Château de Montmort © 4K

#drone #history #castle #france The Château de Montmort is a stately residence built on the site of a medieval castle in the commune of Montmort-Lucy in the Marne department in France. Victor Hugo described the castle and wrote of a “delightful jumble of turrets, weather vanes, gables, dormer windows, and chimneys” (ravissante tohu-bohu de tourelles, de pirouettes, de pignons, de lucarnes et de cheminées). HistoryA castle already existed in the 11th century [1], and evidence of its existence can still be found in the ramparts and moats. The current buildings appear to date from the 16th century, the time of their reconstruction. [1] The castle served as headquarters for Karl von Bülow’s German Second Army during the First Battle of the Marne. During the battle, Bülow and Richard Hentsch, the representative of OHL commander Helmuth von Moltke the Younger, held a crucial meeting at the castle. They concluded that the army was threatened with encirclement by the Allies. The subsequent retreat of Bülow’s Second Army and Alexander von Kluck’s First Army was a decisive turning point in the First World War. [ DescriptionThe lower structure features oriel windows with mullions, characteristic of the early Renaissance. Two flat-sided towers were built on the sides to store cannons. Two wings of the lower structure were removed in the 19th century. The upper structure, built later, bears the date 1577. The layout corresponds to a reference to the former castle in an old document: a square keep surrounded by round towers. One of the towers has a sloping ramp to allow horses access to the upper floors. The ground floor consists of vaulted rooms. On the first floor, in the base panels of the grand salon, the engraver and theatre set designer Eugène Cicéri installed painted fabrics in 1851, inspired by the engravings of Sébastien Bourdon. The gatehouse, with its brick turrets, is also a 19th-century addition. The castle is surrounded by a park and a kitchen garden. The castle and its surrounding grounds have been protected as a historic monument by the French Ministry of Culture since 2001. [1] It had previously been classified and then declassified in 1888.