Today's Castle: Loches

The Chateau de Loches is one of France's most historic castles. The keep was built in 1013 to 1035 by Fulk Nerra, Count of Anjou, one of the most colorful characters of the whole Middle Ages and ancestor of the British royal house. But the spot had already been fortified for centuries; Einhard, in his famous Life of Charlemagne, mentioned a castrum at Loches where Charlemagne's father Pepin the Short defeated Count Hunold of Aquitaine in 742.

Fulk Nerra (972-1040) was a great builder of castles, which he used to consolidate and expand his power. He was given to great acts of violence and cruelty; when he caught his first wife in adultery, he had her burned alive in her wedding dress. After his crimes he made extravagant penances, building two large monasteries and going on three pilgrimages to Jerusalem. According to one account, he crawled the last mile naked, being whipped by his servants. (When you imagine the high middle ages, you have to visualize things like that happening on a fairly regular basis.)

The Castle of Loches eventually passed to Fulk's descendant Henry Plantaganet, who became Henry II of England. Henry added the curtain wall and made this one of his favorite residences. "Plantagenet," in case you ever wondered, comes from planta genista, the common broom, which Henry's father Count Geoffrey wore as a badge on his hat. Legend has it that he adopted this badge after seeing a vision of a woman with a unicorn's head walking through a field of broom, but sadly this legend is not attested until the fifteenth century. (The picture above comes from the French government, one of a very detailed set they took in the 1960s before commencing restoration.)

Philip II of France besieged the castle in the 1180s but failed to take it. In 1189 Henry's heir Richard Lionheart was on crusade. Philip seized the castle by a sudden assault. When Richard finally returned from crusade and imprisonment, in 1194, he immediately retook Loches. But when Richard was dead, Philip took the castle again (in 1204), and kept it. It became a regular residence of the French kings and remained so for centuries

It was probably in this hall at Loches, in 1429, that Joan of Arc first met the Dauphin of France, the future Charles VII. Here Joan, a peasant girl, explained to the assembled nobles that she had seen in a vision that Charles must be crowned at Reims, then held by the English. Somehow she persuaded Charles to let her lead an attack on the city.

The future Louis XI, the "Spider King," spent much of his childhood at Loches. As king he used Loches as a prison, and many of the (mostly false) stories of his cruelty are associated with the castle. Among the famous prisoners held here were the chronicler Philippe de Commynes, Jean II of Valois, and Ludivoco Sforza, the Duke of Milan. Louis updated the defenses of the castle with bastions and canon.

The castle figured in the sixteenth-century wars of religion, and it actually remained a royal property until the monarchy was abolished. These days Loches calls itself "the royal city" and all of its promotional material plays up its association with the monarchy. (Above, private oratory photographed before restoration.)

Great web page on the castle here, in French.