A small town of the Limousin with two castles, where Richard the Lionheart was hit by a crossbow bolt while besieging Châlus-Chabrol on 26 March 1199 and died of the wound eleven days later — the end of a reign, and of the Angevin hold on Aquitaine as his family had known it.
Châlus sits on a height in the Limousin, in the broken granite country between Limoges and the Périgord. Two castles were built there, Châlus-Chabrol and the smaller Châlus-Maulmont, watching a road that carried traffic between central France and the south-west; the position mattered more than the size of the place, since it lay on the approaches to Limoges and on routes joining Paris to Spain and the Mediterranean to the Atlantic.
Châlus-Chabrol has an isolated circular keep of the twelfth century and a residential range built between the eleventh and thirteenth centuries and enlarged in the seventeenth; it has been listed as a monument historique since 1925. The town would be a footnote if a king had not died beneath its walls.
Richard I had returned from the Third Crusade by way of captivity in Germany, and had spent the rest of the 1190s fighting Philip II of France and rebuilding his defences in Normandy. In the spring of 1199 he turned south into the Limousin against Aymar V, viscount of Limoges, one of the great Aquitanian lords whose loyalty had been unreliable throughout his reign and who had supported his enemies.
The chroniclers add a story that has outlived the politics: that a peasant on Aymar’s land had turned up a hoard of gold — in some versions a Roman emperor and his family in precious metal — that the viscount refused to surrender to his duke, and that Richard came to take it. Modern historians generally treat the treasure as embroidery on an ordinary campaign of coercion, though the tale is old and was told within living memory of the event. Either way, Richard invested Châlus-Chabrol, which was defended by a garrison of no great size.
On the evening of 26 March 1199 Richard rode round the walls without full armour, watching his engineers at work. A crossbowman on the ramparts shot him in the left shoulder. The bolt was cut out badly, the wound turned gangrenous, and the king died on 6 April 1199, eleven days later, in the arms of his mother Eleanor of Aquitaine, who had ridden from Fontevraud to reach him.
The crossbowman is named differently by different writers — Pierre Basile, Bertran de Gourdon, John Sabroz, Dudo — which is a fair measure of how the story grew. In the best-known version Richard had the man brought before him, heard that he had shot to avenge a father and brothers killed by the king, pardoned him and ordered him freed with a hundred shillings. Richard’s mercenary captain Mercadier then had him flayed alive and hanged once the king was dead.
The body was divided as a king’s often was. His heart went to Rouen Cathedral, the city of his Norman capital; his body was carried to Fontevraud Abbey and laid at the feet of his father Henry II; and his entrails were buried where he fell, at Châlus, in the chapel beside the castle. The succession passed to his brother John of England, and within five years Philip II had taken Normandy and Anjou.
Châlus-Chabrol keeps the shape it had in 1199 more clearly than most sites of famous deaths. The cylindrical keep, of the later twelfth century, stands apart from the hall range; the walls that Richard’s engineers were undermining when he was shot are the ones a visitor walks beneath. The chapel of Saint-Jean, below the castle, holds the tradition of the royal entrails, and the site has been shown to visitors on that basis since long before archaeology could test it.
The second castle, Châlus-Maulmont, stood on the other side of the town and belonged to a different branch of the same lordship; far less of it survives. In later centuries Châlus-Chabrol passed through several hands, among them Charlotte d’Albret, wife of Cesare Borgia, and their daughter Louise.
Richard was forty-one and had reigned for nine years, of which he had spent about six months in England. His death at a minor siege in the Limousin, over a quarrel with a viscount, struck contemporaries as an absurd end for the most admired soldier in Christendom, and the moralists made the most of it: a king killed by a common crossbowman, the weapon the Church had tried to ban.
Its political consequence was immediate. John inherited a contested succession against his nephew Arthur of Brittany, and the Angevin lands north of the Loire were lost to Philip II by 1204. Châlus, a hill town of a few thousand people, is therefore one of the places where the map of medieval France changed.