3-038-939 - The Print Collector/Heritage Images

The Cathedral, Tours, [France], 1871. 'The object of this campaign for the Germans being to deprive the French of Tours, as a rallying-point for an army intended to raise the siege of Paris, our View of the cathedral in that city will be regarded with interest. Tours, the ancient capital of the province of Touraine, and now the chief town of the department of the Indre-et-Loire, is situated on the left bank of the Loire, at the junction of that river with the Cher, seventy miles below Orleans, and more than twice that distance from Paris, to the south-west. Its name is derived either from the Gallic tribe of the Turones, or from the two old towers, which are conspicuous in all views of the town; one of which is the Tour de St. Martin, or clock-tower, built in the twelfth century; the other is the Tour de Charlemagne, erected in the eleventh century...These towers are the only relics of the Cathedral of St. Martin, one of the most important ecclesiastical establishments in the Middle Ages, dedicated to the first metropolitan Bishop, which vast building was destroyed at the Revolution of 1790. The present Cathedral Church of Tours is that dedicated to St. Gatien, which was constructed, for the most part, about the end of the fifteenth century'. From "Illustrated London News", 1871