In 1150, when the Carlovingian empire was dismembered, there was formed the Comté and Marquisat of Provence, with capitals at Avignon and Aix, the small remaining portion becoming known as the Comté d’Orange.
Under the comtes Provence again flourished, and a brilliant civilization was born in the twelfth and thirteenth centuries which gave almost a new literature and a new art to those glorious gems of the French Crown. The school of Romanesque church-building of Provence, of which the most entrancing examples are still to be seen at Aix, Arles, St. Gilles, and Cavaillon, spread throughout Languedoc and Dauphiné, and gave an impetus to a style of church-building which was the highest form of artistic expression.
It was at this time, too, that Provençal literature took on that expressive form which set the fashion for the court versifiers of the day, the troubadours and the trouvères of which the old French chronicles are so full. The speech of the Provençal troubadours was so polished and light that it lent itself readily to verses and dialogues which, for their motives, mostly touched on love and marriage. Avignon, Aix, and Les Baux were very “courts of love,” presided over—said a chivalrous French writer—by ladies of renown, who elaborated a code of gallantry and the droits de la femme which were certainly in advance of their time.
The reign of René II. of Sicily and Anjou, called “le bon Roi René,” brought all this love of letters to the highest conceivable plane and constituted an era hitherto unapproached,—as marked, indeed, and as brilliant, as the Renaissance itself.
The troubadours and the “courts of love” have gone for ever from Provence, and there is only the carnival celebrations of Nice and Cannes and the other Riviera cities to take their place. These festivities are poor enough apologies for the splendid pageants which formerly held forth at Marseilles and Aix, where the titled dignitary of the celebration was known as the “Prince d’Amour,” or at Aubagne, Toulon, or St. Tropez, where he was known as the “Capitaine de Ville.”
The carnival celebrations of to-day are all right in their way, perhaps, but their spirit is not the same. What have flower-dressed automobiles and hare and tortoise gymkanas got to do with romance anyway?
The pages of history are full of references to the Provence of the middle ages. Louis XI. annexed the province to the Crown in 1481, but Aix remained the capital, and this city was given a parliament of its own by Louis XII. The dignity was not appreciated by the inhabitants, for the parliamentary benches were filled with the nobility, who, as was the custom of the time, sought to oppress their inferiors. As a result there developed a local saying that the three plagues of Provence were its parliament; its raging river, the stony-bedded Durance; and the “mistral,” the cold north wind that blows with severe regularity for three, six, or nine days, throughout the Rhône valley.
Charles V. invaded Provence in 1536, and the League and the Fronde were disturbing influences here as elsewhere.
The Comté d’Orange was annexed by France, by virtue of the treaty of Utrecht, in 1713, and the Comtat Venaissin was acquired from the Italian powers in 1791.
Toulon played a great part in the later history of Provence, when it underwent its famous siege by the troops of the Convention in 1793.