- source: Getty Thesaurus of Geographic Names
- source: Family History Library Catalog
- the text in this section is copied from an article in Wikipedia
Indre is a landlocked department in central France named after the river Indre. The inhabitants of the department are known as the Indriens (masculine; ) and Indriennes (feminine; ). Indre is part of the current administrative region of Centre-Val de Loire and is bordered by the departments of Indre-et-Loire to the west, Loir-et-Cher to the north, Cher to the east, Creuse, and Haute-Vienne to the south, and Vienne to the southwest. The préfecture (capital) is Châteauroux and there are three subpréfectures at Le Blanc, La Châtre and Issoudun. It had a population of 219,316 in 2019.
History
- the text in this section is copied from an article in Wikipedia
Indre is one of the original 83 departments created during the French Revolution on 4 March 1790, by order of the National Constituent Assembly.[1] The new departments were to be uniformly administered and approximately equal in size and population to one another. The department was created from parts of the former provinces of Berry, Orléanais, La Marche and Touraine.
Before the Roman conquest, the Celtic Bituriges tribe occupied an area that included Indre, Cher, and part of Limousin. Their capital was Avaricum (Bourges), and another important settlement was at Argenton-sur-Creuse. The area then became part of Roman Gaul after its conquest by Julius Caesar around 58 BC, and enjoyed a period of stability. Following the collapse of the Roman Empire in the West, the Frankish tribes living in Gaul were united under the Merovingians, and succeeded in conquering most of the country in the sixth century AD. From this time, the Franks controlled most of Gaul and the Carolingian Empire was the last stage of their rule. The Carolingian dynasty reached its peak with the crowning of Charlemagne and after his death in 814, it began to fragment. The Carolingian territories were divided into three sections in 843 at the Treaty of Verdun, and the area that is now the department of Indre, became part of West Francia. In 869, the king of Middle Francia died without leaving a legitimate heir, and eventually part of that kingdom was added to West Francia to effectively form the medieval Kingdom of France.
A castle was built at Châteauroux in the late tenth century. In the eleventh century, the lords of Châteauroux were powerful in the region; their "principality" covered two thirds of the current Department of Indre and they had their own coinage.
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