The article traces this site in Toulouse to the year 410, when Emperor Honorius allowed pagan temples to be converted to Christian use. It says the original building was a temple dedicated to Apollo. A church decorated with golden mosaics was erected in the fifth or sixth century.
Visigoths, who were Arian Christians, used the church until it passed into Catholic hands after the Battle of Vouillé in 507. It became a Benedictine monastery in the ninth century, declined from the fifteenth century, and was closed during the French Revolution. The monastery building then became a tobacco factory.
The earlier basilica was demolished in 1761 to make way for the city's riverside quays. The current building dates from the nineteenth century. It holds the Black Madonna shrine, whose icon is an 1807 copy of the lost original, and the article lists it as a historic monument.
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