Well-built roads, passable all the year round and virtually impervious to the elements, were almost holy things in the Roman world, routes of trade and cultural growth, of conquest and of defence, the veins of civilization. This high status is reflected by a small and beautiful Roman bridge, dating from the late first century BC, that by good fortune survives in the south of France. The Pont Flavien at Saint-Chamas stands astride the Via Julia Augusta – an important route begun in 13 BC on the orders of Emperor Augustus to link the commercially and strategically important cities of Placentia (now Piacenza) in northern Italy with Arles in southern France. At Arles, the Via Julia Augusta linked with the far older Via Domitia that, dating from the second century BC, was the first Roman road built through Gaul and joined Italy to Spain. Placentia was, of course, linked by road to Rome, so the Pont Flavien – with its single stone arch of modest 12-metre span – formed a small but vital link on one of the key routes from Rome, via Arles and Nîmes in southern France, to Spain. This, plus the fact that the Pont Flavien stood within the zone of the cultural, if not political, frontier between Italy and Gaul, explains its extraordinary and ambitious design. Once seen, this exquisite bridge can never be forgotten.
In its small way, the Pont Flavien is a flawless evocation of Rome, a jewel of a creation, a wonder of preservation that is a window onto a long dead world. To reach the bridge you pass along a narrow and now abandoned stretch of the Via Julia Augusta and the first glimpse you get of the bridge is a pair of stone-built triumphal arches, miniature in scale but big in meaning and magnificence. They guard each end of the bridge and offer an extraordinary perspective to all who approach. The arch in front acts as a proscenium for the one behind: very dramatic and very theatrical, and surely a visual device to let the traveller know they had arrived somewhere very special, that they were now in the frontier zone. This pair of arches, that now look uncannily like the pylons of a nineteenth century suspension bridge, were surely intended to proclaim to all travellers heading west and north that Italy was being left behind, and to those heading south that they were now entering the inner environs of the empire, drawing yet nearer on the imperial highway to Rome itself.
The stretch of road between the arches is short, narrow and now pitted and rutted, scarred by generation upon generation of chariots and carts. But despite being only a stone’s throw in length, this small stretch of road offers a vast leap into the past. To stand on this bridge at dusk is to hover in time. Here, the Rome of 2,000 years ago seems not so very distant a place, the triumphal arches being strange portals that goad the imagination. Each arch is dressed with Corinthian pilasters and carries full entablatures, the friezes of which retain handsome swirls of stone-cut acanthus. This seems celebratory, but at the corners of the arches, set above the pilaster capitals, are carved eagles, surely representing the might of Rome, and above them, carved in the round, are lions drawing back on their hind legs and about to pounce. They seem to offer a fair warning to any traveller to behave or suffer the consequences.
The modest but beautiful 1st century BC Roman bridge at Saint-Chamas, Provence-Alpes-Cote d’Azur region, France. The bridge’s importance as part of the Via Julia Augusta is proclaimed by its pair of small but perfect triumphal arches.
On the bridge is carved an inscription that appears to date from the time of construction.
It refers to Lucius Donnius Flavos, a priest from Rome in the reign of Augustus, who is described as the bridge’s builder. Builder perhaps, designer perhaps, but almost certainly the man who – as a priest – dedicated this work to the gods and called upon them to guard it. The highway was sacred and so too was this bridge: then as a gate to the Roman Empire or to Rome itself, now as an emotive and thought-provoking portal to the Roman past.
Detail of one of the triumphal arches showing the entablature with an eagle and a watchful guardian lion – surely calculated to remind travellers of the power of Rome.
CHAPTER TWO
PIETY AND POLITICS
The Pont de Valentré, Cahors, France, started in 1308. A very rare and beautiful example of a medieval bridge with fortifications intact including three towers and cutwaters containing fighting platforms and narrow windows from which passage of the river could be effectively controlled.
IN MEDIEVAL CHRISTIAN EUROPE, BRIDGES WERE built as pious works pleasing to God, as things of utility and of beauty, as part of the defence system, and of course, as routes of trade or conquest. The early fourteenth century Pont de Valentré, across the River Lot at Cahors is all of these things. I well remember, decades ago, my first glimpse one summer evening of this tall-towered, stone-built bridge. It was like something in a fairy tale: fantastic in form, pale, ethereal. The bridge adjoins Cahors, indeed formed a key part of its walled defences, but I saw it not against the town as its backdrop. It strode purposefully and elegantly across the wide and sluggish river against the background of seemingly unchanged rolling and sun-bleached countryside. It was utterly entrancing and, with its mesmerizing silhouette of tall pyramidal-topped towers and pointed arches, it seemed to sum up so many of the architectural and engineering aspirations and achievements of the age in which it was built.
The twelfth and thirteenth centuries marked the great age of masonry-built bridges in the medieval Kingdom of France and in the English possessions in Aquitaine and Gascony. In the late twelfth century, almost the entire western half of France, from the English Channel to the Pyrenees was in the possession of, or under the control of, the English King Henry II, the first monarch of the Plantagenet dynasty.
The Pont de Valentré, Cahors, France, started in 1308. A very rare and beautiful example of a medieval bridge with fortifications intact including three towers and cutwaters containing fighting platforms and narrow windows from which passage of the river could be effectively controlled.
This was a time before the modern concepts of European nationalism were forged. The Plantagenets were a branch of the French Angevin dynasty, and the English royal court was an outpost of French culture. As well as being the King of England, Henry was also the Duke of Normandy and Gascony, and Count of Anjou, Maine and Nantes. Indeed in this feudal world, popular allegiances and identity lay with the regions, rather than with the larger world or the kingdom of which the duchies or counties formed part.
The complex balance of power and land ownership in France fluctuated constantly, and by the time the bridge at Cahors was started in 1308, English possessions in the west and south had dwindled to the area around Bordeaux and to western Gascony. But the situation remained fluid, particularly during the Hundred Years War that started in 1337. During these decades of intermittent territorial and dynastic conflict, control of vast areas of the land regularly changed hands with a dramatic – if relatively short-lived – increase in English possessions in the north and northwest following Henry V’s victorious Battle of Agincourt in 1415.
The Pont de Valentré at Cahors, France, photographed in 1851, revealing its state before the restoration of the 1870s when, among other things, battlements were reinstated to the tops of the cut-waters.
Due to the wars that flared and smouldered in France, Cahors, although under French control, remained