In our Minervois, as in much of old Europe, the events which marked the social landscape were in the main derived from the activities of the christian churches in the middle-ages trying to impose their power over the peoples. The more ancient times of pre-history had the decency not to interfere with the social landscape, the small pockets of people tended at that time to be nomadic and if settled, to be in such small groups that they left no marked imprint on our surroundings.

First and foremost perhaps in the impact on the modern mind, we have the associations with the Albigensian Crusades when the King of France joined forces with the Pope to oust and destroy what they called the Cathar heresy. These events have left their mark with the remains of chateaux at Minerve and Lastours. If the crusade started in Beziers with the burning of the many in the church on 22 July, 1209, it didn't delay much before attacking Minerve which it crushed after a long siege in the summer of 1210.

But before the Albigensians, the Romans were here and they too have left traces of their passing. The Roman conquest was not a feature of the christian churches but by the time of the fall of the Roman empire, the main conurbations were largely christianised whereas the rural areas remained pagan and more open to some of the less mainstream religious groups.

After the Albigensian crusades, the catholic church restructured its organisation, in 1318, and the regional divisions resulting from the subdivision of the Narbonne diocese continued for many centuries and were adopted after the French Revolution when the boundaries of the present day administrative departments were decided. The splitting of the Minervois between the departments of the Aude and the Herault, then, dates from the reorganisation of the diocese of Narbonne in 1318. It is only now being overcome by the establishment of working parties across the two departments to study and make proposals to present a unified image of the Minervois to the rest of the world. The modern driving force is the economic power of tourism.