le to cultivate such undemanding crops as rye or potatoes.
The population has a certain unity, too, although we have to rewind the reel of time back through thousands of years. The Lemovices, who gave the Limousin its name, descended from even more ancient tribes of Iberians, Ligurians, and Celts. Rome conquered, then colonized the region, but when the Empire imploded the Limousin fell prey to the slings and arrows and hatchets and swords of marauding barbarians. The Merovingian kings introduced order and the monastic movement to the Limousin. Eleanor of Aquitaine's marriage to Henry Plantagenet in 1152 put the Limousin in the hands of the English, but during the Hundred Years' War the inhabitants rebelled against the oppression of the Black Prince. During this period of British occupation, Richard the Lionheart met his death in the Limousin, mortally wounded by an archer of his own camp who couldn't shoot straight. Though Richard's death was accidental, the hapless archer was flayed alive. Traces of these turbulent times can still be seen at the fortress of Curemonte and at Uzerche on the Vézère River, a village of ancient gables and turrets.
Christianity was embraced with fervor in the Limousin, which gave the Catholic Church three popes. Many pious hermits took refuge in the region's deep forests, and the influence of abbeys like Saint-Martial in Limoges touched all Christendom. The Limousin's many Romanesque churches display a distinctively sober style, due in part to the hardness of the local granite, which resists the sculptor's chisel. Examples are the twelfth-century collegiate church of Saint-Pierre at Le Dorat in Haute-Vienne, Tulle superb medieval cloister, and the church of Saint-Martin in Ussel.
Enamels, tapestries, and china
This spirituality, expressed in langue d'Oc (the dominant tongue in southern France) also fostered the development of a poetic literature popularized by the troubadours, who sang their songs of love in a variant of langue d'Oc called limousine.
Enamels were another art form that flourished in the Limousin. Medieval silversmiths discovered that by blending sand with metallic oxydes they could obtain brilliantly colored ornaments with a hard, glossy surface. Inspired by their Christian faith, master enamelists like Limosin and Penicaud created magnificent reliquaries to hold the remains of saints or holy hermits, such as the twelfth-century reliquary of Saint Stephen in the church of Gimel-les-Cascades. The Guéret museum preserves a remarkable collection of medieval reliquaries. These marvels of craftsmanship were admired throughout the Christian world, and by the fourteenth century Limoges was the capital of fine enamelwork.
In Felletin and Aubusson still other artists expressed their talents in the tapestries for which the picturesque town of Aubusson, especially, has been famous since the Renaissance. Workshops in both towns still function today, producing tapestries designed by modern artists.
The discovery in 1765 of kaolin deposits near Saint-Yrieix-la-Perche allowed Limoges to rival China in creating beautiful yet strong, translucent porcelain. Madame de Pompadour, mistress of King Louis XV, was enthralled by the prospect of such luxury and lavished her encouragements on the fledgling industry. Supported and organized by Turgot, the king's administrator, the porcelain makers of Limoges made their city the world's china capital. Long the hallmark of an elegant table, bone china from Limoges is threatened by copies and imitations made with cheap labor. The number of china factories has dropped sharply in recent decades, and not even consolidations have managed to revitalize this industry in crisis.
It is astonishing that a land so hard and austere, removed from the major routes of commerce and exchange (but not from the path of war: the Black Prince torched Limoges for rebelling against his tyrannical rule), should have contributed so much to the world of art--enamels, stained glass, poetry, and porcelain--and to the history of religion, producing three popes and several saints, amon