Toulouse and the Rouergue from the count of Auvergne in 885 and established the
dynasty, dividing the two counties between his sons, a division that lasted until 1065.
By 924, the family was claiming supremacy over all Septimania and, for a few
decades, over the duchy of Aquitaine as well. Guilhem Taillefer (961–1037) extended the
family’s interests to the Rhône when he married Emma, one of the heiresses to Provence.
By the middle of the 11th century, the counts had built a castle at Saint-Gilles on the Petit
Rhône. The port quickly became a major trading center, and from the time of Guilhem’s
grandson Raymond IV the heads of the family were often called “counts of Saint-Gilles,”
since the Rhône Valley was their main source of wealth and the home of their most
important followers.
After Raymond IV conquered the Rouergue (1065), he took the title of marquis of
Provence and invented that of duke of Narbonne. One of the leaders of the First Crusade,
he ended his life as count of Tripoli. His niece Philippa married Duke Guilhelm IX of
Aquitaine, allowing her granddaughter Eleanor of Aquitaine and her successive
husbands, Louis VII of France and Henry II of England, to lay claim to Toulouse.
Count Raymond V (r. 1148–94) contracted marriage alliances that extended his power
to the Alps in the east and put pressure on the count of Barcelona in Occitania. His
alliances made and broken with various powers made him for a while the most powerful
lord in Occitania but eventually mired him in endless unsuccessful warfare. In the last
decades of his life, the town of Toulouse became a virtually independent city-state. In
1177, hoping to find an additional ally in the church, he brought the attention of the
Cistercians to the spread of heresy in his lands, inviting armed intervention that presaged
the Albigensian Crusade to come.
His son, Raymond VI, reaped the consequences. In 1208, he was accused of plotting
the death of Peter of Castelnau, the papal legate. Raymond adroitly directed against the
Trencavel family the crusade that was sent to punish him, but in 1211 Simon de Montfort
turned his army against Toulouse and gained possession of the city after his victory at
Muret in 1213. The Fourth Lateran Council (1215) made Simon count of Toulouse, took
Avignon and the Comtat Venaissin for the papacy, and left only a portion of Provence for
the future Raymond VII. When Louis VIII took over leadership of the crusade in 1226,
the family’s fate was sealed. The Treaty of Meaux-Paris (1229) provided that Raymond’s
daughter would marry Louis’s son Alphonse of Poitiers, giving all political claims in
Occitania and the inheritance of Toulouse to the Capetians. Raymond VII, the last count
of Saint-Gilles, died in 1249.
Frederic L.Cheyette
[See also: ALBIGENSIAN CRUSADE; LANGUEDOC; ROUERGUE; TOULOUSE;
TRENCAVEL]
SAINT-GILLES CYCLE
. Aiol (10,983 lines; pre-1173) and Élie de Saint-Gilles (2,671 lines; early 13th c.), which
constitute the Saint-Gilles epic cycle, both sing of a poor knight struggling to make his
way in society. Aiol, whose methodical composition suggests a single author, is
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