Occitania - The country that never was

The nation states of Western Europe might seem eternal. In fact they are artificial creations that just happened to live long enough to become entrenched.

Last year I wrote an article about Montaillou, a small village in southern France whose only reason to fame is the 14th century Inquisition protocols that have miraculously survived into the present day.

One commenter on that article asked if I could write something about the wider region around Montaillou, the region called Occitania. I promised I would do that sometime. That time has now come. Here is the history of Occitania. The nation that never became a state.

In the beginning was the word

There is no perfect agreement of what Occitania is. Some say it goes all the way across southern France from the Atlantic Ocean in the west to the Alps in the east. Some say it stops at the river Rhône. Others that it starts hundreds of kilometers inland from the Atlantic. Some say it goes all the way north to the river Loire or far down into modern Spain. Others insist that it is far smaller.

Since Occitania has never been a political entity there is no right or wrong when delimiting it. Occitania is above all defined as the region where the Occitan language is spoken. But Occitan is hardly spoken at all these days and it is very difficult to determine where it was spoken several hundred years ago.

Map of areas of southern France where remnants of Occitan language were present in 1900. From Wikimedia Commons.

In the very beginning nothing of this was relevant. When Julius Caesar conquered Gaul for Rome (and massacred a few hundred thousand people in the process) the future France was divided in three different areas. In the northeast there lived Belgians which might have been Germanic but were at the very least heavily influenced by Germanic customs. In the southwest were the Aquitani, who were a Basque people. And in the large middle-ground were the "real" Gauls, a Celtic-speaking people.

During its 500 years as a Roman province Gaul was significantly Latinized. Especially since the Germanic tribes that replaced the Romans kept the Latin language. What kind of Latin language that was is unfortunately unknown. What we today call Latin is classical Latin, which is probably quite similar to the language spoken in Rome in the 1st century BC. In the following five centuries there must have been a lot of linguistic development, but the written Latin remained the same.

This vernacular Latin spoken in the post-Roman lands is commonly known as Vulgar Latin, although I have been informed that linguists hate this phrase and want it to be known as Proto-Romance instead. Since no one who was literate at that time wrote in anything but Classical Latin we have very limited information about the Proto-Romance language. Most probably it came in regional varieties from early on. How regional and how varied remains largely unknown.

The first written account of the future language of Gaul is from 842 when the Oaths of Strasbourg were written down. This oath was supposed to be taken by the Frankish soldiers and it therefore needed to be notated in the language these soldiers were actually speaking and could understand. Linguists call this language Gallo-Romance or just Romance.

The interesting thing with the language in the Oaths of Strasbourg is that it is neither French, nor Occitan. It is a precursor common to both languages. In practice this means that as late as the 9th century there was no real linguistic difference between France and Occitania.

Complicated politics

When the Roman empire started to disintegrate, one of the first regions to officially go was, a bit surprisingly, the future Occitania. In 406 the Rhine frontier had broken down and barbarians streamed into the Roman lands. The empire had no resources to counter this invasion but it had a very troublesome mercenary army in the form of the Visigothic tribe under its king Alaric. The emperor decided that the best course of action was to give southern Gaul to Alaric as a personal fief if he could rid it of barbarians.

The Visigoths had no problems defeating the other tribes. Not only did they clear out southern Gaul, they also took possession of the Iberian peninsula (forcing the Vandals and Suebi to conquer North Africa instead, which might not have been entirely according to the emperor's plans). For the rest of the fifth century the Visigoths ruled over a vast kingdom consisting of today's Portugal, Spain and southern France. Nominally they were subjects of the emperor in Rome but in practice they minded their own business.

This was not to be for very long. After the final demise of the Western Roman Empire another Germanic tribe took possession of northern Gaul: the Franks. The Franks were aggressive and expansionist and in 507 they utterly defeated the Visigoths who had to retreat south of the Pyrenees and leave their lands in southern Gaul to the Franks whose land would henceforth be known as France.

Only 200 years later the Visigoths would cease to exist completely with the Muslim invasion of Spain and the establishment of the Iberian caliphate. The Muslims did expand into Gaul as well but were beaten back by Charles Martel, Pepin and Charlemagne.

After the defeat of the Muslims southern France and northern Spain were both formally Frankish lands. The Frankish king was the overlord. In practice these areas had a very high degree of independence. Especially since the Frankish kingdom fell apart after Charlemagne and the Frankish lords were more interested in fighting each other in its core lands than keeping its peripheral subjects on a tight leash.

Simple geography

From the ninth century onwards Occitania was left pretty much to its own devices. Which suited it just fine. At least it suited the Occitanian lords just fine. In this, they had significant help from geography.

Map of modern France with its major rivers. Some cities relevant to the article have been added. It proved to be too much work to add the Massif Central but the city of Clermont is right in the middle of the Massif Central, just imagine a massive mountain range surrounding it and which encompasses the sources of the Charente, Loire and Dordogne rivers. Original map from Wikimedia Commons. 

France might look like a compact unit on a map. But in fact it is easy to divide into several parts. In the Middle Ages communications tended to be along coastlines or rivers, especially rivers. Based on its river systems France can be divided into three parts. The northern half, centered around the rivers of Seine and Loire, was the main component, where the king resided, and also where most of the arable land and thus the population was located.

The southern half can be divided in two parts, one in the southeast, around the Rhône/Saône river system. And one in the southwest, around the Garonne/Dordogne rivers. The southeast is actually quite accessible to northern France due to the upper reaches of the Loire and Rhône rivers being quite close to each other. The French kings thus had more control over southeastern France. But the southwest is protected by the Massif Central that blocks access to it not only from northern France but also from the southeast, making it very hard to reach from the Paris region.

The core parts of Occitania were the sheltered lands between the Massif Central and the Pyrenees. Its main city has traditionally always been Toulouse, on the upper reaches of the Garonne river, somewhat closer to the Mediterranean than to the Atlantic.

The lands of Occitania, and especially Toulouse, were rich. Mostly due to trade. The Muslim conquest of Spain had, somewhat ironically, been a great boon to Occitania. Trade between northwestern Europe and the Mediterranean now had difficulty traveling around the Muslim lands of Iberia. There were other routes, for example on the river Rhine and across the mountain passes of the Alps to Italy. But one of the main routes was by sea and the river Garonne up to Toulouse where the goods were transferred to horses for the 150 km trip to Narbonne on the Mediterranean coast.

This trade made Toulouse into one of the main cities of Western Europe. Around the year 1200 it had 30,000 inhabitants, which was some way from Western Europe's biggest city, Paris, which had at least 100,000 inhabitants. But still more than lesser cities like Rome or London. Naturally, it also made the Count of Toulouse very powerful, especially since he controlled large tracts of territory along the trade routes.

Feuding under feudalism

Occitania had been nominally French since the time of Charlemagne. In practice this did not mean that much. The Middle Ages in Western Europe were characterized by feudalism and under feudalism the concept of state does not really exist. Technically speaking, Occitania had not been French since the time of Charlemagne. Rather, the lords of Occitania had sworn allegiance to the king of France since the time of Charlemagne.

But this allegiance was never without issue. Feudalism might seem stable from our future vantage point, but in fact it was very brittle. One could even be as bold as to state that feudalism was the desperate answer to the brittleness of Medieval society. Feudalism was never more stable than the loyalty of any one lord. Depending on personal chemistry and the ever-present risk of violence, these loyalties could be both very strong and very weak.

The rules of feudalism stipulated that everyone had a lord above them. Even kings, in a sense, had the pope as overlord. And the pope had submitted to God, who was lord of everything. But no rule stopped a count from abandoning his lord and choosing another king as overlord. Unless he had very good reasons, he would lose reputation, and the snubbed king would most probably declare war. But apart from this the count was free to choose another overlord.

The lords of Occitania stuck with the king of France as their overlord. The reasons for this were historical. Charlemagne had once defended them from the Muslim invasion. But there was also a very practical side. The king of France was powerful, which was a political asset for the Occitan lords, but he was also distant enough to not meddle in their affairs. The lords of Occitania had the best of two worlds: the backing of a powerful lord but at the same time the freedom to rule themselves more or less at their leisure.

Unfortunately for Occitania this state of affairs was not going to last forever. After Charlemagne's conquest the Carolingian kings of France had been busy squabbling among themselves. The Capetian kings that took over around the year 1000 had their hands full with keeping the kingdom together at all. What happened in Occitania was the least of their problems.

In the late 12th century the power of the French kings started increasing. Their perpetual wars with England continued, but the king of France started winning. Feudalism had by this time established itself and the king of France could be more certain of the allegiance of the lords of the realm.

With their position in the north more secure the kings of France started looking to expand their power sphere even more. And, naturally, they looked south, to the lands they nominally controlled but in practice had let slip out of their hands.

Most of all the French kings wanted to replace a number of the troublesome southern lords with dependable noblemen from the north. As overlords they were technically allowed to do this but just telling the current lords to get lost would have been the same as a declaration of war, not to mention the reputational damage it would have incurred.

What was needed was a very good excuse to replace the southern lords. Or a good excuse to go to war if they refused. Luckily such an opportunity presented itself in the beginning of the 13th century. The fate of Occitania would be decided by a crusade.

Crusading in Christianity

When we talk about crusades we generally refer to the Crusades to the Holy Land. They were the biggest and most advertised but during the 12th and 13th centuries crusades were quite common throughout Europe. One of the very first crusades was, ironically (at least to me), the Norwegian crusade against Småland in 1123. At least in northern Europe crusades were seen very much as a religiously sanctioned way to continue with Viking style raiding.

The Albigensian crusade against Occitania was not really a Viking style raid against insufficiently Christianized neighbors. Occitania was very old Christian lands. After more than a hundred years of crusading, crusades had come to take on a more political dimension. They were not religious wars as much as papal wars, directed at enemies of the pope rather than enemies of Christianity. This had been vividly demonstrated just a few years earlier when the Fourth Crusade had concluded with the sack of Constantinople, the world's largest Christian city.

It was now time for Occitania to receive the same treatment as Constantinople. The origins of the crusade were simple. There were heretics, called Cathars, in Occitania and the lords of the land were not doing enough to stamp it out. The pope especially thought that the Count of Toulouse was not doing his share in keeping the populace on the straight and narrow. This was an ongoing affair for several decades in the late 12th and early 13th centuries.

In 1208 the Count of Toulouse was excommunicated from the church and his lands placed under interdict, meaning no church services were to be provided there. This was a rash step from the papacy but nothing out of the ordinary. King John of England was excommunicated and his lands interdicted (meaning the whole of England) at about the same time.

The excommunication was more of a papal bargaining chip in the negotiations between the papacy and the Count of Toulouse that had been ongoing for several years. However, things were about to get much worse due to one of those black swan events which change the course of history. The event this time was the murder of the pope's legate and chief negotiator who was cut down by an unknown knight when traveling between Toulouse and Rome. The assailant has never been identified but the Count of Toulouse was immediately blamed for the deed. The pope could hardly let an outrage like that pass unpunished and within a year the crusade against heresy in Occitania was declared.

There is a fair amount of irony in this since Occitania had played an outsized role in crusades past. The original First Crusade was declared in Clermont, a city in the north of Occitania, and the leader of that crusade, which conquered Jerusalem in 1099, was no other than Raymond IV, the then Count of Toulouse.

The north invades

Crusaders were quick to line up for service. They came from all over Western Europe but above all from the French lands directly north of Occitania. Many of the crusaders no doubt had ulterior motives and hoped for plunder and conquest. But most were probably deeply religious men who jumped on the opportunity to take part in a real pope-sanctioned crusade, with all the spiritual benefits it entailed, without having to endure the long and perilous journey to the Holy Land.

The crusaders could muster a huge army but they had to move quickly because the rules of crusades at the time stipulated that crusaders only needed to do 40 days of service before being redeemed. Since Occitania was so close to France there was no need to linger longer than necessary and the armies of the crusaders, though large, had a tendency to evaporate quickly when meeting resistance that did not crumble immediately.

The very first engagement of the crusade was such a quick engagement. Béziers is a medium-sized city close to but not on the Mediterranean coast of today's France. In the Middle Ages it was an important trading town with strong fortifications. The crusaders viewed it as a gate to the rest of Occitania which they must conquer to be able to continue.

When the crusaders arrived at Béziers the more fervent elements of the crusading army, mostly infantry from the lower rungs of society, immediately stormed the city. One of the gates to the city was opened, whether in error or by treason has not been definitely determined, and the crusaders sacked the city.

This was when one of the most notorious lines of the entire crusade was (maybe) uttered by the pope's representative Arnaud Amalric who reportedly said: "Kill them all. God will know his own." as a reply to the question of how to separate heretics from good Catholics. The entire population of Béziers was consequently massacred.

This massacre set the tone for the coming decades in Occitania. Most of the crusaders returned home shortly after the action at Béziers and left only a skeleton crew of French knights to continue the crusade. These remaining crusaders were of course religious men but most of all they seem to have been attracted by the possibility of conquest. Most of them, including their leader Simon de Montfort, were petty nobles from northern France hoping to win greater lands for themselves in Occitania.

The small force of crusaders was hopelessly inadequate to conquer and pacify all of Occitania. But being composed of hardened veteran knights it was also hopeless for the Occitans to defeat them decisively. The result was 20 years of brutal warfare that saw much of Occitania devastated.

Not your lord

Several decades of low intensity warfare implies that the Albigensian crusade was not decided on the battlefield. That might be so, but the fate of Occitania was definitely decided on the battlefield, at least one battlefield. To understand why we must make an even deeper dive into feudal politics.

As mentioned before, feudalism is politically simple, at least in theory. Everyone throughout the system has a superior. When conflicts arise the problem is taken to a higher level where disagreements are ironed out. For example, two squabbling counts would take their dispute to the king who would arbitrate or hand down a judgment which everyone needed to follow.

In practice it was way more messy. At the start of the 13th century most of Occitania had the French king in Paris as overlord, at least nominally. But not all of it. Some smaller counties, like the County of Foix and the County of Comminges, were subjects to the King of Aragon, in northeastern Spain. Both French and Aragonese subjects were far enough from their kings to be more or less independent. And then there was the Count of Toulouse who was more powerful than many kings and sometimes lorded it like a de facto king of Occitania rather than the loyal subject of the king of France which he officially was.

When the crusade was declared the count of Toulouse desperately tried to be that loyal subject of the king which he had failed to be in the past. He even joined the crusaders with some of his knights outside Béziers aiding the attack of one of his own vassals. The count's scheming bought himself some time (his lands would not be attacked until next year) at the price of some added confusion in Occitania. But the real man to watch was not in Occitania at all, but on the other side of the Pyrenees: king Peter of Aragon.

After Béziers the crusaders attacked Carcassonne and then continued further up the mountains which brought them into the counties of Foix and Comminges, who both had the king of Aragon as overlord. More or less the only duty of a feudal lord was to give military aid in the case a vassal was attacked. On the other hand, king Peter's own overlord, the pope, had explicitly said that the Occitan lands should be attacked. It was complicated, to say the least.

From the Occitans viewpoint the whole crusade was a thinly guised invasion by the king of France in order to subjugate their lands. In practical terms, they had a point. But king Peter preferred to take the crusade at face value, at least for the time being, as a papal war against heresy in which he had no business. This did not stop the petitions from the Occitans. They knew that their only realistic savior was the king on the other side of the Pyrenees.

The city walls of Carcassonne are one of very few complete city walls left in France. With its fairy tale look Carcassonne is often chosen to illustrate Medieval Occitania. Ironically enough the original walls were destroyed in the Albigensian crusade and the current walls were built in the middle of the 13th century by the king of France when Carcassonne was an important fortress close to the border with Aragon. Image from Wikimedia Commons. 

Occitania rises - and falls

In the end the king of Aragon could not resist. As the crusade grinded on with questionable results, the papal interest waned. King Peter saw the opportunity to intervene without incurring too much wrath from the pope. It probably helped that king Peter was himself a renowned crusader, having successfully fought the Muslims in the south of Spain, which was also a pope-sanctioned crusade.

In 1213, four years after the start of the crusade, king Peter moved his army north of the Pyrenees to defend his subjects that were being killed and plundered by French knights. And it was not only his ordinary small vassals. Something seminal had happened. The Count of Toulouse had pledged his allegiance to Peter of Aragon if he could protect him from the northerners.

But before we continue we need to look a bit closer at the kingdom of Aragon.

At the start of the 13th century the Muslims in Spain had been driven back to the southern half of the Iberian peninsula. In the north were several new kingdoms that had been created in the newly conquered lands. Castile, in the center, was the most powerful one. Aragon was the easternmost. Although, even further east lay the county of Barcelona, which was formally a vassal to the king of France, but which was also ruled by the king of Aragon since he had inherited the position of count.

Barcelona is important here. It was by far the richest and most populous of the lands of king Peter of Aragon. But there is something else as well. In Aragon the local language was called Aragonese. It was very similar to the Castilian spoken further west, the language that is today known as Spanish. The language of Barcelona is different. In Barcelona and its surroundings people speak Catalan. Catalan is very similar to, and mutually intelligible with, Occitan. In the 13th century they were probably indistinguishable.

When king Peter of Aragon received the pledge of allegiance from the count of Toulouse it opened the prospect of a large kingdom encompassing most of the Occitan-Catalan-speaking lands. Had king Peter been successful he would have been in a strong position to expand his lands east into Occitan speaking Provence and south into former Muslim lands, creating a kingdom encompassing a vast area of the northwestern Mediterranean on lands that today belong to France and Spain.

In the end, it was not to be. King Peter moved north in 2013 to assist Toulouse which was being harassed by the crusaders. At Muret, a small town 25 km south of Toulouse, he made contact with the crusader army. The severely outnumbered crusaders made an immediate attack and in one of the most famous battles of the High Middle Ages not only routed the Aragonese army but also killed king Peter.

Picking up the pieces

The battle of Muret was a major triumph for the crusaders and especially their commander Simon de Montfort who was henceforth hailed as one of the foremost commanders of the Middle Ages. For the Aragonese it was nothing short of a catastrophe. With their army spent, their king dead and their crown prince only six years old they were out of the Occitan game forever. After Muret, Aragon would stay south of the Pyrenees, not without some success, but in the end they would join with Castile to form the kingdom of Spain, leaving the Catalan speakers in Barcelona a minority in Castilian-speaking Spain. Just as the Occitan-speakers north of the mountains were doomed to become a minority in a French speaking country.

Maybe surprisingly, the loss at Muret was not a deathblow to the Occitans. After their victory the crusaders continued unopposed, occupying Toulouse and driving count Raymond of Toulouse into exile. But southern resistance was far from over. On the contrary, guerilla style warfare slowly wore down the French knights and when Toulouse was returned to southern rule, through a coup in 1217, Simon de Montfort had to once again lay siege to it. This time unsuccessfully. In 1218 Simon was killed by a stone from a mangonel outside the walls of Toulouse (according to legend the mangonel was operated by women).

With its commander gone the Albigensian Crusade quickly crumbled. Despite new calls to arms from the pope, and new knights from the north, most cities and towns in Occitania reverted to their traditional lords. An uneasy stalemate was established where southern lords held the land but everyone lived in fear of the next invasion.

This far in the crusade the French kings had stayed firmly on the sidelines. This was mostly due to the perennial wars between France and England which took up most of the king's attention. But in the 1320s some sort of peace was achieved and things calmed down for a couple of years, freeing up resources for other projects. The project king Louis VIII of France decided on was an expedition to Occitania.

In 1226 a large royal army moved south following the usual route down the Rhône and along the Mediterranean coast into Occitania proper. Hardly any fighting took place. City after city yielded to the king of France. In the end an accommodation was decided upon which let everything stay the same while everything was changed.

Count Raymond of Toulouse was allowed to remain as lord of his lands. But he had to marry his daughter and only child to a brother to the French king, meaning that with his death his county would pass over to the royal family of France. He was also forced to support the suppression of heresy. This was done by a new institution called the Inquisition which would get more varied tasks as the Middle Ages progressed but whose original purpose was to track down cathars in Occitania.

The not so heavy yoke

The Albigensian Crusade did not kill off Occitania or the Occitans. In fact, the rule of the French kings was comparatively light. If you were a Cathar, life became difficult, but the majority of Occitans were always Catholic and for them it was probably imperceptible that some Occitan lords were replaced with similar French lords. It was all an improvement compared to the decades of warfare that preceded it.

The Occitan language was hardly affected at all. As the Inquisition protocols from Montaillou show, Occitan was still the only language in rural Occitania a hundred years after the crusade. The towns and cities might have been slightly more French speaking, but even there Occitan must have been widely spoken, otherwise the people of Montaillou would not have been able to migrate there to work.

Occitan could survive much as before the crusade partly because the literal language of the time was neither Occitan, nor French, but Latin. Official business, including the works of the courts and local political bodies, was conducted in any language the participants might command, but the protocols were always done in Latin.

This all changed in 1539 when the king of France signed the Ordinance of Villers-Cotterêts, a set of administrative reforms stipulating, among other things, that from then on French, and only French, would be used in all official documents. Since the new rules only affected written documents it should not have made much difference to the largely illiterate population. But the board was now heavily tilted in favor of French, instead of Occitan.

Life after Occitania

Not only was the Occitan language being outcompeted by French, the Occitan lifestyle slowly changed too. The Occitania of the High Middle Ages was prosperous and culturally sophisticated. The famous troubadour culture, poetic songs about chivalrous knights and fair maidens, was originally and primarily an Occitan affair. Occitan's status as the language of chivalric poetry was strong enough for outsiders to take their chances with it. For example, did Richard the Lionheart, king of England, compose verse in Occitan, a language he knew because of his mother, Eleanor of Aquitaine.

The Occitan economy declined after the Middle Ages. The reason for this was not French oppression as much as technological and political development. With the Spanish conquest of the entire Iberian peninsula the threat from Muslim pirates receded. Larger and more cost-effective ships could then conduct trade between the Atlantic to the Mediterranean around Iberia rather than over Toulouse. Occitania ceased being a trading hub and became a backwater.

The Occitan language and culture lived on for quite some time. One of French literature's most famous characters, a certain D'Artagnan who had friends among the king's musketeers, was an Occitan who spoke French with an audible accent. Still, his fate (and the fate of his historical basis Charles de Batz de Castelmore d'Artagnan) is telling. For an ambitious young Occitan, the only way forward was north, to Paris and the real France.

Occitania was still very much alive, at least culturally, in the 18th century. Then came the French Revolution and the ambitions of the French state increased substantially. The revolutionaries believed that a common language was a necessity for building a communally minded populace and fought hard to eradicate all languages except French. Another decisive blow towards Occitan came in 1881 when France introduced mandatory primary education, in French, naturally.

At the start of the 19th century the Occitan language was still widespread. According to a report from 1794 only 12% of France's population spoke "real French". The rest of the population spoke dialects or minority languages, including Occitan. France's reply to this was partly hard, for example mandatory education in French, but also soft. The elites of Paris tried hard, and were very successful, in depicting minority languages as backwards and culturally inferior to French.

In so doing they succeeded in eradicating the memory of the rich history of Occitania. In the 13th century it was Occitania that was urban, cosmopolitan and sophisticated. At least compared to the country-bumpkins of northern France. Had history turned out differently it might have been Occitania that was the main political entity in Western Europe, instead of two insignificant minority regions on respective sides of a state border. 

This is a map of the potential state of Occitania. It combines the Occitan speaking parts of France with the kingdom of Aragon enhanced by the Basque counties and Navarre. 

The sources for this article are, as the numerous links attest, mostly Wikipedia. But I have also read a book about the Albigensian crusade: Kill Them All - Cathars and Carnage in the Albigensian Crusade by Sean McGlynn.