seeing them and remembering what our city once was and [considering] what it is at present, this love of my homeland causes me to imagine the same pain as if I were today witnessing over and over the sack, destruction, and ruin of these great and magnificent works and buildings of our ancestors. But I will satisfy myself and pacify my grief by embracing and admiring these sad relics and ashes and, as much as I am able, I will render them the just and final piety of a nursling and unofficial offspring, by celebrating them and assuring that their memory stays alive for as long as it pleases the judgment of learned men and as long as these writings last in life and memory.1
By no means unusual in his strong attachment to his native city, Poldo d’Albenas also belonged to a small but growing group of civic elites who chose to express that affection and interest through a detailed analysis of his city’s antiquities dating back to the Gallo-Roman period. As Frédérique Lemerle and Richard Cooper have pointed out, humanist scholars of the mid-sixteenth century, including Poldo d’Albenas of Nîmes, Vinet of Bordeaux, and Guillaume du Choul of Lyon, applied an increasingly sophisticated understanding of Roman building practices, epigraphy, and chronology in their attempts to understand their city’s past during the period of Roman domination.2 If their methods were new, however, their intent was not: to demonstrate the long tradition of their city’s particular character and greatness through a consideration of its origins and special status during ancient times.
In the late medieval and early modern periods, history served as a particularly valuable method for asserting legitimacy and supporting political authority. As scholars such as Beaune, Asher, and Dubois have fully demonstrated, French authors underscored the power of the monarchy in difficult times and helped to create a sense of national sentiment among literate elites by tracing the line of French kings back variously to the Trojans, Franks, and ancient Gauls. They even managed to combine all three through the figure of Francus, the Frankish king of Trojan descent who married into the original line of Gallic kings as presented by Annius of Viterbo.3 This concern for historical legitimacy was equally present at the local level by the beginning of the sixteenth century and just as focused on the distant origins of local communities as the national one. Indeed, Yardeni has argued that there existed an intimate relationship between the development of local identities and a French national sentiment, as local historians sought to identify what their communities had contributed to the wider kingdom and thus to influence the general conception of what it meant to be French. For this reason, local writers generally emphasized the moments they viewed as common to all: the Gallic origins of the city and the time of its conversion to Christianity.4 Further, Tallon agrees that local religious traditions insisting that individual churches were founded shortly after the death of Christ and naming early martyrs to the faith were essential to the notion of a specially privileged French church established in apostolic times and second only to the church in Rome.5 The origins of individual civic and religious communities were thus of prime importance at the local level, just as they served as a means of connection between particular urban identities and a broader notion of being French.
If local historians were consistent in their interest in the ancient origins of their communities, their ideas about these origins evolved over time. The tendency to assign urban foundations to various wandering Trojans or other Greeks, escaping the fall of Troy or making a detour on their way home from the conflict, was still prevalent in the early sixteenth century, as was the continuing habit to claim Caesar or some later Roman emperor as the founder of the city or builder of its most impressive structures. The recourse to Caesar testified to the obvious prestige of imperial Rome as a means of asserting antiquity, but the Trojan myth opened up vistas to an even more distant past. Yet in the first half of the sixteenth century, historians of the French kingdom and its many cities alike sought to fashion a history that would be more specific to the French people and their communities. One way to do this was to embrace the genealogies of Gallic kings and the lists of their foundations provided by the texts of the scribes Berosus and Manetho, supposedly edited by Annius of Viterbo. A second method was to claim the ancient Gallic peoples as the forebears of the French and to scour Greek and Roman sources to gain as much information as possible about their character and actions before the Roman conquest and on the nature of the Gallo-Roman communities that succeeded it. Here, the humanist focus on ancient texts and their interpretation was essential, as was the growing expertise of erudite scholars throughout the early modern period to combine insights from those classical editions with the evidence to be gleaned from the study of “antiquities,” including ancient architecture, inscriptions, and coins.
This general evolution in historical approaches in France is well known. What may be less so is the way that local historians in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries continued to combine the latest historical methodologies with older mythological traditions. A surprisingly broad range of local communities developed their own origin stories, and these seemingly outdated views could persist for generations, sometimes despite their rejection in published texts. It was not only uneducated inhabitants who lent credence to these ideas. Rather, local scholars respected for their classical erudition not infrequently combined their detailed knowledge of Roman culture and history with what we might think was an anachronistic acceptance of the myth of Trojan origins or the generally discredited genealogies of the ancient kings of Gaul. That they continued to accept and convey these origin stories is testament to the important role that these accounts played in establishing the historical legitimacy and identity of French urban communities. As mythical histories were conceived and recorded, they could become part of the historical memory of the community and indeed be collected in its archives, both civil and ecclesiastical. In several instances, moreover, considerations regarding a city’s status in ancient times became tied up with claims for the special sacred character of the local church, leading to an unexpected mixing of historical registers.
Despite such overlaps, the developing desire to ground a city’s origins and status in the Gallic period led to an increasing reliance on the ancient sources that could speak to the history and geography of ancient Gaul before the Roman conquest and in the early imperial period. Lamenting that the ancient Gauls did not record their own history or that the Romans destroyed it if they did, local historians turned first to Caesar’s Gallic War, but also to Strabo, Ptolemy, and other historical and geographical writers of the classical world to locate evidence of their community’s existence and importance in ancient times. Unfortunately, these historical investigations led to considerable argument, since scholars from different urban centers proved eager to claim Caesar’s mention of a particular Gallic oppidum (town, or significant settlement) for their own community. Although many of these disputes remained unresolved—indeed, some of them were not settled definitively until the twentieth century—they both encouraged and benefited from an increasing understanding of Roman vocabulary and administrative categories that by the second half of the seventeenth century had become accessible to casual readers without any knowledge of Latin. As their persistence and wide appeal helps to show, these concerns went beyond idle speculation. In an era when antiquity helped to establish political authority, evidence for the importance of a particular Gallic population center during Caesar’s lifetime could be marshaled to assert the modern community’s rightful dominance over other towns. Thus, urban elites from numerous French cities, such as Bourges, Orléans, Autun, and Chalon-sur-Saône, as discussed below, and Clermont, as fully examined in the next chapter, all invested considerable energy in arguing for the continuous prestige of their communities from the Gallo-Roman past to the French present.
1 Origin Stories: Evolution and Persistence
Over the course of the sixteenth century, a marked evolution occurred in the ways that local historians sought to explain the origins of their communities and their current-day names. For the early sixteenth century, Bourdigné’s account of the foundation of the city of Angers and establishment of the Angevins as a people is typical in its desire to place these origins in a biblical framework, establishing the greatest possible age for the city, its reliance on Greek mythology or the genealogy of the ancient kings of Gaul to explain these origins, and its tendency to relate these details in a story-telling mode. For Bourdigné, writing his Chroniques d’Anjou et du Maine in 1529, the task of uncovering Angers’s first foundation was perplexing and exhausting, until he found the aid of ancient historiographers such as Berosus, Megasthenes, and Diodorus of Sicily. With the help of these writers, though, he was able to ascertain that during the reign of Sarron, third king of Gaul, the inhabitants of the part of Gaul called “Egada” gained permission from their king to build a city. The Egadiens duly returned to their territory and founded “Andes” on the spot where they found the greatest number of birds, 344 years after the Great Flood. This recourse to pseudo-Berosus and ancient Greek historians, however, did not preclude a Trojan origin for the city as well. Many years later, a band of Trojans elected Ajax to be their duke and were subsequently dubbed the Angions after him. When Ajax was found murdered after a fight with Odysseus, the Angions decided to set out without any other leader and ultimately arrived at Andes, which they rebuilt 4,027 years after the Creation and dubbed Angiers. The Egadiens/Andes and the Angions subsequently lived together peaceably and became one people henceforth known as the Angevins.6
This impulse to imagine the origins of a city or people as resulting from the mixing of two peoples was common in the early sixteenth century, particularly in western France. Thus, in Le Mans, after the city was originally built by Sarthon, grandson of Samothes, king of the Celts, and destroyed by the Druids, it was rebuilt by Lemanus, another king of Gaul. Later, the inhabitants known as the Lemans entered into a series of wars with the Senonais, after which it was agreed that a colony of Senonais would remain and that the people of the province would be named after the two peoples combined, the Senomans.7 Other such amalgams of peoples took place among the Bretons and English in Brittany and the Boïens and the Venetians in the small town of Souvigny, not to mention the melding of the Gauls and the Franks so important to the kingdom of France.8
In comparison with other origins stories of the first half of the sixteenth century, Bourdigné’s account of the foundation of Angers was particularly learned. He was careful to name his numerous ancient sources, whether encountered directly or indirectly, and refused to recount any historical events in Angers from the settlement of the Angions up to the time of Caesar for lack of evidence.9 He was also unusual for his time in attributing the foundation and rebuilding of the city to a people (or two peoples), and not to a specific leader. As Jean Balsamo has pointed out, the traditional form of the urban encomium paid careful attention to the character of the original founder of the city as a means for establishing the community’s honor and importance.10 This marked preference for specific founders of noble character reinforced recourse to the ancient kings of Gaul but was somewhat problematic for the Trojan myth, since all Trojans had by definition suffered defeat. It was therefore common to shift the identity of founder princes from the failed warriors of Troy to other ancient Greeks with no such liabilities. When Claude Barthélemy Bernard was in search of an origin story that would provide maximum honor to Riom in the midst of its competition with Clermont for privileges and prestige in the mid-sixteenth century, he therefore described the city’s founder as a Prince Gerhion of the Greek Island of Rhion, great grandson of the God Ocean, who sailed to France, subjected the local barbarians to his rule, married the beautiful daughter of a local seigneur, and defeated a jealous rival whose stronghold sounds suspiciously like a description of an imagined ancient Clermont.11 As Bernard’s and Bourdigné’s texts make apparent, it was common in this period to weave the details of an origin story within the extended narrative of a romance.
By the middle of the sixteenth century, however, these kinds of fanciful origin stories were beginning to fall out of favor, at least within humanist circles. The changes are especially clear if we notice the evolution in thought of one urban historian, Corrozet of Paris. In his La fleur des antiquitez de la noble et triumphante ville et cité de Paris (1532), Corrozet lamented that the original Parisians did not register the founder or date of origin for their city. He then rehearsed a variety of explanations then in existence: that it was founded by Paris, eighteenth king of Gaul; that Hercules left a troop of his followers, called Parrasiens from Asia, on the spot when he was traveling to Spain to kill a dragon; or that it was named “pres de la deesse ysis” thanks to a great statue of the Egyptian goddess Isis that stood at what is now Saint-Germain-des-Prés. Still, the most likely explanation in his estimation was that Paris was founded by Trojans in 830 bce and was later renamed Paris, either in honor of the unfortunate husband of Helen or because “parisia” means bravery in Greek.12 By his last edition of Les antiquitez, chroniqves, et singvlaritez de Paris (1561), however, Corrozet had seriously revised his opinion. After recounting the theories of Parisian origins he had previously offered, he pointed out that, in rejecting them, it was necessary to confess that nothing was known of the foundation and naming of Paris and that the only reliable source of evidence for the city’s antiquity was to be found in two passages from Caesar’s Commentaries. Yet Corrozet did have some ideas about the early history of Paris. “From the above,” he explained, “one clearly sees that the city of Paris was founded and augmented by its own Gallic inhabitants, called Parisians.”13
The ancient Gauls had moved to prominence as the original French people by the third quarter of the sixteenth century. For Pasquier, writing on the history of the French kingdom, the Gauls were one of the three great peoples in history and, rather than being barbarians as some Romans charged, had employed many governing practices that characterized well-ordered states in his own time.14 Fauchet, too, took great trouble to describe all of the customs, or “antiquities,” of the ancient Gauls and then recounted their exploits from their conquests in Germany, Spain, Italy, Hungary, and Greece to their eventual assimilation into the Roman Empire.15 At the local level, urban historians (as we will see in more detail below) argued for their own cities as the descendants of the Gallic strongholds mentioned by Caesar. Chaumeau thus argued in 1566 that Bourges had to be Avaricum, the head city of the Bituriges Cubi that Caesar’s forces attacked in 52 bce, and Vinet with considerably more erudition identified Saintes as the Mediolanum Santonum mentioned by Strabo and Ptolemy.16 For the historians of Toulouse from the sixteenth century forward, the courageous and warlike character of the Volques Tectosages bestowed honor on contemporary residents, while inhabitants of Agen celebrated that their city had once been the capital of the kingdom of the Nitiobriges.17 Such identifications fit well with the determination of scholars such as Vinet to eschew all origin fables and, instead, to examine any lapidary remains and ancient manuscripts for evidence. In fact, numerous local historians assumed that in describing the classical remains of their city they were shedding light on its original, Gallic inhabitants, since they took many Roman monuments for structures built by the Gauls.18
The impulse to identify the ancient origins and founders of communities affected France’s most important cities and its very modest settlements alike, and once a theory had taken root locally it proved remarkably persistent. The province of Berry offers an excellent illustration of this variety of origin stories and their evolution, since in addition to multiple sources providing theories circulating in the sixteenth century, the region boasted two late seventeenth-century historians, Thaumas de la Thaumassière and Catherinot, who were concerned to discredit earlier ideas and to provide more likely alternatives where possible.
The evidence from Berry shows that numerous communities turned to Trojans and other mythical princes to explain their earliest history. When Chaumeau was researching his Histoire de Berry in the 1560s, for example, he explained that the burning of all the ancient charters of Les Aiis Dam Gillon (Les Aix d’Angillon, Cher) made it difficult to ascertain its origins, but that the elders of the community assured him that they had read in the ancient registers that the town had been founded by Sullicus, son of Ajax, who named Les Aiis after his father and nearby Sully after himself.19 Sullicus was certainly in good company, since when Catherinot set out in the 1680s to provide an accurate list of the rulers of Berry over time, he took pains to deny the existence of a bevy of mythical rulers said to have founded quite small places in the province. Among these were Ajax of Les Aix, Albinus of Aubigny, Borbo of Bourbon, Brennus of Brenne, Dunus of Issoudun, Dun-le-Roy, and Meun, Lucius of Montluçon, Surius of Sury, and Turnus of Tournon.20
Equally popular in the sixteenth century was to argue for the Roman origins of many a community, even if this identification was highly dubious. Thus, the inhabitants of Châteaumeillant claimed that their château’s large tower was built by Caesar, while the residents of Concressault held that their town had been called “Concordiae saltus” by the Romans. Meanwhile, historians theorized that Dun-le-Roy had been the Noviodunum mentioned by Caesar.21 In the next century, though, Thaumas de la Thaumassière contradicted many of these theories, pointing out that in all the ancient charters, the bourg of Concressault was not called “Concordiae saltus,” but “Cucuricaudum,” “Concorcellum,” and other similar names. Further, he opined that the well-known ancient geographer Nicolas Sanson was probably correct in identifying the ancient Noviodunum as Neuvy-sur-Barangeon, and not Dun-le-Roy.22 The resort to Latin charters proved a particularly effective way to deflate a whole range of fanciful origin stories. In the case of Issoudun, Chaumeau reported that some believed that the town had been named for the Greek letter Ypsolon (sic), inscribed on all of the public monuments, while others held that it was named for the Silodins, a wise people of ancient Gaul. Chaumeau, however, favored the theory that the town was once divided in two, with a château called Dun and a bourg called Ys. After both were burned by the ancient Bituriges in their attempt to resist Caesar’s armies when he laid siege to Avaricum, they were rebuilt next to each other and their names conjoined. None of these ideas, though, held any plausibility for Thaumas de la Thaumassière, particularly since the Latin names for Issoudun to be found in old charters completely contradicted them.23
I would have wished that this opinion could be confirmed by the testimony of some ancient author worthy of belief, since it would be more honorable to my home city, considering the merit and renown of its founder. But as I can find no proof in the [ancient] authors, and as Julius Caesar, although in fact quite specific in describing even his smallest actions, does not speak of this in any way at all, I am forced to leave this poorly founded tradition to those who love fables more than the truth of history.
More than simply contradicting the traditional view, Thaumas de la Thaumassière was able to account for its origin. The name, Sacro Caesariensis, he theorized, was created by Philippe Le Breton, historian and poet of Philippe ii. The name pleased the twelfth-century counts of Sancerre, who began to use it on their own coinage. Indeed, the author had seen a coin from Sancerre minted during the reign of Philippe ii with the motto “Sacrum Caesaris” on one side and a crowned head with the words “Julius Caesar” on the reverse. Despite these pretensions, Thaumas de la Thaumassière explained, Sancerre was very likely only founded in the time of Charlemagne, as Monsieur Cholet, lawyer in the Parlement of Paris and native of Berry, had reasoned in an epistolary exchange with him back in 1656.26
From this small sample of origin tales from the province of Berry, it is evident that mythical rulers and dubious invocations of Roman origins held considerable attraction in a broad array of communities from the High Middle Ages in some cases to well into the seventeenth century. Thaumas de la Thaumassière and Catherinot would not have felt it necessary to contradict these views as late as the 1680s if they did not still hold local appeal. Yet these kinds of approaches did not merely persist in intellectual backwaters among unnamed persons but also continued to influence the historical theories of scholars who were otherwise well known for their classical erudition. Anthony Grafton has observed that references to the mythical Gallic kings named in the texts of pseudo-Berosus and Manetho, first introduced by Annius of Viterbo, continued well beyond the period when the denunciations of forgery launched by Bauduin, Beatus Rhenanus, and other detractors of Annius should have completely obliterated their legitimacy.27 Indeed, examples of origin stories relying on these mythical kings of Gaul may be found well into the seventeenth century among French urban historians, as we will see. Yet this was not the only kind of mythical history that continued to find favor with local historians who prided themselves on their Latin learning and understanding of Roman antiquities. The evolution of historical methodologies during the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries followed a more complex path than has generally been represented. When the age and importance of a particular city was at stake, in particular, local historians were surprisingly willing to credit traditional theories and to reproduce them in a public forum for the consumption of inhabitants and visitors alike.
In Reims, Bergier was one such historian who insisted on combining the most up-to-date understanding of Gallo-Roman history with a traditional origin story that featured both the ancient kings of Gaul and a Trojan heritage. An erudite scholar who was accorded the post of royal historiographer (historiographe du roi) near the end of his life and whose Histoire des grands chemins de l’Empire romain (1622) went through numerous editions up through the eighteenth century, Bergier was well versed in Roman antiquities and was highly respected for his learning.28 In line with the best theories about the naming and origins of French cities, he therefore explained that in the time of Caesar, Reims was known under the name of Durocortum, or Durencourt, a result of Caesar’s having rendered the original, Gallic name into pronounceable Latin. Under the Franks, however, the names of most French cities were altered, and the Durocortum of the Gallo-Roman period became the Remus or Remis of the Merovingians.29 It was important, Bergier argued, not to credit foundation myths first established by poets rather than historians. Especially drawing his ire was the figure of Bavo, king of the Belgians and supposed cousin of Priam of Troy, who, according to fourteenth-century historian Jacques de Guise, had sent captains to found the cities of Tongres, Metz, Thérouanne, and Ghent. After devoting numerous chapters to demolishing the myth of Bavo and his Belgian kingdom (the concern to dismantle any argument for the ancient existence of a Middle Kingdom is obvious), Bergier acknowledged that this long refutation of “a building that is falling to ruin on its own” might seem unnecessary. He insisted, though, that since this story provided untrue information about Reims’s history and had influenced the city fathers for the last three hundred years, he felt obligated to lay it to rest definitively.30
Based on Bergier’s treatment of Bavo, we might expect him to be equally dismissive of similar origin stories for Reims. When it came to his hometown, however, this erudite scholar seems to have been less concerned to separate poetry from history or to argue against mythical founders. According to Bergier, although it was incorrect to say that Reims took its name from a founder named Remus, it was certainly true that the Remi, the Gallic people of the area, were named for Remus, the twenty-third king of Gaul, around the time of the destruction of Troy. Here, Jean Le Maire des Belges had misread the writings of Manetho, the ancient Egyptian priest, as presented by Annius of Viterbo, who nowhere said that Remus had founded Reims itself but only mentioned the people, the Remi. Further, when the Franks invaded the area, they found the word “Remi” difficult to render gracefully in their language, so they began to call the city “Remus” after its supposed founder.31 Although it was certainly true, Bergier continued, that the name “Frank” or “Francus” means free, there was no contradiction in maintaining that the Franks who established themselves in France also derived their name from their first leader, Francus, the Trojan prince who escaped from Greek servitude at the fall of Troy. As Manetho further showed, Francus married the daughter of King Remus, founder of the people of Reims.32
In Bergier’s presentation of the origins of Reims, therefore, a solid show of ancient erudition abutted a seemingly anachronistic reliance on mythical rulers. In publishing his father’s historical work posthumously in 1635 (Nicolas Bergier died in 1623), Jean Bergier acknowledged that some of the sources on which it was based were considered fraudulent but maintained that his father had used them only as texts under dispute.33 Indeed, in discussing Francus and his marriage to the daughter of King Remus, the author had been careful to recognize that some thought that these “antiquities” were pure fable, but he nevertheless asserted the propriety of a historian of Reims to discuss them. When it came to the texts by Berosus and Manetho, however, Bergier devoted an entire chapter to discussing their legitimacy, ultimately concluding that they were not forged by their annotator and should not be rejected despite their detractors. Of course, since these texts not only mentioned King Remus but also Francus, son of Hector of Troy and son-in-law to Remus, by implication Reims owed something to a Trojan past as well as to the native kings of Gaul.34
These arguments about Reims’s origins and early history were clearly appealing to civic elites in the first half of the seventeenth century. Not only did Bergier foreground King Remus’s role in establishing the Rémois but several other local historians also turned to Remus as the founder of the city. Thus, Cocquault, canon of the cathedral chapter, opened his ecclesiastical history with a genealogy that began with Noah and concluded with King Remus, who founded Reims and gave his daughter in marriage to Francus, while René de la Chèze penned two poems during the reign of Louis xiii in which the shade of Remus introduced himself as king of Gaul and founder of the city of Reims.35 This widespread, continuing recourse to the role of King Remus suggests that this version of Reims’s ancient past possessed particular local significance.
The conceit of King Remus as the founder of the Rémois and his familial link to Francus, the mythical ancestor of the kings of France, at once established the great age of the city of Reims and accorded it an important place in French history. This place predated and presaged Reims’s other important connection with the French monarchy as the location where St. Rémi baptized Clovis and where subsequent kings received their sacre (anointing). Dating the formation of the Rémois back to the time of the fall of Troy also naturally established Reims as more ancient than Rome. This point was an important one for the inhabitants of Reims to make at the turn of the seventeenth century, since previous origin stories had presented the city as founded by Remus, twin of Romulus, one of the co-founders of Rome. This view must have been a venerable one, since Flodoard of Reims (894–966) reported it, and Bergier went to some trouble to demonstrate that the Roman Remus could not have built the Porte Mars, a Gallo-Roman triumphal arch that had been discovered in Reims some sixteen to eighteen years before.36 By contrast, the figures of King Remus and Francus connected the city of Reims with the French monarchy, leading King Remus to appear in local historical works up to 1650.
The seventeenth-century historians of Reims were far from alone in persisting to identify their city’s foundation or early rulers with mythical figures or in presenting these theories in important political venues. In Bourges, Catherinot displayed his erudition in arguing that many early histories of Rome contained as much fable as true history and particularly singled out Titus Livy as a poet in prose rather than a historian, who used his writings to elevate his own nation and put down others. Yet when it came to Livy’s tale of Ambigatus, ancient king of the Celts who ruled from Bourges and who sent his two nephews, Sigovesus and Bellovesus, to lead an array of Gallic peoples to sack Rome, found Milan, and settle territory from Italy to Bohemia, Catherinot was not in any doubt of his existence. As we will see, King Ambigatus formed a crucial element of the local historical tradition arguing for the centrality and ascendency of Bourges and its people within the French kingdom and Gallican church, and this may explain why erudite historians of Bourges from Labbe to Catherinot and Thaumas de la Thaumassière complacently accepted his existence where their own historical methods should have suggested caution.37 Meanwhile, in Limoges, Simon Descoustures, avocat du roi of the presidial court, welcomed Henri iv on October 20, 1605 with a speech identifying the city as an ancient one founded by Phrygian prince Lemovix around 3,622 years after the Creation. Limoges was thus older than either Toulouse or Poitiers, since the former was founded by Tholes, Lemovix’s son, and the latter owed its existence to Lemovix himself. The prince named the city in memory of his brother, Pistonnus, who died fighting Trojan invaders (the Phrygians and Trojans were enemies). Not only was this history deemed appropriate to be presented to the king and his court and published afterward but some sixteen years later Chenu of Bourges even saw fit to include it word-for-word in his Recueil des antiquitez et privileges de la ville de Bovrges.38 Although not everyone in the city credited the story, its promotion of Limoges as the veritable metropolitan city of the entire region of greater Aquitaine must have encouraged its longevity.39
Many traditional origin stories, then, retained their relevance in the early modern period in the face of evolving understandings of classical texts and practices. They often did so thanks to their role in supporting an urban historical identity that argued for the age, importance, and special rights of the community, and the fact that some of these stories had previously been enshrined in local civil or ecclesiastical document collections also encouraged their preservation. Historical narratives shedding light on the city’s origins were sometimes inserted into the municipal treasury. For Toulouse, for example, Noguier explained that the archives of the city attested that Thabor, a relation of the Roman emperor Nero (r.54–68), was king of Toulouse in 65 ce after having been duly elected by the people.40 In Valence in the first half of the sixteenth century, Médard de Cluset, a doctor of the university, recounted that since the ancient historiographers did not give any specific information about the foundation of Valence and Romans, he “decided to ask among the most senior of those who have had charge of the city’s affairs whether it was possible to find something among the writings of the archives of the city hall.” In response, one of the bourgeois with an interest in humane letters showed him an extract he had made from an ancient parchment register, attesting that both Valence and Romans had been founded by the Romans Aemiliannus and Fabius, and that Valence was not named for Emperor Valentinian.41 Alternatively, traditional origin stories could gain considerable support from being incorporated into ecclesiastical sources. In Limoges, a fourteenth-century life of St. Valérie, an important local saint associated with the cult of St. Martial, explicitly held that Limoges was an ancient city named after King Lemovix, a descendant of giants.42 This early mention of King Lemovix helped to assure his longevity, given that the anonymous author of a seventeenth-century Annales manuscrites de Limoges directly borrowed from this saint’s life in devising his own history of the city.43 The corroboration of this foundation myth in a religious text thus likely lent the idea greater authority in the early modern period than it might otherwise command.
As these numerous examples demonstrate, by the first half of the sixteenth century many French cities and even very small towns had already developed origin stories that focused on Trojans, Roman emperors, or other mythical founders. In some cases, these foundation myths had suited specific past interests and had endured through being incorporated into local historical literature or document collections. In others, they persisted in the face of evolving understandings of historical verisimilitude and evidence, largely because they continued to reflect a particular representation of the city’s past that was important to its inhabitants, especially civic elites. It was not simply “bad history” that made Bergier accept King Remus and Francus while he ridiculed the idea of a King Bavo, but also a sense that some of his city’s claims to be essential to the continuity of the French royal line would be undercut if this particular link were abandoned.44 Yet, as the ancient Gauls gained in prominence as the original inhabitants of France during the sixteenth century, much of the historical significance previously invested in these traditional origin stories began to accrue to the Gallic peoples’ particular identities, territories, and character.
2 The Prestige of Classical Antiquity
Despite the endurance of origin stories starring Greek founders and the mythical kings of Gaul, urban historians from the mid-sixteenth century forward began to identify their city’s past with the Gallic people who had inhabited the area at the time of the late Roman republic or early empire. Since the ancient Gauls did not write their own history, as many French scholars lamented, local historians were forced to turn to Greek and Roman sources and especially Caesar’s Gallic War to glean what information they could about the existence of their city and the nature of its people in ancient times. This was not a straightforward procedure, however, since the Latin names that Caesar ascribed to the Gallic oppida he visited or attacked in the course of his campaigns usually did not match current French place names. Further, as many a resident of a community not mentioned by Caesar was forced to admit, the Roman general neglected to record numerous Gallic population centers with which he did not have any contact through war or alliance. Worse, some local historians complained that the testimony of Caesar and other Roman writers was not reliable, since they deliberately destroyed all histories composed by the Gallic priestly class of Druids, consistently misrepresented the Gauls to enhance their own glory, or produced texts that were later subject to further interpretation or manipulation back in Rome. For example, Saint-Julien complained that all the Romans who wrote about Gaul sought to belittle Gallic accomplishments as payback for having successfully sacked Rome and claimed that the Romans had deliberately destroyed all Gallic texts so that their descendants would know nothing of their origins except the lies that the Romans chose to tell.45 Similarly, Edme Thomas protested that given that “Caesar contradicts himself so often, … one must well conclude that his Commentaries have been adjusted in many places [to suit] the maxims of his politics and his own advancement against the rules of historical truth.”46
Despite these problems, it became common historical practice among French scholars to scour the works of Caesar, Strabo, Pliny, and Ptolemy for evidence about particular Gallic communities in the century or two before and after the birth of Christ and to assume that if a population center was flourishing at that time, it must have existed from time immemorial. Indeed, the assumption of continuity was so strong that while local scholars assumed that every community mentioned by Caesar must still exist (except for Alesia, which was famously destroyed), they also claimed that a lack of specific textual evidence could be just as solid proof of a city’s antiquity. Moreover, although many of the civitas-capitals in Roman Gaul were named after Roman emperors, residents staunchly resisted the idea that their communities had in fact been established by the Romans, as their own predilections for specific founders should have suggested. Instead, they argued that these imperial names were merely a sign of special favor bestowed on preexisting communities.47 Local historians thus insisted on the essentially French nature of local populations and cities, despite their own emphasis on the Gallo-Roman period for demonstrating the enduring prestige of their town and for marking an important stage in its greater history. The city of Lyon, first founded as a Roman colony by Lucius Munatius Plancus, governor of the Three Gauls, in 43 bce, provides a particularly good example of this phenomenon. Although Lyon had served as the virtual capital city of Augustan Gaul and local savants gloried in the extensive architectural and epigraphical remains from this period, some local historians were dissatisfied with the idea that their city had first been established by Romans and not native Gauls. In his Mémoires de l’histoire de Lyon, therefore, Paradin argued that Lyon was a flourishing Gallic city long before L. Munatius Plancus established a colony there, and Nicolay echoed this opinion by explaining that Strabo’s praise of the fairs that took place on the “Isle Gallique” demonstrated that Lyon was indeed a renowned and wealthy city long before the Roman presence.48
In their endeavor to establish the Gallic origins of French cities, principally by locating references to them in classical texts, local historians could turn to a variety of publications for assistance. For example, when Abraham Ortelius first published his Theatrum orbis terrarum in 1570, it already included a dictionary of ancient place names with their modern equivalents meant to elucidate the historical maps he included in his atlas, and as subsequent editions appeared, the list became so extensive that it began to be published separately.49 Blaise de Vigenère, too, first published his French translation of Caesar’s Gallic War in 1576 and furnished additional commentary through successive editions to 1589. Meanwhile, historians such as Guillaume du Bellay in 1556 and Fauchet in 1579 provided information on the Gauls and identifications of their communities of use to local historians.50 By the seventeenth century, extensive geographical discussions of the boundaries, provinces, and capital cities of ancient Gaul provided greater access to this kind of information in a more systematized form. Thus, Sanson, royal geographer, offered an encyclopedia of Roman geographical terms that not only provided specific identifications but also explained the principles of how these place names had evolved over time, and the erudite Jesuit Labbe published an accessible translation of Philipp Clüver’s introduction to universal geography, in which he particularly focused on correcting his predecessor’s mistakes regarding Roman Gaul.51 The matching of French towns with the population centers of the ancient Gauls was thus of interest to a wide variety of scholars and urban inhabitants. The problem was that disagreements arose about many of these identifications.
For urban historians, associating their community with the head city of a Gallic people was of great importance, but the desirability of identifying contemporary towns with Gallic centers mentioned by Caesar meant that numerous disagreements erupted over precisely which places could claim that historical prestige. Some of these rivalries dated back to the early sixteenth century and endured over many generations. For example, as far back as 1545, when Jean Jolivet made the first map of Bourges, it was necessary to assert that the large, beautiful, and well-defended Gallic city of Avaricum, the head city of the Bituriges Cubi that Caesar was able to take by siege, was on the site of present-day Bourges, capital of Berry, and not the smaller town of Vierzon.52 In his Histoire de Berry (1566), Chaumeau was also at pains to argue that Bourges was indeed the descendent of the great and populous Gallic oppidum. In his estimation, Caesar’s description of a town surrounded by marsh and strongly defended on all but one side exactly matched Bourges’s situation; Bourges’s location on the Roman route between Genabum (Orléans) and Bibracte (Autun) exactly fit Caesar’s itinerary; Caesar’s belief that once he had subdued Avaricum, he would have all of the lands of the Bituriges under his control required that he have Bourges in mind; and the prevalence of Roman antiquities constantly unearthed in the city proved its importance in Roman times.53 Meanwhile, disagreements also arose over whether Caesar’s Genabum indeed made reference to Orléans or the much smaller town of Gien, and whether Bibracte, the famous meeting site of the Gauls as they planned their resistance to Caesar, was really located at Autun, the nearby village of Beuvray, or even Beaune. In strongly contesting the claims of the Orléanais, the residents of Gien in the sixteenth century could find support in Vigenère’s conclusion that “the wisest opinion” identified their town with the ancient Genabum. Similarly, Fauchet reasoned that the existence of a faubourg still called “Genabe” on the outskirts of the town provided solid evidence for Gien’s claims.54 Indeed, this question seems to have inspired some amicable needling, since Lambert Daneau, the Reformed minister of Gien, in all of his Latin letters to his friend, Pierre Daniel, a lawyer and humanist from Orléans, signed his missives as originating from “antiquum Genabum ad Ligerim” (the ancient Genabum on the Loire).55
If these debates were actively pursued in the sixteenth century, they were by no means laid to rest by the seventeenth—or even later. On the question of Avaricum, later historians of Bourges all felt called upon to defend its identification with the ancient oppidum. In 1643, Labbe thus proclaimed that one would have to be blind to question that Avaricum was Bourges, while in 1683 Catherinot devoted an entire pamphlet, Le vrai Avaric, to the debate. To Chameau’s arguments of the previous century, Catherinot added the observation that since St. Ursin came to Bourges in the middle of the third century to establish an episcopal seat, this intention demonstrated that Bourges had to be the capital city of the region in Gallo-Roman times.56 In regard to Genabum, the inhabitants of Gien continued to claim their town’s descent from the Gallic head city well into the eighteenth century. Thus, when Abbé Jean Lebeuf published his Mémoires sur l’histoire d’Auxerre in 1743, he asserted that he had based his view that Genabum must have been Gien on “an ancient tradition of the inhabitants of Gien,” which he had read “in the manuscript works of some older writers of this town.”57 Further, the question of whether the remains of a Gallic bridge described by Caesar still existed in the bed of the Loire River near Gien still worried historians in the mid-nineteenth century.58
The need to defend the Gallic pedigrees of important provincial capitals such as Bourges and Orléans was thus enduring, and the problem was that smaller communities could also marshal arguments that seemed equally persuasive, at least at first. When Nicolay, royal geographer, was traveling through Berry in the 1560s to write up his Description du Berry for Catherine de’ Medici, he dutifully identified Bourges as the ancient Avaricum but nevertheless seemed much more partial to the claims of Vierzon. Remarking that the existing remains of the ancient walls of Bourges showed it to have been a very small city, and not the great capital of the Bituriges that Caesar described, Nicolay went on to reproduce word-for-word a memorandum provided to him by Michel Chevrier, monk at the monastery of Vierzon, in which the cleric laid out all of the reasons why Vierzon must be the modern-day Avaricum. Chevrier asserted that Vierzon and its fortifications in fact fit Caesar’s description quite well, that the remains of the tower that served as Vercingetorix’s defense were still standing, but that the reason that Vierzon did not look like Avaricum was that it had been sacked several times since. Further, examining Caesar’s reasoning in book 7, chapter 13, the monk especially argued that if the Roman general wanted to take Avaricum in order to subdue the “civitas Biturigum,” which he translated as the city of the Berruyers, then Avaricum could certainly not be the capital city of Berry, obviously Bourges.59
Some ignorant people (the learned Joseph Scaliger calls them foolish and insane) wished to convince others like them that Avaricum was not Bourges but rather Vierzon. [They were] blinded, not only by the resemblance of the vernacular name but because they did not know how to understand what the word “city” meant [for Caesar].62
As humanists and erudite scholars began to arrive at more sophisticated readings of Caesar and to distinguish his vocabulary and political assumptions from later Roman writers, the historians of Bourges could rest more easily in their identification of their community with the head city of the Gallic Bituriges. Important translators of Caesar such as Vigenère and Nicolas Perrot d’Ablancourt took their part, as did historian Fauchet and geographer Sanson.63 Yet the basis for their reasoning evolved over time. While Vigenère echoed his sixteenth-century contemporary Chaumeau in arguing that Bourges closely matched Caesar’s description while Vierzon had never been important enough to be Avaricum, Sanson used the example of Avaricum to illustrate how Caesar systematically referred to the Gallic peoples, their territories, and population centers.
According to Sanson, each Gallic people, such as the Bituriges, possessed a territory, which Caesar referred to as a “civitas,” or city, and a head town, which Caesar referred to using Latinized names, such as Avaricum.64 The difficulty was that many of these Gallic towns changed their names over time. In the time of Augustus (r.27 bce–14 ce), many honored the emperor by incorporating his name in theirs, such as “Augustonemetum” for Clermont. Further, around the time of Constantine (r.306–37) virtually all of these cities underwent a further name change, so that now they were called “city of the people of the region,” for example “civitas Biturigum” or city of the Berruyers for Bourges. This was why, Sanson explained, virtually no French city bore a name similar to its original Gallic one but rather one descended from the Gallic people who had occupied the region.65 Conversely, this historical progression could help in identifying what cities were actually mentioned by Roman authors: since Bourges was still the capital city of Berry and the seat of an archbishop, it was necessarily the “civitas Biturigum” of the later empire and the “Avaricum” of Caesar.66
Such reasoning cleared up much confusion, but its assumption of strict continuity—from Gallic head town, to Roman administrative center, to Catholic episcopal city, to French provincial capital—could also lead scholars astray. For example, Sanson used the same logic he had applied to Avaricum and Bourges to argue that Clermont must be on the site of the ancient Gergovia. Since no-one disputed that the names Augustonemetum and Arverni municipum referred to Clermont, it necessarily followed that Gergovia did as well.67 As we will see in chapter 5, Sanson’s reasoning contradicted the best erudite views on the identification of Gergovia by the mid-seventeenth century, but it resonated with early modern assumptions that significant French communities should be able to trace their roots back without interruption to a distant Gallic past. While Coquille proposed that the Gallic populations of both Bibracte and Gergovia had relocated from oppida perched high on the summits of mountain plateaus, to be re-founded as Augustodunum and Augustonemetum under imperial rule, this theory of a generalized relocation of population centers under the Romans was quite rare.68 The difficulty was that, in some cases, the presumed continuities in fact held. After their conquest of Gaul, the Romans divided the territory into administrative units called “civitates,” based loosely on the territories of the indigenous Gallic peoples, and constituted one urban center as a civitas-capital in each territorial unit.69 In some cases, such as Avaricum and Genabum, the Roman urban center was established on the site of the Gallic head city, but in many others, such as Augustonemetum/Clermont and Augustodunum/Autun, this was not the case.70 In fact, the Romans preferred urban centers to be established in low-lying areas, where they would be accessible to the road system, and even forced the abandonment of communities built on hilltops, one of the preferred locations for Gallic development.71
Local historians of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, however, had great difficulty imagining the level of political reorganization and cultural adjustment that followed the Roman conquest of Gaul. For many urban historians, the Romans constituted only one of the many groups who had sought to dominate the various regions of France before the final victory of the Franks and establishment of the French monarchy, and their tendency to date the first Christian missions to France back to the apostolic period greatly reduced the amount of influence the Romans could be said to have exerted.72 As a result, some local historians simply declared it impossible that the head cities of important Gallic peoples could have been removed and re-founded, and their tendency to confuse the monumental building practices of the Gallo-Romans with the much more ephemeral structures of the Gauls abetted the problem. Thus, when Saint-Julien set out to demonstrate that Autun, and not Beuvray, had to be on the site of the Gallic Bibracte, he based his argument on the fact that no other name for the city was extant before the period in which it was known as Augustodunum, and Caesar would certainly have reported Augustodunum’s name if it were not Bibracte. Further, it was wrong to argue that Autun was founded by Augustus, and if it had not already been the head city of the Gallic Aedui, they would not have been allowed to request that it be renamed in honor of the emperor. Moreover, while there were certainly ancient ruins at Beuvray, they were not extensive enough to match Caesar’s description of Bibracte, while Autun itself possessed so many marks of greatness that it could not possibly have been founded by Augustus.73 Thomas, canon of the cathedral of Autun, echoed this kind of reasoning in the mid-seventeenth century, arguing that if Augustodunum had succeeded Bibracte as the capital city of the Aedui, ancient writers would have been sure to mention under what emperor the city was founded.74 He did not see its very name as a giveaway.
These assumptions found further support in the tendency to misattribute Gallo-Roman building practices to the pre-conquest period. Although Thomas wrote extensively on the antiquities of Autun, boasted a considerable collection of antiquities himself, and was knowledgeable about the objects that other elite inhabitants of the city had unearthed and assembled, he nevertheless assumed that the Aedui had constructed the same kind of public monuments as the Romans. Therefore, in denying that Caesar himself had built many of the theaters to be found in French cities, he theorized that the ancient theaters in Autun were more likely built by the local leaders of the Aedui, such as Divitiacus, a local ally of Caesar’s.75 He also pointed to the vestiges of ancient walls to confirm his argument that Augustodunum and Bibracte were the same city. When Ammianus Marcellinus described these walls in the fourth century, Thomas pointed out, they were already in ruins, demonstrating that Augustodunum had to be an ancient city by this time. Unlike Coquille, he did not consider that the Gauls did not fortify their cities in stone, and unlike Vinet, he could not countenance the idea that Gallo-Roman cities might not generally have been walled in the first couple centuries of Roman rule.76 Such misapprehensions about the dating of ancient monuments not only helped urban historians lay claim to specific Gallic oppida mentioned by Caesar to flesh out the pasts of their own communities but they also encouraged the general assumptions of continuity between Gallic population centers, Gallo-Roman administrative capitals, and French provincial cities that was becoming so important to their overall understanding of local history.
These arguments about the ancient origins of French provincial cities were important, moreover, not just for the prestige that a long history could convey but also for the specific privileges that an ancient past could help justify. In 1560, for example, the towns of Autun and Beaune entered into a dispute over which community would have the right of precedence in the meetings of the provincial estates of Burgundy and whether Autun’s deputies would retain the right to vote immediately after the mayor of Dijon. In making the case for his hometown of Autun before the Parlement of Burgundy ten years later, a young Pierre Jeannin (who ended his career as surintendant des finances [superintendant of finance] under Louis xiii) argued that Autun’s great age and dignity justified its deputies’ traditional right to sit and opine after those of Dijon. Clearly associating Autun with the ancient Bibracte, Jeannin described it as the most powerful town in ancient Gaul, whose citizens were the only Gauls to be honored with the title of brothers, companions, and confederates of the Roman people.77 In his rebuttal on behalf of the town of Beaune, by contrast, Guillaume Rouhier set out to show that “the celebrity of the town of Autun … was nothing but a gust or plaything of fortune” that would pass from one locale to another, and thus, it was not the past but the present that should count in determining precedence. Nevertheless, he asserted, if antiquity were considered, then Beaune’s claim was superior to Autun’s, since it was clear that the principal town of the ancient Aedui was Beaune, the modern descendant of Bibracte.78 This view that Beaune was in fact on the site of Bibracte and thus could claim the prestige of once being the head city of the Aedui, one of the most powerful Gallic peoples in the period before the Roman conquest, surfaced repeatedly in the legal context. Thus, Estienne Bouchin, procureur du roi, also insisted in a pleading first published in 1618 that Beaune was the ancient Bibracte and cited Vigenère’s opinion in corroboration.79 By this time, Autun’s rights of precedence in the provincial estates of Burgundy had been secured, but the relative positions of the deputies of Beaune, Chalon-sur-Saône, Nuits, and Saint-Jean-de-Losne were still in dispute. In upholding the rights of Chalon, therefore, lawyer Bernard Durand pointed to the clear references in Caesar’s Gallic War to the Roman general’s establishing a grain magazine on the location of his town (despite the doubts of the representatives of Nuits), while firmly denying that Beaune could have been Caesar’s Bibracte.80 Although historians’ concerns to ascertain the identity and location of the various Gallic towns mentioned by Caesar certainly reflected a genuine historical interest, they also took on a definite practical importance as rival towns competed for the special rights and privileges that characterized the French royal system.
The origins and early history of French towns were thus of fundamental importance to local historians and their readers in the early modern period. As we have seen, by the early sixteenth century, even very small communities had developed their own foundation stories, and these traditional accounts proved remarkably persistent. Even after it was no longer plausible to hold that Caesar had founded numerous French towns or desirable to claim a Trojan origin, these kinds of historical traditions endured. At the same time, the increasing familiarity with classical texts and critical reading skills associated with the humanist movement opened new vistas for understanding the ancient history of local communities, just as greater knowledge of classical antiquities permitted a much finer delineation of a town’s significance in the Gallo-Roman period. These kinds of changes in historical methodology and understanding were far from uniform, however, since even many scholars who possessed real insight into some aspects of classical history could remain remarkably wedded to seemingly contradictory viewpoints. Further, the new antiquarian focus brought with it its own questionable assumptions, such as the incontrovertible continuity of French history from the Gauls to the present day. Yet, as Yardeni has pointed out, this focus on Gallic origins did much to integrate the individual histories of specific towns into a greater history of the French people, thus forming a notional bridge between local identities and a developing national sentiment. In continuing our discussion of the importance of origin stories for local historians in the next two chapters, therefore, we will be investigating in greater detail the enormous importance that urban history could play, both at the local level and in a greater understanding of the French past. First, in examining the ongoing rivalry between Clermont and Riom, two cities in Auvergne seeking to obtain the prestige and privileges consonant with a provincial capital, we will use this particularly rich example to explore how origin stories and urban history in general could be essential to legal argument, and conversely, how political rivalries could shape the concerns of local history. Second, we will delve into the question of how local historians used arguments about the Gauls, the Gallo-Romans, and the early Christian church to define Frenchness and to place their communities within the wider entity of the kingdom. Although some local historians used their community’s early history to argue for its essential importance and loyalty to the French crown, others invoked the example of the Gauls to imagine alternative political structures to the French monarchy as it existed in the early modern period.
Poldo d’Albenas, Dicovrs historial, 89.
Lemerle, La Renaissance et les antiquités de la Gaule, especially 59–61; Richard Cooper, “Humanistes et antiquaires à Lyon,” in Il Rinascimento a Lione, ed. Antonio Possenti and Giulia Mastrangelo, 2 vols. (Rome: Edizioni Dell’Ateneo, 1988), 1:159–74; Cooper, “Histoire et archéologie de la Gascogne antique.” By contrast, Alain Schnapp is quite dismissive of French antiquarians of the sixteenth century in La conquête du passé: Aux origines de l’archéologie (Paris: Carré, 1993), 132–34.
Beaune, Birth of an Ideology; Asher, National Myths in Renaissance France; Dubois, Celtes et Gaulois.
Yardeni, “Histoires de villes, histoires de provinces,” 132–34.
Tallon, Conscience nationale, 27–36.
Bourdigné, Chroniques d’Anjou, 1:34–41. In the early seventeenth century, local historian Jean Hiret commented that many believed that Bourdigné’s account of the origins of Angers was a fable but reproduced it in full anyway. See Jean Hiret, Des antiqvitez d’Aniov … (Angers: Anthoine Hernault, 1618), 14–17.
Belleforest, Cosmographie universelle, second pagination, 43–46. Belleforest ascribes this information to La Croix du Maine, native of Le Mans. The story was repeated by seventeenth-century historians of Le Mans, with some doubts to its truthfulness but no clear alternative explanation. See Trouillart, Memoires des comtes dv Maine, 1–2; Le Corvaisier de Courteilles, Histoire des evesqves dv Mans, 9.
Bouchart, Grandes croniques de Bretaigne, 204–5; Nicolay, Description générale du Bourbonnais, 41.
Bourdigné, Chroniques d’Anjou, 41.
Jean Balsamo, “La cité humaniste: Topiques urbaines et tradition hodoeporique à la fin de la Renaissance,” in Cités humanistes, cités politiques (1400–1600), ed. Élisabeth Crouzet-Pavan, Denis Crouzet, and Philippe Desan (Paris: pups, 2014), 201–22, at 203.
Cl. B. [Claude Barthélemy] Bernard, Histoire de Rhion chef d’Avvergne, en vulguere François … (Lyon: Jean d’Ogerolles, 1559), 82–103. Bernard claimed that he had merely translated this work from Latin, but if he did so, he certainly adapted it to reflect on the contemporary rivalry between Riom and Clermont. Josiane Teyssot asserts that he created the story as a counterweight to a supposed tradition of Trojan origins at Clermont. See “Les légendes troyennes et grecques dans les villes d’Auvergne à la Renaissance,” in Lamazou-Duplan, “Ab urbe condita,” 365–73. For this rivalry and the part that historical claims played in it, see chapter 5.
Corrozet, La fleur des antiquitez, 5–15.
Corrozet, Les antiquitez, chroniqves, et singvlaritez de Paris (1561), 5r, quotation at 6v. For the way that subsequent sixteenth-century editions of the Antiquitez de Paris described the city’s origins, see Bernstein “Cosmography, Local History, and National Sentiment,” 49–50.
Pasquier, Les recherches de la France, 1:260–64, 266–72. These passages were first published in 1560.
[Claude Fauchet], Recveil des antiqvitez gavloises et françoises (Paris: Jacques du Puys, 1579).
Chaumeau, Histoire de Berry, 57; Vinet, L’antiqvite de Saintes, A4r–v.
Régine Monpays, “L’image du Languedoc chez les historiens de cette province au XVIIe siècle,” Annales du Midi: Revue archéologique, historique et philologique de la France méridionale 110, no. 221 (January–March 1998): 25–40; Christelle Péréra, “Le mythe tectosage dans l’historiographie Toulousaine de l’époque moderne,” Annales du Midi: Revue archéologique, historique et philologique de la France méridionale 110, no. 221 (January–March 1998): 57–70; Darnalt, Remonstrance, 22r–23r.
Vinet, L’antiqvite de Saintes, A2r–v. For a major example of such misdating, see [Nicolas Nault], Histoire de l’ancienne Bibracte, appresent appellée Autun … (Autun: Bernard Lamothe-Tort, [1688]).
Chaumeau, Histoire de Berry, 251.
Nicolas Catherinot, Les dominatevrs de Berry … ([Bourges, 1684]), 1.
Chaumeau, Histoire de Berry, 267, 270, 275; Nicolas de Nicolay, Description dv Berry et diocèse de Bovrges au XVIe … , ed. Victor Advielle (Paris: Auguste Aubry and Dumoulin, 1865), 43, 58.
Thaumas de la Thaumassière, Histoire de Berry, 371, 394–95.
Chaumeau, Histoire de Berry, 254; Thaumas de la Thaumassière, Histoire de Berry, 353.
Chaumeau, Histoire de Berry, 249; Nicolay, Description dv Berry, 90; Nicolay, Description générale de la ville de Lyon, xi.
Jean de Léry, “Histoire mémorable du siège de Sancerre (1573),” in Au lendemain de la Saint-Barthélemy: Guerre civile et famine, ed. Géralde Nakam (Paris: Anthropos, 1975), 175–361, at 193.
Thaumas de la Thaumassière, Histoire de Berry, 402–3, 445, quotation at 402.
Anthony Grafton, Defenders of the Text: The Traditions of Scholarship in an Age of Science, 1450–1800 (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1991), 96–101; Grafton, What Was History?, 99–101, 245–47. Rothstein likewise notes the longevity of Annius of Viterbo’s Antiquities among French authors in “Reception of Annius of Viterbo’s Forgeries.”
See chapter 8 for further detail on Bergier and his place within the early seventeenth-century Republic of Letters.
Bergier, Le dessein de l’histoire de Reims, 294, 300–4.
Ibid., 33–34, 109, 112–13, 121–55, 166–67, quotation at 166.
Ibid., 301, 360–62.
Ibid., 436–40, 442–46.
Ibid., e3r.
Ibid., 398–412, 431, 448.
Pierre Cocquault, Table chronologiqve extraite svr l’histoire de l’église, ville, et province de Reims: Composée par feu M. Pierre Cocquault prétre, chanoine de l’eglise de Reims … (Reims: La Vefue François Bernard, 1650), 1–3; René de la Chèze, Le Remvs gavlois: A Monseignevr, Monseignevr le dvc de Rethelois lievtanant general & gouuerneur pour le roy en ses prouinces de Champagne & Brie; Au jour de son entrée à Reims, le 12. septembre 1618 … (Reims: Nicolas Constant, [1618]), A2r, B1r; La Chèze, Le roy triomphant, ov la statve eqvestre de l’Invincible Monarqve Lovys le Ivste, XIII. dv nom, roy de France et de Navarre: Posée sur le front de l’hostel de-ville de Reims, à la gloire de sa majesté, l’an M. DC. XXXVI; Ensemble d’autres pieces sur le mesme sujet … (Reims: François Bernard, 1637), A1r–A4r. See chapter 8 for more discussion.
Bergier, Le dessein de l’histoire de Reims, 349–59.
[Nicolas] Catherinot, La main de Scevola … ([Bourges, 1682]), 1–3, 9; Catherinot, Le patriarchat de Bourges … (Bourges: Jean Cristo, 1681), 1; Labbe, Histoire dv Berry, 11–13; Thaumas de la Thaumassière, Histoire de Berry, 4–5.
“Discours de l’anticque fondation de la ville de Limoges, et entrée de sa magesté en icelle,” in Ruben, Registres consulaires de la ville de Limoges, 3:85–86; Chenu, Recueil des antiquitez, 472–73.
When Jean Fayen, physician, provided Maurice Bouguereau with information on Limoges for his Théâtre françois, he was clearly familiar with the figure of Lemovix but asserted that it was useless to speculate on the city’s origins. See Bouguereau, Le theatre francois, “Au roy” and xi r.
Antoine Noguier, Histoire tolosaine … (Toulouse: G. Boudeville, 1559), 56.
“So[m]maire de ce que iay peu trouuer de Valence sur le Rhodne. Extraict de Mr. Medard du Cluset,” 7r, and “En vn liure fort ancien escript a la main en parchemin de lectre fort caduque estant en la possession de Noble Clemens Faure de Valence cest trouue ce que sensuit,” BnF ms fr. 209, 11r, quotation at 7r.
Jean-Loup Lemaître, “Sainte Valérie, mythe ou réalité?,” in Valérie et Thomas Becket: De l’influence des princes Plantagenêt dans l’œuvre de Limoges (Limoges: Musée municipal de l’Évêché/Musée de l’Émail, 1999), 19–45, at 25. For more analysis of the historical relevance of the cult of St. Valérie, see chapter 6.
Jean Tricard, “Limoges Secunda Roma: Histoire et amour du pays dans les Annales manuscrites de Limoges (1638),” in Le Limousin, pays et identité: Enquêtes d’histoire (de l’antiquité au XXIe siècle), ed. Jean Tricard, Philippe Grandcoing, and Robert Chanaud (Limoges: Pulim, 2006), 489–504, at 492. This borrowing is apparent in that the anonymous author reproduced all the details provided by the earlier manuscript.
Rothstein, “Reception of Annius of Viterbo’s Forgeries,” 601–2, makes a similar argument for a writer such as Guy Le Fèvre de la Boderie, who despite his learning, continued to make use of Annius’s forged writings in his Galliade in the 1570s–80s, because “his project simply cannot do without the Antiquities” (602).
Saint-Julien, Discovrs de l’illvstre, et tres-ancienne cité d’Avtvn, 188.
Edme Thomas, Histoire de l’antique cité d’Autun par Edme Thomas, official, grand-chantre et chanoine de la cathédrale de cette ville, mort en 1660 (n.p.: Éditions de la Tour Gile, 1993), 311.
This is the argument that Saint-Julien made on behalf of Autun in Discovrs de l’illvstre, et tres-ancienne cité d’Avtvn, 195–96.
Ramsay MacMullen, Romanization in the Time of Augustus (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2000), 93; J. [John] F. Drinkwater, Roman Gaul: The Three Provinces, 58 BC–AD 260 (London: Croom Helm, 1983), 21; Cooper, “Humanistes et antiquaires à Lyon”; Paradin, Mémoires de l’histoire de Lyon, 5–6; Nicolay, Description générale de la ville de Lyon, 19–20.
Peter H. Meurer, “Synonymia-Thesaurus-Nomenclator: Ortelius’ Dictionaries of Ancient Geographical Place Names,” in Abraham Ortelius and the First Atlas: Essays Commemorating the Quadricentennial of His Death, 1598–1998, ed. Marcel van den Broecke, Peter van der Krogt, and Peter H. Meurer (Houten: hes Publishers, 1998), 331–46.
Blaise de Vigenère, ed. and trans., Les “Commentaires” de Cesar, des gverres de la Gavle … Auec quelques annotations dessus (Paris: Nicolas Chesneau & Jean Poupy, 1576); Vigenère, ed. and trans., Les “Commentaires” de Jules César, des guerres de la Gaule: Plus ceux des guerres civiles, contre la part pompeienne … (Paris: Abel L’Angelier, 1589); Guillaume du Bellay, Epitome de l’antiqvite des Gavles et de France … (Paris: Vincent Sertenas, 1556); [Fauchet], Recveil des antiqvitez gavloises et françoises.
[Nicolas] Sanson, Remarqves svr la carte de l’ancienne Gavle tirée des “Commentaires” de Cesar … (Paris: Augustin Courbé, 1657 [1649]); Labbe, La geographie royalle, 1st ed., 1645.
[Nicolas Catherinot], Le vray Avaric … ([Bourges, 1683]), 6.
Chaumeau, Histoire de Berry, 57, 236.
Vigenère, Les “Commentaires” de Ivles César, des gverres de la Gavle, “Annotations,” 254–55; Fauchet, Recveil des antiqvitez gavloises et françoises, 37v.
L. [Louis] Jarry, Une correspondance littéraire au XVIe siècle: Pierre Daniel, avocat du Parlement de Paris, et les érudits de son temps; D’après les documents inédits de la bibliothèque de Berne (Orléans: H. Herluison, 1876), 39.
Labbe, Histoire dv Berry, 20; Catherinot, Le vray Avaric, 3.
Jean Lebeuf, Mémoires sur l’histoire d’Auxerre (1743), quoted in Victor Pelletier, “Gien-sur-Loire et le Genabum des Commentaires de César,” Mémoires de la Société archéologique de l’Orléanais 9 (1866): 159–70, at 168.
Collin, “Question de Genabum: Existe-t-il des vestiges apparents d’un pont dans le lit de la Loire, en face de Gien-le-Vieux?,” Mémoires de la Société archéologique de l’Orléanais 9 (1866): 253–90.
Nicolay, Description dv Berry, 25–27, 50–51.
Chaumeau, Histoire de Berry, 57.
For example, Binet, “Trois dialogues de l’antiquité de Meung sur Loire,” BnF ms fr. 5408, 3v; Bergier, Le dessein de l’histoire de Reims, 55.
Labbe, Histoire dv Berry, 17–18.
Vigenère, Les “Commentaires” de Ivles César, des gverres de la Gavle, “Annotations,” 255; Perrot d’Ablancourt, trans., Les “Commentaires” de César: Troisiesme edition, reveve et corrigee (Paris: Augustin Courbé, 1658); Sanson, Remarqves svr la carte de l’ancienne Gavle, 4, 17; Fauchet, Recveil des antiqvitez gavloises et françoises, 37v.
Sanson, Remarqves svr la carte de l’ancienne Gavle, eii v–eiii r, 4.
Ibid., eiii r–eiv v.
Ibid., 17.
Ibid., 39.
Guy Coquille, Les oeuvres de Maistre Guy Coquille sieur de Romenay, contenant plusieurs traitez touchant les libertez de l’eglise gallicane, l’histoire de France & le droit françois … Tome I (Bordeaux: Claude Labottiere, 1703), 297, col. 1, 299, col. 1.
MacMullen, Romanization in the Time of Augustus, 93; Drinkwater, Roman Gaul, 22, 141–42.
Stephan Fichtl, Les peuples gaulois IIIe–Ier siècle av. J.-C. (Paris: Errance, 2012), 210–11, 213–14, 217–18, 222–23; Drinkwater, Roman Gaul, 143.
MacMullen, Romanization in the Time of Augustus, 93; Robert Bedon, “La naissance des premières villes en Gaule intérieure durant la période de La Tène finale,” in La naissance de la ville dans l’antiquité, ed. Michel Reddé et al. (Paris: De Boccard, 2003), 195–214, at 196.
For more discussion of historians’ conceptions of Gaul and France and their views of the establishment of Christian churches in France, see chapter 6.
Saint-Julien, Discovrs de l’illvstre, et tres-ancienne cité d’Avtvn, 191–92, 195–96.
Thomas, Histoire de l’antique cité d’Autun, 25.
Ibid., 62.
Ibid., 19; Coquille, Les oeuvres de Maistre Guy Coquille, 297, col. 1; Vinet, L’antiqvité de Bovrdeavs, Di r–v. Since most Gallo-Roman cities were not fortified until the late third century, at the earliest, Autun’s walls could certainly look old in the middle of the fourth century if they were built earlier. See Simon T. Loseby, “Decline and Change in the Cities of Late Antique Gaul,” in Die Stadt in der Spätantike: Niedergang oder Wandel?, ed. Jens-Uwe Krause and Christian Witschel (Stuttgart: Franz Steiner Verlag, 2006), 67–104, at 76–77.
“Arrêt du Parlement de Dijon su sujet du droit de préséance de la ville d’Autun sur la ville de Beaune, précédé du plaidoyer de l’avocat Pierre Jeannin en faveur de sa ville natale: 30 janvier 1570,” in Hippolyte Abord, Histoire de la Réforme et de la Ligue dans la ville d’Autun, vol. 3 (Autun: Dejussieu Père et Fils, 1886), 165–66, 172–73.
“Arrêt du Parlement de Dijon su sujet du droit de préséance de la ville d’Autun sur la ville de Beaune,” in Abord, Histoire de la Réforme et de la Ligue dans la ville d’Autun, 176, 178, quotation at 176.
Estienne Bouchin, Plaidoyez et conclvsions prises par M. Estienne Bovchin, sr de Varennes, pendant l’exercice de sa charge de conseiller & procureur du roy, aux cours royales à Beaune: Seconde edition augmentee d’autres plaidoyez (Paris: Claude Morel, 1620), 152–54. Vigenère indeed identifies Bibracte as Beaune in Les “Commentaires” de Cesar, des gverres de la Gavle (23), but strangely, given this identification, calls the Aedui the “Authunois” throughout the rest of his work.
Bernard Durand, “Defence povr les maire, eschevins, & syndic de la ville & cité de Chalon sur la Saone appellez, contre les manans & habitans des villes de Nuicts, & S. Iean de Losne, appellans pardeuant messieurs nos seigneurs du Parlement de Dijon, au fait de la preseance en l’assemblée generale des Estats du duché de Bourgongne, & comtés adjacentes [sic],” in Privileges octroyez avx maires, eschevins, bovrgeois et habitans de la ville & cité de Chalon sur Saone, par les anciens roys de France & ducs de Bourgogne, confirmez par leurs successeurs, & verifiez és cours souueraines … (Lyon: Pierre Cusset, 1660), 4, 23.