Poitiers

Poitiers stands on a rock at the meeting of the Clain and the Boivre, the chief town of Poitou. John, Duke of Berry, rebuilt Eleanor of Aquitaine's walls and the triangular castle at the confluence in the late fourteenth century. On 19 September 1356 the Black Prince defeated and captured the French king John II at the battle fought near the town. The Parlement of Paris, in exile from the Anglo-Burgundian capital, moved to Poitiers in 1418 under the dauphin Charles, and in 1429 the theologians examined Joan of Arc here before she was given command of the royal army.

Charles VII's court and the exiled scholars of Paris helped Poitiers win a university in 1431, which counted about four thousand students by the end of the fifteenth century and later taught Rabelais and Descartes. Calvinism took hold in the town in the sixteenth century. In 1569 the Count of Lude held it for seven weeks against Admiral Coligny's army, until Coligny gave up the siege. In the eighteenth century the royal intendant Blossac razed Eleanor's wall to lay out boulevards and a French garden.