POITOU

. One of the largest counties of France, Poitou played a role of major importance in medieval history. Poitiers, its capital and most influential town, was the seat of a large diocese, mostly coterminous with the county, and its bishops figured prominently in councils of international scope in the 11 th and 12 th centuries. Two of the earliest and most famous French monasteries, Saint-Hilaire and Sainte-Croix (Sainte-Radegonde), were also located in the town and attracted pilgrims in large numbers throughout the medieval period. So also did the beauty of its striking Romanesque churches—Notre-Dame-la-Grande, Saint-Hilaire-le-Grand, Sainte-Croix, Saint-Jean de Montierneuf, among others—which made Poitiers an artistic center of the first order, a development helped by its location on one of the principal pilgrimage routes to Santiago in Spain. Its schools—Saint-Hilaire and Saint-Pierre, the cathedral—never attained quite the same fame, although they were among the best in France south of the Loire; in 1431, Charles VII approved the foundation of a university in Poitiers. During the lifetime of Eleanor of Aquitaine, and possibly even earlier under her grandfather the troubadour Duke Guilhem IX, Poitiers became a center for courtly-love poetry in Occitan, the first of its kind in France. The city was also commercially important for trade both on an international scale (Poitevin wines were well known in England, Normandy, and the Low Countries) and within the province. Finally, from the mid-10th to the mid-12th century, Poitiers ranked as one of the political centers of gravity in France as the capital of the vast duchy of Aquitaine, which comprised a dozen counties in addition to Poitou and covered nearly a third of the southwestern part of the country from the Loire to the Pyrenees.

Territorially, the medieval county corresponded to the tribal lands of the Pictones conquered by Rome in the first century B. C. Under Roman administration, Poitiers, then called Limonum, became the capital, and it was here that Christian conversion began in the 4th century. The earliest monastic foundation in France was at Liguge just south of Poitiers, in the 360s. After coming briefly under Visigothic rule in the the 5th century, Poitou became the vital northern outpost of the duchy of Aquitaine, which fell to the Franks in the late 8th century. Charlemagne appointed the first known count of Poitou. One of the greatest aristocratic dynasties of medieval France was that of the counts of Poitou/dukes of Aquitaine, eight of whom, all named William, ruled from the 950s to 1137. Briefly allied with the Capetians through the marriage of Eleanor of Aquitaine to Louis VII (r. 1137-52), Poitou then became part of the Angevin empire through her second marriage, to Henry II of England, in 1154. English rule lasted only a short time. The Capetian kings conquered and absorbed Poitou into the royal domain in the 13th century, and its history as an independant county came to an end.

George T. Beech

[See also: AQUITAINE; ELEANOR OF AQUITAINE; GUILHEM IX; POITIERS] Dez, Gaston. Histoire de Poitiers. Poitiers: Societe des Antiquaires de l’Ouest, 1966.

Favreau, R. La ville de Poitiers a la fin du moyen age: une capitale regionale. 2 vols. Poitiers:

Societe des Antiquaires de l’Ouest, 1977-78.

Garaud, Marcel. Les chatelains de Poitou et l ’avenement du regime feodal, Xle et Xlle siecles.

Poitiers: Societe des Antiquaires de l’Ouest, 1967.

Labande, Edmond-Rene, ed. Histoire du Poitou, du Limousin et despays charentais. Toulouse: Privat, 1976.

Richard, Alfred. Histoire des comtes de Poitou, 778-1204. 2 vols. Paris: Picard, 1903.