Agenais

Agenais or Agenois is a former province of France.

In ancient Gaul, it was home to the Nitiobrogen with Aginnum, today Agen, as its capital. In the 4th century it was the Civitas Agennensium as part of the Roman province of Aquitania secunda. In the time of the Merovingian and Carolingian Agenais belonged to Aquitaine, and then became a hereditary County as part of Gascony.

1038, the county was acquired by the Dukes of Aquitaine and Count of Poitou. The marriage of Eleanor of Aquitaine and Henry Plantagenet brought Agenais 1152 under English rule. When their son Richard the Lionheart in 1169 his sister Johanna with Raimund VI. , Count of Toulouse, married, was Agenais part of the dowry of the bride. The remaining areas of the county Toulouse Agenais came in 1271 to the French crown.

Already in 1279, when the French king had to recognize the prior rights of the English King Edward I, Agenais was returned to the English crown. During the Hundred Years' War (1337-1453) the territory changed hands several times, and only the withdrawal of the British in 1453 brought it peacefully into the hands of the French.

From now Agenais was only an administrative term. 1572-1615 the county appanage of Marguerite de Valois, the wife of King Henry IV was. At the end of the Ancien Régime, it was part of the province of Guyenne and was in the French Revolution (1789-1799) in the newly created department of Lot- et- incorporated Garonne, whose main component, it is now.

The title of Comte d' Agenais, who had fallen in the Middle Ages among the English kings into disuse, was revived in the 17th century by the French kings. He was led by the family Plessis- Richelieu.