County of Toulouse

The County of Toulouse was a territory in southern France consisting of the city of Toulouse and its environs under the Merovingians ruled by the Count of Toulouse, and the center of Occitania. No succession of such royal appointees is known, though a few names survive to the present. With the Carolingians, the appointments of both counts and dukes become more regular and better-known, though the office fell out of the orbit of the royal court and became hereditary.

The hereditary Counts of Toulouse ruled the city of Toulouse and its surrounding county from the late 9th century until 1271. The counts and other family members were also at various times Counts of Quercy, Rouergue, Albi, and Nîmes, and Marquess of Gothia and Provence.

As a successor state for the Visigothic Kingdom and the Kingdom of Aquitaine, Tolouse, along with Aquitania and Languedoc (but not Gascony), inherited the Visigothic Law and Roman Law which had combined to allow women more rights than their contemporaries would enjoy until the 20th century. Particularly with the Liber Judiciorum as codified 642/643 and expanded on in the Code of Recceswinth in 653, women could inherit land and title and manage it independently from their husbands or male relations, dispose of their property in legal wills if they had no heirs, and women could represent themselves and bear witness in court by age 14 and arrange for their own marriages by age 20. As a consequence, male-preference primogeniture was the practiced succession law for the nobility.

From the middle years of the 12th century the people of Toulouse seem to have begun to free themselves from the most oppressive feudal dues. An act of Alfonso Jordan exempts them from the tax on salt and wine; and in 1152 we have traces of a commune consilium Tolosae making police ordinances in its own name "with the advice of Lord Raymond, count of Toulouse, duke of Narbonne, and marquis of Provence". This act is witnessed by six capitularii, four duly appointed judges (judices constiluti), and two advocates. Twenty-three years later there are twelve capitularii or consuls, six for the city and six for its suburbs, all of them elected and sworn to do justice in whatever municipal matters were brought before them. In 1222 their number was increased to twenty-four; but they were forbidden to touch the city property, which was to remain in the charge of certain communarii chosen by themselves.