La grand-chambre de l'hostal des Carcassonne à Montpellier

Abstract

The great hall of the hostal of the Carcassonne family at Montpellier. An exceptional recent discovery has provided an unexpected and fascinating addition to our knowledge of the great medieval patrician residences in Montpellier. It concerns wall paintings and a decorated ceiling with various heraldic and iconographic motifs that can be attributed to the Carcassonne family, an important bourgeois house that prospered in Montpellier during the century and a half when that city was part of the kingdom of Aragon and then Majorca. The oft repeated heraldic charge that allows this attribution is a «talking-heraldry» bell with handle, covered with fleurs de lys. A frieze picturing the story of Saint Eustache, patron saint of drapers, alludes to the professional activity of the masters of the house : the fashioning of scarlet cloth, a great speciality which Montpellier exported at that time as far as the Near East, and which was the basis of its fortune. A dendrochronological analysis has situated the construction of the residence around 1370. This discovery confirms the important role of the great capitalises in Montpellier in the transformation of the residential dwellings in the central quarters of the city. It also helps us to understand how international exchange led to bonds between the patrician architecture of that city and other mercantile centres in the western Mediterranean.