NARBONNE, a city of France, capital of an arrondissement in the department of Aude, in a vine-growing plain 5 m. from the Mediterranean, 37 m. E. of Carcassonne. Pop. (1931) 26,585. Narbonne was the capital of the Volcae Tectosages. There the Romans in 118 B.C. founded their first colony in Gaul, named Narbo Martius; they built great works to protect the city from inundation and to improve its port, situated on a lake now filled up. The capital of Gallia Narbonensis, the seat of a proconsul and a station for the Roman fleet, Narbo Martius became the rival of Massilia. But the division of Gallia Narbonensis into two provinces lessened its importance. Alans, Suevi, Vandals, each held the city, and at last, in 413, it was occupied by the Visigoths, whose capital it afterwards became. In 719, after a siege of two years, it was captured and extended by the Saracens. Charles Martel, after the battle of Poitiers, and Pippin the Short, in 752, were both repulsed from its walls; but on a new attempt, after an investment of seven years, the Franks again forced their way into Narbonne. Charlemagne made the city the capital of the duchy of Gothia, and divided it into three lordships—one for the bishop, another for a Frankish lord, and the third for the Jews. In the 13th century the archbishopric was seized by the pope's legate, Arnaud Amaury, who took the title of viscount of Narbonne.. Simon de Montfort, however, deprived him of this dignity, receiving from Philip Augustus the duchy of Narbonne along with the county of Toulouse. By his expulsion of the Jews Philip the Fair hastened the decay of the city ; and about the same period the Aude, which had formerly been diverted by the Romans, ceased to flow towards Narbonne and the harbour was silted up.
United to the French crown in 1507, Narbonne was enclosed by a new line of walls under Francis I., but had the last portions of its ramparts demolished in 1870. The archbishopric was founded about the middle of the 3rd century, its first holder being Sergius Paulus; it was suppressed in 179o. The Robine canal, a branch of the Canal du Midi, divides Narbonne into the bourn and the cite.
The former 13th century cathedral (St. Just), consists only of a choir 130 ft. high and transept. The towers (194 ft. high) at each end of the transept date from 1480. The apse of the cathedral was formerly joined to the fortifications of the archiepiscopal palace, and the two buildings are still connected by a mutilated cloister of the 14th and 15th centuries. Part of the palace now serves as hotel de ville, and the palace garden contains many fragments of Roman work; the Musee Lapidaire in the Lamour guier buildings has similar Roman remains. The church of St.
Paul, though partly Romanesque, is for the south of France a rare example of a building of the early 13th century in the Gothic style of the north. It possesses some ancient Christian sar cophagi and fine Renaissance wood carving. Narbonne has a sub prefecture, tribunals of first instance and of commerce, a board of trade arbitrators and a chamber of commerce. It has a good trade in wine and spirituous liquors, salt, tartar, almonds and leather. The industries include cooperage, sulphur-refining, brandy-distilling and the manufacture of bricks and tiles.