For a long time I had been planning a source-gathering trip to France due to the fact that some manuscripts of Biondo's Decades were in its libraries. The loud construction site on our building in Jyväskylä helped to set the trip on May-June 2023. Furthermore, since our seven-month-old daughter was now part of our lives, we decided it was best that she and my wife both accompanied me to France. This way we wouldn't have to spend any time apart from each other. In the next three blogs, I give some glimpses of what I have discovered on my voyage.
The aim of this journey was to consult, digitize and analyse five manuscripts, one in Besançon, three in Paris, and one in Saint-Omer. Some of the manuscripts had very scarce information online, so I was partly going in blind. The first destination was Besançon in the Eastern France, so we decided to fly to Zurich, and head to Besançon by train. The train journey took about four hours and finally Besançon was within sight.
Besançon is an ancient city as it has had occupants since Antiquity. It was called Vesontio by the Romans and Julius Caesar writes about the city in his Gallic Wars this way:
Vesontio [...] is the largest town of the Sequani, [...] and so fortified was it by the nature of the ground, as to afford a great facility for protracting the war, inasmuch as the river Doubs almost surrounds the whole town, as though it were traced round it with a pair of compasses. A mountain of great height shuts in the remaining space, which is not more than 600 feet, where the river leaves a gap, in such a manner that the roots of that mountain extend to the river's bank on either side. A wall thrown around it makes a citadel of this [mountain], and connects it with the town. (De bello Gallico 1.38).
