Saint-Pol

Saint-Pol stands on the Ternoise in the old county that bore its name. A castle rose here in the eleventh century, and the counts later fortified the town, whose inhabitants received its communal charter in 1202. Its position in Artois placed it among the contested strongholds of the northern French frontier.

Louis of Luxembourg, count of Saint-Pol and constable of France, was executed for treason in 1475; Louis XI confiscated his family's possessions. In the sixteenth century Francis I ordered the castle's defences modernized under the direction of a skilled Italian engineer, but imperial troops took both castle and town in 1537. Saint-Pol came under Spanish authority, and the Ternois and Artois were joined to France by the Treaty of the Pyrenees in 1659.