The Loire city of Saint Martin's shrine: see of Gregory of Tours, Alcuin's Carolingian abbey, goal of the Umayyad raid halted in 732, an Angevin and then royal town whose coin became France's money of account, and the residence of Louis XI.
Tours lies on the south bank of the Loire, on the narrow strip of land between that river and the Cher, where the roads of western France crossed. The Roman town of Caesarodunum became the see of Martin, the soldier-saint whose tomb made Tours the greatest pilgrimage centre of Merovingian Gaul, and in the ninth century its abbey of Saint-Martin was one of the chief centres of learning in the Carolingian empire.
The medieval town had two hearts: the old walled city round the cathedral in the east, and the abbey town of Châteauneuf round Saint-Martin in the west, joined by a single wall only in the fourteenth century. Its counts were the rulers of Blois and then of Anjou, and from the middle of the fifteenth century Tours and the castles of Touraine were the favourite residence of the kings of France.
Caesarodunum, founded under Augustus, was a large open town with an amphitheatre. In the late third century it shrank behind a wall enclosing about twenty acres around the amphitheatre, the future cathedral city, and took the name of its people, the Turones. According to Gregory of Tours, its church was founded in the mid-third century by the missionary bishop Gatianus.
Martin, a former Roman cavalryman from Pannonia who was remembered for cutting his cloak in half for a beggar at Amiens, was chosen bishop of Tours by popular acclaim in 371. He founded the monastery of Marmoutier across the Loire, where he lived among some eighty monks. He died at Candes in 397, and his body was brought back by river and buried in a cemetery outside the town, where in about 470 Bishop Perpetuus replaced the small chapel over his grave with a large basilica.
The shrine became a pillar of the Frankish monarchy. After defeating the Visigoths in 507, Clovis came to Saint-Martin with gifts, and Gregory of Tours records that there he received letters from the eastern emperor naming him consul, put on a purple tunic and rode through the town scattering coins. Martin's cloak, the cappa, was kept by later Frankish kings as a relic, and the name of its keepers gave European languages the words chapel and chaplain.
Gregory himself, a Gallo-Roman aristocrat from the Auvergne, was bishop from 573 to 594. He rebuilt the cathedral after a fire and defended the sanctuary of Saint-Martin against Merovingian kings who wanted to drag out fugitives sheltering there. He also wrote the Ten Books of Histories, the main narrative source for sixth-century Gaul, and four books on the miracles of St Martin, which make Tours the best-documented town of Merovingian Francia.
The wealth of Saint-Martin drew the Umayyad raid of 732. Abd al-Rahman al-Ghafiqi, governor of al-Andalus, led his army north past Poitiers towards Tours, and Charles Martel, mayor of the palace of the Franks, blocked the Roman road between the two towns in October. After days of skirmishing the Franks held against the Muslim cavalry, Abd al-Rahman was killed, and his army withdrew south by night. The Battle of Tours saved the shrine and strengthened the family of Charles Martel, whose descendants became the Carolingian kings.
Charlemagne gave the abbey to his adviser Alcuin of York in 796, and Alcuin spent his last years there until his death on 19 May 804. Under him and his successors the scriptorium of Saint-Martin produced corrected texts of the Latin Bible in large single volumes, written in a clear Caroline minuscule, and it became one of the most productive book workshops in the Frankish realm. The Vivian Bible, made in 845 for the lay abbot Count Vivian and presented to Charles the Bald on a visit to the abbey, is the most famous of them.
The Loire carried Viking fleets deep into the Frankish kingdom. Northmen sacked Tours, Saint-Martin and Marmoutier in 853, when the community carried Martin's relics to safety, and the abbey was attacked again in 903. In about 918 the canons of Saint-Martin surrounded their church and its houses with a wall, and this fortified abbey town, Châteauneuf, grew into a merchant quarter separate from the bishop's city to the east. Its lay abbots were the most powerful princes of the region, among them Hugh Capet, who became king of France in 987.
The county of Tours passed in the tenth century to the counts of Blois, and their long rivalry with the counts of Anjou ended in 1044, when Count Geoffrey II of Anjou defeated and captured Theobald III of Blois at Nouy and made him surrender Tours. Touraine then stayed Angevin for 160 years. In the same decades Berengar, master of the schools of Tours, taught that the bread and wine of the Eucharist did not change their substance, and councils at Rome, Tours and elsewhere condemned him between 1050 and 1079.
The counts of Anjou, and from 1154 the Plantagenet kings of England, held Tours from the castle beside the Loire bridge. In May 1163 the exiled pope held a great council in the city, attended by Thomas Becket and more than a hundred bishops. On 3 July 1189 Philip II of France and the rebel Richard the Lionheart took Tours from the dying Henry II of England, who submitted to their terms the next day and died at Chinon two days later.
Philip II completed the conquest of Touraine from Richard's brother John by 1205, and Tours became a royal town. Its coinage outlived the change of ruler: the silver penny minted by the abbey of Saint-Martin, the denier tournois, was adopted by the crown, and in 1266 Louis IX of France issued the gros tournois, making the livre tournois the most widely used money of account in France. The cathedral of Saint-Gatien, rebuilt in Gothic style from the 1240s, rose against the old Roman wall of the city.