At its peak in the late 11th century, Cluny Abbey was more powerful than Rome. Kings, emperors and popes made the journey to this small Burgundian town to seek counsel from its abbot.

The abbey fed a thousand people a day and commanded over 1,500 priories, farms and vineyards across Europe. One abbot, Hugues de Semur, held the post for sixty years, a tenure during which Rome cycled through 22 popes.

Almost none of the great abbey church survives. After the Revolution, it was sold to a property merchant who broke it up for building materials, including a nearby stud farm. Yet the town itself endures, and it contains more medieval houses than the whole of England.

VoiceMap's self-guided audio tour traces how this now-quiet market town shaped medieval Europe, connecting its Romanesque streetscapes to the abbey's astonishing reach and the slow dismantling that followed.