Southern France in the Early Eighth Century

(Государства басков и катаров)

[3] In the year 718 that part of France south of the Loire and Burgundy lay between two powers which

were to affect its destiny for more than a century. To the north we find regions which were dominated

by the Carolingian family -- a family which Pepin of Heristal had established in power over Austrasia

and Neustria and whose authority was being further increased by his able son, Charles Martel. To the

south lay Spain, conquered by the Arab and Berber forces of Musa and Tarik -- forces which were

about to cross the Pyrenees in an advance toward the heartland of Western Europe.

The Midi which faced these two adversaries in the early eighth century was a region without any overall

political cohesion of its own. It consisted of four relatively distinct areas. The largest of these was an

Aquitaine which lay south of the Loire and west of the Rhone Valley, with its southern borders reaching

the Narbonnaise in the east and a Gascon frontier along the Garonne in the west. Aquitaine had been

part of the Merovingian Frankish state since the time of Clovis, but by the eighth century was

controlled by a duke or princeps called Eudes. He and his heirs, Hunald and Waiffre, were to control its

destiny for the next fifty years.

We find a second rather amorphous principality known as Provence, which probably consisted of the

Rhone Valley south of Lyon and east of Aquitaine and the Narbonnaise, up to the crests of the French

Alps -- roughly the area occupied by the old Roman Provincia. Provence was controlled by a series of

local magnates who bore the title of patrician. We know little about these patricians beyond their names with one exception, and we do not even know whether or not they belonged to the same family like the principes of Aquitaine. Provence, like Aquitaine, had long been nominally a part of the Merovingian

Frankish state, though soon [4] after the death of Dagobert it had managed to achieve a large measure

of autonomy under native princes.(1)

West of Provence along the shores of the Mediterranean we find the third distinct region of Southern

France, the Narbonnaise or Septimania, as it was called. Unlike Aquitaine and Provence, the

Narbonnaise had never been conquered by the Merovingians. Instead, for three hundred years it had

been under Visigothic rule. Its boundaries seem to have been the Rhone on the east, a series of fortified

cities like Uzиs, Lodиve, and Carcassonne on the north, the Pyrenean high country inhabited by the

Basques on the west, and the Pyrenees and Mediterranean to the south.(2) Though it had not shared the political history of Aquitaine and Provence, like them it seems to have had an instinct for autonomy,

which in the late seventh century led to a serious revolt by a local Gothic magnate called Paul, a rising

which had to be suppressed by Wamba, king of Visigothic Spain.(3)

The fourth region of the Midi was Gascony which occupied the remaining region of Southern France

north of the Pyrenees. It is difficult to give Gascony's boundaries in any exact way. A later Carolingian

writer summed it up by saying that the Gascons lived across the Garonne and among the Pyrenees.

Following his lead we might hazard the opinion that Carcassonne and Roussillon formed the eastern

boundary, the Garonne its northern border, the Atlantic its western one, and the Pyrenees its southern

one. On the other hand it is uncertain whether Bordeaux and the Bordelais were part of Gascony or part

of Aquitaine during this period.(4) It is equally difficult to be sure that the Pyrenees formed Gascony's

southern border, since other Basques lived south of them in Northern Spain. These Spanish Basques,

who were similar in race and culture to their French Gascon compatriots, occupied an expanse of

Spanish soil northwest of Saragossa in Pallars, Ribagorзa, Aragуn, Navarre, and Asturias and were

generally independent of and at times hostile to the Visigothic [6] rulers of Spain. They appear to have

maintained close ties with those Gascons who lived north of the Pyrenees. That this represented any

formal political unity, however, appears doubtful, for it seems clear that during this period the Basques

of France were ruled by a native family of dukes or principes who bore the name of Loup or Lupo.

They, like the Spanish Basques, were independent of their Narbonnaise and Aquitanian neighbors.(5)

One more region might also be mentioned -- Catalonia, which was to be closely associated with the

Midi after 778, though not before. In 713-714, however, Catalonia had been overrun by the Moors who

occupied all of it with the possible exception of the Urgell region, where there is some evidence of the

survival of an independent native Church and monastic tradition. Yet even here one must be careful, for

there is some evidence that all of this part of Northern Spain was less conquered outright by the

Moslems than handed over to them by dissident Visigothic nobles, one of whom, a certain Cassius,

apostatized from the Christian Church and set up an important Islamic dynasty in the region, the Banu

Kasi.(6) During the period covered by this chapter Catalonia followed the destiny of the rest of Moslem

Spain rather than that of the Midi.