joined newcomers from the immediate hinterland. In the period 1250–1350, in
conjunction with Aigues-Mortes, the major port for Levantine trade, and with Lattes,
Agde, Collioure, and other smaller outlets to the sea, Montpellier acted as a fulcrum of
trade and finance between the Mediterranean world, the Champagne fairs, and Paris.
After the mid-14th century, Montpellier experienced a sharp demographic, economic, and
political decline, occasioned by the Black Death, changes in the overall European
economy and in Mediterranean trade, and, if one is to believe Petrarch’s commentary, by
its incorporation into the French kingdom.
Montpellier was celebrated throughout the later Middle Ages for its schools. A
medical school, founded by the year 1000, most likely by Jewish or Arab physicians, was
incorporated in 1221, and a university uniting it with schools of law and the arts was
chartered by Pope Nicholas IV in 1289. Petrarch studied here before going on to
Bologna. The present-day school of medicine is located in the converted 14th-century
bishop’s palace.
A Benedictine abbey was founded in Montpellier by Pope Urban V in 1364. The
abbey church, which became the cathedral of Saint-Pierre in 1536 when the diocese of
Montpellier was formed, dates in part from the 14th century, although much today is
19th-century neo-Gothic reconstruction. Designed by the Avignon architects Bernard de
Manse and Bertrand Nougayrol, it consists of a wide nave without side aisles, but with
side chapels in the Languedoc manner. Its unsculpted fortresslike façade has two towers
and an awkward porch carried on two thick columns.
Kathryn L.Reyerson
[See also: LANGUEDOC; MEDICAL PRACTICE AND PRACTITIONERS;
MEDITERRANEAN TRADE; UNIVERSITIES]
Cholvy, Gérard, ed. Histoire de Montpellier. Toulouse: Privat, 1984.
Reyerson, Kathryn L. “Commerce and Society in Montpellier: 1250–1350.” Diss. Yale University,
1974.
——. Business, Banking and Finance in Medieval Montpellier. Toronto: Pontifical Institute of
Mediaeval Studies, 1985.
Thomas, Louis J. Montpellier, ville marchande: histoire économique et sociale de Montpellier des
origines à 1870. Montpellier: Valat, 1936.
MONT-SAINT-MICHEL
. In the bay off the border between Normandy and Brittany, the fortified monastery of
Mont-Saint-Michel surmounts a 250-foot tall rock island surrounded by ocean and
quicksand. Although a sacred site had occupied the island since the 8th century, the
conventual buildings result from a period of over 500 years of construction, with the
fusion of monastic and military architecture as the goal.
According to the annals and chronicles of Mont-Saint-Michel, in 708 the archangel
Michael came in a vision to Aubert, bishop of Avranches, and told him to build a church
on the summit of Mont-Tombe. The first in what was to be a series of ecclesiastical
structures took the form of a hollowed-out circular cavern. By the 9th century, the site
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