The raids of the ninth century
After the death of Charlemagne, Provence enters a century of insecurity. The Carolingian renaissance barely reaches the country: the bishoprics slowly rebuild their patrimonies, as does that of Marseille, which obtains the restitution of goods confiscated under Charles Martel. But Saracen pirates strike the coasts as early as 813 and plunder Nice. The incursions grow more frequent from 814 onward: in 838, Marseille itself is attacked and devastated, Saint-Victor destroyed. In 842, the raiders sail up the Rhône as far as Arles. In 848, it is Greeks who carry out a raid on Marseille. In 850, a fresh Saracen attack on Arles fails thanks to the defence of the count of Vienne. In 859, the Normans in turn appear in the Camargue, which they plunder over the following years, and in 869 they abduct Archbishop Rotland, who had come to lead the defence of the coast. Busquet sums up this century in one word: it is the scourge of the age.
This crumbling of security is accompanied by a crumbling of political order. Charlemagne's empire barely outlives its founder: after the troubled reign of Louis the Pious, his sons proceed to the Treaty of Verdun, in 843, and dismember the territory. Provence, attached since Merovingian times to Burgundy, then follows its own political course.
The kingdom of Boson
Boson enters the history of Provence through a double alliance. Brother-in-law of Charles the Bald, son of count Bivin, he receives from the emperor, in 870, the duchy of Vienne, in place of duke Girard. In 875, at the moment of leaving to claim the Italian inheritance of Louis II, Charles the Bald further invests him with the duchy of Provence, uniting under his authority all the territories that had formed the kingdom of Provence of 855 and of 858. The same year, given charge of the government of Lombardy, Boson marries Ermengarde, daughter of the emperor Louis II of Italy: "Doubly allied to the Carolingian family, he thought he had all that was needed to make a king".
Three years later, Boson and Ermengarde welcome Pope John VIII at Arles, on 11 May 878, and accompany him to Italy for the council of Pavia. Back in the south east, Boson summons the higher clergy and the great men of the country to Mantaille, near Vienne, on the territory of Saint-Sorlin. On 15 October 879, the assembly proclaims him king of Provence.
This kingdom carries the name of Provence and reconstitutes, under this same title, the one that Charles, son of Lothaire, had governed from 855 to 863, augmented by the county of Autun. The province of Embrun (Digne, Senez, Glandève, Vence, Nice) seems to have detached itself from it from the outset. No mention of an attachment to any Burgundy accompanies the Mantaille proclamation: the kingdom that emerges from it is a kingdom of Provence, and nothing else. Jealous of their exclusive right to don crowns, "the Carolingian kings nonetheless did not admit his usurpation, despite the ratification that tended to legitimise it". Boson dies a king, withdrawn into the mountains of the Diois, on 11 January 887.
His widow Ermengarde has their son Louis recognised by the emperor Charles the Fat, then has him proclaimed king at Valence at the start of 890. The kingdom Louis inherits keeps the extent gathered by his father in 879: the duchy of Lyon, the duchy of Vienne, the Maurienne and the Tarentaise, the diocese of Belley to the north, Viviers and Uzès beyond the Rhône to the west, Provence to the south, minus the county of Autun and Besançon, lost in the meantime. Defeated by Berengar of Friuli, Louis is captured during the retaking of Pavia in the summer of 902, then freed under oath. Having returned, in breach of that oath, to regain a foothold in Italy in 905, he is blinded there by Berengar. He dies at Vienne on 5 June 928, without a direct legitimate heir.
From 911 or the start of 912, Louis, by then blind, had entrusted the government of the southern part of his kingdom to his cousin Hugues, count of Vienne, with the title of duke of Provence. Hugues is crowned king of Italy at Pavia on 9 July 926. On the death of Louis, in August 928, a provisional agreement divides influence over the former kingdom between Hugues, who keeps Provence, and the king of France Raoul, who receives the Viennois and the north. At the end of 934, Hugues cedes to Rodolphe II of transjurane Burgundy all his rights west of the Alps, in exchange for the latter's renunciation of Italy. Hugues dies at Arles on 10 April 947.
On the death of Hugues, the emperor Otto definitively settles the fate of the kingdom: at the end of 948, he constitutes it, united with jurane Burgundy, in favour of Conrad, son of Rodolphe II. The union of 948 brings the word Burgundy into the name of the kingdom born of Boson for the first time, sixty nine years after the Mantaille proclamation. Conrad, devoid of any real domain south of the Viennois, governs Provence through Burgundian counts whom he appoints there from 948: the royal title, henceforth without land of its own, is maintained there as a bare title, prelude to the long feudal fiction of the kingdom of Arles.
The first comital dynasty and its divisions
The first comital dynasty of Provence occupies too discreet a place in the usual account of its history. The exploit of William the Liberator, who rid the country of the Saracens of the Freinet at the end of the tenth century, is remembered as an isolated episode, whereas his family drew from this victory a prestige and a wealth that earned it alliances of the first rank: in 998, his daughter Constance marries Robert, king of France. But the undivided exercise of comital rights could last only as long as they remained within a single family. From the first half of the eleventh century, marriages of women carry portions of these rights into families foreign to the country, which puts an end to the regime of undivided holding and opens the era of divisions of the county.
Around 1042, the death of William, son of Roubaud, last count from the elder branch through the male line, hastens this movement: his sister Emma marries William, count of Toulouse, and thus passes on to the house of Toulouse the rights of this elder branch, rights that the house of Toulouse, held back first by its Languedocian possessions and then by the crusade, would only ever exercise from a distance, under the sole title of marquis of Provence. The younger branch, descended from William the Liberator, continues longer in the male line, but it is this branch that ultimately carries the county's future: in 1112, the very young Douce, heiress through her mother to part of Provence, marries Raimond Bérenger III, count of Barcelona, and grants him all her goods and rights, which opens to the house of Barcelona the comital crown of Provence for a hundred and thirty four years. The detail of this Catalan reign, from the treaty of 1125 with Toulouse to the marriage of Béatrix with Charles of Anjou in 1246, is the subject of the following section.
Catalan Provence
In 1112, Provence enters a long pairing with Catalonia. Douce, a young heiress through her mother to part of the county and through her father to the Gévaudan, the Carladès and part of the county of Rodez, marries Raimond Bérenger III, count of Barcelona, on 3 February 1112, through the offices of the archbishop of Narbonne. On 13 January 1113, she grants him all her goods and rights: this grant marks the accession of the house of Barcelona to the comital crown of Provence. Despite the competing rights of the counts of Toulouse, Raimond Bérenger, master of the capital Arles, stands as sole count.
The Toulousain neighbour nonetheless remains a source of conflict. After a siege of Orange and the taking of the abbey of Saint-Gilles, a treaty signed on 15 September 1125 divides the territory: the count of Toulouse receives the land north of the Durance, the future marquisate of Provence, while the count of Provence-Barcelona keeps the south, on the left bank of the river. This treaty fixes the form the county would keep for the centuries that follow, but it does not pacify the region: Raimond Bérenger I governs Provence as an annex of his Catalan county, through seneschals sent from Barcelona, until his death in July 1131, which divides his possessions between his two sons and opens twenty years of Baussenque wars, stirred up by the house of Baux and intermittently supported from Toulouse. Busquet sees in this the ambitions of a lordly family, carried by a part of the nobility little inclined to bow to energetic overlords. Peace, concluded at Turin in 1162 before the emperor Frederick Barbarossa, whose niece Richilde Raimond Bérenger III then marries, seals the definitive submission of the house of Baux and the recognition of the Catalan comital title.
The reign of Alfonso I, king of Aragon and count of Provence from 1166, extends this Catalan grip through administration: a baile and procurator governs the county in his name, a juge mage appears in 1179, and Aix, seat of a baile from 1195, then becomes the capital of Provence. This institutional advance is matched by an Aragonese anchoring in southern affairs: on the death of Alfonso I, in 1196, his son Pierre succeeds him in Aragon while the younger son, Alphonse II, governs Provence. The check comes from Spain: Pierre II, guardian of his nephew Raimond Bérenger V after the death of Alphonse II in 1209, dies on 13 September 1213 at Muret, where his intervention against the crusaders turns to disaster (Agulhon and Coulet place this death in 1214; Busquet gives 13 September 1213). This defeat ends Catalan intervention beyond the Pyrenees and durably separates Provence from Aragon, leaving the country to anarchy until the young count's escape in 1216 and his coming of age in 1219.
Raimond Bérenger V then builds the most accomplished reign of the dynasty. His administration equips itself with regular instruments: bailiwicks grouped under a few senior bailes from 1235, viguiers in the submitted towns, clavaires for domanial accounting, statutes of peace renewed. Romée de Villeneuve, Catalan like most of the great officers of the reign, becomes from 1234 the head of this administration. Nice, raised up by the Genoese, submits in 1229 under the leadership of Romée, then first comital viguier. Facing the Empire, Raimond Bérenger asserts his authority even in the theoretical capital of the kingdom of Arles: in 1239, after receiving the homage of the archbishops of Aix and Arles, he has the imperial vicar Bérard de Lorette driven out of Arles by an uprising prepared in secret, durably removing the Emperor from Provençal affairs.
The reign ends abruptly: master of his county, save for Marseille, Raimond Bérenger V dies suddenly on 19 August 1245, before the age of forty. Busquet salutes "the greatest reign, and the most fruitful, that Provence has known, the one that had made of it a modern state". He leaves no son: his fourth daughter, Béatrix, sole heiress, becomes the stake of a competition between the Empire, Toulouse and Aragon, settled by the candidacy carried by Queen Blanche of Castile. On 31 January 1246, Béatrix marries Charles of Anjou, brother of the king of France: Provence passes to the house of Anjou.
A hundred and thirty four years of Catalan rule leave Provence more than a foreign dynasty. Busquet says it without detour of a reign he nonetheless holds to be the most Provençal in appearance: "its government was a government of foreigners, recruited in that Catalonia from which he himself came". The country then turns part of its administration and its officers toward the Catalan and Mediterranean space: seneschals from Barcelona, bailes and procurators come from Aragon, officers from the Llobregat valley. Yet it is on this Catalan foundation that the instruments which endure after him are built: juge mage, bailiwicks, viguiers, clavaires, statutes of peace, a comital administration that the house of Anjou would inherit and carry forward.
The kingdom of Arles, a crown without power
On the death of Rudolph III, in 1032, the last king of Burgundy bequeaths his kingdom to the Empire, Provence included. But Busquet observes that this bequest, like the most beautiful girl in the world, could give only what it had: in its southern part, the Emperor inherited only a theoretical overlordship, a right of investiture rarely followed by effect, and a right of supreme justice that he exercised only rarely, and only in minor matters. "These theoretical rights nonetheless made up the feudal fiction of the kingdom of Arles, whose crown the Emperors claimed with great show".
This fiction crosses the centuries without ever becoming a real power. Only two emperors came in person to be crowned with it at Saint-Trophime in Arles: Frederick Barbarossa in 1178, then Charles IV of Luxembourg, on 4 June 1365, after a stop at Avignon, where he confirmed to Queen Jeanne the exercise of her Provençal rights. But whatever these coronations amounted to, "the counts of Provence remained the masters of their county and directed its policy".
The kingdom of Arles in fact extends well beyond comital Provence: at an apportionment of an ecclesiastical subsidy in 1239, it also encompasses the provinces of Vienne, Tarentaise, Lyon and Besançon, the former kingdom of Burgundy-Provence in its full extent. The title gives rise to concrete episodes. In 1215, the emperor Frederick II grants its vicariate to Guillaume de Baux, who then passes on his theoretical rights to the comital house. In 1239, at Arles itself, an imperial vicar attempts to exercise real authority in the name of Frederick II, before being driven out by an uprising prepared in secret by Count Raimond Bérenger V, which durably removed the Emperor from any Provençal affair. In 1309, Charles II concludes with Bertrand IV, prince of Baux, an agreement by which the latter commits to follow him should he one day travel to Vienne to receive the crown there, a project that never came to pass. The title thus survives as an honorific claim for nearly five centuries, without its holder ever exercising, at any point, effective power over Provence, governed by its own counts.
Comital administration and a troubadour's testimony
The reign of Charles of Anjou, from the middle of the thirteenth century, marks a turning point in the government of the county. Nurturing ambitious projects whose realisation was costly, Charles organises, shortly after his settling in Provence at the end of 1250, a vast inquiry into the domanial rights of the county, in order to recover rights that had fallen into disuse and to draw a better revenue from them. This inquiry, known as the inquiry of 1252, is entrusted to local officers, bailes and clavaires, and centralised by a proctor of the count. It reconstitutes a domain richer than the one his predecessor had enjoyed, and its revenues largely finance Charles's foreign policy, notably in Italy.
This recovery meets resistance. Boniface de Castellane, who rebels in 1263 and whom Busquet regards as an eloquent troubadour, gives voice to this in his sirventes: "I am vexed to see men of law come and go with a great retinue, and it displeases me to see prelates hold council from which no one has had cause to rejoice, for if their right is upheld, they say: it is nothing, everything belongs to the count". It is the only literary testimony identified by name that the corpus retains for the whole of the Provençal Middle Ages.
Queen Jeanne and the end of a dynasty
The county goes through a major dynastic crisis in the fourteenth century around Queen Jeanne. Charles of Duras, who contests her rights, invades Italy at the head of Hungarian troops as early as November 1380, receives from the pope the investiture of the kingdom of Naples in June 1381 and seizes Naples in July, then the queen herself in September. The Estates of Provence, gathered at Aix, proclaim their loyalty and vote taxes to raise troops. The queen, moved from prison to prison, is finally taken to the castle of Muro, where her cousin and nephew has her put to death in secret.
The succession passes to the duke of Anjou, adopted by the queen, but his authority struggles to assert itself in Provence: his earlier policy had left the Provençals with painful memories, and the rapprochement with the house of France worries them. The seneschal and Marseille remain loyal to him, but Aix and its nobility strive to form a union in favour of the dead queen alone. The duke's son, Louis II, eventually prevails after several years of negotiations: he makes his entry into Aix on 21 October 1387, then receives the submission of Saint-Maximin, Toulon and Hyères. The whole of Provence then recognises Louis II, with the exception of Nice, Puget-Théniers and Barcelonnette: these three towns rally to the count of Savoy on 6 August 1388, opening a division of Provençal territory that would last several centuries.
The testament of Charles III and the passage to France
The last sovereign count of Provence, Charles III, has to defend his inheritance to his final day. An army from Lorraine occupies part of the county within a few weeks in the spring of 1481, before Louis XI, who watches the affairs of the county closely, sends troops that, joined by Provençal contingents, lay siege to Forcalquier.
The campaign wears the count down, already affected by the recent death of his wife. Settled at Marseille, he has his testament drawn up there on 10 December 1481. With an emotion that the notarial drafting cannot quite mask, he bequeaths Provence to the king of France, on the express condition that its privileges and statutes be maintained, and that its own political identity be respected. He dies the following day, and his body is buried at Aix, in the church of Saint-Sauveur.
The language of this period
The language of medieval Provence is documented, and by a specialised source. Blanchet places the separation from Latin in the tenth and eleventh centuries: speakers then distinguish their everyday idiom from a Latin that has become "an archaic and learned language, more or less classical, which they had no longer understood for several centuries". The Church takes note of this gap much earlier: as early as 813, "the Council of Tours asks priests to preach in popular Romance speech", a sign that liturgical Latin had ceased to be understood by the people.
The first literary writings termed "proenzal" date from the eleventh century, but Blanchet warns that this label misleads: these texts come from the Limousin and Aquitaine. It is the language of the troubadours, active above all between 1100 and 1300, that tradition associates with "ancient Provençal", and that Blanchet calls the troubadour koinè. He dismantles it piece by piece. This written language served only "a very restricted communication, a literary expression intended for the ruling classes", roughly one percent of the population, with no bearing on the life of the illiterate common people. Its apparent unity is moreover an illusion: the manuscripts carrying troubadour poetry were copied late, mostly in northern Italy, "by copyists foreign for the most part, who did not know the language they were copying" and who mixed together its dialectal forms and periods. Citing Zufferey, Blanchet holds to be "victims of an optical illusion" those who consider this language to have been "clearly constituted from the threshold of the twelfth century"; his conclusion is that "the language known under the name of koinè d'oc in fact had no real and significant existence in the history of Provençal", and that it shows, through its so-called dialectal variants, only the real diversity of the idioms of the Middle Ages.
This thesis stands against the reading defended by R. Lafont and the champions of a unifying reading of the languages of oc. Blanchet places the rupture elsewhere: between an idiom once written by a restricted dominant class, the clerics, and an idiom that had become oral for the dominated and illiterate mass, which he reads as a nascent assertion of popular identity.
Blanchet further establishes a clear division of uses. The local Romance idioms, "Provençal", served the everyday communication of every social class. Latin held a dominant and quasi official function in administrative and religious texts, reserved to clerics who could read and write. Apart from a few religious works such as the Vie de Sainte Douceline, in prose at the end of the thirteenth century, literary writings in the local idiom remain rare for as long as courtly lyric poetry endures.
Blanchet places in the thirteenth century a discreet turning point: the differences between the idioms of oc, already present, "become markedly sharper" in the language of the charters. The true shift comes in the following century: the decline of courtly lyric poetry opens the way, from the fourteenth century, to writing in a genuinely local idiom in the manuscripts that survive. It is in the charters of the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries, more rarely before, that Blanchet places the point where "one meets most clearly the local language of Provence in written form", the writing systems themselves gaining in coherence there.
The testimony of Boniface de Castellane, the rebel of 1263 whom Busquet describes as an eloquent troubadour, retains here its full value. His sirventes, protesting against Charles of Anjou's domanial inquiry and quoted in translation by Busquet, remains the sole author writing in the Provençal language whom the corpus devoted to the event history of Provence names for the whole of the Middle Ages: a voice still writing within the orbit of troubadour culture, at a date when that culture was already declining.
The comital crown also bears on this evolution. From 1113 under a Catalan dynasty, then from 1246 to 1486 under the Angevin dynasty close to the crown of France, an aristocracy of French culture and language settles around the court of Aix. Blanchet holds that this prestige gives French standing very early among the lettered circles of Provence, notably through the patronage of King René, well before any legal text: an ordinance of Charles of Anjou, in 1277, on the use of French in the county's treasury, remains without concrete effect. French appears spontaneously in legal and administrative texts, in Provence as in the Comtat, only from the end of the fifteenth century, a phenomenon Blanchet attributes to the growing vehicular function of French across all of Europe at the time.
At the close of the medieval Provençal period, the language holds to three uses, which precede by several generations the Edict of Villers-Cotterêts: Provençal, spoken alone, serves the communication of every social class, Latin dominates administrative and religious writing, and French wins over the lettered elites of Aix through the prestige of the Angevin court alone, without any legal text yet having compelled it there.
Timeline, 536 to 1481
Sources for this page
- Maurice Agulhon and Noël Coulet, Histoire de la Provence, collection Que sais-je ?
- Philippe Blanchet, Le provençal, essai de description sociolinguistique et différentielle, Peeters, 1992.
- Wikipedia, article « Histoire de la Provence ».
- Raoul Busquet, Histoire de Provence.