Trésor des Chartes
The Trésor des Chartes are the ancient archives of the French crown.History
On 5 July 1194, Philip II of France was defeated by Richard I of England at the Battle of Fréteval. Philip managed to flee but lost his archives, his treasury and the Royal seal which were captured by Richard.
After the battle, Philip was forced to re-establish the archives of the Kingdom, the registers and the domestic archives of the French crown and he entrusted Grand Chamberlain with this mission which led to the creation of the Trésor des Chartes, the predecessor of what became the Archives Nationales during the French Revolution in 1790.
After Gauthier's death in 1204, Keeper of the Seals Guérin was entrusted with this mission.
From 1231, the documents were stored in the Royal Palace in Paris.
At the end of the reign of Saint Louis, the archives and, from 1300–1302 the registers of the Chancery, were stored on the second floor of the Sainte-Chapelle of the palace along with the Royal Library, on the floor above the French Crown Jewels and the Passion relics. It was consequently called the "Trésor des Chartes", the "Charters treasury", in Latin Thesaurus chartarum et privilegiorum domini regis. They remained in the chapel until the demolition of the Trésor des Chartes in 1776 after the fire of the Maison du Roi.
The archives of Philip IV of France and of his three sons, kings of France, Louis X, Philip V, and Charles IV represent almost a third of the conserved documents. The chests that contained these archives were called "layettes".
In 1615, Pierre Dupuy was commissioned by Mathieu Molé, first president of the parlement of Paris, to draw up an inventory of the documents of the Trésor des chartes. This work occupied eleven years. His manuscript inventory is preserved in the original and in copy in the Bibliothèque Nationale, and transcriptions are in the national archives in Paris, at the record office in London, and elsewhere.
