Posanges Castle

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Entrance facade of Posanges Castle

The Castle Posanges ( French Château de Posanges ) is a fortified castle complex in Posanges , about two and a half kilometers north of Vitteaux in the Côte-d'Or department of the Bourgogne-Franche-Comté region . The complex was built in the 15th century by a favorite of the Duke Philip the Good and looks very castle-like , as it was built using medieval structures. From a military point of view, however, Posanges Castle was insignificant, as it neither protected an important part of the duchy, nor did it guard an important road or waterway. Posanges may have been one of the first French systems that were structurally designed to be able to withstand the firearms that were emerging at the time.

The castle has been classified as a Monument historique since December 27, 1913 and is therefore a listed building . It cannot be visited, but is clearly visible from the road.

history

In 1299 the Seigneurie Posanges was owned by Eudes de Frolois , who had received it as a fief from the Burgundian Duke Robert II . At that time there was already a permanent house there , but not at the site of the current castle. Erard de Lézigne is known to have owned a part of Posanges in 1391 . In the first half of the 15th century the property came to Guillaume du Bois (also spelled Dubois), the bailli des Auxois and maître d'hotel Philipps des Guten. Guillaume came from the Berry and had all his possessions lost because those in the course of where the civil war of the Armagnacs and Bourguignons by the Armagnacs had been taken. Du Bois gradually brought the scattered parts of the Seigneurie into his possession and from 1437 had today's representative complex built. When he died on November 6, 1453, the new building was not yet completely finished. It was only Guillaume's son Antoine who completed the work in 1490 with the furnishing of the lodging . He also had two stair towers built to access the north towers.

Northeast view

The du Bois family remained in possession of the fortified complex until 1561. That year Joachim du Bois was forced to sell it to Arvier de Cléron . Joachim was found guilty of killing Antoine de La Perrière along with two other men . Already sentenced to death, he was pardoned, but had to pay high compensation to the mother of his victim in return. In order to be able to meet this requirement, he was forced to sell the Seigneurie Posanges together with the castle. However, the de Cléron family no longer resided in the complex themselves, but let tenants manage and live in it. In 1704, Bénigne de Torcey , widow of a member of the Balathier-Lantage family , bought Posanges Castle. Bénigne's daughter Marie sold it to the Ursuline convent of Vitteaux in 1714 for 25,500  livres .

During the French Revolution , the castle was confiscated , declared national property and auctioned in 1792. At that time the castle included a castle garden , a kitchen garden , moats , various farm buildings , four journals hemp fields , 59  ouvrées vineyards, 60  soitures fields, 416 journals from other countries and 23  acres of forest. The Thenadey family became the new owners. The Lestre family bought the property from her in 1810 for 6,000  francs . It was followed by the Lambert family, through whom the investment came to Nestor Lacoste, the mayor of Vitteaux. Further changes of ownership followed until the 20th century. In 1964 a weaving mill was built in the castle courtyard, but the building was demolished again in 1980. In the same year, extensive restoration work began on the existing building, which at that time was the property of Roland Remoissenet .

description

Ground plan of the facility from 1913

Posanges Castle is a square complex with round towers at the corners. At first glance, the floor plan appears to be square, but in fact it has a slight trapezoid shape. The facility is surrounded on all sides by a water ditch up to 14 meters wide and up to 3.5 meters deep , which is fed by the Brenne . The three-storey corner towers are more than ten meters high without a roof and - with the exception of the helmet- free south-west tower - have a conical roof . All have chimneys as a heating option. Together with the windows with seating niches and the toilet niches in the wall thickness, they show a certain comfort. The existing loopholes in the masonry also show that they are defensible. All four towers have roughly the same external dimensions. The interior of the north towers has a diameter of around five meters, and their upper floors can be reached via spiral staircases in the courtyard-side stair towers. The two south towers have an inside diameter of eight meters with a wall thickness of 2.1 meters. In the south-west tower there is a basement room under the ground floor room with cross vaults that can be reached through a hatch in the floor. Its purpose has not yet been clearly clarified. It could be used as a dungeon or as an ice cellar . The two upper floors were combined into one floor for the castle chapel . On the outside, the chapel can be recognized by a round-arched chapel window , in the gable of which you can find the coat of arms of Guillaume du Bois.

The four corner towers are connected by curtains around eight meters high and 35 meters long . These connecting walls are crowned by battlements and formerly had a probably wooden and colored battlement on the top of the wall. The upper floors of the two south towers were accessible via this. The curtains have almost no openings. Exceptions are three windows on the south side and the large gate on the north side of the complex. To this one for a four-meter-long two-arched stone bridge, which replaces a previous drawbridge . The drawbridge cover and the beam holes are still in place today. The large entrance gate is three meters high. To the east of it there is a smaller hatch . A drawbridge still leads to this 1.80 meter high and 60 cm wide door. Above the segmental arch of the entrance gate there is an empty niche with a keel -arched upper end. There used to be a statue of the Madonna from the 17th century, which is now in the Louvre . A copy of this statue is in the newly built chapel in the courtyard. A coat of arms relief and the inscription "AD MAJOREM - 1715 DEI GLORIAM" used to be between the niche and the archway. A large defensive bay with a high hipped roof and keel arched windows rises above the statue niche . The bay window rests on three rows of console stones, which are decorated with the coat of arms of Guillaume de Bois. Maschikulis lie between them .

View of the courtyard before 1919

In the inner courtyard, which is framed by the curtains, there is an old fountain and a chapel, which, however, is a modern building. The former stately lodging leaned against the south wall from the inside, because only there are windows in the masonry preserved. One of them was temporarily redesigned as a door that gave access to the no longer preserved castle garden. The residential building was probably a half-timbered building . Its wooden structure was probably painted in color, and the building looked somewhat like the ducal hotel in Beaune . This southern building had already completely disappeared in the 19th century, and at that time the courtyard was mostly occupied by agricultural buildings. A stone horse stable with a barrel-vaulted ceiling had stood on the west side of the courtyard since 1554 . It was laid down in 1964 together with a timber structure on the east side to make room for a new weaving mill. The same thing happened with a small house on the north wall, which until then had been inhabited by the leaseholder of the palace complex.

literature

  • Jules d'Arbaumont: Posanges et ses seigneurs . P. Lachèse, Belleuvre & Dolbeau, Angers 1867 ( digitized ).
  • Claude Frégnac: Merveilles des châteaux de Bourgogne et de Franche-Comté . Hachette, Paris 1969, pp. 138-139.
  • Bernhard and Ulrike Laule, Heinfried Wischermann: Art monuments in Burgundy . Wissenschaftliche Buchgesellschaft , Darmstadt 1991, pp. 437-438.
  • Rolf Toman, Ulrike Laule (ed.): Burgundy. Art, landscape, architecture . Tandem, Königswinter 2009, ISBN 978-3-8331-4436-3 , pp. 140-141.
  • A. Massicot: Le manoir de Posanges (Côte-d'Or), au point de vue de l'Architecture militaire et de la fortification du XVe siècle . L. Lenoir, Semur 1881 ( digitized version ).
  • Jean-Bernard de Vaivre: Le chateau de Posanges . In: Congrès archéologique de France. 146e session . Société Française d'Archéologie, Paris 1986, ISSN  0069-8881 , pp. 211-234.
  • Françoise Vignier: Aimer les châteaux de Bourgogne . Ouest-France, Rennes 1986, ISBN 2-85882-949-7 , pp. 22-23.
  • Françoise Vignier (ed.): Le Guide des châteaux de France. Cote d'Or . Hermé, Paris 1985, ISBN 2-86665-015-8 , pp. 137-138.

Web links

Commons : Posanges Castle  - Collection of images, videos and audio files

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ a b Kelly DeVries: Facing the new Technology: Gunpowder Defenses in Military Architecture before Trace Italienne, 1350-1500 . In: Brett D. Steele, Tamera Dorland (Ed.): The Heirs of Archimedes. Science and the Art of War Through the Age of Enlightenment . MIT Press, Cambridge, Mass. [u. a.] 2005, ISBN 0-262-19516-X , p. 58 ( digitized version ).
  2. ↑ Entry of the castle in the Base Mérimée of the French Ministry of Culture (French)
  3. ↑ J. d'Arbaumont: Posanges et ses seigneurs , 1867, p. 14.
  4. ↑ a b c F. Vignier: '' Posanges ''. In: F. Vignier (ed.): Le Guide des châteaux de France. Côte d'Or , 1985, p. 137.
  5. ↑ J. d'Arbaumont: Posanges et ses seigneurs , 1867, pp. 15-16.
  6. ↑ C. Frégnac: Merveilles des châteaux de Bourgogne et de Franche-Comté , 1969, p. 139.
  7. ↑ a b c d e f g Information sheet on the occasion of the Journée du patrimoine in 2011 ( PDF ; 495 kB).
  8. ^ B. and U. Laule, H. Wischermann: Kunstdenkmäler in Burgund , 1991, p. 437.
  9. ↑ a b c R. Toman, U. Laule: Burgund. Art, Landscape, Architecture , 2009, p. 140.
  10. ^ A b F. Vignier: Aimer les châteaux de Bourgogne , 1986, p. 23.
  11. ↑ a b J. d'Arbaumont: Posanges et ses seigneurs , 1867, p. 29.
  12. ↑ Bureau des biens à vendre (ed.): Tableau des biens à vendre . Paris 1791, p. 10 ( digitized version ).
  13. ↑ a b J. d'Arbaumont: Posanges et ses seigneurs , 1867, p. 30.
  14. ^ A. Massicot: Le manoir de Posanges (Côte-d'Or), au point de vue de l'Architecture militaire et de la fortification du XVe siècle , 1881, p. 9.
  15. ↑ a b Kelly DeVries: Facing the new Technology: Gunpowder Defenses in Military Architecture before Trace Italienne, 1350-1500 . In: Brett D. Steele, Tamera Dorland (Ed.): The Heirs of Archimedes. Science and the Art of War Through the Age of Enlightenment . MIT Press, Cambridge, Mass. [u. a.] 2005, ISBN 0-262-19516-X , p. 57 ( digitized version ).
  16. ^ A. Massicot: Le manoir de Posanges (Côte-d'Or), au point de vue de l'Architecture militaire et de la fortification du XVe siècle , 1881, pp. 13-14.
  17. ^ A b R. Toman, U. Laule: Burgundy. Art, Landscape, Architecture , 2009, p. 141.
  18. ^ A. Massicot: Le manoir de Posanges (Côte-d'Or), au point de vue de l'Architecture militaire et de la fortification du XVe siècle , 1881, p. 7.
  19. ↑ a b c A. Massicot: Le manoir de Posanges (Côte-d'Or), au point de vue de l'Architecture militaire et de la fortification du XVe siècle , 1881, p. 10.
  20. ↑ a b B. and U. Laule, H. Wischermann: Kunstdenkmäler in Burgund , 1991, p. 438.

Coordinates: 47 ° 25 ′ 5.9 ″  N , 4 ° 31 ′ 34.2 ″  E