Aurillac

Aurillac lies beside the Jordanne below the Cantal mountains in Auvergne. The town grew around a Benedictine abbey founded by Count Gerald in 885; Gerbert, the future Pope Sylvester II, studied there. Medieval consuls contested the abbots' authority, and the town endured English sieges in the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries. During the Wars of Religion, Protestants took Aurillac in 1569 and sacked the abbey, burning its library and archives.