The Medieval Pyrenees - Catalonia, Roussillon & the Comté de Foix

During the Middle Ages the Pyrenees supported two very distinct ways of life: the fundamentally urban civilisation of the coastal reaches, mercantile in ambition and Mediterranean in outlook, and that unsung, tireless village culture which flourished in the high places and valleys inland.

Here in the remote mountains a rural and essentially feudal Christianity emerged, consecrated in innumerable small Romanesque churches and largely immune to news from elsewhere. The mediator was monasticism, introduced uncertainly at first but becoming in fact a vehicle of political will under the mighty Oliba of Cerdagne. 

Oliba’s early foundations at Ripoll and Cuxa embody this ambition and are among the seminal essays of Romanesque architecture in Europe. They found a reflection in the parish churches of the High Pyrenees and, moderated by the vernacular of Catalonia, resulted in some of the most serene and beautiful buildings of twelfth-century Europe. Even more remarkably, these churches were largely spared the calamities of the post–Renaissance period, leaving their glorious marble sculpture intact and preserving, albeit often in museums, the finest of their paintings.

These early achievements were enhanced by the arrival of the Cistercians, invited by Count Ramón Berenguer to fill the void left by the expulsion of the Moors from south-western Catalonia, and their monasteries at Poblet and Santes Creus remain even more complete than Fontenay or Fossanova. Neither were the cities neglected: ever more responsive to distant developments, Girona, Barcelona and Lérida were provided with cathedrals of the first rank. Shortly after came that extraordinary flowering of late medieval mercantile culture which transformed the previously neglected market towns of the north, St-Girons, Foix and St-Bertrand-de-Comminges.