Gallia Narbonensis

Rome's first permanent Gallic province, founded in 121 BCE after legions crushed the Allobroges and Arverni to secure the land route between Italy and Hispania and protect Rome's Greek ally Massalia (Marseille). So thoroughly Romanized that it was simply called "Provincia" -- the origin of the modern name Provence. Its cities and villas prospered for six centuries before falling to the Visigothic Kingdom in the 470s as western Roman authority collapsed. Julius Caesar used the province as his staging ground and supply base for the Gallic Wars from 58 BCE onward, and its Mediterranean coast filled with prosperous colonies of veteran soldiers -- Narbo Martius, Arelate (Arles), and Nemausus (Nîmes), whose Roman amphitheatres and aqueducts (the Pont du Gard) still stand today. Vineyards and olive groves modeled on Italian estates made the province one of the wealthiest agricultural regions outside Italy itself, and its schools of rhetoric drew students from across the western empire. By the 3rd century its cities had grown wealthy enough to build the grand civic monuments whose ruins define Provence's landscape still. When the Visigoths and then the Franks pushed south through the 5th century, Narbonensis passed from Roman to Visigothic rule without the violent destruction seen further north, its Roman administrative and legal culture surviving well into the early medieval Kingdom of the Visigoths.

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