The reverses experienced at Poitiers, Moncontour, and St. Jean-d’Angély had not been fatal to the Protestants. In the middle of December Coligny wrote to the captain of La Charité that he felt ready to resume the offensive in the spring, having in La Rochelle, Cognac, Angoulême, Montauban, Castres, La Charité, and Montpellier a chain of impregnable fortresses extending from the seaboard clear to the heart of France, and controlling the Loire.[1417] A survey of the map will show the strength of the Huguenots in this part of France. All of Provence and Lower Languedoc was in full control of the Protestants, Montauban, Albi, and Castres, constituting a line of defense on the west. In Upper Languedoc they were not so strong and the condition of the Catholics was less precarious, since Toulouse, Auch, Agen, and Cahors, formed a quadrilateral in the very center. The Huguenots controlled many of the lesser towns, so that Montluc complained that time and again he had to pass through their hands “and for the least affair trot up and down with great trouble from city to city. Would to God that, as they do in Spain, we had made our constant abode in the good towns; we had then both more riches and more authority.”[1418] Guyenne was safely Catholic if it could continue to hold its own; for this important fact Montluc richly deserves credit.[1419] But Guyenne, Gascony, and Upper Languedoc were isolated from the Catholic north by a broad Protestant strip running southeastward from La Rochelle to Montpellier through Saintes, Cognac, Angoulême, Chalais, Bergerac, Montauban, Albi, Castres, Béziers, and Montpellier, which united Saintonge on the seaboard with Provence and Dauphiné. But, on the other hand, Béarn was separated from the main trunk of Calvinism and was not yet safe, in spite of Montgomery’s success, unless it were bound to the main trunk. The Huguenot leaders realized this, and one of Coligny’s adroitest strokes, after Moncontour, was the seizure of Port-Ste. Marie, below Agen on the Garonne, with the aid of the German reiters.[1420] The capture of this place (November 29, 1569) insured the passage of the Garonne to the Huguenots[1421] and accomplished for those of the far south what the possession of La Charité insured to those of central France, for it bridged the Garonne. Later, when Bernard d’Astarac, baron de Martamot, early in the following January (1570) recovered Tarbes[1422] on the Adour, the Huguenots had a chain of fortresses running straight north from Béarn through Condom and Nérac to Bergerac and Angoulême, and Catholic Gascony and Guyenne were cut in twain.