Alphonse de Poitiers administers southern France

1249

Louis IX's brother Alphonse inherited the county of Toulouse through his wife and imposed a thorough French administration on the former Cathar heartland. Occitan autonomy, already broken by the Albigensian Crusade, was now buried under royal bureaucrats, standardized law codes, and Parisian tax collectors. His efficient government was so alien to the southern lords that many remembered the heretics with nostalgia.