Abstract

Early in 1067 Count Roger of Carcassonne — known to some modern historians as Roger II and to others as Roger III — died without direct descendants and probably intestate. He was still a young man. Roger was the son of Rangard of La Marche and Count Peter-Raimond. With many others he proudly traced his lineage back to the tenth-century Count Roger “the Old” and his brother Odo and through them claimed a cousinage to counts and countesses from the high valleys of the Pyrenees to the ancient cities on the Mediterranean. By the time of Roger's death the houses of Foix, Comminges, Couserans, Béziers-Albi-Nîmes, Bigorre, Barcelona, Navarre, and Aragon were all related through male descent, through daughters who had married out, or through heiresses who had married in. They were but the remnant of an even larger number of branch lineages, three of which came to an end in the 1060s