Château de Bar-sur-Seine (Castle of the Counts of Bar)

En un regard

Le château en bref

The castle of the Counts of Bar overlooks Bar-sur-Seine from a triangular promontory above the Seine. Originating from an 11th-century feudal motte enlarged by Count Milo IV, it became the seat of a county which, in the 13th century, passed from Burgundian feudal overlordship to that of Champagne, and then to the French crown through the marriage of Joan I of Navarre, born at the castle in 1273, to Philip IV the Fair. Retaken and handed back in turn to Burgundy and to France in the 15th century, and besieged seven times during the Wars of Religion, it was destroyed by the inhabitants in 1594. Today only freely accessible remains survive: sections of fortifications, the Clock Tower and a rib-vaulted lower hall, listed as a historic monument in 1982.