. Montpellier, first noted in documents of the 10th century as a rural site, is located close to the Mediterranean in Languedoc. By the late 11th century, a bustling town of artisans and merchants had developed under divided political allegiance to the bishop of Maguelone and local lay lords of the Guilhem family. The king of Aragon and Majorca would replace the Guilhem as seigneurs in the 13th century. The king of France made his influence felt in the south increasingly after the Treaty of Meaux-Paris (1229), which brought Languedoc under Capetian domination following the Albigensian Crusade. In 1293, Philip IV the Fair purchased the episcopal quarter of Montpellier, and in 1349 Philip VI would acquire the seigneurial sector from the bankrupt Majorcan king James III for 120,000 écus.
The economic heyday of Montpellier was the 13th century. Northern French and Flemish cloth, dyed scarlet in Montpellier, was exported throughout the Mediterranean world. Spices, drugs, sugar, and silks of the East were imported by Montpelliérains and sold on the local markets or transshipped to centers of demand throughout the western Mediterranean basin and northwestern Europe. Montpellier grew to about 40,000 inhabitants by the early 14th century. Immigrants from Italy, Spain, and central France joined newcomers from the immediate hinterland. In the period 1250–1350, in conjunction with Aigues-Mortes, the major port for Levantine trade, and with Lattes, Agde, Collioure, and other smaller outlets to the sea, Montpellier acted as a fulcrum of trade and finance between the Mediterranean world, the Champagne fairs, and Paris. After the mid-14th century, Montpellier experienced a sharp demographic, economic, and political decline, occasioned by the Black Death, changes in the overall European economy and in Mediterranean trade, and, if one is to believe Petrarch’s commentary, by its incorporation into the French kingdom.
Montpellier was celebrated throughout the later Middle Ages for its schools. A medical school, founded by the year 1000, most likely by Jewish or Arab physicians, was incorporated in 1221, and a university uniting it with schools of law and the arts was chartered by Pope Nicholas IV in 1289. Petrarch studied here before going on to Bologna. The present-day school of medicine is located in the converted 14th-century bishop’s palace.
A Benedictine abbey was founded in Montpellier by Pope Urban V in 1364. The abbey church, which became the cathedral of Saint-Pierre in 1536 when the diocese of Montpellier was formed, dates in part from the 14th century, although much today is 19th-century neo-Gothic reconstruction. Designed by the Avignon architects Bernard de Manse and Bertrand Nougayrol, it consists of a wide nave without side aisles, but with side chapels in the Languedoc manner. Its unsculpted fortresslike façade has two towers and an awkward porch carried on two thick columns.
