Most European cities with rich medieval histories, like Poitiers’, have a castle. It goes with the job description: Angers, London, Milan, etc… Good luck finding a castle at Poitiers today – but it once had one, and a very rich one at that.
Poitiers actually had castles in two places. The earliest, doubling as fortified defenses and royal residences, stood where the Palace of the Dukes of Aquitaine [LINK] stands today, at the high point of the city looking over the Boivre to the west. From at least the 9th Century, when the Carolingian Emperor Louis the Debonnaire (son of Charlemagne) and his son Pippin of Aquitaine lived periodically in Poitiers, until the early 12th Century, the Castle/Palace of Poitiers played this double role. Under Alienor of Aquitaine in the mid-12th Century the defensive aspects of the Palace were softened, and in the sack of Poitiers by English troops in 1346 the Palace was largely destroyed. It would be rebuilt in the following decades in the form we know it today, as much more of a comfortable aristocratic residence, under the administration of Jean, Duke of Berry.
Alienor, last in the dynasty of the Dukes of Aquitaine, had Paris surrounded by a new set of fortified walls in the mid-to-late 12th Century. This befit Poitiers’ then-new (and to-be short-lived) role as a strategic stronghold of the rising Anglo-Angevin state, a rival to the northern France domains of the Kings of France. The extensive ramparts, among the longest in Europe, had many towers but no separate castle as part of the line. After the French King Philippe-Auguste regained control of Poitiers in 1204, the year of the death of Alienor, he immediately set forth to build such a castle. King Philippe’s castle arose at the confluence of the Clain and the Boivre, controlling access to the city from the north. Built in the shape of a triangle due to the shape of the land where the rivers joined, the castle was completed by 1232.
The triangular castle at the junction of the Clain and the Boivre did not have its finest hours in the 13th and early 14th centuries. It certainly failed to keep English soldiers under the Earl of Derby from capturing and looting the city in 1346, in the early days of the Hundred Years’ War. The 15th Century however was its finest hour. From the mayhem of continued war, with the French King Jean II captured at the Battle of Poitiers in 1356 (the third of the great battles around Poitiers – after 507 and 732) and held for, well, a King’s Ransom in England, emerged Jean II’s son Jean (1340-1416), best known as the Duke of Berry. Initially appointed by his father as the King’s Lieutenant for much of Aquitaine, Jean de Berry gradually became one of the powers of the land for several decades.
Jean, Duc de Berry, clearly enjoyed Poitiers. He spent months at a time and frequently returned there, especially during the period of the Hundreds’ Year War where the English controlled Paris. Unlike previous Kings and Counts who spent their Poitiers time residing in the Palace of the Dukes of Aquitaine, Jean de Berry preferred the Castle on the Clain and the Boivre. He had the castle rebuilt, from 1375, in late-Gothic/ early Renaissance style, with the rounder towers, more plentiful windows, and rich decoration which characterized the transition away from the purely defensive castles of the early Middle Ages, and towards the leisure homes of the Loire Chateaux. Jean de Berry was also a Renaissance man in his passion for collection and his intellectual curiosity. He created a then-unequaled collection of diamonds, reliquaries and works of art, which he had stored in Poitiers, and had an aviary built at the castle filled with exotic birds.
With all his political power and art collections, Jean de Berry is best known today for a book. More specifically, he is known for one of the finest and most spectacular books of the 15th Century, The Very Rich Hours of the Duke of Berry (Les Très Riches Heures du Duc de Berry). The Très Riches Heures is the most famous and best surviving example of manuscript illumination of the late Gothic period. It is a book of hours, or breviary, a collection of prayers to be at certain times of day in a regular rhythm, one of the most popular genres for the nobility which was discovering books in the 15th and 16th centuries. Many are displayed in museums around the world today, as is the Très Riches Heures, at the Museum in Chantilly, France. The Duke commissioned the work in his last years, from Paul Limbourg and his two brothers. All the brothers and the Duke died in 1416 – possibly from an outbreak of the Plague.
One feature of the Très Riches Heures is its illuminated manuscript pages for each month of the year, each one with a different chateau of the Duke’s territories. Perhaps the most famous of these pages is the one for July, which depicts none other than the newly rebuilt chateau of Poitiers. Its triangular shape is clearly in evidence. The Boivre empties into the Clain in the background, while in the foreground farm workers harvest wheat and shear sheep under a bright blue summer sky. [PHOTO] This wonderful early 15th century painting is also one of the very few representations of “a real castle” at Poitiers – but clear evidence that Poitiers in fact did have one.
The 15th Century was the finest hour of the Chateau of Poitiers. The 16th was to be its last hour. After the 1569 siege of Poitiers by the Protestant army of Gaspard de Coligny, in the Wars of Religion, the castle of the Duke of Berry, the Castle of Poitiers, is damaged. The ongoing religious conflicts created much destruction in the region, and distrust in Poitiers itself [LINK]. By 1591, the reactionary Catholic League, headed by the Duc de Guise, controls the city. Local leaders, distrusting anti-League tendencies in the commander of the Castle by the Clain, partly demolish the castle, and end the role it played in the city’s history. During the 17th century stones quarried from the ruins of the chateau are used as building materials (notably for the charitable hospital on the Place Montierneuf).
Today only a few vestiges remain of Poitiers’ great chateau at the confluence of the city’s two rivers. Even one of the rivers, the Boivre, seems to have largely disappeared, having been channeled underground in order to gain building space. Two of the chateau’s three great towers survived. One is visible for anyone who enters Poitiers by road from the north: the Tour du Cordier [LINK, PHOTO], located at the “Gate of Paris”, in a small square recently renamed for the Duke, the Place Jean de Berry. The base of the northernmost tower can be seen at the Square de la Petite Villette. As for the exotic birds, the diamonds and the magnificent library, the traveler will need to use their imagination.
