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Europe · High and late Middle Ages

County of Poitou

drawn on the map 1206–1249

Comté de Poitou; capital Poitiers. The heartland of the House of Poitiers, whose counts were simultaneously Dukes of Aquitaine (see entry 6); thus Poitou's history is bound to Aquitaine's.

Shown on the map
1206–1249
Peak area
24k km²
Region
Europe

Overview

Comté de Poitou; capital Poitiers. The heartland of the House of Poitiers, whose counts were simultaneously Dukes of Aquitaine (see entry 6); thus Poitou's history is bound to Aquitaine's. It came to the crown with Eleanor, back to the Angevins, and was finally secured for France by Philip II Augustus and successors; later held as an apanage (notably by Alphonse of Poitiers, brother of St Louis). A major theatre of the Hundred Years' War.

Common questions

What was the County of Poitou?
Comté de Poitou; capital Poitiers. The heartland of the House of Poitiers, whose counts were simultaneously Dukes of Aquitaine (see entry 6); thus Poitou's history is bound to Aquitaine's.
When is the County of Poitou shown on the map?
The border data draws the County of Poitou 1206–1249. The source samples borders at fixed dates, so a span can begin late or run on past the end.
How large was the County of Poitou?
At its greatest extent drawn on this map, the County of Poitou covered about 24,000 km². That is the largest area the border data gives it across the years it is drawn, not necessarily its greatest extent in history.

Sources

This compendium cites its sources once for the whole document rather than per territory. Its bibliography names the English Wikipedia articles for each territory as the primary basis, cross-checked against Encyclopædia Britannica and specialist snippets, and flags entries built on unreliable foundations — the 911 treaty of Saint-Clair-sur-Epte known only from Dudo of Saint-Quentin, and Arnaud Amalric's alleged order at Béziers attested only decades after the fact. The article this entry is anchored on:

This entry was last updated .

This entry was researched and drafted with AI from the sources above, and has not been reviewed by a historian. How entries are made

Text available under CC BY-SA 4.0: reuse it with a credit to The World Through Time and a link to this page. Passages drawing on the Wikipedia articles listed above are also licensed CC BY-SA 4.0 by their contributors.

Border geometry for the map itself comes from Cliopatria v0.12 (Seshat Global History Databank, CC-BY-4.0).

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