Cité de Carcassonne

The hill above the Aude sits where the road from the Atlantic meets the road to the Mediterranean, and everyone who wanted to control that crossing eventually wanted the hill. A Gaulish hilltop settlement became the Roman town of Carcaso around the 1st century BC, and the Romans gave it its first serious walls. The Visigoths rebuilt those defences when they took over in the 5th century, and some of that early masonry can still be spotted in the lower courses of the inner ramparts. Saracen garrisons and the Franks under Pepin the Short came and went after that, but the place only became the fortress people recognise today in the Middle Ages. Over the 11th and 12th centuries the Trencavel family, who held the title of viscount of Carcassonne, turned the old stronghold into something grander. They built the Château Comtal on the western side of the hill, while the suburbs of Saint-Vincent and Saint-Michel grew up against the walls and the town prospered on trade. In 1096 Pope Urban II consecrated the church of Saint-Nazaire while touring southern France to preach the First Crusade. Languedoc at the time was a patchwork of tolerant courts where Cathar belief, a Christian movement the Church condemned as heresy, had won many followers, and the Trencavels were accused of protecting them. That accusation brought an army south. A crusade raised by the pope reached Carcassonne on 1 August 1209, and the town was crowded with refugees from the countryside while the summer heat drained its water supply. The young viscount, Raimond Roger Trencavel, went to the crusaders' camp to negotiate and was kept prisoner, and the town surrendered. His lands were handed to the crusade's new leader, Simon de Montfort, a minor lord from the Île-de-France who suddenly found himself ruling one of the richest regions in the south. His grip never quite held. Montfort died at the siege of Toulouse in 1218, his son Amaury could not keep the territory, and in 1224 the dead viscount's son, also called Raimond Trencavel, rode back in and reclaimed the Cité. The triumph lasted barely two years before King Louis VIII brought the region under the French crown. In 1240 the same Raimond Trencavel returned with an army and failed to retake it, and the townspeople who had backed him were pushed out of the suburbs, eventually founding a gridded new town called the Bastide Saint-Louis on the other side of the river. The crown turned the captured town into a frontier fortress. The Kingdom of Aragon still held land just beyond the Pyrenees, and until the Treaty of Corbeil settled the border in 1258, Carcassonne stood watch over it. Louis IX and his successors added a second, outer wall so that attackers would have to storm two lines of stone in turn. The design was tested in 1355, when Edward, the Black Prince, rode through Languedoc during the Hundred Years' War. His army burned the lower town and then left the Cité alone. Then history moved on and left the fortress behind. The Treaty of the Pyrenees in 1659 pushed the French frontier far to the south, and Carcassonne's walls guarded nothing in particular. Napoleon had it struck off the list of official fortifications in 1804, stone was carted away for local building, and within a few decades the government had decided the whole thing should simply be demolished. A local antiquarian, Jean-Pierre Cros-Mayrevieille, and the writer Prosper Mérimée, then France's inspector of historic monuments, argued fiercely for saving it, and they won. In 1853 the architect Eugène Viollet-le-Duc began a restoration that Paul Boeswillwald and later Nodet carried on for decades. The slate roofs and wooden fighting galleries they added were criticised even then, and still are, as looking more like northern France than the sunny south. Yet without them the Cité might not exist at all, and the argument has become part of its character. The Cité joined the UNESCO World Heritage list in 1997 and has never been an empty monument. Families still live inside the walls, a theatre in the castle grounds stages the Festival de Carcassonne each July, and on 14 July the ramparts vanish behind a long fireworks display called the Embrasement de la Cité, with red light glowing along the towers while locals crowd the banks of the Aude to watch.