Vanished Kingdoms: The Rise and Fall of States and Nations (29 page)

Aragon

A Mediterranean Empire

(1137–1714)

I

Perpignan is the
chef-lieu
of France’s most southerly department, the Pyrénées-Orientales (dép. 64), one of five such departments within the Region of Languedoc-Roussillon. As the
corbeau
flies, it is situated 510 miles south-south-west of Paris, close to the Franco-Spanish frontier. In former times it was the provincial capital of historic Roussillon, which today borders the Spanish districts of Lleida and Gerona and the Principality of Andorra. The Côte Vermeille, the ‘Scarlet Coast’, lies immediately adjacent on the Golfe du Lion, 12 miles to the south, and beyond it the Costa Brava. The best way to get there is by TGV Express; fast, luxurious trains leave the Gare de Lyon four times a day for Avignon, and thence along the plain of Languedoc via Montpellier, Béziers and Narbonne. The journey takes 4 hours 45 minutes. Passengers arriving in the daytime are usually greeted by the strong southern sun, which bathes the city on average for 300 days each year.

Alternatively, one can fly to the regional airport of Perpignan-Rivesaltes, which hosts flights from domestic and international destinations including Paris-Orly, London-Stansted, Charleroi and Southampton. On entering the terminal building, the first poster one sees reads:

VISITEZ LE CHÂTEAU DES ROIS PLACE-FORTE D’UN ROYAUME EPHÉMÈRE

(‘Visit the Castle of the Kings, Fortress of an Ephemeral Kingdom’).
¹
Few visitors could be expected to know beforehand what the ‘Ephemeral Kingdom’ refers to.

The old city lies on the southern bank of the River Têt, which is lined by the Boulevard de la France Libre. An inner ring road is formed by the boulevards Foch, Wilson, Briand and Poincaré which surround the imposing medieval citadel. A tangle of narrow streets filled with cafés and restaurants tumbles down towards the river, and is dominated by three squares: place de la Loge, place Verdun and the place Arago (François Arago (1786–1853) was a renowned scientific pioneer of local descent). The railway station is located at the end of the avenue Général de Gaulle.

Nonetheless, as the tourist websites emphasize, Perpignan has unmistakable foreign flavours. ‘A good part of Perpignan’s population is of Spanish origin,’ one reads, ‘refugees from the Civil War and their descendants. The southern influence is further augmented by a substantial admixture of North Africans, both Arabs and white French settlers repatriated after Algerian independence in 1962.’ ‘While there are few monuments to visit,’ the website continues, ‘Perpignan is an enjoyable city with a lively street life. Its heyday was in the 13th and 14th centuries.’
²
The most recommended sights include the medieval Loge de Mer, the cathédrale Saint-Jean, the Palais de la Députation (once the parliament of Roussillon) and, of course, the citadel.

Nowadays, Perpignan’s Catalan connections are widely publicized and actively promoted. The Castilet Gate is home to a Catalan folk museum called ‘Casa Pairal’. The
Office de tourisme
promotes the festivals of La Sanch at Easter, of Sant Jordi in April, when sweethearts exchange gifts, and the Festa Major at the summer solstice, which celebrates ‘the spirit of Perpignan la catalane’. It invites public participation in the Catalan national dance, the
sardana
, flies the Catalan flag alongside the French tricolour, and revels in the city’s sobriquet of
La Fidelissima
, once awarded to the city for resisting a French king. In short, it takes pride in
Perpigna
being ‘
la capitale de la Catalogne française
’. These perspectives, not recognized before the 1980s, ‘have greatly enhanced our heritage’.
³

Perpignan’s local rugby club, the
Union Sportive des Arlequins Perpignanais
, or ‘
USA Perpignan
’ for short, plays in the Catalan colours of ‘blood red and gold’. Founded in 1902, it is based at the Stade Aimé Giral, and in 2008–9 won the French champions’ title.
⁴

As always in France, a concise academic history is on sale. A volume entitled
Histoire du Roussillon
, written by a
maître de conférences
at the University of Toulouse, starts with an eloquent invocation of the geographical setting: ‘Roussillon, however, is not just the mountain range brusquely surging from the sea… It is also the coastland of the great “Middle Sea”, with all its burden of history… Roussillon owes both its intensity and the explosion of its destiny to the sea’s presence.’ The story of the province unfolds from ancient times to the contemporary epoch. The birth of Perpignan comes about a third of the way through:

Originally just a simple Roman villa, it was chosen by certain counts of Roussillon, who established their residence there at the end of the ninth century, thereby supplanting the functions of the adjacent ruined city of Ruscino. The consecration of the parish church of St John the Baptist on 16 March 1025, next to the hall of the count, marks the earliest manifestation of a new political and administrative centre.
⁵

The physical chessboard on which political life developed here after the collapse of the Roman Empire evidently saw a mass of tiny lordships struggling to exist, trapped between the rising power of the Moorish emirs in Iberia and that of the Frankish kings in the former Gaul. Every other mountaintop sprouted a fortified tower or castle, attesting to a state of affairs in which every larger district had its count and every valley its viscount. As the feudal lords battled to subordinate their neighbours, some lordships thrived and expanded, while others shrivelled. Gradually, as the lesser fry were swallowed up, a few powerful dynasts came to dominate. One of these was Inigo Aristra, the Basque warlord who drove out the Carolingians from the western Pyrenees in the early ninth century, not long after Charlemagne’s campaign against the Moors. A second, in the eleventh century, was Sancho El Mayor, originally ‘King of Pamplona’.

The narrative grows infernally complicated following the disintegration of the Frankish Empire and of its outlier beyond the eastern Pyrenees, the
Marca Hispanica
or ‘Spanish March’. The historical record lists a procession of kings, princes and counts, all with unlikely names. Who exactly was Suniaire I, not to mention the long line of Guillaberts, Gausfreds and Guinards? Can Count Raymond Berenguer II (r. 1076–82) really be a different person from Berenguer Raymond II (r. 1076–97)? And are the Raymonds (or Raimunds) different from the Ramóns?

Seeking answers to these puzzles, one climbs the cobbled streets to Perpignan’s citadel. There, another surprise awaits in the form of an imposing, fortress-like structure called ‘Le Palais des rois’. It is not what one expects from a palace, and looks for all the world like a desert fort from
Beau Geste
, plucked from the sands of the Sahara. Its garden is adorned with palm trees, and its interior displays an extraordinary mixture of ecclesiastical Gothic arches and exotic Moorish courtyards. Cultural and historical compasses spin out of control. Who were these kings, and where was their kingdom?

In the summer of 2010 Perpignan hosted the twenty-third annual ‘Estivales’, a popular festival of music, dance, theatre, circus and cinema. For three weeks in July, hundreds of entertainers presented scores of performances, and tens of thousands of enthusiasts flocked to enjoy them. Large-scale open-air shows took place on the Campo Santo, a purpose-built arena constructed beside the medieval church of St Jean le Vieux; more intimate events were staged in the Cloister of the Minimes. In 2010 the main theme of Mediterranean culture was given an extra African accent. The programmes were headed by the Dunas flamenco group from Seville; the Nederland Dans Theatre, Salif Keita from Mali, Victoria Chaplin’s Invisible Circus, the Africa Umoja Ensemble from South Africa, and singers such as Vanessa Paradis and Alain Souchon.
⁶
Yet many would say that the best of Perpignan was to be discovered on the festival’s fringe by the carefree crowds sipping wine under the stars, munching tapas, applauding the street artists, listening in the park to a gypsy guitarist or an impromptu jazz band, or dreamily dancing till dawn to the scent of hibiscus.

The Pyrenees, which form a mountain range of spectacular proportions and whose dark outline stood out against the night sky of the festival, provide the permanent backdrop to Perpignan. They run for some 200 miles from sea to sea, from the picturesque painters’ villages of Collioure and Banyuls on the Côte Vermeille to the elegant resorts of Biarritz and Bayonne on the Atlantic shore. In between lie a tangle of craggy ranges, deep verdant valleys, fantastic gorges, elevated plateaux, steep passes, lonely scree fields and deserts, powerful snow-driven rivers, crystal-clear lakes, flower-strewn pastures and, high above the 10,000-foot line, a world of glaciers, snowfields and rugged rock summits. The tallest peaks – the Pic de Aneto (11,168 feet), the Maladeta (10,853 feet) and the Monte Perdido (11,007 feet), to use their Spanish names – all lie in the central section. For more than 350 years, this massive natural barrier has separated France from Spain. With one small exception, in the Vall d’Aran, the Franco-Spanish frontier winds its way along the full length of the Pyrenean ridge.

In terms of historic provinces – which were replaced during the French Revolution by the
départements
– the
montant nord
or ‘northerly slope’ of the Pyrenees was occupied towards its Mediterranean end by Cerdagne as well as by Roussillon, both of which go back to the days of the
Marca Hispanica
. On the southern slopes, if one starts from the Costa Brava, the line of the March parallel to the ridge takes one today through upper Catalonia, past the Principality of Andorra, and back into the north-western corner of Catalonia. Historically, one is passing through a series of ancient counties from Perelada on the coast to Pallars in the heart of the mountains.

In some stretches, the French side of the Pyrenees is less accessible than the Spanish side. The inland valley of the Ariège, for example, which runs north from Andorra, was kept apart politically from Cerdagne and Roussillon by a near-impassable tract. As a result, the counts of Foix, who once dominated the Ariège, were drawn westwards into Béarn and Navarre. The eastern Pyrenees, in contrast, though containing some mighty summits, have always invited human movement and migration, rarely acting as the cultural and linguistic wall which political planners in Paris or Madrid might have preferred. The area of Catalan speech, for instance, straddles the Pyrenean ridge just as Basque does in the far west.

Roussillon (Rosselló in Catalan) combines a short length of coastline with a long stretch of the Pyrenean ridge. Its 1,500 square miles are dominated by one huge mountain and two transverse rivers. Le Mont Canigou or ‘Canigo’ (9,137 feet), where Catalans light their traditional Midsummer Eve bonfires, is visible across the sea from the vicinity of distant Marseille. The Rivers Têt and Tech, which water the Roussillon plain, rise in the upland districts of Conflent and Vallespir respectively, once counties in their own right. The region is famed for its
vin doux naturel
from the Côte Vermeille, for its ancient Romanesque abbeys such as St Michel de Cuxa or St Martin de Canigou, and for some of ‘the most beautiful villages in France’ – Castelnou among them, together with Evol, Mosset, Vinca and St Laurent de Cerdans.
⁷
From the thirteenth century onwards, Roussillon’s northernmost border, from the plateau of Caspir to the medieval fortress of Salses, formed a defence line against the growing power of France. It faces the formidable ‘five sons of Carcassonne’, the French castles of Aguilar, Quéribus, Peyrepertuse, Puilaurens and Termes along the Languedoc frontier. Salses was built to plug the gap between the seaside lagoons and the inland heights.