Corinthian capitals and pilasters animate the piers and triforium area, like the Roman gate
in the city. Ribbed vaults resemble those of the Gothic Cistercian abbey of Pontigny.
Langres seems to have been started in the middle of the 12th century and built slowly
over the remaining decades of the century. A kind of baroque exuberance manifests itself
in the ornate capitals and friezes.
Whitney S.Stoddard
[See also: PARAY-LE-MONIAL; PONTIGNY; ROMANESQUE
ARCHITECTURE]
Schlink, Wilhelm von. Zwischen Cluny und Clairvaux: Die Kathedrale von Langres und die
burgundische Architektur des 12. Jahrhunderts. Berlin: De Gruyter, 1970.
LANGUEDOC
. The provinces in southern France that came to be recognized in the Middle Ages as the
region of Languedoc formed one of the principal territorial units assembled under the
kings of France. The extent of this medieval Languedoc was far wider than that of the
later administrative province of the 17th and 18th centuries. Neither did it comprise,
however, the totality of the linguistic region of the Langue d’oc (Occitan). Though the
Langue d’oc may strictly be said to have extended across the county of Angoulême and
the Auvergne, the territories of Languedoc commenced south of the River Dordogne, in
the mountains of Auvergne and Burgundy. They were re flected in the five great
seneschalsies—Beaucaire-Nîmes (extending north to Viviers and Le Puy),
CarcassonneBéziers, Toulouse, Quercy, and Rouergue—through which the kings
administered them from the 13th century. Throughout the Middle Ages, this region
retained an identity based on culture and customary law. Only in the 13th century,
however, after prolonged and brutal contact with the people of the north, do the first
references occur to the region as an entity distinct and its people as distinguished by their
language (homines nostri idiomatis, videlicet de nostra lingua). In the 14th century,
finally, residents of Carcassonne could refer casually to their region as the patria and
speak of plans to travel north, in Franciam.
With the end of the Roman Empire and the subsequent advance of the Franks under
Clovis I, the region fell by the 8th century into two zones: the northern, including the
Rouergue, Toulousain, and Albigeois, incorporated into the Frankish kingdoms as part of
the territory of the dukes of Aquitaine, and the southern, known as Septimania and
extending from the Pyrénées to the Rhône, part of the kingdom of the Visigoths. The
Arab invasions that destroyed the Visigothic kingdom reached Septimania in 718, and the
area remained under Islamic control until 759, when Pepin III conquered it definitively
for the Frankish realm.
Under the empire of the Carolingians, counts were appointed in Septimania and
southern Aquitaine, and in the period that followed the decline of imperial authority in
the 9th century their successors competed to form the comital dynasties of Languedoc.
The most successful of these, the house of Toulouse-Rouergue, came eventually to
dominate most of the territory between the Rhône and the Garonne; its downfall in the
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