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ORIGINS AND SIGNIFICATION OF THE LANGUEDOC CROSS
Numerous letters had to be sent to a lot of people in France in order to find the origin and the meaning of the Cross which serves as the logo to the Southern Pyrenee Region, also chosen as the logo of the web site, and, why not as the Coat of Arms of this family. Here is a summary of the answers received.
In terms of Heraldic Coat of Arms, the Cross of Toulouse, or Cross of the Languedoc, or'occitane' Cross, is a Greek Cross of equal branches, arrow-shaped and gold pommelled, of which the extremities of the branches are triply upright on fetlockjoint and beaded.
At the end of the first Crusade, in July 1099, the crusaders recaptured Jerusalem from the Muslims. Although Godefroy de Bouillon was then elected King of Jerusalem, it came to be that an actor's memory was occulted by History, but who was by no means the mainspring of succes: Raymond de Saint-Gilles (1042-1105) also known as Raymond of Toulouse.
-The crusaders bore the cross, apriori, latin, that of the Calvary. But it is not unthinkable that the chiefs might have borne a somewhat more sophisticated cross. Now, Raymond was a chief, and a great one at that !
-According to Pierre Salies, in a doubled number of the periodical of December 1994, the Genesis of our Cross of Toulouse comes from the will to modify ever so slightly the original model of the latin Cross. Thus, only the extremities of the branches were modified, transforming the straight line into an assembly of two curves while preserving the outline of the primitive cross inside the outline obtained.
-And yet this cross had to be fastened to a shield, a broad piece of defensive armor, wide at the top and pointed at the bottom, with a convex surface part, fashioned to encircle the body of the bearer. Rivets were needed to accomplish this! For a simple latin cross, four, eight at the utmost sufficed. For Raymond's, twelve were needed. One at each crown of the figure formed by the curves which replaced the extremities of the branches.
-The cross thus obtained will evolve with the times, the branches becoming equal, the sides being rounded... until it comes down to the design as known nowadays.
At which moment was this cross, typically representative of the Counts of Toulouse, diffused to a point where it represented the Languedoc, then the Region of Southern-Pyrenees? - It emerges in 1211 with the seal of Raymond VI, Count of Toulouse, and will always be used afterwards by his successors. It will assert itself in all of the Toulousan realm, at the dawn of the XIIIth century and will figure henceforth on the Arms of the city of Toulouse, then on those of the Languedoc Region from the XIVth to the XVIIIth century.
Numerous hypotheses exist on the origin and was the subject of many symbolic interpretations.
-In the beginning, a simple solar wheel comprising 12 spokes, each one beaded on the end, symbolizing the 12 houses of the Zodiac (the Cross of St-Michel of Lanes in the Laragais).In the XIIth and XIIIth centuries, the clergy visualized in this figuration, The Lord crucifiedV and his twelve apostles.
-It has also been called a cathartic cross in as much as it was opposed to the latin cross, rejected by the "Cathares".
-Finally, it seems to materialize the itinerary of the Wisigoths, from the shores of the Black Sea to Toulouse by the Balkans, Italy and Spain. There are similar ones in theV South of France (Venasque and Forcalquier in Provence), in the Spanish Catalogne (Cloister of Santa Maria de l'Estany), in Northern Italy (in Pisa and in Venice).
These crosses landmark the routes opened by ancient civilizations, which connect us to the Distant Orient from where it might have originated, sayings of a cult of the first ages (Cross of Tourfan in Oriental Turkestan) infers Roger Camboulives in his work on the origins of the Cross of Toulouse.
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