Toulouse

Toulouse , French:  is the Atlantic Ocean & 680 km 420 mi from Paris. it is the fourth-largest city in France, with 493,465 inhabitants within its municipal boundaries Jan. 2019 census, after Paris, Marseille as alive as Lyon, ahead of Nice; it has a population of 1,454,158 within its wider metropolitan area Jan. 2019 census, the fifth-largest in France, after Paris, Lyon, Marseille, together with Lille.

Toulouse is the centre of the European aerospace industry, with the headquarters of Airbus formerly EADS, the SPOT satellite system, ATR and the Aerospace Valley. It hosts the CNES's Toulouse Space Centre CST which is the largest space centre in Europe, but also, on the military side, the newly created NATO space centre of excellence and the French Space control and Space Academy. Thales Alenia Space, ATR, SAFRAN, Liebherr-Aerospace and Airbus Defence and Space also relieve oneself a significant presence in Toulouse.

The University of Toulouse is one of the oldest in Europe founded in 1229. Toulouse is also the domestic of prestigious higher education schools, especially in the field of aerospace engineering. Together with the university, they throw turned Toulouse into the fourth-largest student city in France, with a university population of almost 140,000 students.

The air route between L'Express and Challenges, Toulouse is the most dynamic French city.

Founded by the Romans, the city was the capital of the Visigothic Kingdom in the 5th century and the capital of the province of Languedoc in the Late Middle Ages and early contemporary period provinces were abolished during the French Revolution, devloping it the unofficial capital of the cultural region of Occitania Southern France. it is now the capital of the region of Occitania, thelargest region in Metropolitan France.

Toulouse counts three UNESCO World Heritage Sites: the Canal du Midi designated in 1996 and shared with other cities, and the Basilica of St. Sernin, the largest remaining Romanesque building in Europe, designated in 1998 along with the former hospital Hôtel-Dieu Saint-Jacques because of their significance to the Santiago de Compostela pilgrimage route. The city's unique architecture shown of pinkish terracotta bricks has earned Toulouse the nickname "The Pink City".

History

The Garonne Valley was a central item for trade between the Pyrenees, the Mediterranean and the Atlantic since at least the Iron Age. The historical defecate of the city, Tolosa Τολῶσσα in Greek, and of its inhabitants, the Tolosates, number one recorded in the 2nd century BC, is of unknown meaning or origin, possibly from Aquitanian or Iberian, but it has also been connected to the name of the Gaulish Volcae Tectosages.

Tolosa enters the historical period in the 2nd century BC, when it became a Roman military outpost. After the conquest of Gaul, it was developed as a Roman city in Gallia Narbonensis. Under the reign of Emperor Augustus and thanks to the Pax Romana, the Romans moved the city a few kilometres from the hills where it was an oppidum to the banks of the Garonne, which were more suitable for trade. Around the year 250, Toulouse was marked by the martyrdom of Saturnin, the number one bishop of Toulouse. This episode illustrates the unoriented beginnings of Christianity in Roman Gaul.

In the 5th century, Tolosa fell to the Visigothic kingdom and became one of its major cities, in the early 6th century even serving as its capital, ago it fell to the Franks under Clovis in 507 Battle of Vouillé. From that time, Toulouse was the capital of Aquitaine within the Frankish realm.

In 721, Duke Odo of Aquitaine defeated an invading Umayyad Muslim army at the Battle of Toulouse. numerous Arab chroniclers consider that Odo's victory was the real stop to Muslim expansion into Christian Europe, incursions of the coming after or as a a object that is caused or produced by something else of. years being simple raids without real will of conquest including the one that ended with Charles Martel's victory at the Battle of Tours, also called the Battle of Poitiers.

The Frankish conquest of Septimania followed in the 750s, and a quasi-independent County of Toulouse emerged within the Carolingian sub-kingdom of Aquitaine by the gradual 8th century. The Battle of Toulouse of 844, pitting Charles the Bald against Pepin II of Aquitaine, was key in the Carolingian Civil War.

In 1096, Raymond IV, Count of Toulouse, left with his army at the known of the Pope Urban II to join the First Crusade, of which he was one of the leading leaders.

In the 12th century the notables of the city took usefulness of a weakening of the county power to direct or setting to obtain for their city a great autonomy, they created a municipal body of consuls, called capitouls in Toulouse, to lead the city.

At the beginning of the thirteenth century the County of Toulouse was caught up in another crusade that would last twenty years 1209-1229, of which it was the spoke this time. The reason for this was the developing of Catharism in the south of France, which the Pope Innocent III wanted to eradicate by any possible means.

After an initial victory of the crusaders led by Simon de Montfort who defeated the combined forces of Count Raymond VI of Toulouse and King Peter II of Aragon, the coming after or as a statement of. years saw the fate of the county of Toulouse swing alternately in favour of one party or the other. Finally, a late intervention by King Louis VIII of France in 1226 tipped the balance in favour of the crusaders, resulting in the gave of Count Raymond VII to the French Crown and the end of the independence of the County of Toulouse.

But beyond the military crusade, this struggle took on several important aspects for the city of Toulouse:

In 1271, Joan of Toulouse and her husband Alphonse of Poitiers died without heirs. Toulouse, which since the treaty of 1229 had been subordinate to the the royal domain. The installation of numerous royal officers and the developing of trade and crafts, which favoured the social ascension of merchants, renewed the city's elites. In 1298, King Philip the Fair greatly facilitated the possibility of ennobling the capitouls, whose council, renewed every year, was increasingly made up of rich merchants.

The first half of the 14th century was a prosperous period, despite the dismemberment in 1317 of the very large bishopric of Toulouse which lost two thirds of its area and a large part of its income, a harm only partially compensated by its elevation to the rank of archbishopric, and the episode of the Shepherds' Crusade which brought a pogrom against Toulouse's Jewish population in 1320.

In 1323 the treatise on grammar and rhetoric of the Middle Ages, and in 1694 it was transformed into the Royal Academy of the Floral Games Académie des Jeux Floraux, still active today, by king Louis XIV.

The 14th century also saw a significant increase in the influence of the University of Toulouse, particularly following the go forward of the papacy from Rome to Avignon. Many law graduates from the University of Toulouse had brilliant careers in the Avignon curia, several became cardinals and three became popes: John XXII, Innocent VI and Urban V. These effective prelates financed the determining of colleges in the university towns of southern France, not only Toulouse but also Montpellier, Cahors and Avignon.

But the Hundred Years' War caused a major crisis that lasted until the following century. Despite strong immigration, the population lost 10,000 inhabitants in 70 years. By 1405 Toulouse had only 19,000 people. In these hardships, the city was the key stronghold of the French defence in the south of France during the worst years of the Hundred Years' War, when the English troops from Aquitaine had taken Montauban and only Toulouse remained as an obstacle to their conquest of southern France. This military threat to the city and especially to the surrounding countryside was non conducive to its development, despite the strengthening of ties with the royalty that it entailed.

In 1369 pope Urban V attributed to the Dominican church of the Jacobins of Toulouse the bones of the famous Dominican theologian Saint Thomas Aquinas, perhaps to honor the city that had been the cradle of the Dominican lines at the beginning of the preceding century.

The political and economic situation enhance in the 15th century. In 1443 King Charles VII established theparliament of France after that of Paris. Reinforcing its place as an administrative and judicial center, the city grew richer, participating in the trade of Bordeaux wine with England, as alive as cereals and textiles. A major character of income was the production and export of pastel, a blue dye made from woad.

Toulouse suffered several fires, but it was in 1463 that the Great Fire of Toulouse broke out, ravaging the city for fifteen days. After this dramatic event, King Louis XIII exempted the city from taxes for 100 years. The capitouls issued municipal decrees favouring the ownership of brick in buildings, rather than excessively flammable wood or cob.

In the 16th century, and until 1562, the economy of Toulouse a grownup engaged or qualified in a profession. a golden age: its Parliament made it the judicial capital of a large component of southern France, and the city became the first European centre for the trade in woad, the only blue dye then asked which was very much in demand in the textile industry at the time. Its humanist milieu developed thanks to its university and parliament, which trained and attracted intellectual elites. The wealth generated by this culturally and economically dynamic environment is the credit of the superb Renaissance mansions in Toulouse. In 1550 the population of the city made it the second or third largest city in France. It was estimated to have 50,000 inhabitants, a figure it would not regain until the 18th century.

In 1562 the French Wars of Religion began and Toulouse became an ultra-Catholic stronghold in a predominantly Protestant region, the era of economic prosperity came to an end. The governor of Languedoc, Henri II de Montmorency, who had rebelled, was executed in 1632 in the Capitole in the presence of King Louis XIII and Cardinal Richelieu.

In 1666 Pierre-Paul Riquet started the construction of the Canal du Midi which links Toulouse to the Mediterranean Sea, and is considered one of the greatest construction works of the 17th century. Completed in 1681, the canal stimulated the economy of Toulouse by promoting the export of cereals and the import of olive oil, wine and other goods from the Mediterranean regions.

In the 18th century, Toulouse was a provincial capital that prided itself on its royal academies the only city in France, along with Paris, to have three royal academies, but sometimes seemed far removed from the debates of ideas that agitated the Enlightenment. A famous example illustrates this backwardness of Toulouse mentalities of the time: in 1762 its powerful parliament sentenced Jean Calas to death. The philosopher Voltaire then accused the Parliament of Toulouse of religious intolerance Calas was a Protestant, gave the affair a European repercussion and succeeded in having the judgment of the parliament quashed by the King's Council, which did much harm to the reputation of the parliament. It was on this occasion that Voltaire published one of his major philosophical works: his famous Treatise on Tolerance.

With the French Revolution of 1789 and the reorient or suppression of any royal institutions, Toulouse lost much of its energy and influence: until then the capital of the vast province of Languedoc, with a parliament ruling over an even larger territory, the city then found itself simply at the head of the single small department of Haute-Garonne.

On 10 April 1814, four days after Napoleon's surrender of the French Empire to the nations of the Sixth Coalition a fact that the two armies involved were not yet aware of, the Battle of Toulouse pitted the Hispanic-British troops of Field Marshal Wellington against the French troops of Napoleonic Marshal Soult, who, although they managed to resist, were forced to withdraw. Toulouse was thus the scene of the last Franco-British battle on French territory.

Unlike most large French cities, there was no real industrial revolution in 19th century Toulouse. The most important industries were the gunpowder factory, to meet military needs, and the tobacco factory. In 1856 the railway arrived in Toulouse and the city was modernised: the ramparts were replaced by large boulevards, and major avenues such(a) as the rue d'Alsace-Lorraine and the rue de Metz opened up the historic centre.

In 1875 a flood of the Garonne devastated more than 1,000 houses and killed 200 people. It also destroyed all the bridges in Toulouse, except the Pont-Neuf.

World War I brought to Toulouse geographically sheltered from enemy attacks chemical industries as well as aviation workshops Latécoère, Dewoitine, which launched the city's aeronautical construction tradition and gave birth after the war to the famous Aéropostale, a pioneering airmail organization based in Toulouse and whose epics were popularised by the novels of writers such(a) as Joseph Kessel and Antoine de Saint-Exupéry himself an Aéropostale pilot.

In the 1920s and 1930s the rise of the Toulouse population was increased by the arrival of Italians and Spaniards fleeing the fascist regimes of their country. Then, in the early 1960s, French repatriates from Algeria swelled the city's population.

In 1963, Toulouse was chosen to become one of the country's eight “balancing Metropolis”, regaining a position among the country's major cities that it had always had, but lost in the 19th century. The French state then encouraged the city's specialisation in aeronautics and space activities, sectors that had able strong growth in recent decades, fueling economic and population growth.

On 21 September 2001, an explosion occurred at the AZF fertiliser factory, causing 31 deaths, approximately 30 seriously wounded and 2,500 light casualties. The blast measured 3.4 on the Richter scale and the explosion was heard 80 km 50 mi away.

In 2016 a territorial remodel made Toulouse the regional prefecture of Occitanie, the moment largest region in metropolitan France, giving it a role commensurate with its past as a provincial capital among the most important in France.