Agen

Agen is a Garonne port in the Agenais, below the hill of the Ermitage, where flour mills, fisheries and the river trade carried the town to perhaps ten thousand people by the late Middle Ages, over a built-up area of some sixty hectares. In 1279 the lords of the Agenais swore homage to the English king in the church of the Jacobins, and the town was held in the long contest between the French and English crowns. Agen was largely spared the worst fighting of the Hundred Years' War, though the Garonne flood of 1435 was long remembered as one of the worst.

After the war the town recovered. Several Italian bishops, among them Cardinal Leonardo della Rovère from 1487 and the novelist Matteo Bandello from 1550, brought humanist learning to the see. Saint-Caprais was damaged in the Wars of Religion in December 1561, and in 1585 Margaret of Valois, Queen of Navarre, came to Agen and tried to bring it into the Catholic League's camp. The prunes grown across the Lot-et-Garonne were shipped down the river from its quays. The old cathedral of Saint-Étienne was destroyed in the Revolution, and Saint-Caprais became the cathedral in 1802.