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 modified by the erection of a “lantern”) was solemnly consecrated by Urban II. in 1096. Mutilated about 1640 and during the Revolution, the building was partly restored between 1850 and 1860. The tower of St Porchaire, a precious remnant of 11th-century architecture, was restored in the 19th century under the auspices of the well-known Société des antiquaires de l’ouest.

Among the secular buildings the first place belongs to the law courts, formerly the palace of the dukes of Aquitaine and counts of Poitiers, and rebuilt between the 12th and the 15th century. The Salle des Pas Perdus forms a fine nave 160 ft. long by 56 ft. wide, with a vaulted wooden roof. The southern wall is the work of duke Jean de Berry (d. 1416), brother of Charles V.; above its three vast fireplaces are mullioned windows filled with stained glass. The Maubergeon tower attached to the palace by the same duke represented the feudal centre of all the lordships of the count ship of Poitiers. The house known as the prévôté or provost’s mansion, built about 1500, has a fine façade flanked by turrets, and there are other houses of the 15th, 16th and 17th centuries. In the Hôtel de Ville, erected between 1869 and 1876, are museums of natural history and painting. The museum of the Antiquaires de l’ouest occupies the chapel and the great hall of the old university, adjoining the old Hôtel de Ville; it is a valuable collection comprising Roman antiquities, Merovingian sculptures, medals, a fine Renaissance fireplace, &c. The building devoted to the faculties also contains the library. The municipal records are very rich in charters of Eleanor of Guienne, Philip Augustus, Alphonse of Poitiers, &c.

Poitiers is the seat of a bishop, a prefect, a court of appeal and a court of assizes, and centre of an educational division (académie), and has tribunals of first instance and of commerce, a board of trade arbitration, a chamber of commerce and a branch of the Bank of France. Its educational institutions comprise a university with faculties of law, science and letters, and a preparatory school of medicine and pharmacy, a school of theology, training colleges for both sexes, a lycée for boys and a school of fine art. Trade is in farm produce, wine, cattle, wool, honey, goose-quills and leather. The industries include the preparation of goose-skins, printing, tanning, and the manufacture of brushes, paint and candles.

Poitiers, called Limonum at the time of the Roman Conquest, afterwards took the name of its Gallic founders, the Pictones or Pictavi. Christianity was introduced in the 3rd century, and the first bishop of Poitiers, from 350 to 367, was St Hilarius. Fifty years later the city had fallen into the hands of the Arian Visigoths, and became one of the principal residences of their kings. Alaric II., one of their number, was defeated by Clovis at Vouillé, not far from Poitiers, in 507, and the town became a part of the Frankish dominion. This was the first occasion on which the peoples of northern and southern Gaul met in conflict in the neighbourhood of the town which was destined to see them so frequently join battle. By his victory in 732 over the Mahommedans at Moussais-la-Bataille in this region, Charles Martel proved the saviour of Christendom. Eleanor of Guienne frequently resided in the city, which she embellished and fortified, and in 1199 entrusted with communal rights. Alphonse of Poitiers, at a plenary court held in 1241 in the great hall of the Palais de Justice, received the homage of his numerous vassals. After the battle of Poitiers in 1356 (see below), Poitou was recognized as an English possession by the treaty of Brétigny (1360); but by 1373 it was recovered by Bertrand Du Guesclin. It was at Poitiers that Charles VII. was proclaimed king (1432); and he removed thither the parlement and university of Paris, which remained in exile till the English withdrew from the capital in 1436. During this interval (1429) Joan of Arc was subjected to a formal inquest in the town. The university was founded in 1432 Calvin had numerous converts at Poitiers. Of the violent proceedings which attended the Wars of Religion the city had its share. In 1569 it was defended by Gui de Daillon, comte du Lude, against Gaspard de Coligny, who after an unsuccessful bombardment retired from the siege at the end of seven weeks.

Counts of Poitiers.—In the time of Charlemagne the countship of Poitiers, which was then a part of the kingdom of Aquitaine, was represented by a certain Abbon. Renoul (Ranulph), who was created count of Poitiers by the emperor Louis the Pious in 839, was the ancestor of a family which was distinguished in the 9th and 10th centuries for its attachment to the Carolingian dynasty. One of his successors, Ebles the Bastard (d. 935), took the title of duke of Aquitaine; and his descendants, who bore the hereditary name of William, retained the same title. William IV., Fièrebrace, joined Hugh Capet, his brother-in-law, in 987. William V. the Great (993–1030) was a patron of letters, and received from the Italian lords the offer of the imperial crown after the death of the emperor Henry II. in 1024. William IX. (1086–1127) went on crusade in 1100, and had violent quarrels with the Papacy. His son William X. (1127–1137) sided with the anti-pope Anacletus against Innocent II. In accordance with the dying wishes of William X. his daughter Eleanor was married in 1137 to Louis, the son of Louis VI. of France. Sole heiress of her father, she brought her husband a large dowry, comprising Poitou, Saintouge, Aunis, a part of Touraine and Berry, Marche, Angoumois, Périgord, Auvergne, Limousin, Bordelais, Agénois and Gascony. After the dissensions between Louis VII. and Eleanor had resulted in a divorce in 1152, Eleanor married the count of Anjou, Henry Plantagenet, who became king of England as Henry II. The west of France thus passed into the hands of England, a transfer which gave rise to long wars between the two kingdoms. Philip Augustus reconquered Poitou in 1204, and the province became in succession an apanage of Alphonse, son of Louis VIII., in 1241; of Philip the Tall, son of Philip the Fair, in 1311; of John, son of Philip of Valois, in 1344; and of John, duc de Berry, son of John the Good, in 1356; and passed to the dauphins John (1416) and Charles (1417), sons of Charles VI. When Charles VII. ascended the throne he finally united the count ship of Poitiers to the Crown.

Battle of Poitiers.—This battle, fought on the 19th of September 1356 between the armies of King John of France and Edward the “Black Prince,” was the second of the three great English victories of the Hundred Years’ War. From Bordeaux the prince had led an army of his father’s Guienne vassals, with which there was a force of English archers and men-at-arms, into central France and had amassed an enormous booty. King John, hitherto engaged against the army of John of Gaunt duke of Lancaster, in Normandy, hurried south to intercept the raiding army and to bar its homeward road. The Black Prince, by forced marching, was able to slip past the French, but reaching Maupertuis, 7 m. south-east of Poitiers, with the king’s army in chase, he found himself compelled to choose between fighting and abandoning his spoil. He chose the former course, in spite of the enemy’s great superiority in numbers (16,000 to 6500), and in order to give his trains time to draw off took up a defensive position on the 18th of September, with a slight hollow in front and a wood behind, between the Poitiers-Bordeaux main road and the River Maussion. John, instead of manoeuvring to envelop the English, allowed the Cardinal Talleyrand de Périgord to attempt to negotiate a peace. This proving vain, the French army attacked without any attempt at manoeuvre or reconnaissance, and on a front so narrow that the advantage of superior numbers was forfeited. Moreover, King John ordered all but the leading line to dismount and to attack on foot (tactics suggested by the success on the defensive of the dismounted English men-at-arms at Crecy and the Scots at Bannockburn), and thus condemned the best part of his army to a fatiguing advance on foot across difficult country in full armour.

The French arblasters, who might have crushed the relatively