vegetation, and its range of agricultural systems, Aquitaine was a composite of different
regions.
The beginnings of medieval Aquitaine go back to the Roman conquest and occupation.
By the 4th century, the Romans had for administrative reasons divided southwestern
France, aside from the Narbonne region, into Aquitania Prima and Secunda, Bourges
being the capital of the first and Bordeaux of the second. This political division
disappeared after the Germanic invasions and settlement of the 4th and 5th centuries, but
the church perpetuated it through medieval and into modern times in its ecclesiastical
organization, with Bourges becoming the see of a vast archdiocese in south-central
France and Bordeaux the center of the western archdiocese that included the dioceses of
Poitiers, Saintes, Angoulême, Périgueux, and Agen. The christianization of Aquitaine
began in the later 4th century and continued through the early-medieval period with the
establishment not only of the bishoprics in Aquitanian towns but also monasticism and
the parish system in the rural areas. As a result of the 5th-century invasions, most of
Roman Aquitaine became part of the ephemeral Visigothic kingdom of southern Gaul
and Spain (406), but the Frankish conquest under Clovis I installed the Franks as rulers of
the region after the Battle of Vouillé (near Poitiers) in 507. The failure of the Franks to
settle in substantial numbers in Aquitaine, combined with the repeated division of their
kingdom under the later Merovingians, meant that Frankish rule and influence were
minimal during the 6th and 7th centuries. A distinctive Aquitanian civilization took shape
during this time, characterized on the one hand by its fidelity to the Roman past in
language, education, laws, institutions of local government, coinage, business customs,
and the like and on the other by its Christian character. For a brief period at the beginning
of the 8th century, the Aquitanians, profiting from the dynastic troubles of the
Merovingian kings, acquired political autonomy with the founding of the first medieval
duchy of Aquitaine by Duke Odo (ca. 720).
This was only an interlude. Two foreign invasions put an end to Aquitanian
independence by the later 8th century. Gascon immigrants from the Pyrénées had already
occupied much of southern Aquitaine as far north as Bordeaux in the late 6th century and
were followed in the 720s by Muslim invaders, whose northern advance was stopped at
the Battle of Poitiers in 732. Charlemagne firmly implanted Frankish control and
reorganized the duchy into the subkingdom of Aquitaine, ruled by his son, Louis (781).
The Carolingian hold on Aquitaine was in its turn weakened by the Viking invasions in
the mid-9th century. Striking sporadically for the next century and a half up major river
valleys from the Loire to the Garonne, the Vikings attacked not only coastal areas but
also far inland, devastating towns, dispersing populations, and disrupting ecclesiastical
life in both the monasteries and the secular church. In the confusion and destruction of
the later 9th century, Carolingian kings gradually abandoned the province, and the
kingdom of Aquitaine, barely a century old, came to an end.
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