Chinon Castle

A Gallo-Roman castrum crowned the spur above the Vienne by the 5th century — behind its walls Chinon withstood a siege by the Roman general Aegidius in 463 — but the castle proper was the work of Theobald I, Count of Blois, called "the Trickster", who raised a stone tower on the mount in 954. The counts of Anjou pressed hard on Blois: after Odo II of Blois fell in battle in 1037, Fulk III marched into Touraine and Chinon's garrison surrendered at once, and in 1044 Geoffrey II of Anjou captured Theobald of Blois-Chartres, who bought his release by recognising Angevin ownership of Chinon, Langeais and Tours.

In the summer of 1156 Henry II of England besieged and took Chinon from his younger brother Geoffrey, in his second rebellion, and kept it, paying Geoffrey an annuity of £1,500. Chinon held one of Henry's main arsenals and, from 1163, the royal treasure of the south-western provinces in a purpose-built treasure tower, and he rebuilt the castle so thoroughly that most of what stands dates from his reign. William of Newburgh wrote that even before Henry's works "nature seemed to vie with human art in fortifying and defending it".

Henry held his last Christmas court there in 1172; the next year his eldest son, Henry the Young King, slipped out of Chinon by night to join Louis VII in Paris, opening a revolt joined by his brothers Richard and Geoffrey, and Queen Eleanor was shut up in the fortress before being sent to England. In 1187 Richard raided the Chinon treasury to fund repairs to his own castles in Aquitaine. Two years later, ill and abandoned, his castles falling to Richard and Philip II of France, Henry withdrew to Chinon and died there on 6 July 1189, in the chapel of Saint-Melaine.

From 1200 King John's engineer Urri strengthened its towers and ramparts and cut the ditch that turned the western tip of the spur into the Fort du Coudray, and it was at Chinon that John married Isabelle of Angoulême — the marriage Philip Augustus seized on to confiscate the Plantagenets' continental lands. In spring 1203 Hubert de Burgh took command of the garrison. By 1205 Chinon was one of the last intact castles in the Loire Valley. Philip's army sat before it from the autumn of 1204; when the battered walls could no longer be held the garrison sallied out to fight in the open, where de Burgh was wounded and taken, a prisoner until 1207. The fortress, which had passed for impregnable, fell in 1205, and soon afterwards Philip took Normandy itself.

Philip rebuilt what he had broken to his own pattern: the cylindrical Tour du Coudray, a round keep typical of French design of the period, three round flanking towers on the ramparts, and the Porte des Champs — a gatehouse with twin drum towers, portcullis and drawbridge.

When Philip IV moved against the Knights Templar on charges of heresy, the order's leaders — Grand Master Jacques de Molay among them — were imprisoned at Chinon in the Tour du Coudray, where graffiti carved by the knights still marks the walls. Between 18 and 20 August 1308 three cardinals sent by Pope Clement V heard the leaders' confessions there. In 1312 the pope suppressed the order by the bull Vox in excelso; the leaders were sentenced to life imprisonment, and de Molay and Geoffrey de Charney were burnt at the stake.

From 1427 to 1450 Chinon was the residence of Charles VII, when Touraine was almost the only territory in France still his. On 6 March 1429 Joan of Arc arrived at the castle, claiming heavenly voices had told her Charles would grant her an army to relieve Orléans. She lodged in the same Tour du Coudray; Charles received her two days later and sent her to Poitiers to be examined. In April she returned, was granted supplies, and rode to join the army at Orléans.

The Huguenots held the château briefly in 1562, and Henry IV made it a state prison. Cardinal Richelieu was given the castle to keep it out of unfriendly hands but let it fall into ruin, and apart from a brief occupation by royalist Vendeans in 1793 it lay abandoned. Prosper Mérimée, Inspector-General of Historic Monuments from 1834, halted the decay and set repairs in motion, and in 1840 Chinon was recognised as a monument historique. Between 2003 and 2010 a €14.5 million campaign excavated nearly 4,000 square metres of the Fort Saint-Georges — uncovering a previously unknown palace of Henry II — and restored the royal lodgings, roofless for two centuries, along with the Tour du Coudray. It is owned by the Indre-et-Loire General Council.