Carcassonne established by his brother Louis IX. By the 14th century, Paris attained a
population of perhaps 200,000; Bordeaux, Marseille, Montpellier, and Lyon, 30,000; and
Béziers, Bourges, Dijon, Narbonne, Reims, Rouen, Toulouse, and Troyes, about 10,000.
Plagues in the 14th century carried off half the towns-people, but rural immigrants
quickly replaced many of them. Although recurrent plagues prevented urban populations
from rising, the townspeople became a larger percentage of the population. Shortage of
rural labor encouraged emancipation and rising wages, so more peasants could afford
manufactured goods and richer ones a few luxuries. Yet some merchants evaded the high
costs of guild labor by “putting out” wool to be spun and woven by peasants in their
homes.
Although only churches, castles, and municipal buildings used masonry before 1150,
when Gothic architecture supplanted Romanesque, after 1300 guildhalls and patrician
palazzos did, more in the south than in the north, thereby reducing fire hazards and
blocking rats, which had spread disease after gnawing through wood. Laws regulated
leprosaries, hospitals, tanneries, and slaughter-houses, along with cemeteries outside the
walls. Better planning, paving, water supplies, and waste disposal also ameliorated
conditions in richer quarters, as faubourgs, or suburbs, proliferated. Universities arose,
first at Paris and then at Toulouse, Montpellier, Avignon, Orléans, and Grenoble. Forging
enduring alliances with towns, although he taxed them heavily, Louis XI (r. 1461–83)
fostered silk production at Lyon and also a fair that diverted much business from Geneva
as well as the commerce through Marseille and other ports, Aigues-Mortes having
declined since its harbor had silted up.
William A.Percy, Jr.
[See also: AIGUES-MORTES; BASTIDE; BOURGEOISIE; CHAMPAGNE; CITÉ;
COMMUNE; FAIRS AND MARKETS; POPULATION AND DEMOGRAPHY;
TEXTILES]
TRADE ROUTES
. Medieval France was crisscrossed by little roads of mud foundation that linked towns of
secondary importance, creating a dense network in contrast to the older Roman road
system, still partially functional, which favored straight, paved thoroughfares between
major urban sites. The main river systems—the Seine, Loire, Garonne, and Rhône (the
boundary between southern French territory and the empire)—and lesser rivers like the
Saône served as important arteries of trade in an era when water transport was
substantially less expensive than overland carting. Cross-Channel and Atlantic trade
connections linked Normandy and Brittany to the British Isles. North Sea ports, such as
Montreuil-sur-Mer, Boulogne, and Calais, were jumping-off points for trade via Frisia
and Denmark to Hanseatic centers farther east. Access to central and southern France by
land from the east was a matter of Vosges and Jura crossings and Alpine passes. With the
Spanish peninsula, commercial links with southern France might be overland across the
Pyrénées or, more frequently, by sea. Mediterranean ports, such as Collioure, Agde,
Medieval france: an encyclopedia 1740