The bastides: new towns between two kings (1222-1373)

A land to repopulate

When the crusade against the Albigensians came to an end, the Midi around Toulouse was a land of burned villages and dispossessed lords. The treaty signed in Paris on 12 April 1229 by Raymond VII, Count of Toulouse, after a public penance on the parvis of Notre-Dame, left him the Toulousain, the Agenais, the Rouergue and the Albigeois south of the Tarn, forbade him to rebuild his walls, and promised his only daughter, Joan, to a brother of the king, Alphonse of Poitiers: the county would go to the crown if the couple had no child. It was in this defeated land without fortresses that the bastide was born. The Occitan word bastida at first meant any construction at all; it came to name a town founded at a stroke, by a dated act, with streets laid out before the houses and liberties written down before the inhabitants. As early as 1222, on the puech de Mordagne, above the Cérou, Raymond VII had given a charter to the future inhabitants of Cordes, to rehouse, it is said, those whom the crusaders' raids had driven out; the same year, Castelnau-de-Montmiral received the same franchises. Charles Higounet saw in these first foundations the hand of two of the count's administrators, Doat Alaman and his son Sicard, the bastidors. Then came Lisle-sur-Tarn, peopled with the inhabitants of a castle dismantled under the terms of the treaty, Villeneuve-d'Aveyron, grafted in 1231 onto an old priory, and Puymirol, in 1246, on a cliff in the Agenais. Montauban, founded in October 1144 by Count Alfonso Jordan with a charter and a square plaza, is indeed the ancestor, but it remained without descendants for eighty years.