Chapter 24: The Lavender Fields of Provence
The Duchy of Provence’s First Independent Century
The Duchy of Provence’s First Independent Century
The creation of the independent Duchy of Provence (and Toulouse, although that title was rarely used) threw a spectacular wrench into the plans the Popes in Rome to eradicate the most stubborn, resistant, and long-lived heresy in Western Europe up until that point - the Albigensians [1]. The First Albigensian Crusade had begun in 1209, and following a series of rapid victories for the Catholic faction, the crusade turned into an armed hunt for any remaining Albigensians and Albigensian sympathizers. However, resistance under the Count of Toulouse Raimond and his son, crystallized in the mid-1210s, and Crusader reversals became frighteningly common. The fact that the Crown of Aragon was actively assisting the Albigensians and the Kingdom of England had chosen to turn a blind eye towards the matter had robbed the crusade of the wind beneath it’s wings, and by 1234, with support from the anti-Papal Frederick Hohenstaufen, the crusade had collapsed.
Such a state of affairs could hardly be allowed to stand, however, and in 1279, the Second Albigensian Crusade was called. Much like the previous Crusade, the Crusaders achieved a number of early victories. In 1274, Jaime I of Aragon died, and the ensuing succession crisis would rob the Albigensians of one of their most valuable allies. However, once again, a Count named Raimond would ruin the Pope’s plans. Raimond VIII, the grandson of the Count that gained fame in the First Albigensian Crusade, found a natural ally in the rising star of Guillaume de Marselha, the firebrand Provencal commander that had booted the Aragonese out of Provence. Together, the two managed to ally themselves with the neutral England under Edward I, a young and inexperienced King, and managed to convince the Holy Roman Empire to drop out of the Crusade with a handsome supply of gold. With Alfons I of Sicily and Philip III of France both preoccupied elsewhere, the combined forces of Provence and Toulouse managed to shatter the Papal forces sent against them at Carcassonne, the same sight of a major Crusader victory in the First Albigensian Crusade.
Victory at Carcassonne had meant that the pendulum of the war had swung back into the favor of the Albigensians, but their true stroke of luck came later that year, when Pope Celestine V was elected by the College of Cardinals. Hailing from Aquitaine, he was the moderate candidate in the election when it came to the Albigensians, claiming that the bigger problem for the church were the Mongolians coming in from the east that the relatively unimportant Albigensians in the West. News of Carcassonne reached Rome mere days before conclave began, and as such, many of the cardinals had doubts of victory in the Second Albigensian Crusade, with many of the undecided Cardinals switching their vote from Celestine’s opponents to him in hopes of ending the conflict. Celestine, upon his ascension, dutifully made peace with the Albigensians and, in an attempt to curry favor with the more hard-line Cardinals, invested Guillaume Empéri de Marselha, a Catholic, with the title “Duke of Provence. [2]”
With the Crusade over, Duke Guillaume needed only to defeat the inevitable Aragonese counterattack. However, another stroke of luck came in 1282 when, upon landing outside of Marselha, King Peter of Aragon chose not to attack, and soon, was forced to return home due to pressure from his troops. The Duchy of Provence had been born, and owed no little part of that success to the incredible luck it had possessed.
Upon attaining independence, however, Provence found that it had a number of issues plaguing it. The Duchy had two distinct halves - Toulouse, which was French-influenced and heavily Albigensian, and Provence, which was much more Catalan-influenced and significantly Catholic. In an attempt to hold the two portions of the Duchy together, Guillaume raised Raimond VIII to be second in the Kingdom only to him, making the Count of Toulouse the second-most powerful man in the Duchy, and ensured the right of both Catholics and Albigensians to worship as they chose in the Duchy of Provence.
Guillaume’s solutions were effective, but not largely because of their own worth [3]. Instead, the arrival of the Black Death in Provence held the Duchy together. The death of Guillaime led to his grandson, François, taking power [4]. Although the Black Death shocked and weakened the people of Provence, forcing the people of Provence and Toulouse to work together, but it was the reforms enacted by François I that solidified his Duchy’s unity among the Toulousian and Provencal elements of society. The first was François’s opportunistic actions regarding the peasantry and vacated land following the Black Death. Marselha reabsorbed lands that lay fallow because of dead landowners, and that land was distributed among the urban poor so long as they could bring an able family to work it. This action would have been impossible had the Black Death not vacated so much land that the crown could reabsorb cost-free, and as a result, the Duchy gained a relatively large landed class that was not a part of the nobility - and one that was composed of both Catholic Toulousians and Albigensian Provencals were a part of. On a similar note, François also legislated that all of those receiving new lands from the crown had to utilize the Three-field system, vastly improving the agricultural output of the Duchy [5].
At the same time, François, with the help of a highly influential scholar Henri de Saluzzo, began the codification of the lands of the Duchy of Provence, her people, and her lands. The undertaking was an immense one, taking nearly twelve years to complete. Taking a complete census, he counted every man in the Duchy and each plot of land in the Duchy for tax purposes. Ultimately, his streamlined tax system was able to stabilize the Duchy by establishing a per capita base tax [6]. This allowed François to lower general taxes on merchants in particular and freemen and peasants in general without greatly disrupting his income. As a result, the people of Provence began to draw closer to Marselha.
The result of François “the Magnificent” Empéri’s long reign - he ruled from 1309 to 1361 - was an unprecedented era of Provencal success and prosperity [7]. However, that was in the future. The reforms enacted during the Black Death had given Provence one of the strongest footings in Europe to recover from, and they did so with incredible flair. Under François’s two sons, Ugos and Jacques, the Duchy saw an explosion of commercial success [8]. Provencal mercenaries became renowned throughout the Mediterranean world, with some taking part in the War of the Four Counts in Sicily, the Aragonese-Castilian wars in Iberia, the Marinid Civil War in North Africa, and the Kingdom of Mann’s raids on Angevin territory in the north. Meanwhile, Marselha grew into a worthy rival of Palermo, Genoa, and Barcelona for the chief merchant port in the Western Mediterranean [9].
Not that much of this was due to the two sons of François the Magnificent, however. Duke Ugos I Empéri was a skilled poet and duelist, but was a complete ascetic, refusing to engage in nearly any social activity or pleasure [10]. Although he did marry (and married well - the niece of the Holy Roman Emperor, a noted beauty) he never had children, and scandalous rumors circling the court claimed that he had never consummated his marriage. This was made even more damaging by his brother Jacques, who was known in his time as “The Provencal Paris” for his womanizing ways. Never happy with the dour cousin of the Duke of Swabia he’d been forced to marry, Jacques quickly took to romancing the shunned Duchess, Oriel. By 1382, the Duchess was pregnant, with Ugos (who presumably would have known the child’s parentage) too unable to move decisively to do anything about his wife’s infidelity in public. However, in private, it seems that Ugos planned on killing the child and divorcing Oriel, which forced the lovers to act. In January 1383, a group of conspirators, led by Jacques, killed Ugos, and quickly moved to establish Jacques as the new Duke of Provence.
Jacques rapidly divorced his wife and married Oriel, but he had run into a number of problems. The first was that, while he was the brother of Ugos and son of François the Magnificent, he was not the only claimant to the throne in Marselha. He had two nobles, Joris and Simos, that were descended from Raimond VIII and heirs to Provence with some legitimacy. They found ready and willing volunteers for their rebellions in the nobility of Provence, still chafing under François’s taxation, and the Pope, who was quite annoyed by the unceremonious divorce and remarriage that Jacques had gone through. Thus, in 1383, the 39-year-old Jacques I Empéri faced a major rebellion that threatened to destroy the hard-won unity of the Duchy of Provence.
Luckily for Jacques, he had more advantages that one might think. Joris and Simos predictably fell to squabbling over which one was the rightful heir to the Duchy of Provence, and tensions were inflamed even further when the Pope arrived with the now-revitalized Knights Templar, who were only too happy to “discourage” those Knights under both descendants of Raimond that were Albigensians from continuing in their faith. However, this failed to actually destroy the alliance arrayed against Jacques, merely slowing it down as it menacingly crept towards Jacques’s defenses.
The other advantage that Jacques possessed was Oriel. Despite the fact that he had murdered her first husband, their marriage was still a symbol of the alliance between the Holy Roman Empire and the Duchy of Provence, which was something that gave Jacques an immeasurable advantage. The Welf Emperors of the Holy Roman Empire had never been friends with the Popes in Rome, and there was no love lost between the supposed religious and temporal heads of Christendom. Thus, in 1384, when a Holy Roman force swept into Italy through the Alps and threatened Rome, the Pope hastily withdrew to defend the Holy See. This left Joris and Simos dangerously exposed, and Jacques prepared a massive attack on his rebellious nobles as soon as the Pope was away.
Here, however, fate caught up with Jacques. His army engaged in battle with that of Joris and Simos, and their disagreements led to a quick victory for Jacques. During the victory celebration, however, one of Jacques’s commanding officers revealed that his wife had been one of the women Jacques had slept with during one of his many “escapades.” In a drunken melee, the officer stabbed and killed Jacques before being cut down by the Duke’s guards. The end result was a collapse of the resistance to change in Marselha. The only question that remained was who would make the move that led to that change.
In the end, it was Louis de Toulouse who made the first move. A young, gallant Knight, he rallied the armies of both Jacques and the rebel lords and called for a parlay outside of Marselha. The two sides agreed to invite the closest relative to the Empéri family that led the Duchy of Provence to be their new Duke. This ended up being Sevis Empéri, the son of the Count of Valencia and an Empéri wife, who took his mother’s name upon returning to Marselha. In a somewhat subdued ceremony, he was crowned Duke of Provence in April of 1385, marking the beginning of a new chapter in Provence’s history.
However, that new chapter would not begin under Sevis I. Disinterested in the affairs of running the state, Sevis instead devoted himself to hunting and his stunningly beautiful Irish wife. Sevis expired in 1399, with no fewer than three sons left to succeed him. The eldest, François II, would take a page out of his father’s book and rely almost entirely on the Duchy’s most trusted advisor and savior: Sir Louis de Toulouse. Having transformed from a gallant, young knight to a tough, grizzled veteran, he nonetheless provided invaluable oversight in the Duchy. Under his watchful eye and the distant eyes of Sevis and, to a lesser extent, François II, the Duchy of Provence prospered. The legacy of François I finally was able to bear fruit, with the economic situation of the Duchy of Provence seeing an almost unbroken period of growth. The culture of Provence, the tolerance of Albigensians and Catholics for one another, and the power and prestige of Provence were all enhanced - it was a true Golden Age for the Provencals.
However, it could not last. In order to understand one of the most pivotal portions of the Late Middle Ages, one must first understand all of the events leading up to it. In Sicily, the death of King Rodrigo I led to the ascension of Queen Vincenza de Mahdia, who, at 25, was beautiful, brilliant, unmarried, and absolutely devoted to Sicily and Catholicism. Meanwhile, in London, Imperator Henry I Plantagenet was crowned, and opened his foreign policy up by assassinating the King of France, who had been collaborating with the Holy Roman Emperor of the time, Leopold IV Welf, in a conspiracy that was rapidly uncovered and exposed to the people of Europe in what was to be one of the most damaging faux pases ever committed by an Angevin Emperor. Worst of all, however, were the events in Rome. When the reigning Pope died, conclave convened to elect a new Pope, but the vote was evenly split between two candidates. One, a Pisan bishop, was supported heavily by Vincenza de Mahdia and King Sancho VI for his hard-line stance on heretics and Muslims, while the other candidate, a bishop from Pest, was notably more tolerant of these sects, and found support from Duke François II and Kaiser Leopold IV. When the faction supporting the bishop from Pest, who took the name Pope Gregory XIII, stormed out, they found a warm welcome in Mainz, where they set up a Papacy-in-exile, while the remaining cardinals named their preferred bishop Pope Urban V, who remained in Rome. With these events transpiring between 1421 and 1427, all it took was a tiny spark to ignite one of the most pivotal conflicts in the Late Middle Ages - The War of the Romans [11].
[1] - At least, from the Papal point of view. Even at that point, Orthodox writers considered Catholicism itself a heretical sect of Christianity, and later writers of various sects would later confirm the Orthodox point of view in their own treatises.
[2] - This didn’t stop Celestine from being wildly unpopular, however. His Papacy lasted only two years, with a mob killing him in the streets of Rome in frustration.
[3] - While his solutions were good ones, Guillaume’s motions to ensure a tolerant society were largely too restrained - he had the right idea, but he didn’t run with it as far as he could have.
[4] - Guillaume’s son, also named Guillaume, had died of dysentery in 1299, and the majority of Guillaume Sr.’s children had been girls - hence his success at placing them on foreign thrones and in foreign courts. Guillaume could have supported one of his tow recognized illegitimate sons as his heir, but refused to out of fear of undoing the hard-won legitimacy of his Duchy, and thus his grandson received the Duchy upon Guillaume’s death.
[5] - The Three-field system, in which one field is allowed to lie fallow so that the nutrients in the soil could be replenished, had been around since the time of Charlemagne, but had never entered widespread use. Here, Provence is the first area to adopt it in force.
[6] - A similar tactic to one employed by Diocletian. Certainly, François’s base tax is one of many for non-nobles, but now that the landowning nobility is taxes, he could afford to lower taxes in general, which in turn won him support in his Kingdom. The only ones complaining were the nobility, who were unable to do much about it because of the overwhelming support for François from their peasants and the freemen of Provence - the very same men that would make up the infantry and fodder in any rebelling lord’s army.
[7] - François’s extraordinarily long reign is due to the fact that he ascended to power at 15 and died at 67 - a remarkable longevity for the time.
[8] - Ugos being the Occitan equivalent of Hughes in French.
[9] - Genoa, while not being too far overshadowed, was always a fringe competitor among this group, the Black Death had devastated Barcelona, and the War of the Four Counts was seriously disrupting Sicilian trade in the 1370s and 1380s, which, combined with the relative peace of Marselha, allowed it to slip into competition here.
[10] - Modern psychologists tend to believe that Ugos had a severe anxiety disorder that caused him to act so.
[11] - This next update will be a sort of “Mid-season Finale” for the events of the Late Middle Ages. It’ll settle some old scores, solidify the positions of some countries in the future, and basically set things up for the second half of the Late Middle Ages. After Chapter 25, I’ll be touring the Old World, going back to places such as Sicily, Venice, and Russia that we haven’t seen in a while, as well as some new places, like Hungary, northern Italy, north Africa, the Middle East, and even China! But not before The War of the Romans, one war I’ve been building up to since Chapters 7 and 8 and one that I’m quite excited about. Thanks to all for reading!