Fortification and sovereign powers (1180-1340)

The fortified town of Carcassonne and its offshoots, the castles overlooking
the Black Mountain and Corbières foothills, form a superb heritage complex.
The architecture rises as a spectacular vertical extension of the rock. This
chain of fortresses is also an invitation to journey through history, to
discover other fortification systems, through which sovereign powers sought to
control, defend and monitor territories against enemies from within and
without.

The 2021 Carcassonne colloquium aimed to bring together historians, architects
and archaeologists from all over Europe to compare equivalent sovereign
systems on the European continent in the 13th and 14th centuries. The present
volume reflects the extraordinary breadth of these interactions. From daily
life to living under siege, from stone cutting to the implementation of
intricate building projects, from administration to project management, every
facet of these fortified networks is evoked, in widely varied contexts. They
showcase how much the Carcassonne ensemble is symbolic of a European, even
global, movement of appropriation and spatial organisation by different
societies.