Occitania in the context of Roquefort

French people (French: Les Français, lit. 'The French') are a nation primarily located in Western Europe that share a common French culture, history, and language, identified with the country of France.

The French people, especially the native speakers of langues d'oïl from northern and central France, are primarily descended from Romans (or Gallo-Romans, western European Celtic and Italic peoples), Gauls (including the Belgae), as well as Germanic peoples such as the Franks, the Visigoths, the Suebi and the Burgundians who settled in Gaul from east of the Rhine after the fall of the Roman Empire, as well as various later waves of lower-level irregular migration that have continued to the present day. The Norsemen also settled in Normandy in the 10th century and contributed significantly to the ancestry of the Normans. Furthermore, regional ethnic minorities also exist within France that have distinct lineages, languages and cultures such as Bretons in Brittany, Occitans in Occitania, Basques in the French Basque Country, Catalans in northern Catalonia, Germans in Alsace, Corsicans in Corsica and Flemings in French Flanders.

The langues d'oïl  are a dialect continuum that includes standard French and its closest relatives historically spoken in the northern half of France, southern Belgium, and the Channel Islands. They belong to the larger category of Gallo-Romance languages, which also include the historical languages of east-central France and western Switzerland, southern France, portions of northern Italy, the Val d'Aran in Spain, and under certain acceptations those of Catalonia.

Linguists divide the Romance languages of France, and especially of Medieval France, into two main geographical subgroups: the langues d'oïl to the north, and the langues d'oc in the southern half of France. Both groups are named after the word for yes in their recent ancestral languages. The most common modern langue d'oïl is standard French, in which the ancestral oïl has become oui.

Old French (franceis, françois, romanz; French: ancien français [ɑ̃sjɛ̃ fʁɑ̃sɛ]) was the language spoken in most of the northern half of France approximately between the late 8th and mid-14th centuries. Rather than a unified language, Old French was a group of Romance dialects, mutually intelligible yet diverse. These dialects came to be collectively known as the langues d'oïl, contrasting with the langues d'oc, the emerging Occitano-Romance languages of Occitania, now Southern France.

The mid-14th century witnessed the emergence of Middle French, the language of the French Renaissance in the Île-de-France region; this dialect was a predecessor to Modern French. Other dialects of Old French evolved themselves into modern forms (Poitevin-Saintongeais, Gallo, Norman, Picard, Walloon, etc.), each with its linguistic features and history.

The duke of Aquitaine (Occitan: Duc d'Aquitània, French: Duc d'Aquitaine, IPA: [dyk dakitɛn]) was the ruler of the medieval region of Aquitaine (not to be confused with modern-day Aquitaine) under the supremacy of Frankish, English, and later French kings.

As successor states of the Visigothic Kingdom (418–721), Aquitania (Aquitaine) and Languedoc (Toulouse) inherited both Visigothic law and Roman Law, which together allowed women more rights than their contemporaries would enjoy until the 20th century. Particularly under the Liber Judiciorum as codified in 642/643 and expanded by the Code of Recceswinth in 653, women could inherit land and titles and manage their holdings independently from their husbands or male relations, dispose of their property in legal wills if they had no heirs, represent themselves and bear witness in court from the age of 14, and arrange for their own marriages after the age of 20. As a consequence, male-preference primogeniture was the practiced succession law for the nobility.

Occitan (English: /ˈɒksɪtən, -tæn, -tɑːn/; Occitan pronunciation: [utsiˈta, uksiˈta]), also known by its native speakers as lenga d'òc (Occitan: [ˈleŋɡɒ ˈðɔ(k)] ; French: langue d'oc), sometimes also referred to as Provençal, is a Romance language spoken in southern France, Monaco, Italy's Occitan Valleys, as well as in the Catalonian Val d'Aran; collectively, these regions are sometimes referred to as Occitania. It is also spoken in the southern Italian province of Cosenza (mostly in Guardia Piemontese). There it is referred to as Gardiol, which is considered a separate Occitanic language. Some include Catalan as a dialect of Occitan, as the linguistic distance between this language and some Occitan dialects (such as the Gascon language) is similar to the distance between different Occitan dialects. Catalan was considered a dialect of Occitan until the end of the 19th century and still today remains its closest relative. Occitan has a particularly rich lexicon. Lo Panoccinari, considered the most comprehensive dictionary ever published in this language, records over 250,000 unique words (more than 310,000 including dialectal variations).

Occitan is an official language of Catalonia, Spain, where a subdialect of Gascon known as Aranese is spoken (in the Val d'Aran). Since September 2010, the Parliament of Catalonia has considered Aranese Occitan to be the officially preferred language for use in the Val d'Aran.

A troubadour (English: /ˈtruːbədɔːr, -dʊər/, French: [tʁubaduʁ] ; Occitan: trobador [tɾuβaˈðu] ) was a composer and performer of Old Occitan lyric poetry during the High Middle Ages (1100–1350). Since the word troubadour is etymologically masculine, a female equivalent is usually called a trobairitz.

The troubadour school or tradition began in the late 11th century in Occitania, but it subsequently spread to the Italian and Iberian Peninsulas. Under the influence of the troubadours, related movements sprang up throughout Europe: the Minnesang in Germany, trovadorismo in Galicia and Portugal, and that of the trouvères in northern France. Dante Alighieri in his De vulgari eloquentia defined the troubadour lyric as fictio rethorica musicaque poita: rhetorical, musical, and poetical fiction. After the "classical" period around the turn of the 13th century and a mid-century resurgence, the art of the troubadours declined in the 14th century and around the time of the Black Death (1348) and since died out.

Occitania (French: Occitanie [ɔksitani] ; Occitan: Occitània [utsiˈtanjɔ]; Catalan: Occitània [uksiˈtaniə]) is the southernmost administrative region of metropolitan France excluding Corsica, located on the south of the country, created on 1 January 2016 from the former regions of Languedoc-Roussillon and Midi-Pyrénées. The Council of State approved Occitania as the new name of the region on 28 September 2016, coming into effect on 30 September 2016.

The modern administrative region is named after the larger cultural and historical region of Occitania, which corresponds with the southern third of France. The region of Occitania as it is today covers a territory similar to that ruled by the Counts of Toulouse in the 12th and 13th centuries. The banner of arms of the Counts of Toulouse, known colloquially as the Occitan cross, is used by the modern region and is also a popular cultural symbol. In 2022, Occitania had a population of 6,080,731.

Septimania is a historical region in modern-day southern France. It referred to the western part of the Roman province of Gallia Narbonensis that passed to the control of the Visigoths in 462, when Septimania was ceded to their king, Theodoric II. During the Early Middle Ages, the region was variously known as Gallia Narbonensis, Gallia, or Narbonensis. The territory of Septimania roughly corresponds with the modern French former administrative region of Languedoc-Roussillon that merged into the new administrative region of Occitanie. In the Visigothic Kingdom, which became centred on Toledo by the end of the reign of Leovigild, Septimania was both an administrative province of the central royal government and an ecclesiastical province whose metropolitan was the Archbishop of Narbonne. Originally, the Goths may have maintained their hold on the Albigeois, but if so it was conquered by the time of Chilperic I. There is archaeological evidence that some enclaves of Visigothic population remained in Frankish Gaul, near the Septimanian border, after 507.

The region of Septimania was invaded by the Andalusian Muslims in 719, renamed as Arbūnah and turned into a military base for future operations by the Andalusian military commanders. It passed briefly to the Emirate of Córdoba, which had been expanding from the south during the same century, before its subsequent conquest by the Christian Franks in 759, who by the end of the 9th century renamed it as Gothia or the Gothic March (Marca Gothica). Eventually, the Christian Franks chased the Muslim Arabs and Berbers away from Septimania and conquered Narbonne in 759, and the Carolingian king Pepin the Short came up reinforced. Septimania became a march of the Carolingian Empire and then West Francia down to the 13th century, though it was culturally and politically autonomous from the northern France-based central royal government. The region was under the influence of the people from the count territories of Toulouse, Provence, and ancient County of Barcelona. It was part of the wider cultural and linguistic region comprising the southern third of France known as Occitania. This area was finally brought under effective control of the French kings in the early 13th century as a result of the Albigensian Crusade, after which it was assigned governors. From the end of the thirteenth century Septimania evolved into the royal province of Languedoc.

The Occitans (Occitan: occitans) are a Romance-speaking ethnic group originating in the historical region of Occitania (southern France, northeastern Spain, and northwestern Italy and Monaco). They have been also called Gascons, Provençals, and Auvergnats.

The Occitan language is still used to varying levels by between 100,000 and 800,000 speakers in southern France and northern Italy. Since 2006, the Occitan language is recognized as one of the official languages in Catalonia, an autonomous region of Spain.

Savoy (/səˈvɔɪ/; Arpitan: Savouè [saˈvwɛ]) is a cultural-historical region in the Western Alps. Situated on the cultural boundary between Occitania and Piedmont, the area extends from Lake Geneva in the north to the Dauphiné in the south and west and to the Aosta Valley in the east.

Savoy, formerly a part of the Kingdom of Burgundy, emerged as the feudal County of Savoy ruled by the House of Savoy during the 11th to 14th centuries.The original territory, also known as "ducal Savoy" or "Savoy proper", is largely co-terminous with the modern French Savoie and Haute-Savoie départements in the region of Rhône-Alpes, but the historical expansion of Savoyard territories, as the Duchy of Savoy (1416–1860), included parts of what is now western Italy and southwestern Switzerland. The current border between France and Italy is due to the Plombières Agreement of 1858, which in preparation for the unification of Italy ceded western Savoy to France, while the eastern territories in Piedmont and Liguria were retained by the House of Savoy, which was to become the ruling dynasty of Italy.

The County of Tripoli (1102–1289) was one of the Crusader states. It was founded in the Levant in the modern-day region of Tripoli, northern Lebanon and parts of western Syria.When the Frankish Crusaders, mostly southern French forces – captured the region in 1109, Bertrand of Toulouse became the first count of Tripoli as a vassal of King Baldwin I of Jerusalem. From that time on, the rule of the county was decided not strictly by inheritance but by factors such as military force (external and civil war), favour and negotiation. In 1289, the County of Tripoli fell to the Muslim Mamluks of Cairo under Sultan Qalawun, and the county was absorbed into Mamluk Sultanate.

The County of Barcelona (Latin: Comitatus Barcinonensis, Catalan: Comtat de Barcelona) was a polity in northeastern Iberian Peninsula, originally located in the southern frontier region of the Carolingian Empire. In the 10th century, the Counts of Barcelona progressively achieved independence from Frankish rule, becoming hereditary rulers in constant warfare with the Islamic Caliphate of Córdoba and its successor states. The counts, through marriage, alliances and treaties, acquired or vassalized the other Catalan counties and extended their influence over Occitania. In 1164, the County of Barcelona entered a personal union with the Kingdom of Aragon. Thenceforward, the history of the county is subsumed within that of the Crown of Aragon, but the city of Barcelona remained preeminent within it.

Within the Crown, the County of Barcelona and the other Catalan counties progressively merged into a polity known as the Principality of Catalonia, which assumed the institutional and territorial continuity of the County of Barcelona.

James I the Conqueror (Catalan: Jaume I or Jaume el Conqueridor; Aragonese: Chaime I o Conqueridor; 2 February 1208 – 27 July 1276) was King of Aragon, Count of Barcelona, and Lord of Montpellier from 1213 to 1276; King of Majorca from 1231 to 1276; and King of Valencia from 1238 to 1276. His long reign of 62 years is not only the longest of any Iberian monarch, but one of the longest monarchical reigns in history, ahead of Hirohito but remaining behind Queen Elizabeth II, Queen Victoria, and Ferdinand I of the Two Sicilies and King Louis XIV

King James I saw the expansion of the Crown of Aragon in three directions: Languedoc to the north, the Balearic Islands to the southeast, and Valencia to the south. By a treaty with Louis IX of France, he achieved the renunciation of any possible claim of French suzerainty over the County of Barcelona and the other Catalan counties, while he renounced northward expansion and taking back the once Catalan territories in Occitania and vassal counties loyal to the County of Barcelona, lands that were lost by his father Peter II of Aragon in the Battle of Muret during the Albigensian Crusade and annexed by the Kingdom of France, and then decided to turn south. His great part in the Reconquista was similar in Mediterranean Spain to that of his contemporary Ferdinand III of Castile in Andalusia. One of the main reasons for this formal renunciation of most of the once Catalan territories in Languedoc and Occitania, and any expansion into them, is that he was raised by the Knights Templar Crusaders, who had defeated his father, who was fighting for the Pope alongside the French. It was thus effectively forbidden for him to try to maintain the traditional influence of the Count of Barcelona that previously existed in Occitania and Languedoc.

The Occitan Valleys are the part of Occitania (the territory of the Occitan language) within the borders of Italy.It is a mountainous region in the southern Alps. Most of its valleys are oriented eastward and descend toward the plains of Piedmont.

The area has a population of 174,476 inhabitants (July, 2013).Its major towns are Lo Borg Sant Dalmatz (Borgo San Dalmazzo), Buscha (Busca), Boves (Bueves) and Draonier (Dronero).