Château de Brie-Comte-Robert

After his death in 1328, she profited from comfortable revenues (a royal dower of many fiefdoms in Brie and Champagne), which enabled her to devote important sums to the maintenance and the improvement of her own possessions, including Brie-Comte-Robert.

She had a chapel built dedicated to Saint-Denis, joined to the Tour Saint-Jean (St John Tower), and laid out vast pleasure gardens.

In 1420, the passage of the English army, en route to Troyes, and the siege of Melun which followed, brought some disorder to the town, but did not affect the castle.

It is from 1429 that the city was, « par quatre diverses fois en trois ans », ("four separate times in three years"), taken and retaken by the French and the English.

The major event remains however the siege begun in September 1430 by the Humphrey Stafford, 1st Duke of Buckingham, who caused immense damage, in the town as well as to the castle.

Starting from the reign of Francis I, the castle and its grounds were entrusted by the king to some of his close associates, either by way of favour (« don pour un temps » - "gift for a time"), or by conditional sale with option of repurchase (« l'engagement »).

In the middle of the century, various families of Italian lords, close to Catherine de' Medici (Aquaviva, Pierrevive, Gondi), held the castle, but allowed the building to deteriorate, even causing the burning of the floors and some frames.

Later repairs had to be very modest: in 1681, the castle was regarded as "... uninhabitable, the ditches full of rubbish, the garden fallow..." (« inhabitable, les fossés comblés d'immondices, le jardin en friche... »).

Jean-Antoine de Mesmes, first President of the parlement of Paris carried out various maintenance works on the roofs and repairs to the access bridges.