Marseille

Marseille grew around the sheltered Vieux-Port, a Greek foundation that kept a large measure of economic and political independence until the union of Provence with France in 1481. In 1423 a Catalan fleet under Alfonso V of Aragon sacked the city, and the destruction took long to repair. Francis I annexed the monks' salt pans around the harbour in 1518 for the galley arsenal, and his engineers fortified the island of If. The imperial army besieged Marseille in 1524 and was driven off; in 1536 work on Notre-Dame de la Garde was finished in time to see off Charles V's troops, and from that October a Franco-Ottoman fleet of thirty galleys wintered in the port.

Marseille's Chamber of Commerce, founded in 1599, is the oldest in France. Louis XIV, after putting down the city's resistance in 1660, built Fort Saint-Nicolas at the harbour mouth, but gave the port free-port status. On 25 May 1720 the Grand Saint-Antoine arrived from the Levant; plague followed and killed some 38,000 of the city's 75,000 people, the last great outbreak of its kind in France. In 1792 about five hundred Marseille volunteers marched to Paris singing the war song that took their city's name.