Gâtinais () or Gâtine () was a

province A province is an administrative division within a country or sovereign state, state. The term derives from the ancient Roman , which was the major territorial and administrative unit of the Roman Empire, Roman Empire's territorial possessions ou ...

of France, containing the area around the valley of the Loing, corresponding roughly to the northeastern part of the département of Loiret, and the south of the present department of

Seine-et-Marne Seine-et-Marne () is a department in the Île-de-France region in Northern France. Named after the rivers Seine and Marne, it is the region's largest department with an area of 5,915 square kilometres (2,284 square miles); it roughly covers its ...

. Under the Bourbons, the Gâtinais had already been divided between the provinces of

Île-de-France The Île-de-France (; ; ) is the most populous of the eighteen regions of France, with an official estimated population of 12,271,794 residents on 1 January 2023. Centered on the capital Paris, it is located in the north-central part of the cou ...

and

Orléans Orléans (,"Orleans"
(US) and Seine The Seine ( , ) is a river in northern France. Its drainage basin is in the Paris Basin (a geological relative lowland) covering most of northern France. It rises at Source-Seine, northwest of Dijon in northeastern France in the Langres plat ...

and the

Loire The Loire ( , , ; ; ; ; ) is the longest river in France and the 171st longest in the world. With a length of , it drains , more than a fifth of France's land, while its average discharge is only half that of the Rhône. It rises in the so ...

. Under the

Franks file:Frankish arms.JPG, Aristocratic Frankish burial items from the Merovingian dynasty The Franks ( or ; ; ) were originally a group of Germanic peoples who lived near the Rhine river, Rhine-river military border of Germania Inferior, which wa ...

, Gâtinais was the '' pagus'' Wastinensis (eventually to become Wasteney in the 20th century), (or Vastinensis) one of five belonging to the Archbishop of Sens. The west part of

Puisaye The Puisaye () is a natural and historical region of France, now divided between the Departments of France, departments of Loiret, Nièvre and Yonne. Its historical and administrative center is the town of Saint-Fargeau. Its inhabitants are know ...

and the archbishop's other fiefs in the northwest of the modern department of Yonne, west of that river, are also often considered part of Gâtinais; as is the area around Étampes in the present department of Essonne. Around the 10th century, the main town of this province was Château-Landon, and a twenty-five-mile circle around Notre-Dame de Château-Landon basically comprised it. The western part, ''Gâtinais orléanais'', approximately corresponds to the

arrondissement An arrondissement (, , ) is any of various administrative divisions of France, Belgium, Haiti, and certain other Francophone countries, as well as the Netherlands. Europe France The 101 French departments are divided into 342 ''arrondissem ...

s of Montargis and a large part of Pithiviers, in Loiret. Pithiviers has for several centuries been the most representative town of Gâtinais. The eastern part, ''Gâtinais français'', had Nemours as its chief town, and corresponds to the arrondissement of

Fontainebleau Fontainebleau ( , , ) is a Communes of France, commune in the Functional area (France), metropolitan area of Paris, France. It is located south-southeast of the Kilometre zero#France, centre of Paris. Fontainebleau is a Subprefectures in Franc ...

in Seine-et-Marne. This is an essentially agricultural area, although the west is wooded. It was for several centuries known for its saffron, a crop that disappeared from this area because of the heavy charges on human work and the impossibility to mechanise this particular crop; these days saffron makes a timid reappearance in the local fields under the impulse of natural regional park of Gâtinais français.''Gastronomy''
in ''le-republicain.fr''. Article on the launching of a saffron plantation in Villeneuve-sur-Auvers in the Gâtinais. It is also famous for its honey, produced by traditional methods in the whole area.

Literary use

A region called Gâtinais is a neighbour of the fictional land of Poictesme in James Branch Cabell's '' Biography of the Life of Manuel''.

References

{{DEFAULTSORT:Gatinais Former provinces of France