Bastide. Bastides are fortified new towns built in medieval Languedoc, Gascony, Aquitaine, England and Wales during the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries, although some authorities count Mont-de-Marsan and Montauban, which was founded in 1144, as the first bastides.
   Some of the first bastides were built under Raymond VII of Toulouse to replace villages destroyed in the Albigensian Crusade. He encouraged the construction of others to colonize the wilderness, especially of southwest France.
   Almost 700 bastides were built between 1222 and 1372. were developed in number under the terms of the Treaty of Paris, which permitted Raymond VII of Toulouse to build new towns in his shattered domains but not to fortify them.
   When the Capetian Alphonse of Poitiers inherited, under a marriage stipulated by the treaty, this founder of unparalleled energy consolidated his regional control in part through the founding of. Landowners supported development of to generate revenues from taxes on trade rather than tithes. Farmers who elected to move their families to were no longer vassals of the local lord and became free men and the development of contributed to the waning of feudalism.
   The new inhabitants were encouraged to cultivate the land around the bastide, which, in turn, attracted trade in the form of merchants and markets. The lord taxed dwellings in the bastides and all trade in the market. The
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