Thread: How did people afford to build gothic cathedrals during the Gothic time of architecture?

I am doing a research paper on Gothic architecture. One of the things I wanted to talk about in it was how people could afford these huge buildings. I cannot find any information although my teacher says she knows but wants me to find it. I have looked and am fed up lol. please help.

1) Tithing: 10% income tax that the church imposed on everyone.
2) The church owned choice lands and operated farms on them. These were also a source of income for the church.
3) These cathedrals took centuries to build. Forget about the 30 year mortgage. These were paid for over centuries.
4) The sale of indulgences.
5) The church became wealthy through a policy that allowed them to collect a significant portion of the estates of the victims of their inquisitions. Spain was not the only country to suffer that treatment.
6) The church made it illegal for their operatives to get married and have sex. Their operatives took vows of poverty. The church took their earnings and paid them little. There were no families to support.

In 'Life in a Medieval City' Frances and Joseph Gies write:'Money to pay for a cathedral comes from a number of sources. Added to the steadily growing revenues of the chapter and its dependencies are the profits from indulgences, which are the bishop's monopoly. Many an avaricous baron has made peace with God by a handsome gift to a cathedral building fund. Death-bed bequests are an especially fruitful source. The church has campaigned long and shrewdly in favour of wills. Relics, which are part of the reason for building a cathedral, help to raise money long before its completion. They attract pilgrims to the site, and, since they are portable, they can be sent on missions to the surrounding countryside.

Even with all the resources of guilty consciences and psychological cures few cathedrals would be completed without the assistance of an entirely different factor, civic pride. The cathedral belongs to the town as well as to the bishop and is often used for secular purposes, such as town meetings. The burghers can be counted on to give it financial support, not merely through private contributions by the wealthy, but through corporate contributions by the guilds. Proud, devout, and aflluent, the guilds compete with each other and with the great lords and prelates in endowing the pictures in glass of Bible stories and the lives of the sainst which are the chief gloryof the cathedral, and which represent no less than half its total cost. For at least one cathedral. Chartres, we have precise figures: of 102 windows, forty-four were donated by princes and other secular lords, sixteen by bishops and other ecclesiastics, and forty-two by town guilds, who signed their identities with panels representing their crafts.'