The chateaux of the Loire are in the centre of France and also at the centre of Frenchness. Rising from a soft, prosperous landscape, their monumental elegance betokens power and fragility but comes with a flip-side of violence, skulduggery and debauchery.

Everyone knows that the Loire Valley was the stamping ground of late medieval and Renaissance kings. But their women – mothers, wives, mistresses and a lone virgin – also had vital roles, and not just as producers of babies (though, the virgin aside, they managed that at an alarming lick, too).

Joan of Arc beat the English; Catherine de Médicis effectively ran France for 25 years; and Anne de Bretagne was crucial to the power-play between Brittany, France and the Habsburg regime.

With the 500th anniversary of Anne’s death due this year , what better time for a leading ladies’ trail through the region, taking in their chateaux? In fact, almost all the women were associated with several properties; it was the court’s habit to move around . For simplicity, we have linked each protagonist to the chateau with which she had the most visible, or dramatic, connection.

Joan of Arc (1412-31) – Chinon

In 1429, a young woman rode from Lorraine to this vast, ridge-topping castle overlooking the Vienne river. She had come to tell King Charles VII that, if he was (I paraphrase) too much of a drip to boot the English out of France, she’d do the job for him. Celestial voices had so bidden her. All she needed was his army. She was 17. The real surprise was that Charles VII agreed. Shortly, the French were relieving Orléans, clearing the region of Englishmen and giving them a fearful pasting at the battle of Patay. Some see it as the beginning of the end of the Hundred Years War.

And it started right here . Chinon had been a key 12th-century Plantagenet possession in France. It was a favoured spot of our Henry II, who died here in 1189. King John finally lost the place to the French in 1205.

These days it remains a battered but utterly imposing veteran, which you would still not want to besiege. There is not much left inside, but what survives is good – and all the better for a recent £13 million makeover. And you may still stand where Joan stood, for that room remains.

Joan of Arc

Agnès Sorel (1422-50) – Loches

Agnès was assuredly the temptress of the Loire Valley saga. She pioneered naked shoulders and a plunging décolleté – and was famously portrayed with one breast exposed. Little wonder that she entwined Charles VII . She thus became the first official mistress to a French king (while also lady-in-waiting to his wife, the queen ).

Charles was certainly besotted, bestowing upon her the Logis Royal at Loches. Within the citadel topping the town, this was a good and safe place to be. The citadel had a fortress at one end with a 118ft keep that still looks like a fist raised at the sky.

At the other end, Agnès’s Logis Royal was among the first Loire chateaux built for leisure . It is posh, decorative and has the topless portrait of Ms Sorel and lovely views over the valley. Anne de Bretagne was also here a century later; her oratory is perhaps the finest room.

Next door, the St Ours collegial church is the resting place of Agnès’s body . It has moved about a bit and been much-desecrated since she died at the age of 28. During the body’s final transfer to the church in 2005, scientific tests confirmed that she had died from a murderous overdose of mercury. Who had killed her? No one knows for sure. And the recumbent figure of Agnès on her tomb gives nothing away, for her face is hidden by flanking angels.

Anne de Bretagne (1477-1514) – Langeais

Anne was 11 when she was plunged into the snake pit of diplomacy. As the marriageable duchess of a mainly independent Brittany, she was a prize catch – and the Austrians thought they had landed her on her betrothal to the Habsburg Maximilian I. The French were appalled . Thus the French king Charles VIII attacked Rennes, unilaterally annulled her marriage to Max, and bade her follow him to Langeais, for the wedding in 1491.

Had it been a happier occasion, Langeais would have provided a lovely setting. The chateau presents a forbidding face to the town (the drawbridge still works) but it is much more sumptuous on the other side.

And, restored by a 19th-century businessman, it is pretty sumptuous inside too. Look out for some splendid tapestries, sacred paintings and a waxwork recreation of Anne’s wedding ceremony . The young couple – she was 14, Charles VIII 21 – look glum, as well they might.

The courtly, cultured Charles brought back artists and artisans from his Italian campaigns, thus generating the first rays of the Renaissance that came to define the Loire Valley. Then, after nutting himself on a low door, he died.

There was no heir. In such circumstances, Anne was contractually obliged to marry the next king along, Charles’s distant cousin, Louis XII. So she became queen a second time – but older and stronger. She stamped her authority on the court and brought to it clever women from good families. “Talking of her knowledge, no other queen compares,” wrote one contemporary chronicler.

Diane de Poitiers (1499-1566) – Chenonceau

Diane was the Loire’s second-sexiest woman, and evidently remained so into middle age. She was governess to the future Henry II when he was 11 and she 31. Before too long, they were lovers. It has been claimed that she was simultaneously the mistress of Henry’s father, King Francis I (“How nice when father and son share a common interest,” said a French lady friend of mine) but this is now doubted.



King Henry II's Chamber at Chateau d'Amboise

Henry was obliged to marry Catherine de Médicis when both were 15 but he remained bewitched by Diane , who was amply rewarded – not least with Chenonceau, the loveliest of all “Loire chateaux” (though it is actually on the River Indre).

When Henry was killed in a jousting tournament, Catherine took her revenge, expelling Diane from Chenonceau and taking it as hers. Catherine added a sublime gallery to the bridge that Diane had built across the river, and more gardens. Here she hosted world-class parties to showcase monarchical power, with the men dressed as women and vice versa.

Today the chateau retains a feminine grandeur and Diane’s bedchamber remains seductive. As Gustave Flaubert, a house guest in the 19th century, wrote: “Sleeping in Diane de Poitier’s bed is worth more than sleeping with a number of palpable realities.”

Catherine de Médicis (1519-89) – Blois

Catherine was stout, spoke with an Italian accent and, on marriage to the future Henry II, was dismissed as a “Florentine shopkeeper” by French courtiers who considered the Médicis decidedly arriviste. She also had to tolerate her husband’s preference for Diane de Poitiers. But as queen, then mother and regent to three subsequent kings, she was among the most powerful women in French history.

As such, she was all over the Loire Valley – but the Blois chateau remained a key royal base. Built around a courtyard, its four sides cover four distinct eras of Loire architecture – late medieval, through early Renaissance, then later Renaissance (when Francis I put up the see-and-be-seen outside staircase) and on to Neoclassical.

Blois was a hub of Catherine’s efforts to resolve the Catholic-Protestant conflict then ripping France apart. One of her tactics was to send flying squads of beautiful young women off to calm down warlords, and glean pillow secrets. The 1572 St Bartholomew massacre of thousands of Protestants happened on her watch, as did the murder of the Catholic extremist the Duc de Guise.

Now restored to Renaissance splendour, Blois is heavy with colour and hangings. Catherine’s own chamber is an indigestibly rich cacophony of gold, red and green. She died there, aged 69. If she hadn’t resolved the religious wars, that was because their intractability demanded blood. Diplomacy, with or without nubile women and transvestite parties, was never going to be enough.

Chateau Royal at night

Mary Stuart (1542-87) – Amboise

Amboise bills itself as the nursery of royals. Louis XI’s children, including the future Charles VIII, grew up there, as did Francis I – and all the offspring of Henry II and Catherine de Médicis who survived. It was for their eldest son, the future Francis II, that Mary Stuart was shipped across from Scotland at the age of five.

In France, young Mary was considered pretty, tall, and gifted at music, poetry , riding, falconry and languages. She married Francis – a short, sickly stutterer – in 155 8, when she was 15, he 14. They were based at Amboise. When Francis took the throne just over a year later, the couple were king and queen of both France and Scotland, with a decent claim, too, to the English crown.

Had things gone smoothly, our history might have been remarkably different. But they didn’t. In the 1560 Tumult of Amboise, Protestant insurgents attacked the chateau, intending to kidnap the king. They failed miserably, and vengeance was merciless. Some 1,200 Protestants were executed and their bodies hung from the chateau façade. Within months, however, Francis was dead – at 17, of an ear infection. Mary grieved bitterly, then returned to Scotland and a no-less-troubled onward life as Queen of Scots.

Amboise’s eminence ensured it benefited from the very finest Renaissance attention on the part of Italian artists and architects , most notabl y Leonardo da Vinci. He crossed the Alps on a donkey (with the Mona Lisa in his saddlebag), lived his final years at the Clos Lucé manor house close to Amboise, and is buried in the chateau’s St Hubert chapel.

Up here, perhaps more than anywhere else , you get a sense of the sheer majesty of the Loire Valley era.

Essentials

WHERE TO STAY

Closerie St Jacques, Loches ££

Historic town house directly below the citadel (0033 247 916312; lacloseriesaintjacques.com; b & b doubles £102).

Le XII, Luynes ££

Contemporary rooms and a first-class restaurant housed within a 17th-century building in a village near Tours (247 260741; le-12.com; doubles from £81).

La Feuillaie, St Ay ££

Unimpeachable (and unpronounceable) b & b – with great grounds, historic-chic rooms and excellent table d’hôte dinners – in unsung St Ay, south-west of Orléans (616 757127; lafeuillaie.com; b & b doubles from £93).

Auberge Ligérienne Côté Loire, Blois £

The oldest auberge in town, offering character, practical comfort, splendid food and a fine welcome (254 780786; coteloire.com; doubles from £51).

WHERE TO EAT

La Dariole, Orléans ££

The city’s best value-for-money restaurant, in a half-timbered 15th-century house close to the cathedral (238 772667; dinner from £22).

Océanic, Chinon ££

Fish and other fine food bang in the centre of town (247 934455; dinner from £20).

Les Flaveurs de la Terre, Loches £

Wine shop and wine bar with unsuspected terrace, serving local bites that can easily evolve into a full lunch or dinner (247 590891; around £15 per person).

Further information

Loire Valley Tourist Board (238 799500; visaloire.com).