. The Angoumois was a small county in west-central France of only modest importance in medieval times. On its borders lay Poitou to the north, the Limousin to the east, the Périgord to the south, and the Saintonge-Aunis to the west. Since the French Revolution, it has been part of the department of the Charente. Owing to its small size and its proximity to larger territorial states, it did not give rise to a feudal principality of any consequence save for brief periods in the late 9th and early 12th centuries. Nor did it become an ecclesiastical center of any more than regional importance. In early Roman times, the Angoumois belonged to the jurisdiction of the Santones (Saintes, Saintonge), then in the 4th century it broke away as a separate civitas centered on the town of Angoulême. Early tradition credited a 4th-century St. Ausonious with being the first bishop, though the first attested one is St. Cybard (d. 581). The bishopric of Angoulême belonged to the archdiocese of Bordeaux.
Almost nothing is known of the Angoumois under the Merovingians save that Angoulême, its only town of any size, was fortified by the 7th century and formed part of the duchy of Aquitaine. Armies of Pepin the Short conquered the province in the 760s preparatory to a century of Carolingian rule. After heavy damage by 9th-century Viking raids, recovery began later in the century with the establishment of Vulgrin I as count of Angoulême (r.
867–86) by Charles the Bald. Vulgrin not only restored order in the Angoumois but annexed the neighboring counties of Périgord and Agen to the south and possibly the Saintonge to the west and began the hereditary dynasty of the counts of Angoulême later called Taillefer. For a brief moment, Angoulême was the capital of a major territorial principality of west-central France, but Vulgrin’s successors not only were unable to preserve it intact but could not resist the counts of Poitou/dukes of Aquitaine, who extended their power over the Angoumois in the 11th century.
The county became part of the Plantagenêt empire in the later 12th century, though its counts led bitter Aquitanian resistance to their rule. King John of England’s abduction in 1200 of Isabelle, heiress of the county of Angoulême, led to Capetian intervention and the ousting of the English. After John’s death in 1216, Isabelle’s marriage with Hugues X de Lusignan, her intended husband prior to her abduction, contributed to the creation of a powerful feudal state ruled by the united Taillefer-Lusignan dynasty, which controlled the counties of the Aunis, Saintonge, La Marche, and Angoulême in the early 13th century. Capetian power gradually prevailed, however, and the Angoumois was integrated into the royal domain in 1314. Several monasteries flourished in the medieval Angoumois, most notably those of Cellefrouin, Saint-Étienne-de-Baigne, Saint-Amant-de-Boixe, and the oldest, Saint-Cybard-d’Angoulême. A monk of this latter abbey, Adémar de Chabannes (d. 1034), here wrote the chronicle that is the most important surviving source for the history of Aquitaine from the 9th to 11th century.
Boisonnade, Prosper. L’ascension, le déclin et la chute d’un grand état féodal du Centre-Ouest: les Taillefer et les Lusignan, comtes de la Marche et d’Angoulême et leurs relations avec les Capétiens et les Plantagenêts 1137–1314. Angoulême: Société Archéologique et Historique de la Charente, 1935, 1943.
Boussard, J. Historia pontificum et comitum Engolismensium. Paris: Argences, 1957.
Debord, André. La société laïque dans les pays de la Charente Xe–XIIe siècles. Paris: Picard, 1984.
Depoin, Joseph. “Les comtes héréditaires d’Angoulême de Vulgrin Ier a Audouin II, 869–1032.” Bulletin de la Société Archéologique et Historique de la Charente (1904).
Histoire du Poitou, du Limousin et des pays charentais. Publiée sous la direction de Édmond-René Labande. Toulouse: Privat, 1976.
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