Aigues-Mortes

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Aigues-Mortes
Aigues-Mortes coat of arms
Aigues-Mortes (France)
Aigues-Mortes
region Occitania
Department Gard
Arrondissement Nîmes
Canton Aigues-Mortes (main town)
Community association Terre de Camargue
Coordinates 43 ° 34 '  N , 4 ° 12'  E Coordinates: 43 ° 34 '  N , 4 ° 12'  E
height 0-3 m
surface 57.78 km 2
Residents 8,325 (January 1, 2017)
Population density 144 inhabitants / km 2
Post Code 30220
INSEE code
Website www.ville-aigues-mortes.fr/

Aerial view of the Bastide

Aigues-Mortes [ ɛgˈmɔʀt ] is a town in the French department of Gard with 8325 inhabitants (as of January 1, 2017).

geography

The name "Aigues-Mortes" means dead water . The inhabitants are commonly called Aiguemortais or Aiguemortaises .

Conceived as a port city in the 13th century, Aigues-Mortes was then on the banks of a large lagoon and was connected to the Mediterranean by canals . Paths led to the western delta of the Rhône through extensive moors. When the city was founded, a trunk road was laid on a dam, which formed the only connection to the mainland and was defended by the Tour Carbonnière .

After the silting up of the shallow water zone, Aigues-Mortes is now around six kilometers from the sea, but can still be reached from there via a canal. The city is also located on the Canal du Rhône à Sète , a navigable link between the Rhone and Sète . From there there is a connection to the Canal du Midi .

history

Antiquity

Gaius Marius mentions a settlement at this location around 102 BC. The name Ayga Mortas ("Dead Water") was first used in the 10th century.

Medieval city foundation

Statue of Louis IX the saint in Aigues-Mortes

Until the 13th century the French king owned no land in southern France. The area of Provence belonged to the Holy Roman Empire of the German Nation , while Languedoc-Roussillon belonged to the kings of Aragon .

In 1240 Louis IX, the saint , acquired the area. He had the Tour de Constance built between 1241 and 1250 and began building the city as a bastide in 1248 . This gave him his first Mediterranean port on his own territory. From here the king set out for the Sixth (1248–1254) and Seventh Crusade (1270). In 1270 Ludwig died of typhus during the crusade . The city was almost complete at that time. A statue of the king from the 19th century stands in the main square of the city.

Southwestern and southeastern section of the city wall from the south
City gate

From 1268, a tax of one penny per pound of goods was levied to finance the construction of the city wall . The successors of Ludwig IX., In particular his son Philip the Bold , later had a fortress square built with a circumferential battlement and 10 city gates regularly distributed in it. The builder Eudes de Montreuil is considered the planner . The foundation of the city wall he designed rests on a wooden platform supported by oak piles that are rammed into the ground down to the solid ground. It is 1634 m long. During the war with Aragón the expansion stalled, but was resumed at the instigation of Philip IV the Fair . The city wall was completed at the beginning of the 16th century. It is still completely preserved today. In urban planning, Aigues-Mortes is an outstanding example of the medieval closed city and is discussed by Le Corbusier and Leonardo Benevolo .

Early modern age

At first, Aigues-Mortes developed well as a port city. As the lagoon silted up, the sea gradually receded further and further. Until the 16th century, the city was one of the most important transport hubs on the French Mediterranean coast. In 1481 Provence fell to France and Marseille ousted the city as the leading French Mediterranean port. The economic activity of the residents was now concentrated on trade, viticulture and the salt pans.

Charles V and Francis I met in Aigues-Mortes in 1538 to conduct negotiations that led to the Nice Peace Treaty .

During the Reformation the city became Huguenot . On August 22, 1622, their commander, Gaspard III. de Coligny , later Duke of Châtillon, gave the city to Louis XIII without a fight . who had appeared with an army before Aigues-Mortes to suppress the Huguenot rebellion in Languedoc. This earned de Coligny a reward of £ 5,000 and the marshal's baton .

Modern times

Attack on the Italian salt works in 1893

In 1893, clashes between locals and Italian migrant workers quickly escalated in the salt pans, which led to a massacre of the Italians. According to an official record, there were 8 dead and 50 injured, while Italian reports spoke of 50 dead and 150 seriously injured.

Population development

year 1962 1968 1975 1982 1990 1999 2010 2017
Residents 4203 4197 4531 4472 4999 6012 8341 8325
Sources: Cassini and INSEE

coat of arms

The city's coat of arms depicts St. Martin sharing his cloak with a beggar. St. Martin is the patron saint of the city and the French kings. The spiritual father of the coat of arms is said to have been a gun judge named d'Hozier , the coat of arms dates from April 26, 1697.

Attractions

Tour Carbonnière
Tour de Constance

The main sights are the completely preserved city wall with the Tour de Constance . This and other towers of the city wall served as a prison for Protestants during the Huguenot Wars . Abraham Mazel , the head of the Protestant resistance movement ( camisards ), managed to escape from the Tour de Constance in 1705 . Marie Durand , who became famous for her long prison sentence, was imprisoned here for 38 years, from 1730 to 1768, because she did not renounce her Protestant faith. In the Middle Ages, Aigues-Mortes was in the middle of a swampy area. The only access to the city from the land side was through the Tour Carbonnière , the coal tower, the oldest surviving mention of which comes from 1346. The tower is 3.2 km north-northeast of the bastide in the municipality of Saint-Laurent-d'Aigouze .

The Church of Notre-Dame-des-Sablons was the starting point of the seventh and eighth crusades. Also worth seeing are the chapels of the gray and white penitents ( Chapelle des Pénitents gris and Chapelle des Pénitents blancs ).

traffic

Aigues-Mortes is on the Saint-Césaire – Grau-du-Roi railway . The single-track, non-electrified line was opened in 1873 by the Compagnie des chemins de fer de Paris à Lyon et à la Méditerranée (PLM), initially Aigues-Mortes was its southern endpoint. In 1909 it was extended over the Canal du Rhône à Sète to Grau-du-Roi ; A 21 m long swing bridge was built immediately south of the train station , on which it crosses the entrance to the city harbor.

Aigues-Mortes train station
Railway swing bridge over the Canal du Rhône à Sète in the open state

The main road in north-south direction is the Route départementale D 979, which branches off from Route nationale 113 at Codognan and ends in Grau-du-Roi. It is crossed in Aigues-Mortes by the west-east axis D 62 – D 58 ( Carnon - Sylvéréal ). Nearest highway is the A9 autoroute , which at Orange in the direction of Paris leading A7 flows ( "Autoroute du Soleil") and in the south to the Spanish leads border.

The navigable freshwater canal Canal du Rhône à Sète was opened in 1806. In Aigues-Mortes a side canal branches off to Grau-du-Roi, which flows into the Mediterranean.

Personalities

Others

The first part of Ernest Hemingway's The Garden of Eden ( German : The Garden of Eden ), a 1986 posthumously published novel about a ménage à trois , among other plays in Aigues-Mortes and the adjacent Le Grau-du-Roi .

Web links

Commons : Aigues-Mortes  - collection of images, videos and audio files
Wikivoyage: Aigues-Mortes  - travel guide

Individual evidence

  1. Information brochure from the tourist information office
  2. Le Corbusier: La Ville radieuse , Paris 1933
  3. Leonardo Benevolo: The history of the city , Campus, Frankfurt a. M. & New York 1983, pp. 524-529
  4. Frank Caestecker: The migrant. In: Ute Frevert, Heinz-Gerhart Haupt (ed.): The man of the 19th century. Campus, Frankfurt a. M. & New York 1999, p. 256.
  5. Le pont tournant d'Aigues-Mortes in: Ferrovissime No. 105, p. 55 ff.