GASCONY

. Gascony, a large province in southwestern France north of the Pyrenees, had almost nothing to do with northern France during the early Middle Ages. It passed under English rule in the late-medieval period before finally being integrated into the French monarchy in the 15th century. With no clear geographical boundaries other than the Pyrenees in the south and the Atlantic in the west, it did not correspond to a single natural region but was rather a historical creation grouping a collection of counties extending to the Garonne River in the north (the Bordeaux region) and inland to the Languedoc (Toulouse) in the east. Among the best-known counties and viscounties making up medieval Gascony were Armagnac, Bigorre, Comminges, Fezensac, Lomagne, Albret, and Marsan. The present-day departments of the Pyrenees-Atlantiques, Hautes-Pyrenees, the Landes, and the Gers cover most of the territory of medieval Gascony. Ecclesiastically, most of the province lay within the archdiocese of Auch, which broke down into the bishoprics of Bayonne, Comminges, Oloron, Lescar, Tarbes, Dax, Aire, Lectoure, Bazas, and Couserans.

The earliest Gascons (Lat. Vascones) were Basques who filtered across the Pyrenees at the end of the 6th century into what had been the Roman Aquitania Prima, eventually settling as far north as the Bordeaux region. The Basque language did not prevail except in a few regions of the Pyrenees; what came later on to be called Gascon was a romance dialect. Gascony formed the southern part of what became the first duchy of Aquitaine created near the end of the 7th century. Saracens overran the province temporarily early in the 8th century, but the Carolingian conquest of the 8th century had more lasting effects. Nonetheless, internal divisions combined with Viking invasions, which struck Gascony as well, in the 9th century weakened the Carolingian government, and toward the middle of the century Gascony emerged as an independent duchy, now separate from Aquitaine, with its capital at Bordeaux. An almost complete lack of documentary evidence makes it difficult to reconstruct the history of the duchy for the next two centuries, yet this was clearly the time when the rise of a dozen regional lordships, such as those of the counts of Bigorre, Armagnac, and Comminges and the viscounties of Lomagne, Oloron, and above all the powerful state of the viscounts of Bearn, took shape and undermined the authority of the duke. In the 1050s, the counts of Poitou/dukes of Aquitaine acquired the ducal title through marriage, forging the great territorial principality of the duchy of Aquitaine-Gascony, centered in Poitiers and Bordeaux. Through the successive marriages of Eleanor, duchess and heiress of Aquitaine-Gascony, to Louis VII of France in 1137, then to Henry Plantagenet of Anjou in 1152, Gascony passed along with Aquitaine first under Capetian then under English rule. For the next three centuries, the English resisted all efforts of the French to drive them out and maintained their hold on Gascony even when they lost Aquitaine in the north. Only the loss of Bordeaux in 1453 forced them to abandon their holdings to the French kings.

Gascony never proved to be particularly favored ground for monastic foundations in large numbers, yet one should note the success of abbeys, most of them foundations of the 10th to 12th centuries, at Saint-Sever, Sordes, Lescar, Saint-Pe-de-Generes, Saint-

Mont, and Sainte-Foide-Morlaas. Many northern Europeans came to know Gascony because the northern pilgrimage routes to Santiago in Spain traversed the province.

George T. Beech

[See also: AQUITAINE; ARMAGNAC; FOIX]

Bordes, Maurice, ed. Histoire de la Gascogne des origines a nos jours. Roanne: Howath, 1982. Labarge, Margaret W. Gascony, England’s First Colony 1204-1453. London: Hamish Hamilton, 1980.

Trabut-Cussac, Jean-Paul. L ’administration anglaiseen Gascogne sous Henry III et Edouard I de 1254-1307. Geneva: Droz, 1972.

Vale, Malcolm G. A. English Gascony, 1399-1453. London: Oxford University Press, 1970.