Gisors Castle

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The Gisors castle ruins

The Château de Gisors is the ruins of a motte in the French town of Gisors in the Eure region Normandy and dates from the 11th century. Your defense tower ( donjon ) stands on a moth , a 1097 artificially created mound. The castle was built in 1106 and completed in 1113.

Edification phase

The castle had a unique strategic location on the border with Normandy , whose dukes were also kings of England from 1066 to 1204. The builder of the "Castrum Gisortis" is Robert II. De Bellême on behalf of Wilhelm II. Of England , in 1101 Thibaud Pagan takes over the castle under construction and has it expanded. In the year of completion in 1113, the peace of Gisors was concluded here. In 1119 King Henry I of England received Pope Calixtus II here , who was supposed to mediate between two Christian kings. Because of the ongoing border problems between France and England, the castle was taken over by the Knights Templar in 1158 , who managed it for Henry the Younger (son of Henry II of England) and his wife Margaret of France (married in 1161) when they were minors. In 1164, through betrayal, the Templars delivered the castle to Henry II of England, who expanded the castle. On April 11, 1165, Henry II had negotiated with the French King Louis VII at the castle. In 1191 it is again owned by France, which is responsible for the erection of the prison tower.

Rumors about the Templar treasure

It became particularly well-known because, according to legend, the Templar treasure was hidden in it after the French King Philip IV arrested the leadership of the order on October 13, 1307. In particular, Gérard de Sède claimed in his book The Templars Are Among Us from 1963. He relies on an imaginative interpretation of a testimony of a Knight Templar during the interrogation after their arrest that on the day before their arrest there were high Templars under Gerard de Villers and Hugo von Chalons would have left the Paris Templar headquarters with three carts with 50 horses, whereby he saw the three carts as an encrypted reference to Gisors, which he called the castle of the three wagons due to a star constellation when the castle was founded. They originally wanted to ship the treasure to de Sède (in the port of Eu to de Sède), but would have been prevented by roadblocks. Gisors was on an old Roman road between Paris and Eu. He saw a further support in the statements of the former gardener and guide of the castle Roger Lhomoy, who carried out illegal excavations starting from the old well of the castle in 1946 (see below).

According to Demurger, the four highest representatives of the Templar Order ( Jacques de Molay , Hugues de Pairaud , Geoffroy de Charnay and Godefroi de Gonneville) were imprisoned as prisoners of the king on Gisors in the period between 1310 and the final judgment in March 1314. There is no recorded news from them at this time. According to Hersan, Philip the Fair had a stranger imprisoned in the tower of Gisors in 1314, with whom no one was allowed to speak.

Further development

From January 9, 1419, during a siege by Henry V until 1449, it came into English possession again, and it was not until August 16, 1449 that it finally passed into French state ownership. Gisors himself capitulated on September 24, 1419. The castle was closed in 1591, and in 1862 it was declared a historical monument.

Digs

From 1929 Roger Lhomoy worked as a castellan in Gisors Castle. The legendary alleged Templar treasures were not hidden from him. In 1941 Lhomoy therefore undertook various excavations on his own until, in March 1946, he allegedly found a Romanesque chapel consecrated to Saint Catherine of Alexandria in the castle moth . To do this, he freed the old castle well from rubble (to a depth of around 30 m) and excavated cross tunnels from the bottom of the well. According to his own statements, he found a Romanesque burial chapel with stone sarcophagi and metal chests. When he reported the find, however, the authorities forbade further investigations (the passages dug by Lhomoy were in great danger of collapsing) and filled the well again. The summoned mayor did not check the find, but had Lhomoy's adventurous do-it-yourself tunnels filled in because of the great danger of collapse by German prisoners of war. Lhomoy was mocked, which is why he left Gisors a few years later, exasperated and broken.

Excavation wave

In 1962 the French journalist Gérard de Sède, for whom Lhomoy had worked as a groom, published his book The Templars Are Among Us or The Riddle of Gisors . De Sede based his theses on the Lhomoys reports and his own research. The book became a bestseller and drew public attention to the castle. A wave of amateur digs broke through the castle. Lhomoy was able to obtain an official resumption of the excavations with the French President Charles de Gaulle , but he lacked the approval of the castle owner, the mayor of Gisors. De Gaulle commissioned Education Minister André Malraux with the excavation work on the castle complex in February 1964. At his instigation, the military closed the castle for months and began work. However, these destabilized the Motte and the tower of the castle threatened to collapse. The excavations had to be stopped in March 1964 without any results. Since then, further excavations have been prohibited. To intercept and support the donjon for further excavations would require a considerable effort, whereby it would still not be certain that further excavations would not bring it to collapse after all.

literature

  • P.-F.-D. Hersan Histoire de la ville de Gisors. Gisors 1858, gallica

Web links

Commons : Burg Gisors  - Collection of images, videos and audio files

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ Hersan Histoire de la ville de Gisors , 1858, p. 60. According to Hersan there was a place on the way from Gisors to Èragny that was called the Hanged, because the Templars responsible for the treason were later hanged there as punishment (p . 61).
  2. ↑ Shown e.g. B. at Janusz Piekałkiewicz There is Gold , Südwest Verlag
  3. ↑ Demurger The Last Templar , dtv, 2007, p. 267
  4. ↑ Hersan, loc. cit. P. 132. It has been suggested, among other things, that he was a lover of one of the king's daughters.
  5. ↑ Étienne Hamon, Un chantier flamboyant et son rayonnement: Gisors et les églises du Vexin , 2008, p. 123

Coordinates: 49 ° 16 ′ 51.3 "  N , 1 ° 46 ′ 27.3"  E