Château de Germolles

Probably once a holding of the counts of Chalon, the site belonged from the early 13th century to a family who took its name. Guigon de Germola, recorded in the first third of that century, descended on his father's side from the marriage of Josseran III Gros de Brancion and Alix, daughter of Count Guillaume III of Chalon, making the Germolles a cadet branch of the sires of Brancion-Uxelles.

What stood here was modest. The term maison forte is used of the buildings only from the time of Geoffroy de Germolles, in the last quarter of the 13th century; before that the record speaks of a house and a grange, possibly the remains of a farm. The lower chapel and the great wine cellar of the present château survive from that phase, and probably the entrance châtelet with its two turrets.

Guigon died in 1266–67. Geoffroy held the lordship to 1297, then Guillaume I to 1344, Jean to 1355, and Guillaume II, ruined by an old debt to Lombard money-lenders. He pledged the revenues of Germolles in 1376–77 and then illegally made over the freehold itself to Philibert Paillart, a former chancellor of Duke Philip the Bold.

Germolles came to Philip the Bold, first Valois duke of Burgundy, in 1380 — a purchase by some accounts, a confiscation of an illegally alienated fief by others. The duke, overlord of the fief, made good his rights and recovered the lordship in 1381, buying up the claims third parties held over its revenues. Within a year of acquiring it he gave the domain to his wife, Margaret III of Flanders.

Margaret set out to turn an austere 13th-century house into a country palace, and called in the artists already attached to the ducal couple: the master mason Drouet de Dammartin, the sculptors Jean de Marville and Claus Sluter, and the painter Jean de Beaumetz — the same hands then at work on the duke's chartreuse de Champmol. Building began in 1382 and ran on for a decade or more, producing a large rectangular block around a courtyard inside a water-filled moat.

She worked the estate as well as the house. A rose garden was planted and its petals sent to Flanders to be distilled into rose water, and a model sheepfold was built, to establish in Burgundy the animal whose wool had made the fortune of Flanders. King Charles VI of France was received at Germolles on 12 February 1389 at the invitation of his uncle and aunt. In 1393 Sluter carved the group of the duke and duchess seated under an elm among their sheep; in 1399 a Virgin from his workshop was set over the château gate; and in 1400 étuves, heated bath rooms, are mentioned in the house.

After Philip and Margaret the château passed to the three dukes who followed them: John the Fearless, Philip the Good and Charles the Bold. Sluter's group was repaired in 1466 and sheltered from the weather. When Charles was killed at Nancy in 1477 Germolles fell to the crown of France.

Kings granted its use to a succession of families until the end of the 18th century, and during the Revolution it was sold as a bien national. Parts of the building were lost afterwards to damage both deliberate and accidental, much of it through lack of maintenance.

The great reception hall above the cellar burned at the beginning of the 19th century. The monumental fireplace from its south wall, carrying capitals from Sluter's workshop that show an episode of Chrétien de Troyes's Yvain, the Knight with the Lion, was moved in the 20th century into the hall of the present château. Fires devastated Germolles in 1873. At the end of the century fire also took the upper chapel that Margaret's architect had built above the old lower one, beheading that part of the building and leaving its remains open to the sky.

The château was bought at the end of the 19th century by the family that owns it still. In 2009–2010, with support from the State and the department of Saône-et-Loire, the octagonal choir turret regained its slate roof and the chapel nave the volume it had lost; the Burgundy region awarded its tenth regional heritage prize for the part Mathieu Pinette and Christian Degrigny took in the work.

By an order of 12 June 1989 the entrance porch was classed as a monument historique, with the grange and the grounds inscribed, and the house was given the Maisons des Illustres label in 2013. One of the best-preserved residences of the dukes of Burgundy, it remains privately owned, opens for guided visits most of the year, and is one of fourteen sites open to the public on the Route des châteaux en Bourgogne du Sud.