Vitryat

None of the fifteen member communes is a town of any size. Bassu, Bassuet, Changy, Couvrot, Glannes, Lisse-en-Champagne, Loisy-sur-Marne, Merlaut, Saint-Amand-sur-Fion, Saint-Lumier-en-Champagne, Val-de-Vière, Vanault-le-Châtel, Vavray-le-Grand, Vavray-le-Petit and Vitry-en-Perthois are small rural communes scattered across farmland southeast of Châlons-en-Champagne, most with populations in the low hundreds. Vitry-en-Perthois, the largest of the group, counts under a thousand inhabitants. The area has no administrative or commercial centre of its own; its growers are oriented toward Vitry-le-François, a market town a few kilometres to the south that gives the UMC its name but does not belong to it. Vitry-le-François owes its existence to the destruction of Vitry-en-Perthois. On 24 July 1544, troops of Emperor Charles V, then at war with Francis I, burned the town to the ground. Francis I answered with letters patent dated 29 April 1545 ordering a new fortified town built nearby, on the site of the hamlet of Maucourt. The Italian military architect Girolamo Marini laid it out as a Renaissance grid, a 612-metre square divided into regular blocks around a central Place d'Armes 117 metres wide, and the new town took the king's name. Vitry-en-Perthois itself was rebuilt on its original site and remains inhabited today, one of the fifteen villages of this UMC area, a few kilometres from the town whose founding it caused but of which it forms no part.