Angers

Why go

Angers is a real, lively university city that happens to hold one of the wonders of medieval Europe. Inside its black-and-white striped castle hangs the Apocalypse Tapestry, more than a hundred metres of fourteenth-century weaving; across the river, Jean Lurçat’s twentieth-century answer fills a twelfth-century hospital ward. In between are slate roofs, half-timbered houses, gardens and the gentle Maine river. Fewer visitors than the Loire châteaux, more everyday French life: a fine place to stay rather than just pass through.

History

Angers sits on the Maine a few kilometres before it joins the Loire, and it was the capital of Anjou for most of a thousand years. Its counts were formidable: Fulk III, called Nerra, who died in 1040, built castles across the region, and his descendant Geoffrey, nicknamed Plantagenet, married the heiress of England and Normandy. Their son became Henry II of England in 1154, and for half a century Angers sat at the heart of an empire stretching from Scotland’s border to the Pyrenees.

When the French crown took Anjou back in the early thirteenth century, it built the present castle during the minority of Louis IX, under the regency of his mother Blanche of Castile. Its curtain wall, some 660 metres long, is set with seventeen massive round towers striped with dark schist and pale limestone. Under Henry III, in the late sixteenth century, the towers were cut down for artillery; only one keeps its original height.

Anjou was given to princes of the royal family. Duke Louis I commissioned the Apocalypse Tapestry around 1373, designed by the Flemish painter Jean Bondol and woven in Paris by about 1382; originally about 140 metres long, it was bequeathed to the cathedral by his grandson, King René, in 1480. René, poet, painter and patron, is remembered here as ‘good King René'.

During the Revolution the tapestry was cut up and used as floor mats and horse blankets; its surviving pieces were recovered in the nineteenth century and since 1954 have hung in a purpose-built gallery inside the castle. The artist Jean Lurçat, deeply struck by it in the late 1930s, began ‘Le Chant du Monde’ in 1957 as a ten-piece modern reply; the city acquired it in 1967.