Cité of Carcassonne

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View of the Cité and the Aude river
Aerial view of the Cité (2016)

The Cité of Carcassonne is a medieval fortress town located on a hill in the old town of Carcassonne in the Occitania region of southern France .

It is located on the right bank of the Aude and in the southeast of today's city. Its origins lay in Gallo-Roman times, and it was expanded into a fortress in the Middle Ages. The fortress city is surrounded by a double wall (each about three kilometers long with a total of 52 towers). The main buildings inside the still inhabited Cité are a castle ( Château comtal ) and a church ( Basilique Saint-Nazaire ).

In the 19th century, the already decaying Cité of Carcassonne was restored under the direction of Eugène Viollet-le-Duc . The result was a well-preserved, extensive historical monument that was declared a World Heritage Site by UNESCO in 1997 .

overview

Floor plan of the Cité (north about below)

Carcassonne was named Carcasso in the 1st century BC. Founded by the Romans on the site of today's Cité. The so-called Gallo-Roman towers with a horseshoe-shaped floor plan in the inner wall testify to the time of Carcasso.

Today, 229 permanent residents live on the 14 hectares on which 3,000 to 4,000 people lived in the Middle Ages. Everyone else works for tourism and lives outside of it. The Cité is an extensive open-air museum used for tourism and is usually not accessible to cars.

In the 13th century, the fortress city housed the central administration of the Inquisition in southern France . It was also a center of the heterodox ("heretical") Cathar movement and, along with Toulouse, was one of the most important cities in the historic Occitania region .

In the 19th century, the Cité of Carcassonne was restored by the architect Eugène Viollet-le-Duc , and in 1997 it was declared a World Heritage Site by UNESCO .

Legendary origin of the name

Popular legend has it that the fortress was once besieged when Mme. Carcas ruled the castle. The siege lasted so long that hunger soon claimed the first victims in the Cité. Mme. Carcas then decided to fatten a pig and when it was fat enough she had it thrown from the castle wall. The besiegers, already exhausted, thought at the sight of the strong animal that there must be a lot of it up there if they were thrown from the castle wall now. Dejected, they gave up and returned home. When the castle bells rang to celebrate the end of the siege, one of the besiegers is said to have said Madame Carcas sun ( Madame Carcas is ringing → Carcas sun).

Military history

The castle town lies on a hill above the Aude valley and allowed the control of trade routes between the Atlantic and the Mediterranean . Archaeological excavations revealed the existence of a settlement in the 6th century BC. Be proven. The founding of the Colonia Julia Carcaso and the Castellum Carcaso took place 43–30 BC. Instead of. After the first incursions of the Great Migration , the Romans built a wall ring flanked by towers in the 3rd century AD to protect the colony, which still forms a large part of the inner wall ring today. The ring consists of four gates and 30 towers of the Gallic-Roman type (round on the outside and square on the inside (horseshoe-shaped)) with large windows that were suitable for throwing spears . Nevertheless, the Visigoths occupied the castle town in 412 , to whom the building of the fortress is often wrongly attributed. In 509 Clovis , the founder of the Franconian Empire , pushed the Visigoths back to Carcassonne, but could not take the city. Only the Arabs occupied the city in 725 and, despite its isolated location, were able to hold it even after the defeat in 732 at the Battle of Poitiers . From 751 Pippin the Little conquered the fortress with the help of the Visigoth tribes remaining in Septimania , and the area became a Franconian fiefdom , even though the Arabs briefly recaptured Carcassonne in 793. In 1067 the fief went to the House of Barcelona and soon afterwards to Trencavel , the vice-count of Béziers .

60 years later, today's Count's Castle was built. Inside the castle town, its walls form a rectangle protected by five towers and a dry moat. The former wooden hurdles were partially reconstructed by Viollet-le-Duc in the 19th century. The entrance gate was closed by two portcullis and an iron-studded door, which had to be operated by different people - to prevent betrayal.

In 1185 Raimund V von Toulouse tried to conquer the Provence Carcassonne as part of the eternal disputes with the Trencavel , but failed.

In the further course of the 12th century the Cathar doctrine ( Albigensians ) spread over the county of Toulouse with Carcassonne as an important center. After the call of Pope Innocent III. For the Albigensian Crusade 1208 the Count of Toulouse Raimund VI submitted . the army of northern French knights under Simon IV. de Montfort . As a result, the holdings of the Vice Count of Carcassonne and of Béziers, Raimund Roger Trencavel , were invaded. Carcassonne, the fortifications of which were for the most part a thousand years old, was taken after a two-month siege (probably through treason, another version: because of lack of water). Béziers was also conquered, the population of both cities massacred, and Simon received the fief. Like the barons of the fourth crusade, he tried to conquer his own principality; In addition to numerous castles, Toulouse was captured by him in 1216.

However, the city was regained in a coup a year later by Raimund VII . Simon von Montfort died during the subsequent siege of the city. His son and heir Amaury von Montfort could not hold the conquered territories. In 1223 Carcassonne was besieged by Raymond VII, and on January 14, 1224 Amaury ceded the city in a peace treaty, went back to the Île-de-France and gave the feudal right to his liege lord, the French King Louis VIII . Two years later the king occupied the city without a fight, and the war-weary nobility increasingly submitted to the crown. Most of the county of Toulouse fell to the king in the Treaty of Paris in 1229; the rest would follow in 1271. After twenty years of crusade, the region's economy was badly damaged and the flourishing knightly culture of Languedoc destroyed.

In 1240 Raimund II besieged Trencavel with the support of Aragon again Carcassonne. There was an uprising in the region. However, the siege was ended after three months by an army sent by the king. The suburbs were razed as punishment .

From 1247 the lower town was built on the left bank of the river. In the period that followed, up to around 1285, the king had a kennel built and reinforced the inner ring to protect it. The outer ring with battlements and hurdles is lower than the inner one and lies in the firing area. Low, inwardly open towers alternate with high, circular closed towers that could be converted into independent bulwarks. The mightiest of them is the Vade Tower, 25 meters high, on the southeast corner. This construction protects the inner wall from projectiles as well as from sappen graves and excavations. The artificially created bottleneck between the walls exposed the besiegers after taking the outer wall to fire both from the inner wall and from the towers of the outer one, which had not yet been captured. Angled driveways, drawbridges and mighty towers hindered the use of siege weapons against the gates. After these reconstructions, the city was considered impregnable, but at the same time lost its strategic importance.

Edward, the "Black Prince" , renounced a siege in 1353; however, set the lower town on fire. When Roussillon belonged to the French Empire from 1659 , Carcassonne was no longer a border fortress and lost its importance.

The fortifications originate from various feudal building epochs from the Gallo-Roman period to the High Middle Ages and represent an outstanding example of medieval defense technology. Only with the emergence of modern artillery did the construction principles lose their validity.

Details on the construction of the defensive wall

Château comtal, access from the Cité

The walls of the Cité come from several construction periods. The oldest parts of the wall were built at the time of the Visigoths. You can recognize them by the layers of small, cube-shaped stones, interrupted by layers of bricks - and by the narrowness of the towers, which, however, are already provided with real windows. In the 12th century it was mainly the castle that was built. The outer wall ring with its smooth cuboids dates from the middle of the 13th century.

At the end of the 13th century, some of the towers and parts of the inner wall were built, which was then rebuilt and pushed forward. The blocks from this period are usually artistically carved. The towers have several storeys and are provided with loopholes. The building material for the two concentric fortification belts was obtained from the surrounding quarries: hard sandstone, difficult to remove and work on, but which began to erode over the centuries under the influence of the violent storms in the southwest.

The inside of the walls consists of pebbles, rock fragments and sand, connected by lime, which also serves as mortar. The texture of the masonry varies with the individual epochs of the construction.

The regularly laid out outer wall of 1.5 kilometers in length was built soon after 1230 in 15 years, hence its uniform appearance. The building history of the 1.3 kilometer long inner wall is much more complicated, and its masonry is anything but uniform. At that time the city already had an approx. 1,000 year old city wall from Gallo-Roman times, which was no longer up to date. Today it forms the skeleton of the inner belt and can often be seen in the lower part of today's wall.

As always in such cases, the area between the two walls is called the kennel . The kennel held the attacker in an area that the vigilante's projectiles could actually reach. The wall should be as high as possible because up until the 14th century it was not shot back, but thrown back. In peacetime, such a kennel was used for knightly fighting games and festivals. Sometimes the old parts of the wall were supported by new foundations in the case of terracing, so that the strange picture arises that the older part is higher than the later.

The trench around the wall was not filled with water, but had the function of preventing the use of larger siege devices, which had to be directed against the wall at right angles to the direction of the Zwinger and therefore did not have enough approach path. The fortification of the city with a double curtain wall corresponded at that time to a new defense tactic, which had been designed in the time of Philip Augustus (1180-1223) around 1200 in the vicinity of the king. Their principle was: the defense must be active , it must be able to inflict heavy losses on the attacker. More than a thousand archers were therefore posted on the battlements, and the towers flanked the entire wall without leaving any blind spots.

It was possible to move into the kennel between the two fortification walls - from the city - without exposing oneself to the entire mass of besiegers. This enabled the first attackers who should have penetrated this far to be pursued individually or in small groups. With this tactic one could successfully withstand even a numerically superior siege force.

Many of the outer line towers are called shell towers ; that is, they are open at the rear so that the enemy could not find refuge once they got past the first wall. He could then still be attacked from the inner wall - by the archers, for example. The effectiveness of this defense, however, has never really been tested.

Literature and play

Non-fiction
  • Lily Deveze: Carcassonne . Bonechi, Florence 1997, ISBN 88-7009-976-8 .
  • Jean Girou: Carcassonne. 2000 ans d'Histoire . Editions du Languedoc, Albi 1949.
  • Jean Guilaine (Ed.): Histoire de Carcassonne . Edition Privat, Toulouse 1984, ISBN 2-7089-8234-6 (Pays et villes de France).
  • Frédérik Letterlé (ed.): Carcassonne. Études archéologiques . SESA, Carcassonne 2009, ISBN 978-2-9531120-1-6 .
  • Ralf Nestmeyer : Languedoc-Roussillon . 6th edition. Michael-Müller-Verlag, Erlangen 2012, ISBN 978-3-89953-696-6 .
  • Jean P. Panouillé: The Carcassonne Fortress Ouest France, Rennes 1987.
  • Agnes Ploteny: Carcassonne. Catharian castles . Editions Estel, Blois 2004, ISBN 2-912426-16-2 .
  • Jean Roubier: La cité de Carcassonne . Edition Challamel, Paris 1948 (Charme de la France; 6).
Fiction
game

Web links

Commons : Historic fortified city of Carcassonne  - Collection of pictures, videos and audio files

Coordinates: 43 ° 12 ′ 23 "  N , 2 ° 21 ′ 50"  E