Historic buildings

by Unknown

THE RAMPARTS OF CARCASSONNE
A. MOLINIER

To what race shall we attribute the foundation of the city of Carcassonne? We cannot say exactly, so many races having occupied this part of the valley of the Aude in turn; the first in point of time was that of the Iberians, that mysterious people, who had colonized Southern Europe long before the coming of the Aryan race. Without taking any more account than is necessary regarding the hypothesis of the etymologists, we may recall the fact that the celebrated William von Humboldt attaches the vocable Carcaso, as well as many others from the south of Gaul and the north of Spain, to the Iberic language.

Erected into a Latin colony by Cæsar himself, or by his adopted son, Augustus, Carcassonne vegetated obscurely for three centuries until the day when the invasion by the Barbarians and the civil wars brought about the ruin of the Empire. At this moment she was shorn of her ancient glory; and from a Latin colony, she became a simple castrum, which many manuscripts of the Notitia dignitatum, written about the year 400, do not even mention. But if the old city lost her importance with regard to civil life, she gained it in military life. At the moment the Germans, those hereditary enemies of Rome, spread over the whole of Gaul, the cities repaired their too long neglected fortifications in great haste; open spaces they surrounded with high walls; the ancient citadels were reinforced; and in their haste, just as happened later during the Hundred Years’ War, many sumptuous buildings erected by Latin architects, were sacrificed to make the defences. Carcassonne is now furnished with a strong enclosure, the honour of which many archæologists, among them Viollet-le-Duc, wish to give to the Visigoths; but it seems more prudent to attribute them to the last engineers of the expiring Empire. This enclosure, of which some parts still exist to-day, is composed of curtains of medium height, surmounted by a parapet without projections and flanked at intervals with semicircular towers opened at the gorge, or closed by a flat wall.

The towers were bare up to the level of the circling road, higher they comprised two or three stories. Viollet-le-Duc supposes that they were covered with a roof, and restored one according to this hypothesis. Much more elevated than the curtain, these Gallo-Roman towers commanded it from above, and on each of their flanks the curtain is interrupted by a gap connected by a narrow bridge, which was easy to destroy in case of an attack.

One must imagine the city of Carcassonne, with this enclosure composed of high curtains with parapets and turrets, and, at intervals, high towers, dominating the country and commanding the neighbouring defences. Such she was at the end of the Empire and such she remained for several centuries. Occupied by the Visigoths, vainly besieged several times by Clovis and by the successors of that prince, she was not forced before the Eighth Century. At this date, she fell into the hands of the Arabs, with all of the surrounding country. The domination of the Mussulmans, however, was very ephemeral; occupied by them about 720, Carcassonne again became Christian thirty years later, in 759.

Carcassonne became an important town. The city remains a fortress of the first order, almost impregnable, with its towers, its curtains and its vast château; but around it, on the slopes and at the base of the hill between the Aude and the city, extensive and flourishing boroughs are forming. These bourgs are mentioned in 1067; more recent discoveries tell us that the two principal ones were Saint-Vincent and Saint-Michel. The latter was a commercial town inhabited by common people and workmen whose turbulent character caused great embarrassment to the viscounts during the Twelfth Century. From the beginning of that century, the notables of Carcassonne took the side of the enemy of their legitimate master, the Count of Barcelona, gave him their oath, and on two different occasions the Viscount, Bernard Aton, was chased by them from his capital. When he returned, in 1125, he took rigorous measures to assure his rule in the future. Each tower on the wall was confided to the care of a faithful noble who had to live in it with his family and his men, to do what was called le service d’estage. The feudal acts have preserved for us the name of several towers, the turris monetaria vetus, for example, but it would be difficult to state precisely to which of the existing towers the old names were given.

To the same viscount, Bernard Aton, is attributed the construction of a great part of the present wall of the city, and almost the entire château; from the reign of the same prince dates also the old part of the church Saint-Nazaire. Let us begin with the château. An act of the year 1034 already mentions the residence of the Counts of Carcassonne, and the sala, in which the Bishop of Gerona, Pierre Roger, lived; it speaks of the kitchens, the chambers, the stables and the chapel Saint-Marcel. Later, the castellum Carcassonne is always carefully distinguished from the citadel; the acts, in mentioning a camera rotunda, speak of the elm that ornamented the court and under which the feudal lords rendered justice, as Saint Louis did later at Vincennes. But these give very meagre information which the study of this building will happily permit us to complete.

The ordinary residence of the suzerain, the Château de Carcassonne, like the donjons of the North, was designed to protect him against all attacks that came from outside as well as from within the town. A last refuge for faithful defenders, it had to be a shelter during a regular siege, or a personal attack, and to protect the suzerain against enemies without and traitors within. Therefore, a special wall was erected against the town and against the country. The Château de Carcassonne was no exception to the general rule. Supported by the exterior wall on the side of the town, it is defended by a wide moat and by a circular barbican over the end of a bridge that was thrown over the moat; it forms a parallelogram, flanked by towers and high curtains. The masonry is the same and is composed of yellowish stones placed in regular layers of from fifteen to twenty centimetres in height. The domes have the form of hemispherical caps, with regular arches and are unornamented. The bays are semicircular without mouldings, or projections; nowhere is there any sacrifice to decoration, with the exception of certain upper openings that are inaccessible to attack, and these have received a few ornaments,—mouldings and little columns of marble that garnish the corners of the windows. The principal entrance towards the city was defended by two portcullises and two successive gates; after having passed these obstacles, you find yourself in a large court of honour which was flanked on one side by the walls of the city, and on the other by dwellings, shops, and light wooden buildings, that have disappeared to-day, or have been restored in the style of the Thirteenth Century. A few halls of the Twelfth Century have, however, survived; they are not very attractive, with their surbased vaults and their narrow openings.

Let us now turn our back on the château and enter the lices, for this is what they called the space circumscribed by the two walls of the City. We have seen above that from 1240 the town had a double wall, but the first, probably much damaged by the lords of Trencavel, was doubtless reconstructed in, and appears to date almost entirely from, the reign of St. Louis. It is composed of curtains elevated upon the rock and which never could have been of a great height: since the ground of the lices was made, it has gained in height. Sometimes the two curtains were quite far apart, sometimes, on the contrary, they are close together, and the straight passage between them was formerly closed by walls with battlements and solid gates. Most of the towers which flank the exterior wall are very simple and are quite low; as a rule, they are composed of two storeys and their platform is covered with a pointed roof covered with slate.

The interior enclosure, which is much stronger and better preserved than the exterior, dates only in part from the Thirteenth Century, but if the royal architects have respected the work of their predecessors as scrupulously as possible, they have never hesitated to transform the defective or insufficient portions, whenever they felt it practical. This second enclosure is at once higher and stronger than its neighbour, the towers are closer together and better arranged for defence. The elevated and spacious curtains still carry traces of the hourds which surmounted them in times of war; in many of those near the château, the base dates from the time of a remote epoch,—perhaps the time of the Romans, but the tops were remodelled in the Thirteenth Century by Saint-Louis, or Philip the Bold. Moreover, these princes made no other changes in the whole wall that extends from the château to the Tower of the Inquisition; you particularly notice the Tower of Justice, a beautiful building with four stories of the feudal period, and the Visigoth Tower, cleverly restored, too cleverly perhaps, by Viollet-le-Duc, but an interesting example of the military system of the Gallo-Romans of the Decadence.