At any rate the Catalan Cerbère, known to-day only as the frontier French station on the line to Barcelona, has become an unlovely railway junction, of little appeal except in the story of its past.
In the twelfth century the place had already attained to prominence, and its feudal seigneur, named Rabedos, built a public edifice for civic pride, and a church which he dedicated to San Salvador.
In 1361 Guillem de Pau, a noble of the rank of donzell, and a member of a family famous for its exploits against the Moors, became Seigneur de Cerbère, and the one act of his life which puts him on record as a feudal lord of parts is a charter signed by him giving the fishing rights offshore from Collioure, for the distance of ten leagues, to one Pierre Huguet—for a price. Thus is recorded a very early instance of official sinning. One certainly cannot sell that which he has not got; even maritime tribunals of to-day don’t recognize anything beyond the “three mile limit.”
The seigneurs of Pau, who were Baillis de Cerbère, came thus to have a hand in the conduct of affairs in the Mediterranean, though their own bailiwick was nearer the Atlantic coast. At this time there were nine vassal chiefs of families who owed allegiance to the head. After the fourteenth century this frontier territory belonged, for a time, to the Seigneurs des Abelles, their name coming from another little feudal estate half hidden in one of the Mediterranean valleys of the Pyrenees.
The chapel of Cerbère, founded by Rabedos in the twelfth century, had fallen in ruins by the end of the fourteenth century, but many pious legacies left to it were conceded to the clercs bénéficiaires, a body of men in holy orders who had influence enough in the courts of justice to be able to claim as their own certain “goods of the church.” Louis XIV cut short these clerical benefits, however, and gave them—by what right is quite vague—to his maréchal, Joseph de Rocabruna.
Some two centuries ago Cerbère possessed something approaching the dignity of a château-fortress.
An act of the 25th May, 1700, refers to the Château de Caroig, perhaps the Quer-Roig. The name now applies, however, only to a mass of ruins on the summit of a near-by mountain of the same name. Not every one in the neighbourhood admits this, some preferring to believe that the same heap of stones was once a signal tower by which a warning fire was built to tell of the approach of the Saracens or the pirates of Barbary. It might well have been both watch-tower and château.
CHAPTER VI
FROM PERPIGNAN TO THE SPANISH FRONTIER
