# Military defense in the royal towns of Touraine during the Wars of Religion: a daily martial culture.

https://martcult.hypotheses.org/1457.

Rémi Demoen

► To cite this version:

Rémi Demoen. Military defense in the royal towns of Touraine during the Wars of Religion: a daily martial culture. https://martcult.hypotheses.org/1457. Martial Culture in European Towns (1350-1650), Nov 2021, Berne, Switzerland. 2022. hal-03575308

HAL Id: hal-03575308

https://hal.science/hal-03575308

Submitted on 15 Feb 2022

**HAL** is a multi-disciplinary open access archive for the deposit and dissemination of scientific research documents, whether they are published or not. The documents may come from teaching and research institutions in France or abroad, or from public or private research centers.

L'archive ouverte pluridisciplinaire **HAL**, est destinée au dépôt et à la diffusion de documents scientifiques de niveau recherche, publiés ou non, émanant des établissements d'enseignement et de recherche français ou étrangers, des laboratoires publics ou privés.

Public Domain
<figure><img src="image_1.png" /></figure>

Military defense in the royal towns of Touraine
during the Wars of Religion: a daily martial culture

Defending and safeguarding the town

The three royal towns of Amboise, Chinon and Loches, spread across the Touraine region, all had fortresses, real royal strongholds, which had to be defended from the crown's enemies in the context of the Wars of Religion. The three municipal authorities, responsible for ensuring the defense of their urban areas through a system of citizen guards, were therefore in regular contact with the soldiers, whether they were sent by the royal authorities to guard the town and the castle, or simply as a stopover on their way to a war zone.¹ Military and defensive issues are therefore omnipresent in the administrative documents of these three cities and are manifested by the militarisation of urban spaces. This paper proposes, among other things, to compare the military and defensive mechanisms of the three cities, as well as their impact on urban life, in order to understand the place of the martial fact in the political culture of the second half of the 16th century.

Réf: 1. SOURIAC Pierre-Jean, « Foules et guerres civiles. Mobilitisation, présence militaire dans la région toulousaine durant la première décennie des guerres de Religion (1562-1570) », L'effort de guerre, Actes du 127e congrès du C.T.H.S, Nancy, 2002, CTHS, p.31-51, 2004.