Aix-en-Provence

Aix lies in the plain north of Marseille beneath the Montagne Sainte-Victoire, the Roman Aquae Sextiae and for centuries the capital of Provence. The counts of Provence, of the houses of Aragon and Anjou, made it their residence in 1189, and Aix grew into a court town with an archbishop, whose cathedral of Saint-Sauveur holds King René's altarpiece of the Burning Bush by Nicolas Froment. Louis II of Anjou granted the town a university in 1409.

Provence passed to the French crown in 1481 on the death of Charles III of Maine and was formally united in 1487, though it remained until 1789 an associated state with its own Estates and institutions. In 1501 Louis XII set up the Parlement of Provence in Aix, which became the great law court of the region. The clock tower of the town hall dates from 1510. In 1536 the army of Charles V invaded Provence and entered Aix. In the seventeenth century Archbishop Michel Mazarin, brother of the cardinal, laid out the regular streets of the Mazarin quarter south of the old town, and the Cours Mirabeau was planted on the line of the medieval ramparts. Pierre Pavillon built the new town hall between 1655 and 1678, and the intendants of Provence were based in the city.