Château de Montsoreau

The site appears in writing from the sixth century as the domain of Restis; a building, administrative or religious, had stood on the rock since Gallo-Roman times. Eudes I, count of Blois, turned the mount into a fortified castle in 990. It passed under Angevin control around 1001, and Foulques Nerra put it in the keeping of Gautier de Montsoreau, of one of the most pre-eminent families of Anjou.

The castrum Monsorelli became one of the forty fortified places of Anjou and one of the few already ranking as a lordship at the turn of the year 1000; a town grew quickly around it, counted among the most strongly fortified and populous places by the second half of the eleventh century. When the community of Fontevraud was established in 1101 the abbey depended on Gautier de Montsoreau, a direct vassal of the count of Anjou, and Gautier's stepmother Hersende de Champagne headed it in Robert d'Arbrissel's lifetime.

Guillaume IV de Montsoreau took the side of Geoffrey Plantagenet against Geoffrey's brother Henry, the future Henry II of England. Henry besieged the castrum and, for all its fortification, took it at the end of August 1152, capturing Guillaume and his defenders. Guillaume was restored to the place afterwards; Henry was the only man to master the fortress in its 450 years.

The male line failed with Gauthier, and the lordship went with his daughter Ferrie on her marriage in 1213 to Pierre II Savary de Montbazon, whom Philippe Auguste, fresh from Bouvines, sent in 1214 with the archdeacon of Tours to negotiate peace with King John. The second house of Montsoreau ended in 1362, when Renaud VII's only daughter married Guillaume II de Craon; the Chabot house, the fourth, lasted only a few decades.

In 1450, to clear his debts, Louis II Chabot sold Montsoreau and Coutancière to his brother-in-law Jean II de Chambes, who undertook to rebuild the castle. Chambes, one of the wealthiest men in the kingdom, had entered Charles VII's service as an esquire in 1426 and rose to councillor and chamberlain, first master of the king's household in 1444, associate of Jacques Coeur, and ambassador to Venice in 1459 to prepare a new crusade.

The Flamboyant Gothic house raised between 1450 and 1460 was built directly in the bed of the Loire, and marks the turn from military architecture to architecture for pleasure: large windows, numerous chimneys, care taken over sanitation. Its ground floor and courtyard-side cellars commanded navigation on the river. Chambes withdrew from politics from 1461 and died in 1473; his son Jean III added the Renaissance stair tower, and Jean III's wife Marie de Chateaubriant founded the collegiate church of the Holy Cross across the moat in 1519.

In 1568 Protestants sacked Montsoreau, destroying the collegiate church of the Holy Cross and the town's fortifications. Four years later Jean VI de Chambes took a zealous part in organising the Angevin Saint Bartholomew, the massacre carried out at Saumur and Angers. On his death in 1575 his brother Charles became count of Montsoreau and the following year married Françoise de Maridor, whose name became attached to the killing of Louis de Bussy d'Amboise. Alexandre Dumas wrote about the château in La Dame de Monsoreau (1845–46).

Through the last decade of the sixteenth century a garrison of seventy men lived in the castle. It was gone by the reign of Louis XIII, and when René de Chambes asked for royal troops Richelieu refused him; condemned to death as a counterfeiter, René fled to England and never returned.

The widow of Louis François II de Bouchet Sourches, marquis de Tourzel, sold the château and what remained of the domain after 1804, and nineteen successive owners reshaped the site. The north front had stood directly in the Loire until the riverside road was built about 1820, and Turner, on a short stay on the river in October 1826, made a watercolour of it that was engraved in 1832.

By 1910 the decay had troubled the Société Française d'Archéologie, and Senator Geoffre asked the general council of Maine-et-Loire to intervene; the department bought up the separate properties from 1913 and began restoration in 1923, work that continued until the Second World War. After a further campaign from 1997 to 2001 the château opened to visitors on 6 July 2001, and in June 2015 the department leased it for twenty-five years to the collector Philippe Méaille, whose Art & Language collection opened here as a museum of contemporary art in April 2016.