Château de Châteaudun

A fortress was restored on the rocky spur above the Loir around 940 by Viscount Geoffroy de Châteaudun, vassal of Thibaud I le Tricheur, Count of Chartres and Blois; the old town grew up around it. The cylindrical keep at the north-west end of the spur was raised for Thibaut V, Count of Blois, around 1170 by some accounts and about 1180 by others. It measures 31 metres to the roof and 42 metres overall, 17 metres in diameter, with walls four metres thick. Of its three levels the lowest could be entered only from the floor above, through a shaft, and held the provisions. The rest of the castle was built along the cliff edge, sixty metres above the bed of the Loir.

On 13 October 1391 Guy II de Châtillon, last Count of Blois, sold the counties of Blois and Dunois to Louis d'Orléans, brother of King Charles VI. Louis was assassinated in 1407 and Châteaudun passed with the rest of his property to his son Charles d'Orléans, who in 1439 made a gift of the castle to his half-brother Jean de Dunois, the bâtard d'Orléans and companion-in-arms of Joan of Arc; the gift is remembered as a reward for Dunois's part in freeing Charles from his English captivity. In 1452 Dunois began the chapel and a Gothic corps de logis, converting the fortress into a residence.

The Sainte-Chapelle went up between 1451 and 1493, one of eleven such chapels built by the kings and royal princes of France in the Middle Ages: choir and high chapel from 1451 to 1454, nave and south oratory from 1460 to 1464, bell tower in 1493. The lower chapel holds some fifteen statues of saints revered by Dunois and his family, and a Last Judgement painted on the south oratory wall by Paul Goybault in 1467.

The west or Dunois wing, five storeys of Gothic lodging, was built between 1459 and 1468, the work carried on until Dunois's death by the master mason Nicole Duval; it preserves one of the rare courtrooms of the Ancien Régime kept in its original state. His descendants the dukes of Longueville continued the building until 1518 with the north wing, its lower storeys raised by François I d'Orléans-Longueville between 1469 and 1491 and the upper floors finished by François II and his heirs in the first quarter of the sixteenth century. In the Louis XII manner, it marks the transition between flamboyant Gothic and the first Renaissance; its staircase was crowned with rich lead cresting and figures of Mélusine, the legendary ancestress of the Lusignans from whom the Longuevilles descended, and the master of the works may have been Colin Biart. With the Château de Montsoreau of 1453 and the Palais Jacques-Cœur of 1451, these additions count among the earliest residences in France built essentially for leisure.

On 9 May 1538 a ceremony involving minstrels marked the betrothal and proxy wedding at Châteaudun of James V, King of Scotland, and Mary of Guise; the king's proxy, Lord Maxwell, gave the bride a diamond spousing ring which cost 300 French crowns. On 10 November 1630, the day remembered as the journée des Dupes, Louis XIII had Michel de Marillac imprisoned here as head of the cabal formed with Marie de Médicis against the king and Richelieu. The following May, Marillac's brother the marshal was beheaded in the Place de Grève.

The Longueville family died out without issue in 1694 and the castle returned to the dukes of Luynes. Half abandoned by its owners, it served as a refuge for the people of Châteaudun after the fire that ravaged the town in 1723. The badly damaged upper works of the Longueville wing, dormers and parapets alike, were demolished in 1770. During the Revolution the chapel was sacked and the buildings were used as a barracks.

The first restorations were launched in 1866 by the duc Théodoric de Luynes with the architect Frédéric Debacq. The Prussians damaged the castle again during the battle of Châteaudun in 1870. The State acquired it in 1938 and began a restoration directed by J. M. Trouvelot; the explosion of the bridge in 1944 destabilised the upper parts of the monument, which were straightened again without being dismantled.

The castle was classified a monument historique on 6 July 1918, the parcels at its foot inscribed on 14 October 1946, and the surroundings and the cloître de Luynes protected on 2 April 1947. Its rooms hold some seventy tapestries, among them a classified set of seven pieces telling the story of Clorinde and Tancrède after Tasso. The State has owned the castle since 1938, and it is run by the Centre des monuments nationaux.