children, John Lackland. King John would lose the castle in a siege in 1205 to the French king Philip II Augustus, from which date it was included in the French royal estates as the royal duchy of Touraine. The castle in Chinon served as a prison for a time when Philip IV the Fair ordered the Knights Templar arrested in 1307. Jacques de Molay, Grand Master, and a few other dignitaries of the Order of the Temple were incarcerated there prior to trial and eventual execution. Chinon again played a significant role in the struggle for the throne between the French and the English during the Hundred Years' War (1337-1453) when the heir apparent, the future Charles VII of France sought refuge and installed his court there in 1425. The province remained faithful to him and he made lengthy stays with his court there. In 1429, the 17-year-old Joan of Arc came to Chinon to meet and to acknowledge him as the rightful heir to the throne. After interrogation to prove she had been sent on a mission from God and with the men and arms then accorded to her, she would go on to break the siege of Orléans in June and open the way for Charles to be crowned at Reims in July 1429. The meetings in Chinon with the future Charles VII of France and his acceptance of her constituted the turning point of the war, helping to establish both firmer national boundaries and sentiment. Chinon also served Louis XII as he waited for the papal legate Caesar Borgia to bring the annulment papers from Jeanne de France, enabling him to marry Anne of Brittany in 1498, and thus solidifying an even more coherent French territory In 1490, the commune of Chinon was the birthplace of the writer, humanist, humorist, philosopher and satirist François Rabelais, author of Gargantua and Pantagruel amongst other works, which figure in the canon of great world literature. The region is the scene of these fantastic, critical and observant adventures. From the sixteenth century, Chinon was no longer a royal residence, and in 1631 it became part of the estates of the Duke of Richelieu, who neglected the fortress. Apart from townhouses and convents that were built, the city changed little up to the Revolution. In the 1820s, however, the fortifications were pulled down and the banks of the river Vienne were opened