The hilltop capital of the counts of Poitou and dukes of Aquitaine: city of Saints Hilary and Radegund, of Eleanor of Aquitaine and her court, prize of battles fought nearby in 732 and 1356, and seat of the exiled French Parlement where Joan of Arc was examined in 1429.
Poitiers stands on a steep limestone spur where the Boivre flows into the Clain, a naturally defended site on the main road between the Loire valley and Bordeaux. It was the capital of the Pictones under Rome, one of the earliest bishoprics in Gaul, and from the tenth century the seat of the counts of Poitou, who were also dukes of Aquitaine and claimed to rule most of south-western France.
Two battles fought outside it, in 732 and 1356, spread its name far beyond the town. Poitiers was also Eleanor of Aquitaine's city, a prize of the Hundred Years' War, and the refuge of the French royal courts while the English held Paris.
Roman Lemonum, later called Pictavi after its people, had an amphitheatre larger than that of Nîmes and, from the late third century, a wall around the top of the spur. Its first known bishop, Hilary, who led the Western opposition to Arianism in the 350s and was exiled to Phrygia for it, died in about 367, and the baptistery of Saint-Jean, begun in the fourth century, is among the oldest Christian buildings in France.
In 507 the Frankish king Clovis defeated and killed the Visigothic king Alaric II at Vouillé, about ten miles to the north-west, bringing Aquitaine under Frankish rule. Around 560 Queen Radegund, who had left her husband Chlothar I, founded the nunnery of the Holy Cross inside the walls. In 569 she obtained a fragment of the True Cross from the Byzantine emperor, and the Italian poet Venantius Fortunatus, her friend and later bishop of Poitiers, wrote the hymns Vexilla regis and Pange lingua for its arrival.
In 732 Abd al-Rahman al-Ghafiqi, the Umayyad governor of al-Andalus, defeated the duke of Aquitaine near Bordeaux and marched north towards the rich shrine of St Martin at Tours, and later accounts say his men burned the church of Saint-Hilaire outside Poitiers. Charles Martel, mayor of the palace of the Franks, met them on the Roman road between Poitiers and Tours in October; Abd al-Rahman was killed and his army withdrew in the night. English historians call the encounter the Battle of Tours, while French writers name it after Poitiers.
The victory kept Poitiers in Frankish hands. Charlemagne made Aquitaine a sub-kingdom for his son Louis the Pious in 781, and a royal palace was built at the highest point of the old Roman town, on the site the later palace of the counts still occupies. From the tenth century the counts of Poitou, the House of Poitiers, also held the title of duke of Aquitaine, which their descendants kept until the twelfth century.
The counts made Poitiers the capital of a principality that stretched from the Loire towards the Pyrenees in name, if rarely in fact, and they spent heavily on its churches. Pope Urban II consecrated the abbey of Montierneuf, founded by Duke Guy-Geoffrey, in 1096, and the west front of Notre-Dame-la-Grande, carved in the first half of the twelfth century with prophets, apostles and scenes of the Incarnation, belongs to the same prosperous age.
Guy-Geoffrey's son, the ninth duke named William, who ruled from 1086 to 1126, is the earliest troubadour whose poems survive: eleven songs in Occitan. He added the square keep of the palace, later called the Maubergeon tower, in about 1104, and installed in it his mistress, the viscountess known as Dangereuse, for which the bishop of Poitiers excommunicated him. His son, the last duke of the line, died on pilgrimage to Santiago de Compostela in 1137, leaving his lands to his daughter Eleanor.
Eleanor of Aquitaine married the future Louis VII of France at Bordeaux in July 1137, and weeks later the couple were enthroned as duke and duchess at Poitiers. After that marriage was annulled, she married Henry of Anjou in the cathedral of Poitiers on 18 May 1152, and two years later he became Henry II of England, bringing the city into the lands of the Angevin kings.
Henry and Eleanor began the present cathedral of Saint-Pierre in 1162, and its great Crucifixion window, glazed in about 1165, shows the royal couple as donors. Eleanor ruled Aquitaine from Poitiers between 1168 and 1173, and in 1172 her son Richard the Lionheart was installed as duke of Aquitaine in the abbey church of Saint-Hilaire. After the family revolt of 1173–1174 Henry kept Eleanor a prisoner for fifteen years.
As a widow Eleanor granted Poitiers a charter of commune in 1199, and the great hall of the palace was rebuilt in her time. After her death at Fontevraud Abbey in 1204, Philip II of France overran Poitou, and Poitiers opened its gates to him in August of that year.
Poitou became the appanage of Alphonse, brother of Louis IX of France, who was invested as count in 1241 and with the king defeated a rebellion backed by Henry III of England in 1242.
The Hundred Years' War brought the English back. Henry of Grosmont, Duke of Lancaster, stormed and sacked Poitiers in October 1346 and set fire to part of the palace. On 19 September 1356 Edward, the Black Prince, retreating south with his Anglo-Gascon army, turned at Nouaillé-Maupertuis, some five miles south-east of the city, and destroyed the army of John II of France. The Battle of Poitiers ended with the king and his youngest son Philip prisoners, and the Treaty of Brétigny of 1360 handed Poitou to Edward III of England.
English rule was short. Poitiers was handed over in 1361, and in August 1372 Bertrand du Guesclin, constable of France, entered the city after its townsmen turned against the English garrison. Charles V of France rewarded the town by ennobling its mayors and aldermen, and the county returned to his brother John, Duke of Berry, who rebuilt the burned parts of the palace in the 1380s.