Carcassonne

I had the good fortune this past weekend to go to the medieval village of Carcassonne accompanied by a very nice history teacher from my school in Fronton. Carcassonne is the largest medieval village in Europe. Positioned high upon a promontory, it is enclosed by two ramparts and boasts a basilica and a castle (which has a wall of its own). Construction began there in Roman times, but it continued to be an important castle because of its position in the frontier between France and Spain. In the 1200s it was a stronghold of a group of religious dissenters called Cathars, and the village was abandoned when the French throne became strong enough to take power away from the provincial lords there. It also ceased to be a strategically important position when the border between Spain and France, which had been right next to the castle, moved south. It deteriorated little by little after that through neglect, until the reconstructive efforts of Eugène Viollet-le-Duc in the mid 19th century made it into the functioning tourist attraction it is now. That is not to say that it has been polished to false perfection; the charm of the village is that bits from every part of its history are visible. The basilica Saint-Nazaire et Sainte-Celse, for example, has both roman arches and gothic arches, and just below it there is an outdoor amphitheatre where concerts are held in the summertime. And the walls still taunt historians with their mysteries: in the castle’s main courtyard, a doorway mid-way up the wall shows where a stairway in the castle once led to a second storey above the courtyard that has since burned or crumbled. No one knows anymore what that storey looked like or what purpose exactly it served.

My favorite part of the village, though, is the legend of its name. It is said that an Arabic princess named Carcas ruled over the town. Charlemagne wanted to take it in his efforts to expand his empire south and besieged the city. After five years, things were looking pretty grim for Carcas and her people. They were almost out of food, and would not be able to withstand Charlemagne's siege much longer. But Carcas had an idea: they would feed all their remaining food, all the flour they could scrape together, to the one pig. Then, once it was nice and fat, they would catapult it over the wall onto the soldiers' encampment. The plan was successful: they hurled the fattened hog, their only hope, onto their besiegers, who, seeing that the town had such a well-fed pig to spare, thought that their cause was hopeless. If they had enough food on the inside to fling fat pigs willy-nilly, it would be years before they gave in. So Charlemagne and his men packed up camp and left. As they were leaving, the princess Carcas sounded her victory on the bells of the basilica: in French, "Carcas sonne" les cloches de la victoire.