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Heritage classified

Key figures

Origin and history

The abbey of Notre-Dame de Nanteuil was founded around 850 by Charles le Chauve, grandson of Charlemagne, on a site where already existed a primitive Christian oratory attributed to Saint Martial. This first Benedictine monastery was destroyed in the 10th century by Viking invasions, then rebuilt at the end of the same century under the impulse of a local lord, perhaps Guillaume Taillefer, Count of Angoulême. The archbishop of Bordeaux then placed the abbey under the tutelage of Saint-Cyprien de Poitiers, marking the beginning of his spiritual and political influence.

In the 11th century, a first Romanesque building was erected around 1050, quickly replaced by an imposing church whose capitals date back to the years 1125–30. The twelfth and thirteenth centuries marked the climax of the abbey, enriched by gifts and a collection of relics that motivated the construction of the Nanteuil Treasure, a square tower with archatures still visible today. In 1304 Bertrand de Got (later Pope Clement V) visited the Abbey before placing it under the protection of the Holy See, stressing its importance on the way to Santiago de Compostela.

The Hundred Years' War devastated the abbey: burned by the Anglo-Normands, then looted by the Anglo-Gascons, it lost its 18 bells and relics. Rebuilt in the 15th century under Abbé Aymery Texier, it declined after its beginning in 1530. In the 17th century, reduced to secular life, the monks disappeared definitively in 1770, when the bishop of Poitiers removed the abbey to merge his possessions at the seminary. The ruins were saved in the 20th century by restorations, including that of the Treasury in the 1950s.

The architecture of the abbey, now partially in ruins, reveals a church of colossal proportions: three naves, a salient transept and a choir to walk around, typical of Romanesque art. The Treasury, a vaulted room on two levels without an interior staircase, successively served as a cartrier, a repository for the relics, and then a mass grave after the looting. The remains also include scattered Romanesque capitals (museums of Angoulême and Poitiers) and fragmentary murals.

Located on a secondary road of Compostela, the Abbey played a major economic and spiritual role in Charente. His estates extended through donations, such as that of Lord Hyrvox of Ruffec in the 13th century. The suppression of 1770 was intended to finance a college in Ruffec, marking the end of eight centuries of monastic life. Today, the site, classified as a Historic Monument in 2017, is visited in the summer and bears witness to this prestigious past.

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