The wall paintings in the round room of the Château Comtal of Carcassonne

The ‘round’ room—thus called because of its semi-circular vault—is located in the centre of the western wing of the Château Comtal in the Cité of Carcassonne.

In 1926, wall paintings were discovered under a layer of plaster. The paintings are on the four walls of this rectangular room and, according to current knowledge, they constitute the most important cycle of wall paintings from the twelfth century kept in a non-religious building in France. However, there has as yet been no convincing interpretation of this complex set of decorations.

The various parts of the pictorial narration are organized in two rows on the north and south walls, and in three bands on the west wall. Because of the coating’s state of conservation on the east wall, only a few traces of the painting are visible, except on the intrados of the arch that opens onto the interior court of the château, which contains contours of several figures in its northern part.

There are battle scenes on the north and south walls, and the paintings on the west wall, which are less well preserved, depict officers and men engaged in discussion.

The two sides confronting each other in the battle scenes differ from each other in their clothing and arms. There are warriors armed with circular shields, known as ‘roundels’. Some of them are wearing turbans, parts of which are fluttering in the wind. The headdresses’ rounded tops distinguish them from the adversaries’ conical helmets. These contrasting characteristics suggest that this is a battle between Christians and Muslims.

However, some of the details are problematic. Firstly, the blond-haired cavalier with a roundel, who’s been knocked to the ground by his adversary (on the south wall), is hardly representative of a Muslim warrior. The same is true of the blond-haired bearded man holding a roundel on the west wall. Furthermore, though the confrontation represented on the south wall clearly shows the victory of the cavalier on the left over his adversary with a roundel, this isn’t the case on the opposite wall. In fact, on the south wall the defeated soldier has been knocked off his horse by a lancer, whereas the battle taking place on the north wall only shows the detail of the lance of the man wearing the turban, which has just broken on impact with the shield of his adversary, who’s wearing a conical helmet. Neither of the cavaliers has been knocked off their horse, but the broken lance could be interpreted as a sign of the lancer’s inferiority[1].

Two other scenes on the west wall are equally problematic. In the first, on the upper band, there’s a group of three people. One of them, of whom only the top of the head is visible, is wearing a crown. The other two are speaking to him. The first, shown in profile, is represented as wearing a turban over a red face with exaggeratedly dark eyebrows. The second, represented in a three-quarter view, is sporting wavy hair, a beard and a white moustache enhanced with blue. He is dressed in a scarlet cloak that is tied at the shoulder. The two figures, although juxtaposed and speaking to the same person, are completely different in the way they are represented.

In the middle band, to the right of the window opening onto the rampart, there’s group of five people also engaged in discussion. Three of them are in the centre of the scene. The two bearded figures on the right, who are seated and dressed in cloaks, are speaking to an armed man, who is facing them. He is holding a roundel, a lance, and an épée is hanging from his belt. However, he isn’t wearing a turban and his blond curly hair and beard are clearly visible. And he isn’t caricatured in profile like the turbaned man in the band above, but represented in a three-quarter view that enables the viewer to appreciate his fine features.

The painted decorations in the round room of the Château Comtal of Carcassonne are a good example of the difficulty that the modern viewer has in interpreting an iconographic repertoire, whose literary and historic sources remain unknown. It is of course possible to identify the two opposing sides, one of which seems to be Islamic and the other Christian. But on closer inspection, the contrasts in the treatment of the various figures are not clear enough for the viewer to be able to identify exactly which side each figure belongs to.

It may be a representation of events taken from the Chanson de Roland (The Song of Roland) and set in a region close to Spain. But it is also possible that the paintings are based on books in the Old Testament, such as the Book of Kings, the Book of the Maccabees, or the Books of Chronicles, and illustrate the knightly battles between eastern warriors. Such scenes were highly prized in the thirteenth century and featured on the stained glass in the Sainte-Chapelle in Paris, and were also used to decorate the king’s chamber in the Palace of Westminster. The representation on the intrados of the eastern opening—a bird with its wings spread evoking the Holy Spirit, above an enthroned figure, whose feet are resting on a little monster, while a juggler performs before him—may indicate that the latter interpretation[2] is correct.

[2] The combination of an enthroned king treading on a monster and a juggler recalls the literary duo of king Solomon and his jester, Marcolfi,  as described in Dialogus Salomonis et Marcolfi.