Ainay-le-Vieil Castle — Historical Castles , France, History, Castles,
The Ainay-le-Vieil Castle, also famous as Château d’Ainay-le-Vieil, is located in a small village which interestingly enough carries the same name as the castle, in the Cher department in France. The location of Ainay-le-Vieil was in fact first occupied by the Gallo-Romans a long time ago. Located in a border region, Ainay-le-Vieil’s location was first fortified in the 12th century and belonged to no other than the House of Bourbon. The Ainay-le-Vieil, which can now be seen there, was built over the earlier motte-castle, during the 2nd half of the 13th century, most likely by the House of Sully. Jean de Sully gave the castle the appearance which can be seen today during a rebuilding around the year 1330. It was constructed as an unusual, octagonal enclosure surrounded from all sides by a huge moat. It was flanked by no less than 7 round towers, and an entrance gate with 2 more towers. Without any natural defenses to protect it, it was originally circled by a second wall with a double moat and drawbridge. Sadly this 2nd enclosure has now disappeared, and can no longer be seen. Ainay-le-Vieil Castle, was found extremely useful during the Hundred Years War, during which it served as a bridgehead to harass the people of England. After the France lost the Battle of Poitiers in the year 1356, it was the one and only castle in the entire region to remain in French hands. Similarly enough, it lost all military importance it had, with the French victory at the end of the Hundred Years’ War. In the year 1435 the Ainay-le-Vieil was bought by no other than Jacques Cœur, the treasurer of Charles VII of France. It was however confiscated, along with all of Jacque’s other possessions and wealth, in the year 1450. After the castles was given back to Jacque’s son after his death, his son sold it to Charles de Chevenon, the Lord of Bigny, in the year 1467. Inside the inner enclosure circle Charles built a lodging constricted of brick and stone in pre-Renaissance Louis XII style, between the years 1500 and 1505. After that, the castle was embellished and beautiful gardens were laid out turning it from a former military complex into a comfortable residence. During the French Revolution, at the end of the 18th century, the castle was survived destruction, even though the Marquis of Bigny was beheaded, his wife was sent in exile in England and his son died in the Battle of Quiberon, fighting against the revolutionary troops. Nevertheless, the Ainay-le-Vieil never taken from the hands of the Chevenon family and the new Marquis of Bigny restored it and garden in the mid-19th century. The descendants of the Chevenon family still own the castle these days. Today the Ainay-le-Vieil Castle can be visited for a small fee. A really beautiful castle. Unfortunately, the 16th century, pre-Renaissance lodgings were under construction and covered in scaffolding when I came by. A beautiful and interesting castle with amazing gardens.
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Jacques Coeur
Jacques Coeur, was a wealthy and extremely powerful French merchant, who also served as a councillor to no other than King Charles VII of France. His career is still to this day a significant example of the spirit of enterprise and the social progress among the merchant classes in the beginning of the period of the rise of France after the Hundred Years’ War has ended.
Coeur’s father was a furrier in the cloth-producing commercial town by the name of Bourges. Coeur received his training trough gathering experience in financial operations and on a commercial trip to the Middle East. Once Paris was recovered from the war by Charles VII, Coeur earned the confidence of the king and became an argentier (which is a steward of the royal expenditure and banker of the court) and after that a member of the king’s council. He was given the task to be in charge of the tax collection, as commissaire in the estates’ assemblies of the Languedoc region and as an inspector general of the salt tax. He was even sent on diplomatic missions to Spain and Italy. In the year 1441, he himself arranged the marriage of his own daughter to a nobleman and obtained the archbishopric title of Bourges for his son Jean and the bishopric of Luçon for his brother.
Because of his talent for business opportunities, Jacques Coeur was able to make use of almost every occasion and every means to increase his wealth. He was not a real statesman, and so he was able to serve the state as much as he served his own interest. His position as an argentier was the foundation and the reason for all of his activities to be so successful. It gave him not only access to the king himself and , of course, to the clientele of the court but also access to merchandise from every available source; his stores, located in Tours, stocked cloth, silks, jewels, armour, and even spices. Coeur increased his vast fortune by also making dials in salt on the Loire and the Rhône rivers, in wheat in Aquitaine, and in wool in Scotland. Montpellier, where he built one of his loges, a kind of stock exchange for the merchants, was the first centre of his Mediterranean trade. In the city of Florence, where he was registered in the Arte della Seta, he owned a personal workshop used for the manufacture of silks. A workforce of traveling salesmen, drivers, and especially ship owners supplied his communications and transportation needs, and not to mention that he himself owned at least seven ships in the Mediterranean. Like the Italians, Coeur set up individual companies for each branch of the trades he was interested in. He financed his businesses with credit that he obtained at all sorts of fairs in Geneva, Avignon, Florence, and Rome, and by using fiscal receipts from the king himself. He also had the political support of Alfonso V, king of Aragon, and the cities of Genoa, Florence, and Barcelona, as well as the popes, who was the one to authorized his trade with the Muslims in Alexandria.
Despite his wealth in real estate and personal property, his luxurious style of life, and his titles, influence, and personal dynamism were impressive, his prosperity was in matter of fact really fragile. He had only a few efficient associates, and the risks of maritime commerce were huge, and not to mention that his competitors, especially in Montpellier, were ruthless. Even if he always appeared to be short of money, he was still rich enough to be able to lend the king funds necessary for the reconquest of Normandy in the year 1450 and to even become a creditor for a large part of the aristocracy. For those reasons Coeur became an object of envy and jealousy to many people.
After being unfairly accused of having arranged the poisoning of Agnès Sorel, the mistress of Charles VII, and of having engaged in a lot of dishonest speculation, he was arrested in the year 1451 and condemned to remain in prison until an enormous fine was paid. With the help of some of his friends, he escaped from prison and took refuge, first in Florence and then in the year 1455 in Rome. In the month of November of the following year he passed away, most likely on the Aegean island of Chios, where he had gone in charge of an expedition organized by Pope Calixtus III against the Turks. After his death, Louis XI made amends for some of Coeur’s treatments by his father, by returning a few of Coeur’s properties to his sons and by reviving enterprises that the former argentier had initiated like the silk workshop in Lyon and the first attempts to start a company in the Middle East.
Jacques Coeur was representative of his generation; his ambitions were traditional: honours, noble rank, land. He differed from his more mediocre contemporaries by the sheer volume and extent of his trades, his audaciousness and tenacity, his self-confidence, his talent for making himself loved or hated, and most of all by his rare talent for seizing opportunities. Even if he understood business opportunities for his generation but was not prophetic. He was the pure incarnation of the rise of the merchant middle class, imitated in succeeding generations in Lyon and Tours with the same success.
The legend of Jacques Coeur remains many-faceted, and history has preserved conflicting images of him. For a long time he was seen as an adventurer, exploiting for his own profit the revenue of the kingdom and deceiving his master. The crowd, hostile to a nouveau riche, brought him down; he was accused of magic. The 18th century, the century of the Enlightenment, took pity on him as a victim of despotism. An eminent 19th-century historian, Jules Michelet, however, was the first to look upon Coeur as the model for a whole generation and a precursor of the powerful bourgeois class of succeeding centuries.
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Originally published at https://historicalcastles.com on September 27, 2020.
