Flight from persecution
Flight from Provence to the Comtat
← View on the mapWhy it happened
Provence passed to the French crown in 1481;1 anti-Jewish riots then spread,1 and Louis XII issued a general expulsion order in 1498, renewed in 1500 and enforced at the end of July 1501,1 leaving Jews only conversion or exile.1
The migration
Disturbances that began at Arles, Aix, and Marseilles in 1484 recurred at Tarascon in 1489, Arles before July 1493, and Manosque in 1495.1 Louis XII's 1498 expulsion order, renewed in 1500 and again at the end of July 1501, was then definitively implemented.1 Conversion was the only stated alternative; the crown later imposed a special 'tax of the neophytes,' and a 1512 roster lists 122–164 people, probably heads of families, paying it in sixteen Provençal localities.1 The adjacent papal Comtat Venaissin served as a refuge for Jews from Provence and Languedoc after several expulsions, including around 1500.2 Its principal communities were Avignon, Carpentras, Cavaillon, and L'Isle-sur-la-Sorgue.2 The corrected line therefore runs within the combined Provence-Comtat map region to the papal enclave, not to Rome.