Aquitaine
Aquitaine, archaic Guyenne/Guienne, is a historical region of France and a former administrative region of the country. Since 1 January 2016 it has been part of the region Nouvelle-Aquitaine, it is situated in the south-western part of Metropolitan France, along the Atlantic Ocean and the Pyrenees mountain range on the border with Spain. It is composed of the five departments of Dordogne, Lot-et-Garonne, Pyrénées-Atlantiques and Gironde. In the Middle Ages, Aquitaine was a duchy, whose boundaries fluctuated considerably. There are traces of human settlement by prehistoric peoples in the Périgord, but the earliest attested inhabitants in the south-west were the Aquitani, who were not proper Celtic people, but more akin to the Iberians. Although a number of different languages and dialects were in use in the area during ancient times, it is most that the prevailing language of Aquitaine during the late pre-historic to Roman period was an early form of the Basque language; this has been demonstrated by various Aquitanian names and words that were recorded by the Romans, which are easily readable as Basque.
Whether this Aquitanian language was a remnant of a Vasconic language group that once extended much farther, or it was limited to the Aquitaine/Basque region is not known. One reason the language of Aquitaine is important is because Basque is the last surviving non-Indo-European language in western Europe and it has had some effect on the languages around it, including Spanish and, to a lesser extent, French; the original Aquitania at the time of Caesar's conquest of Gaul included the area bounded by the Garonne River, the Pyrenees and the Atlantic Ocean. The name may stem from Latin'aqua', maybe derived from the town "Aquae Augustae", "Aquae Tarbellicae" or just "Aquis" or as a more general geographical feature. Under Augustus' Roman rule, since 27 BC the province of Aquitania was further stretched to the north to the River Loire, thus including proper Gaul tribes along with old Aquitani south of the Garonne within the same region. In 392, the Roman imperial provinces were restructured as Aquitania Prima, Aquitania Secunda and Aquitania Tertia, better known as Novempopulania in the south-west.
Accounts of Aquitania during the Early Middle Ages are a blur, lacking precision, but there was much unrest. The Visigoths were called into Gaul as foederati, they established themselves as the de facto rulers in south-west Gaul as central Roman rule collapsed. Visigoths established their capital in Toulouse. In 507, they were expelled south to Hispania after their defeat in the Battle of Vouillé by the Franks, who became the new rulers in the area to the south of the Loire; the Roman Aquitania Tertia remained in place as Novempopulania, where a duke was appointed to hold a grip over the Basques. These dukes were quite detached from central Frankish overlordship, sometimes governing as independent rulers with strong ties to their kinsmen south of the Pyrenees; as of 660, the foundations for an independent Aquitaine/Vasconia polity were established by the duke Felix of Aquitaine, a magnate from Toulouse of Gallo-Roman stock. Despite its nominal submission to the Merovingians, the ethnic make-up of new realm Aquitaine wasn't Frankish, but Gallo-Roman north of the Garonne and main towns and Basque south of the Garonne.
A united Basque-Aquitanian realm reached its heyday under Odo the Great's rule. In 721, the Aquitanian duke fended Umayyad troops off at Toulouse, but in 732, an Umayyad expedition commanded by Abdul Rahman Al Ghafiqi defeated Odo next to Bordeaux, went on to loot its way up to Poitiers. Odo was required to pledge allegiance to the Frankish Charles Martel in exchange for help against the advancing Arabic forces. Basque-Aquitanian self-rule temporarily came to a halt in 768 after the assassination of Waifer. In 781, Charlemagne decided to proclaim his son Louis King of Aquitaine within the Carolingian Empire, ruling over a realm comprising the Duchy of Aquitaine and the Duchy of Vasconia He suppressed various Basque uprisings venturing into the lands of Pamplona past the Pyrenees after ravaging Gascony, with a view to imposing his authority in the Vasconia to south of Pyrenees. According to his biography, he achieved everything he wanted and after staying overnight in Pamplona, on his way back his army was attacked in Roncevaux in 812, but narrowly escaped an engagement at the Pyrenean passes.
Seguin, count of Bordeaux and Duke of Vasconia, seemed to have attempted a detachment from the Frankish central authority on Charlemagne's death. The new emperor Louis the Pious reacted by removing him from his capacity, which stirred the Basques into rebellion; the king in turn sent his troops to the territory, obtaining their submission in two campaigns and killing the duke, while his family crossed the Pyrenees and continued to foment risings against Frankish power. In 824, the 2nd Battle of Roncevaux took place, in which counts Aeblus and Aznar, Frankish vassals from the Duchy of Vasconia sent by the new King of Aquitaine, were captured by the joint forces of Iñigo Arista and the Banu Qasi. Before Pepin's death, emperor Louis had appointed a new king in 832, his son Charles the Bald, while the Aquitanian lords elected Pepin II as king; this struggle for control of the kingdom led to
Tour Pey Berland
Tour Pey Berland, named for its patron Pey Berland, is located in Bordeaux at the Place Pey Berland next to Cathédrale Saint-André. Its construction was from 1440 to 1500 at the initiative of the archbishop of the same name. Crowned a steeple, it has remained isolated from the rest of the Cathedral to protect the Cathedral from the vibrations of the bells. After the completion, the church had no money for the purchase of bells, therefore the tower was used for housing until 1790. After 1790, a lead factory was set up in the tower. Bells were installed after 1851 and the tower began to be used for its original purpose
Bust of Cardinal Escoubleau de Sourdis
The Bust of Cardinal Escoubleau de Sourdis is a marble portrait sculpture by the Italian artist Gian Lorenzo Bernini. Executed in 1622, the work depicts François de Sourdis, it is in the Musée d'Aquitaine in Bordeaux, France. Notes Bibliography
Gian Lorenzo Bernini
Gian Lorenzo Bernini was an Italian sculptor and architect. While a major figure in the world of architecture, he was and more prominently, the leading sculptor of his age, credited with creating the Baroque style of sculpture; as one scholar has commented, "What Shakespeare is to drama, Bernini may be to sculpture: the first pan-European sculptor whose name is instantaneously identifiable with a particular manner and vision, whose influence was inordinately powerful...." In addition, he was a painter and a man of the theater: he wrote and acted in plays, for which he designed stage sets and theatrical machinery. He produced designs as well for a wide variety of decorative art objects including lamps, tables and coaches; as architect and city planner, he designed secular buildings, churches and public squares, as well as massive works combining both architecture and sculpture elaborate public fountains and funerary monuments and a whole series of temporary structures for funerals and festivals.
His broad technical versatility, boundless compositional inventiveness and sheer skill in manipulating marble ensured that he would be considered a worthy successor of Michelangelo, far outshining other sculptors of his generation. His talent extended beyond the confines of sculpture to a consideration of the setting in which it would be situated. Bernini was born in Naples in 1598 to Angelica Galante and Mannerist sculptor Pietro Bernini from Florence, he was the sixth of their thirteen children. Gian Lorenzo Bernini was the definition of childhood genius, he was “recognized as a prodigy when he was only eight years old, he was encouraged by his father, Pietro. His precocity earned him the admiration and favor of powerful patrons who hailed him as ‘the Michelangelo of his century’”. In 1606 his father received a papal commission and so moved from Naples to Rome, taking his entire family with him and continuing in earnest the training of his son Gian Lorenzo. Several extant works, dating from circa 1615-20, are by general scholarly consensus, collaborative efforts by both father and son: they include the Faun Teased by Putti, Boy with a Dragon, the Aldobrandini Four Seasons, the discovered Bust of the Savior.
Sometime after the arrival of the Bernini family in Rome, word about the great talent of the boy Gian Lorenzo got around and he soon caught the attention of Cardinal Scipione Borghese, nephew to the reigning pope, Paul V, who spoke of the boy genius to his uncle. Bernini was therefore presented before Pope Paul V, curious to see if the stories about Gian Lorenzo's talent were true; the boy improvised a sketch of Saint Paul for the marveling pope, this was the beginning of the pope’s attention on this young talent. Once he was brought to Rome, he left its walls, except for a five-month stay in Paris in the service of King Louis XIV and brief trips to nearby towns for work-related reasons. Rome was Bernini’s city: “‘You are made for Rome,’ said Pope Urban VIII to him, ‘and Rome for you’”, it was in this world of 17th-century Rome and the international religious-political power which resided there that Bernini created his greatest works. Bernini's works are therefore characterized as perfect expressions of the spirit of the assertive, triumphal but self-defensive Counter Reformation Roman Catholic Church.
Bernini was a man of his times and religious, but he and his artistic production should not be reduced to instruments of the papacy and its political-doctrinal programs, an impression, at times communicated by the works of the three most eminent Bernini scholars of the previous generation, Rudolf Wittkower, Howard Hibbard, Irving Lavin. As Tomaso Montanari's recent revisionist monograph, La libertà di Bernini argues and Franco Mormando's anti-hagiographic biography, Bernini: His Life and His Rome, illustrates and his artistic vision maintained a certain degree of freedom from the mindset and mores of Counter-Reformaton Roman Catholicism. Under the patronage of the extravagantly wealthy and most powerful Cardinal Scipione Borghese, the young Bernini rose to prominence as a sculptor. Among his early works for the cardinal were decorative pieces for the garden of the Villa Borghese such as The Goat Amalthea with the Infant Jupiter and a Faun. Other allegorical busts date to this period, including the so-called Damned Soul and Blessed Soul of circa 1619, which may have been influenced by a set of prints by Pieter de Jode I but which were in fact unambiguously cataloged in the inventory of their first documented owner, Fernando de Botinete y Acevedo, as depicting a nymph and a satyr, a paired duo in ancient sculpture.
By the time he was twenty-two, Bernini was considered talented enough to have been given a commission for a papal portrait, the Bust of Pope Paul V, n
Système universitaire de documentation
The système universitaire de documentation or SUDOC is a system used by the libraries of French universities and higher education establishments to identify and manage the documents in their possession. The catalog, which contains more than 10 million references, allows students and researcher to search for bibliographical and location information in over 3,400 documentation centers, it is maintained by the Bibliographic Agency for Higher Education. Official website
Bordeaux
Bordeaux is a port city on the Garonne in the Gironde department in Southwestern France. The municipality of Bordeaux proper has a population of 252,040. Together with its suburbs and satellite towns, Bordeaux is the centre of the Bordeaux Métropole. With 1,195,335 in the metropolitan area, it is the sixth-largest in France, after Paris, Lyon and Lille, it is the capital of the Nouvelle-Aquitaine region, as well as the prefecture of the Gironde department. Its inhabitants are called "Bordelais" or "Bordelaises"; the term "Bordelais" may refer to the city and its surrounding region. Being at the center of a major wine-growing and wine-producing region, Bordeaux remains a prominent powerhouse and exercises significant influence on the world wine industry although no wine production is conducted within the city limits, it is home to the world's main wine fair and the wine economy in the metro area takes in 14.5 billion euros each year. Bordeaux wine has been produced in the region since the 8th century.
The historic part of the city is on the UNESCO World Heritage List as "an outstanding urban and architectural ensemble" of the 18th century. After Paris, Bordeaux has the highest number of preserved historical buildings of any city in France. In historical times, around 567 BC it was the settlement of a Celtic tribe, the Bituriges Vivisci, who named the town Burdigala of Aquitanian origin; the name Bourde is still the name of a river south of the city. In 107 BC, the Battle of Burdigala was fought by the Romans who were defending the Allobroges, a Gallic tribe allied to Rome, the Tigurini led by Divico; the Romans were defeated and their commander, the consul Lucius Cassius Longinus, was killed in the action. The city fell under Roman rule around its importance lying in the commerce of tin and lead, it became capital of Roman Aquitaine, flourishing during the Severan dynasty. In 276 it was sacked by the Vandals. Further ravage was brought by the same Vandals in 409, the Visigoths in 414, the Franks in 498, beginning a period of obscurity for the city.
In the late 6th century, the city re-emerged as the seat of a county and an archdiocese within the Merovingian kingdom of the Franks, but royal Frankish power was never strong. The city started to play a regional role as a major urban center on the fringes of the newly founded Frankish Duchy of Vasconia. Around 585, Gallactorius is fighting the Basque people; the city was plundered by the troops of Abd er Rahman in 732 after they stormed the fortified city and overwhelmed the Aquitanian garrison. Duke Eudes mustered a force ready to engage the Umayyads outside Bordeaux taking them on in the Battle of the River Garonne somewhere near the river Dordogne; the battle had a high death toll. Although Eudes was defeated here, he saved part of his troops and kept his grip on Aquitaine after the Battle of Poitiers. In 735, the Aquitanian duke Hunald led a rebellion after his father Eudes's death, at which Charles responded by sending an expedition that captured and plundered Bordeaux again, but did not retain it for long.
The following year, the Frankish commander descended again to Aquitaine, but clashed in battle with the Aquitanians and left to take on hostile Burgundian authorities and magnates. In 745, Aquitaine faced yet another expedition by Charles's sons Pepin and Carloman, against Hunald, the Aquitanian princeps strong in Bordeaux. Hunald was defeated, his son Waifer replaced him, confirmed Bordeaux as the capital city. During the last stage of the war against Aquitaine, it was one of Waifer's last important strongholds to fall to King Pepin the Short's troops. Next to Bordeaux, Charlemagne built the fortress of Fronsac on a hill across the border with the Basques, where Basque commanders came over to vow loyalty to him. In 778, Seguin was appointed count of Bordeaux undermining the power of the Duke Lupo, leading to the Battle of Roncevaux Pass that year. In 814, Seguin was made Duke of Vasconia, but he was deposed in 816 for failing to suppress or sympathise with a Basque rebellion. Under the Carolingians, sometimes the Counts of Bordeaux held the title concomitantly with that of Duke of Vasconia.
They were meant to keep the Basques in check and defend the mouth of the Garonne from the Vikings when the latter appeared c. 844 in the region of Bordeaux. In Autumn 845, count Seguin II marched on the Vikings, who were assaulting Bordeaux and Saintes, but he was captured and executed. No bishops were mentioned during part of the 9th in Bordeaux. From the 12th to the 15th century, Bordeaux regained importance following the marriage of Duchess Eléonore of Aquitaine with the French-speaking Count Henri Plantagenet, born in Le Mans, who became, within months of their wedding, King Henry II of England; the city flourished due to the wine trade, the cathedral of St. André was built, it was the capital of an independent state under Edward, the Black Prince, but in the end, after the Battle of Castillon, it was annexed by France which extended its territory. The Château Trompette and the Fort du Hâ, built by Charles VII of France, were the symbols of the new domination, which however deprived the city of its wealth by halting the wine commerce with England.
In 1462, Bordeaux obtained a parliament, but regained importance only in the 16th century when it became the centre of the distribution of sugar and slaves from the West Indies along with the traditional wine. Bordeaux adhered to the Fronde
