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 11th and 12th 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 Pyrénées.
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 Ligugé 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: Société des Antiquaires de l’Ouest, 1966.
Favreau, R. La ville de Poitiers a la fin du moyen âge: une capitale régionale. 2 vols. Poitiers:
Société des Antiquaires de l’Ouest, 1977–78.
Garaud, Marcel. Les châtelains de Poitou et l’avènement du régime féodal, XIe et XIIe siècles.
Poitiers: Société des Antiquaires de l’Ouest, 1967.
Medieval france: an encyclopedia 1408