Millennium

 

By the year 1000 the Carolingian wars and subsequent invasions had done serious damage in the Lauragais. The cultivated areas on the hillsides were being worked as they had been from time immemorial, but large tracts of land were uncultivated, and many farms had been abandoned. After Vikings, Muslims, Franks, Magyars and milites [1] had done their worst, the brick-built castle at Baziege was no more. Apart from Toulouse itself, which had miraculously survived, just ten villages still stood. (The present Lauragais has 153 communes). The ‘Magnificent Ten’ were Laurac, Lanta, Caraman today. Photo http://www.mairie-caraman.fr/Caraman, Puylaurens, Montgiscard, Montesquie), Nailloux, Belpech, Auterive and Vauré. Apart from Vauré, which was hidden in a forest, they were mostly built on hilltops at a cautious distance from main routes passing them’.

Not one of these ten villages is in the main valley, which was a place of ruin and desolation. The woebegone watercourses such as the Hers Mort had slowly waterlogged the heavy soils of the valleys, which now reverted to forest; the biggest of these was in the plain east of Toulouse round Baziège. Between Baziège and Naurouze was marsh and woodland, where a huge bovine called aurochs was still being hunted! Further north the forest of Vauré stood where Revel now stands, and there were separate forests at Nailloux, Montgiscard, Montesquieu, (‘Wild Mountain’) St. Papoul and the Piège itself. Running through the middle of the Lauragais was the Via Aquitania, still paved and called ‘the iron Road’, but infested with bandits. Other than that there were only tracks impassable in wet weather.

As the millennium dawns, we see salt traders emerging from the mist of the dangerous tenth century plodding towards Toulouse with their mule trains, not along the bandit infested Via Aquitania, but along the ridge route between Beziers and Caraman where you had more of a chance of seeing the bandits coming. Bandits or not, salt was necessary to preserve meat through the heat of a Languedoc summer. The ancient salt trade may have given rise to the foundation of the village of Caraman, as a crossroads with a toll on it. Place names in Caraman such as ‘Salères’ or ‘Sanayre’ testify to the salt activity. As the lights of history begin to come on again for the new millennium we see who has survived and prospered in the bad times. The Lords of Caraman were among the foremost. We can imagine the mule trains arriving at Caraman with their load of salt, and going off back east carrying corn and salted foods. The lords of Caraman had been authorised to hold this market in the 900s, and had made a fortune. The mules carried a pack on either side; if the cargo was textile these were called ‘balles’; from which modern French gets ‘emballages’ ‘packing’.

The people of the Lauragais must have had a rather nervous year 1000, in which long standing apocalyptic predictions of divine judgement will have been supplemented by very real fears about what might appear over the Pyrenees. In Limoges hundreds of apprehensive people gathered in the church and were suffocated. The millennial hysteria did not really calm down until 1033 which, in the absence of anything apocalyptic in the year 1000, had been proposed as an alternative millennium date 1000 years after Christ’s death.

It is worth emphasizing the contrast with Saxon England at the same time. The vast majority of Saxon villages were on flat land, and the main roads passed right through the middle of them, as they still do. Defence had played virtually no part in their design, and they had neither castles nor walls. This is because English government and society (in spite of the Vikings) had not been shredded by internal conflict as the Languedoc had been. The invasions and the murderous infighting of the milites are responsible for this. The Norman milites who came to England hastily built wooden ‘motte-and-baileys’ (castella), because they did not fancy sleeping in the open surrounded by the just-conquered Saxons any longer than they had to. The castle in an English village dates after 1066, and was there to protect the Norman lord from his enemy the Saxon villagers. There are no castra of the Lauragais type in England because the last thing a Norman miles (singular of ‘milites’, and pronounced MEE-LAYS) wanted was to have the Saxons villagers inside the wall with him, whereas a Lauragais ‘miles’ had little fear of his plebeian next-door neighbours because he and they were on the same side. It was the other milites in the nearby villages that worried him, and the outer wall of the castrum defended him and his villagers from them.

It is a sign of things beginning to become a little more ordered when we read of a regular toll on salt imposed at Baziège from the year 1005. Baziège, of course, is on the Via Aquitania quite a way south of Caraman. Its name does not appear in the Magnificent Ten because, lying in the valley on the main road to Toulouse, it had taken all the flak going and was undoubtedly a heap of rubble. The fact that a toll had been established there may represent the reopening of the main valley route after a period in which it was too dangerous. Control over the vital salt trade had been transferred from the lords of Caraman to the monastery at St Sernin of Toulouse, and the monks in turn sold the right to collect this salt-tax at Baziège to the Lords of Laurac.

The Lord of Laurac was a major league miles, like the Lord of Caraman, who had survived the bad times. Only such a person would be able to prevent disorder at a place where salt and money were to be found close together. The salt market was held by the road side at Baziege. Some ‘Gothic merchants’ (notice they are still ‘Gothic’ three hundred years after the Muslims overthrew the Visigothic kingdom) were fined for allowing their mules or donkeys to trample crops growing near the road.

Before the panic over the millennium was over, we may imagine a mule train belonging to some bold ‘Goths’ who, trusting in the law enforcement capability of the Lords of Laurac, come plodding up from Narbonne carrying their precious cargo of salt to and through the Lauragais. Bold, because they are among the first to risk travelling once again on the bandit-infested ‘iron road’, the old Roman ‘Via Aquitania’. Among the salt merchants and Compostella pilgrims, unnoticed and un-noteworthy, there would be the odd Bosnian weaver, who had joined the party for the dangerous journey through the Lauragais.

The Bosnian weaver was indeed odd: he was a pacifist in an age of violence, and his long term objective was suicide. He was a vegetarian, but ate fish in the confident though mistaken belief that fish do not have sex; he was celibate in an age of love shortly to be celebrated by Troubadours; and in a world where everyone since Roman times had believed in a maximum of one God, he believed in two. This celibate, suicidal, pacifist, fish-eating, vegetarian, ‘dualist’, Bosnian weaver was, according to his enemies, addicted to secret ceremonies in which he kissed cats’ bottoms; for this reason he was called in German a ‘Kattare’ and in the Lauragais a ‘Cathare’.

The castles of the milites, grimly ready for any attack, were at the centre of the Magnificent Ten villages, but in general they are the ones you can’t see any more because they have been demolished. (Most of the ones you can see are what would be called ‘Follies’ in England, country houses for fat bourgeoisie who had never seen, did not want to see, and mostly never would see ‘spears thrown in anger’. In 1005 these belonged to the distant future.) To the north of the Lauragais, Caraman existed in the year 1000, and was a castrum built of brick with a central keep surrounded by concentric rings of fortified houses. Its defensive system consisted of a ditch, a bank called the ‘ravelin’, which had a crenellated wall with a walkway behind it called the ‘castellas’. The place had a small garrison of men at arms. The name is Germanic and means ‘the big hill’.

Caraman grew up on the same ridge as the castle of the Hunauds at Lanta. I would like to connect the Hunauds (though I have no evidence) with the shadowy figure of ‘Hunaud’ who was Duke of Aquitaine in the mid 700s and was eventually stoned to death for being a nuisance in Italy. The Hunaud Lords of Lanta, first mentioned in the 1100s, would have been milites like the lords of Laurac: their castle ‘Lanta of the Hunauds’ is not mentioned until 1196 but probably existed well before that. Built of brick in the Toulouse style, it stands on a ledge below a ridge of hills between the Seillonne to the north and the Saune to the south. Its history is inseparable from that of the Hunaud family, who continued to play a role in the place until the seventeenth century.