Château de Loches

Gregory of Tours records that when Ursus of Cahors — Saint Ours — arrived in 491 to found a monastery, a castrum already stood on the rocky spur above the Indre. That first building was probably timber, and nothing of its architecture survives. In 742 the place was taken by the forces of Pépin and Carloman as they put down the revolt of Hunald, duke of Aquitaine, and the castle was razed.

A new one replaced it, and in 840 Charles the Bald granted it to a nobleman of Orléans named Adaland to hold against Norse incursions. The line that mattered most arrived by marriage: Foulques le Roux, son of the prefect Ingelger, wed Roscille de Loches, who brought him the fortress. From that match grew the house of the counts of Anjou.

The keep still standing was raised by Foulques Nerra, fourth count of Anjou, in the first third of the 11th century; dendrochronology on surviving beams puts the felling of its timbers between 1013 and 1035. It is one of the earliest large military buildings built in stone. Its entrance was set high and reached only through a small rectangular tower alongside. Inside, the ground floor held a well and two ovens, the aula filled the first level and the camera the second, while the third was given over to defence — sergeants, weapons and stores of projectiles.

Loches was an Angevin enclave inside the lands of the counts of Blois and Chartres while both houses fought for Touraine, a base from which the Angevins could raid the Blésois directly, working alongside Montrichard, Montrésor, Langeais and Montbazon. In 1011, with Foulques Nerra away on pilgrimage, the castle was entrusted to Lisoie de Basougers. After a failed assault on the fortress in 1042 the count of Blois himself was captured and shut in the keep by Geoffroy Martel, Foulques Nerra's son. The fighting ended in 1044 when Geoffroy Martel won the battle of Nouy.

Henry II came into possession of Loches through his marriage to Eleanor of Aquitaine and threw ramparts and ditches around the upper town, the bourg Saint-Ours. John Lackland handed the castle to Philippe Auguste in 1193; Richard the Lionheart took it back the following year in a siege that legend says lasted three hours, and the Plantagenets added further towers. Philippe Auguste finally took it in 1204 — the keep's fall is put a year later in some accounts — and building work at once turned Loches into a huge military fortress. From then it belonged to the royal domain and saw no further major fighting.

The royal lodging was built in the 14th century under Charles V and Charles VI. Enguerrand d'Eudin, captain of Loches from 1358 to 1364, had the fortifications, the drawbridge and the keep repaired in 1358–59. Charles VII lived here often in the company of Agnès Sorel — the first woman officially recognised as a royal favourite, to whom he gave the castle as her residence — and it was at Loches, in May 1429, that he met Joan of Arc.

The southern rampart towers, built by Henry II and Richard the Lionheart, held Templars in 1307 awaiting trial; Hugues de Pairaud, arrested at Poitiers with fifteen others, was kept here before being sent on to Paris. From the 15th century Louis XI — who had lived at Loches as a child but preferred Amboise — turned the place into a state prison, and it served as one until 1926. Artillery had made the old keep obsolete, and the 25-metre Tour Louis XI went up in the 15th century with a terrace laid out for cannon and cells whose limestone still carries prisoners' graffiti and carvings; the ground floor holds the torture room with its ringed iron bar. In the martelet, whose four levels run downwards rather than up, Ludovico Sforza, duke of Milan, captured by Louis XII in 1500, died in 1508 in the cell he had covered with frescoes.

Louis XVI used Loches to hold British prisoners taken during the American War of Independence. The château was pillaged and badly damaged during the Revolution; major restoration began in 1806, and parts remain ruinous. The castle was classified as a historic monument in the list of 1862, the gate of its enceinte in July 1886 and the old royal lodging in 1889. The castle and the adjacent church of Saint-Ours are open to the public.