LITTLE LOCAL HISTORY (1)
The SAULT country had a significant prehistoric population from the distant Mousterian age (Cave of l'Aubesier) to the late Stone Age (settlements at : Deffends, Oratoire, Buan, Meni, Fourches).
In pre-Roman times, the SAULT and ALBION countries were the seat of the people known as Albici/Albiens/Albiques, whose capital could have been the oppidum of Péréal near d'Apt. When Caesar, in the course of his struggle with Pompey, laid siege in 49 BC to Marseilles, the Albici were the only ones, he writes, to go to the help of the people of Marseilles, and, in his judgement, "... these Albiens were in no way inferior in valour to our own men."
In dependance on the city-state of Apta Julia, the region of SAULT (Saltus), with the Pax Romana of the Early Empire, experienced rapid growth, as did the valleys of the rivers Toulourenc, Anary, Jabron, Calavon and Largue, with the implantation of large rural estates (Villae) which were later abandoned at the time of the barbarian invasions during the Late Empire. From the 5th. to the 7th. centuries, the Visigoths (412), Burgundians, Ostrogoths (508), Lombards (576), then, a century later, the Saracens pursuing their conquest and destruction of the Roman Empire, invaded Provence and a large part of High Provence in successive waves.
|
In this latest period the Vale of SAULT was a place of refuge for the inhabitants of the ruined cities. The valley and surrounding mountains were to become a scene of intense life, and were to be, as Fernand Benoît writes, "the conservatory of the race and its traditions". At the beginning of 859 AD, pursued by the Normans who occupied the Rhone valley and Low Provence, and were advancing up the Durance valley, Charles I, king of Provence, great-grandson of Charlemagne, took refuge in SAULT, attended by ten bishops, all the great men of the kingdom and of the People's Assembly, in order to organise the reconquest of his kingdom. Until a few decades ago, it was believed that the first d'Agoult, then Marshal of the Empire, had received the fief of SAULT from the Empror Henri II in the 11th. C, but recently uncovered documents establish that Mayeul, abbott of Cluny, later to be made a saint, was the uncle of Humbert, founder of the House of Agoult, whose sons, descended from the Romans, as was reported in 909 AD by Foucher, the father of Saint Mayeul, were to rule over the countries of Sault and Apt throughout the Middle Ages.
The sovareignty over SAULT and its valley is conformed as belonging to Isnard I, known as d'Entrevennes d'Agoult, by authentic letters dating from Spire, 25 June 1204 AD.
It was in favour of François d'Agoult that, in a letter of 22 April 1561, Charles IX gathered into the Barony of SAULT all the fiefs and sub-fiefs in the possession of the Seigneur d'Agoult, and raised this collection of territories to the level of Comté, with the creation of a Court of Appeal.
On the death in 1613 of Chretienne d'Aguerre, widow of François d'Agoult, the Comté of SAULT passed from the d'Agoult family to that of Créquy-Lesdiguières. Later the Comté of SAULT passed to Louis Nicolas de Neufville, Duke of Villeroy in 1703.
On June 25 1793 the Convention created the department of Vaucluse, made up of Avignon, the Comtat Venaissin, the Principality of Orange, the Vigérie d'Apt and the Comté Gabriel de Neufville de Villeroy, the last Comte de Sault, was condemned to death by the Revolutionary Tribunal of Paris, and executed either that day or the next.
During the Second World War, reviving a thousand year tradition, the SAULT country became a refuge for many patriots, and was the centre for the Resistance forces known as "Le Maquis Ventoux".
In August 1944, in the course of bitter fighting between the Forces Françaises de l'Intérieur and the German army, the town of SAULT suffered reprisals, and was decorated with the Croix de Guerre with Vermilion Star, and a military citation.
(1)Taken in large part from "Val de Sault et Pays d'Albion", published by Les Alpes de Lumière, relying on the work of Pierre MARTELL and Guy BARRUOL, and from "Dictionnaire des Communes de Vaucluse" by Robert BAILLY.
|
|
|
|
Identity
History
