A royal hunting lodge in the forest east of Paris that became the manor of Louis IX, the deathplace of two Capetian kings, the birthplace and fortress residence of Charles V, with its 50-metre keep and Sainte-Chapelle, and the place where Henry V of England died in 1422.
The Château de Vincennes stands on a limestone plateau at the edge of the Bois de Vincennes, about eight kilometres east of the Île de la Cité. It began as a hunting lodge of Louis VII of France in the royal forest, became a favourite manor of Louis IX of France, and between about 1337 and 1380 was rebuilt as the largest royal fortress in France, with a keep some 50 metres high inside a walled enclosure more than a kilometre round.
Two Capetian kings died in the old manor, Charles V was born there and governed from the keep, and in 1422 it was where Henry V of England, heir to the French crown under the Treaty of Troyes, died of the illness he had caught at the siege of Meaux.
The forest of Vincennes appears in a charter of Charles the Bald in 848, and from the late tenth century it belonged to the kings. Louis VII had a lodge built there before 1178, and Philip II of France turned it into a manor and in 1183 enclosed the forest with a stone wall, making some 770 hectares into a royal game reserve within an easy ride of Paris.
The manor stood in what is now the north-eastern corner of the château, a group of wings around courtyards enlarged in the late thirteenth century. Its last remains were destroyed after the castle became an arsenal in 1796, and excavations directed by Jean Chapelot between 1992 and 1996 recovered its foundations and more than 2,700 fourteenth-century floor tiles.
Louis IX of France stayed at Vincennes more often than anywhere except the palace in Paris, held his council there, and left his queen, Margaret of Provence, and their children there when he was away. His friend Jean de Joinville remembered that in summer, after mass, the king would go and sit in the wood of Vincennes with his back against an oak and let anyone with business come and speak to him without hindrance from ushers, and then settle the case himself. The oak of Vincennes became the best-known image of Capetian justice.
In August 1239 Louis received the Crown of Thorns, bought from the Latin emperor of Constantinople, near Sens and brought it by way of Vincennes to Paris, walking barefoot for the last stage. A thorn and a fragment of the True Cross stayed at Vincennes in the manor chapel of Saint Martin, and a century and a half later they were the reason for a new royal chapel. In 1270 Louis took leave of his family at Vincennes before setting out on the crusade to Tunis, where he died that August.
Louis IX's son Philip III of France married his second wife, Marie of Brabant, at Vincennes in 1274. On 5 June 1316 Louis X of France died there after drinking a large quantity of chilled wine following an exhausting game of jeu de paume, leaving a pregnant queen whose son, John I, lived only five days.
Charles IV of France fell mortally ill at Vincennes and died there on 1 February 1328, the last of the direct Capetian kings. His queen, Jeanne d'Évreux, was pregnant, and he directed that if the child were a girl the peers should choose the king. She bore a daughter, the assembly passed over Edward III of England, whose claim came through his mother, and crowned Philip of Valois, and the succession decided after the death at Vincennes became one of the causes of the Hundred Years' War.
Around 1337 Philip VI of France decided to fortify the site with a great tower west of the manor. The work stalled in the defeats and bankruptcy that followed, and John II of France took it up again after his release from English captivity in 1360: his capture at the Battle of Poitiers in 1356, the Paris revolt of Étienne Marcel and the rising of the Jacquerie in 1358 had shown how exposed the crown was inside Paris. By 1364 the three lower storeys were finished, Charles V moved into the keep in 1367 or 1368 while building continued, and the tower was complete by 1369–1370.
The keep rises about 50 metres above the courtyard, a square block with a round turret at each corner and a fifth tower on the north side carrying latrines for every floor. Its walls are more than three metres thick at the base, and over two kilometres of iron bars were built into the masonry to tie doorways, vaults and whole storeys together. Each storey has a central room about ten metres square, and the lower four are vaulted on a single carved and painted column.
It was a fortress within a fortress. A wall 11.5 metres high with a turret at each angle, the chemise, surrounds the keep inside its own moat, and in the Middle Ages the only entrance was a bridge from the gatehouse to the first floor. Tree-ring dating shows that the oak panelling of the royal rooms was cut between 1367 and 1371 from trees grown around the Baltic.
Charles V of France, born at Vincennes on 21 January 1338, made the keep his residence and a seat of government. The first floor held the chambre à parer, the principal room of state; the second floor held the king's own chamber, whose vault still shows painted fleurs-de-lys and the royal arms on a blue ground; and the third floor was the apartment of the dauphin, the future Charles VI of France. Building accounts of 1365–1367 mention a bath chamber, and lead pipes replaced the earlier clay ones.
Around the king's chamber lay the rooms he used alone: a wardrobe where, according to the chronicles, he spoke in private with the emperor Charles IV during his visit of 1378, an oratory set into the wall, and small studies, one of them in the latrine tower, where he read and worked. His library of more than 1,200 volumes, full of the French translations he commissioned, including Nicole Oresme's versions of Aristotle, was housed mainly in a tower of the Louvre and inventoried in 1373, but books also travelled with him to Vincennes and his other houses.
Charles also planned a town. From 1372 he surrounded the keep, the manor and the site of a new chapel with a rectangular wall about 330 by 175 metres, flanked by six towers and three gate towers each about 42 metres high. According to Christine de Pizan's life of the king, written in 1404, he meant to fill the enclosure with fine houses for the lords, knights and officers he trusted most. The plan was never completed, and Charles died on 16 September 1380 at Beauté, the manor he had built nearby in 1376–1377.