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Gallia est omnis divisa in partes tres. ‘All Gaul is divided into three parts.’ The opening passages of Julius Caesar’s Commentaries on the Gallic Wars define the target of Roman conquest in geographic terms. Caesar goes on to describe the boundaries of Gaul, its inhabitants, and their character. He does so – at least in part – to enhance the value and importance of his military triumph. The heirs to the vanquished Gauls – French medieval readers and translators of the Gallic Wars – consumed, copied and transformed Caesar’s text, preserving some features and emphasizing them, while erasing others. Although the text and its description of the divisions of Gaul enjoyed considerable popularity and influence in France throughout the Middle Ages, at the time of the Hundred Years War, when France was politically divided, French texts often replaced the tripartite form of Caesar’s Gaul with other models of geographical description. This essay will consider the changing character of geographical thinking about France by the French in the later Middle Ages – expressed in languages both visual and verbal. It will show how geography became entwined with contemporary French identity, particularly with reference to the ways that authors, artists and mapmakers received, transmitted and ignored the tradition of Caesar’s divided Gaul. Fought with the English, primarily on French soil, the war occasioned monumental division in France. Instigated by a dispute about the inheritance of the French crown, as well as over feudal rights owed the French king by his English rival, the Hundred Years War waxed and waned from 1337 to 1453. The calamities of the war were visited on France both physically, in terms of lost and plundered territory, and politically, in terms of the huge rifts that the war wrought in the fabric of French society. Not only did the French struggle against the English, but also, because of bickering, rivalry and ultimately murder among the peers of the realm, the French were also divided against one another, and thus the Hundred Years War also became a civil war. The Armagnacs (French supporters of the French king Charles VII), the Burgundians (French but for some critical years supporting the English) and the English divided France into three fractious parts that joined into fragile alliances. As divisions, they were not as coherent or distinct as Caesar’s provinces, but they divided France painfully if temporarily. © Cambridge University Press 2013.

Journal Abbreviation: Mapp. Medieval Geographies: Geographical Encounters in the Lat. West and Beyond, 300-1600