M. Jordan Love
Department of Art History and Archaeology
“’On Earth as It Is in Heaven?’: The Creation of the Bastide Towns of Southwest France.”
In May and June I used the IRCPL Grant award to travel to southwest France to do research on my dissertation on bastide towns of southwest France. I was able to visit the Municipal Archives in Agen, and meet with two professors at the University of Toulouse. However, the most fundamentally important work I was able to accomplish on this trip was to take laser measurements of the churches, market halls, and town squares in my case-study towns. There is simply no substitute for doing on-site work in medieval architecture. I was also able to visit many more bastide towns than my last visit two years ago, towns which I had not seen before. Seeing new bastides towns opened whole new avenues of ideas and research possibilities, and as a consequence, I was able to write over fifty pages (one and a half chapters) of my dissertation this summer after my return, based on what I had measured and reviewed.
For example, at my case study town of Monflanquin, I measured the length of the church as 46.8 meters—equal to 144 Royal feet. I also was able to ascertain that another case study town, Villeréal had a market square of 144 feet. Could the church at Monflanquin then, be an extension of the use of holy numbers as the dimensions of Villeréal suggest? The church would have been a much more obvious place to use them and a place where church officials were highly likely to have been part of the design process. The 144 foot measurement once again refers to the width of the walls of the heavenly Jerusalem as measured out by angel in the Book of Revelation. The church’s 33 foot width also comes into play. As a multiple of three, this number can allude simply to the holy Trinity but more likely would refer to the age of Christ at his death. In addition, the nave itself has been divided up into square bays of 33 foot sides. With these four squares aligned to a total of 132 feet, the difference between the four squares and the full length of the nave is 12 feet—a number that alludes to the apostles. This last twelve feet is the depth of the last transverse arch to the end—the area of the altar and a place where the number 12 was traditionally used, though usually with columns and other architectural elements.
Up until now, we have only had hints and suggestions as to how close the church or mendicant orders were involved in bastide town creation. Villeréal was founded by the king of France in 1267. However, it was created agreement with the Abbey d’Aurillac for the use of their land. The abbey was one of the oldest Benedictine abbeys, founded in 885 by Saint Geraud d’Aurillac, and it was also a great center for medieval intellectual study—Odo of Cluny was abbot there in the tenth century and founded a theological school. Most importantly, Aurillac was known as the home monastery of Gerbert of Aurillac, the future Pope Sylvester II who had studied mathematics and Arabic numbers in Spain. This suggests that the use of holy numbers at Villeréal and other bastides was no accident, and may in fact indicate that they considered town building as a creation of a New Jerusalem. Making deals with the Cistercians made sense in this region—one of the biggest complaints against the clergy in the southwest of France was their ostentation. Saint Dominic warned that the way to win over the population was not through the “display of pomp and power.” Therefore, the involvement of the Cistercians in bastide founding, as with the Dominicans and Franciscans, would have been better received by the local population, and the Secular Church must have appreciated their presence to a certain extent as a counter to any future rise in heresy.
