroux in 1082, but at some later point it went missing entirely, remaining lost for centuries until 1856, when a workman repairing the abbey claimed to have discovered a reliquary hidden inside a wall, containing what was said to be the same relic. This rediscovery ignited a genuine theological controversy, directly clashing with the rival Holy Prepuce of Calcata in Italy, which had already been officially venerated by the Church for centuries. In 1900, the Roman Catholic Church resolved the dispute in the most decisive way possible: it ruled that anyone thenceforth writing or speaking publicly about the Holy Prepuce would be excommunicated — a prohibition that effectively ended official discussion of the relic. Today, the only surviving structure of the church is the 11th-century lantern tower, known as the Tour Charlemagne (Charlemagne Tower), which originally formed the central rotunda of the abbey; the space was more brightly lit than the rest of the church thanks to eight tall windows, giving the “lantern tower” its name.