VII. The Papal Palace and other Fourteenth-Century Buildings at Sorgues near Avignon

Abstract

John XXII, elected as the second of the Avignon popes on 7 August 1316 at the age of seventy-two, built extensively in the territories around that city as well as initiating works in Avignon itself. In 1318 he began the construction of a palace on the edge of the small town of Sorgues, situated some nine kilometres north of Avignon at a point on the line of the old Roman road to Orange where there was a bridge across the river Ouvèze, a major tributary of the Rhône. This paper considers the evidence for the palace, including the surviving remains of the structure which are published here for the first time, and for certain contemporary buildings in Sorgues, in particular the house at 27 Rue de la Tour in which a series of late fourteenth-century frescoes was uncovered in 1936. These researches began with an architectural study of this ‘Maison des Fresques’, but it soon became clear that such investigations raised wider questions involving the interpretation of documentary and archaeological evidence relevant both to the palace and to the medieval topography of the town.