POICTIENS, or POITIERS, a corruption of the Latin Pictavium, so called by the Gallic tribe, the Pietaii, who inhabited the district in Ctesar's time, is one of the old est towns in France; it is the capital of the department of Vienne, and ;formerly of the province of Poitou. It occupies the summit and slopes of a little eminence, round the base of which flow the Clain and the Boivre, is encircled by walls and towers, and has a very dull appearance. Pup. 76, 31,099. It is connected by railway with Tours. from which it is 63 tn. distant, and Bordeaux. Before the revolution, Poictiers had an immense number of churches, chapels, monasteries, and nunneries; even yet these are sufficiently numerous. The principal are the church of St. ,Jean (now converted into a one of the oldest Christian monuments in France; and the cathedral of St. Pierre, one of the finest in France, belonging (hi part) to the 12th c., and in which, or in the older edifice that occupied its site, 23 councils were held—the first in the4th, and the last in the 15th century. lt also contains the ashes of Richard cc:cur-de-Icon. lts univers ity, founded by Charles VII. in 1431,was also abolished after 1789, but its place has been
supplied by a university-academy with two faculties. Poictiers possesses, besides, a very celebrated lyceum, and a variety of other educational institutions, a public library of 2.5,000 vols. and MSS., a museum, and several learned societies, of which the most distinguished is that for the cultivation of the antiquities of western France. In and around Poictiers are numerous Celtic and Roman remains. In the vicinity, Alaric II., the Visigoth, was defeated and slain by Clovis in 507. Somewhere between Poictiers and Tours a great battle took place in 732, between the Franks under Charles Martel (q.v.) and the Moors under Abd-ur-Raluna.n. The Moors were routed .with enormous slaugliter-375,000 of them (according to one old exaggerating chronicler) being left dead on the field; later still (in 1356), at 31aupertuis-le-Beauvoir, about 5 u. of Poictiers, Edward the black prince, with some 12,000 or 14,000 Englishmen and Gaseous, beat 60,000 of the troops of king Jean of France, and took the monarch himself and one of his sons prisoners.