…Montpellier and other cities.

The Jews of Montpelier are prohibited from holding any “high” office in France by a decree in 1190.

King Peter II of Aragon (and, as Peter I, Count of Barcelona), had responded to Pope Innocent III’s call for a crusade against the heretics in southern France by dispatching Christian crusaders into Aragonese-held Provence, where Albigensian heretics had garnered a large following.

With Montfort having turned the crusade into a political war to end the independence of the southern French nobles, Peter endeavors to placate the northern crusaders by arranging a marriage between his son James, now three years old, and Simon's daughter.

He entrusts the boy to be educated in Montfort's care in 1211.

The University of Montpellier is considerably older than its formal founding date, associated with a bull issued by Pope Nicholas IV in 1289, combining all the long-existing schools into a university.

The schools of liberal arts that developed into the Montpellier faculty of arts may have have been a direct continuation of the Gallo-Roman schools that gathered around masters of rhetoric.

The school of law was founded by Placentinus, from the school of law at Bologna, who came to Montpellier in 1160, taught there during two different periods, and died there in 1192.

The famous school of medicine was founded perhaps by people trained in the Spanish medical schools; it is certain that, as early as 1137, there were excellent physicians at Montpellier.

The school of medicine owed its success to a policy of the Guilhem lords of Montpellier, by which any licensed physician might lecture there: with no fixed limit to the number of teachers, lectures multiplied, and there was a great choice of teachers.

The statutes given in 1220 by Cardinal Conrad von Urach, legate of Pope Honorius III, which are confirmed and extended in 1240, had placed this school under the direction of the Bishop of Maguelonne, but the school enjoys a great deal of de facto autonomy.

The University of Montpellier is considerably older than its formal founding date, associated with a bull issued by Pope Nicholas IV in 1289, combining all the long-existing schools into a university.

Jacob ben Machir ibn Tibbon occupies a considerable place in the history of astronomy in the Middle Ages.

A Provençal Jewish astronomer of the Ibn Tibbon family, his works, translated into Latin, will be quoted by Copernicus, Reinhold, and Clavius.

He is also highly reputed as a physician, and, according to Jean Astruc ("Mémoires pour Servir à l'Histoire de la Faculté de Médecine de Montpellier," p. 168), is in 1300 named regent of the faculty of medicine of Montpellier.

Isabella of Majorca is the daughter of James III and his first wife, Constance of Aragon.

Her maternal grandparents are Alfonso IV of Aragon and his first wife Teresa d'Entença.

Her paternal grandparents are Ferdinand of Majorca and his wife Isabelle de Sabran.

After the death of her mother, Isabella's father had remarried to Violante of Vilaragut, who gave Isabella a half-sister named Esclaramunda, who died young.

Her father had lost the kingdom of Majorca in 1343 and died two years later in the Battle of Llucmajor fighting against the forces of Peter IV of Aragon.

Isabella had been captured with her brother and stepmother by her uncle King Peter after the battle in which her father was killed, and confined to the convent of the Clarissans at Valencia with her stepmother.

She is freed in late 1358, thanks to the efforts of her stepmother, on the condition that she renounce her rights to Majorca.

On September 4, 1358, Isabella marries John II, Marquess of Montferrat, in Montpellier.

Her marriage is arranged by her stepmother, who is at this time living at the Court of Monferrato.

A general lack of knowledge about the Pyrenees has for centuries permitted repetition of the errors and misconceptions about the mountains that had been propounded by such authors of antiquity as Diodorus Siculus of Sicily and the Greek geographer-historian Strabo (both first century BCE).

The first explorations are made in 1582, followed by botanical works from the academies at Montpellier.

Louis-Sébastien Lenormand makes the first ever recorded public demonstration of a parachute descent on December 31, 1783, by jumping from the tower of the Montpellier Observatory in France, using his rigid-framed model, which he intends as a form of fire escape.

Lenormand was born in Montpellier on May 25, 1757 as the son of a clockmaker.

Between 1775 and 1780, he had studied physics and chemistry under Lavoisier and Berthollet in Paris, where he also got involved with the administration of saltpeter.

In this position he learned of the use of scientific and mathematical knowledge in the production of gunpowder.

Having returning to his natal town, he worksin his father's clock shop while immersing himself in the intellectual community and starting his experiments with parachuting, inspired by the performance of a Thai equilibrist who used a parasol for balance.

Before performing the public jump from the observatory tower, Lenormand had tested his parachutes using animals.

Antoine-Jérôme Balard, who is working in a pharmacy school in Montpellier, France, in 1826, discovers in the residual bitterns ("saline liquors") from the manufacture of salt from Mediterranean Sea water the same pink liquid discovered by Carl Jacob Löwig in Heidelberg the previous year. (German chemist Justus von Liebig also has apparently obtained the element before Balard, but wrongly considers it to be iodine chloride.)

Balard liberates the element by passing chlorine through aqueous solution of the residues, which contain magnesium bromide.

Distillation of the material with manganese dioxide and sulfuric acid produce odoriferous red vapors, which are condensed to a dark liquid.

The similarity of this procedure to that for making chlorine suggests to Balard that he has obtained a new element similar to chlorine.

He calls it muride, after the murex, a Mediterranean mollusk whose bromine-containing secretions yield the classically famous dye known as Tyrian purple.

The Academie Francaise does not accept the name, however, and calls the element bromine, named for Greek bromos, a stench, because of the odor of its vapors.

Bromine is now added to the list of halogens.