Maybe I'm currently feeling a bit low with every news story (plastic, poverty, Brexit, the rise of the far right) but this has upset me a lot this evening.

I'm not religious and I know it's ultimately just a building, but even so I have found this gut-wrenchingly sad. As you say, it contained so much age, history and amazing craftsmanship. It may be "new" in TMA terms, but it's still survived for the best part of a thousand years, years filled with almost unending bloody conflict across western Europe.

The latest reports suggest that a great deal of the fabric can be saved (although at least one of the rose windows is gone). Most importantly it doesn't sound as though anyone has died in the fire. I hope it can be rebuilt.

Well the stone is at least saved, it will need repatching and roofing but its glorious structure will at least be saved and give today's craftsmen a chance to mimic the skills of the medievalist crafts.
Churches and graveyards lie at the centre of our communities, like the stone circles and barrows of prehistory, mostly defunct but their walls can tell tales. Here in Yorkshire, Saxon and Viking engraved stones and gravestones, down the road from us, the church has rose coloured walls up to 8 foot high caused by fire. In the 12th century when the English were fighting the Scots, a band of Scottish fighters came to the village. The villagers had locked themselves into the church, and the Scots set fire to the church which had a thatched roof.

Churches are strangely echoing the fate of stone circles as religion departs, beautiful churches will always have the tourist but the rest in the backwaters will fade away.....To be hunted out in another century just like TMAers do today with stone circles.

https://goo.gl/maps/wv5rbXcYLhx

Don't know about links to the fall of Rome or Dark Ages (I think it is well after that time) but it certainly had real Gothic stuff, amazing stone carvings (got some dizzying photos from up top of the weird gargoyles gaping out over the city). Inside, the wood reeked of age and the walls were hung with loads of tapestries and gilded icons.

Looking at that footage from yesterday I cannot imagine any wood or art has made it through to today. I glad I went there a few times. They could well be renovating it for centuries.

It is sad, but it will be rebuilt, and the fire will become part of it's history, just like York Minster. Look at the fantastic job they did on Dresden Cathedral after it was destroyed during WWII.
https://www.goodnewsnetwork.org/dresden-church-rebuilt-from-wwii-ashes/