Liège

Liège stands where the Légia stream meets the Meuse, and from 972 until 1795 it was the capital of a prince-bishopric that had grown from the Roman civitas of the Tungri. Bishop Notger received full immunity in 980, and the prince-bishops ruled their lands as ecclesiastical princes of the Empire. The city was called the City of a Hundred Bell Towers, for the cathedral of Saint Lambert, six collegiate churches and some fifty other churches stood in it. The Liégeois fought their bishops for their liberties, and the perron, a column in the market square, symbolised those freedoms.

In the fifteenth century the Burgundian dukes gathered the Low Countries into one state, and the Liégeois refused to accept Philip the Good's nephew Louis of Bourbon as their prince. They allied with Louis XI of France but were beaten at Montenaken and forced into a humiliating peace in 1465. In 1468 six hundred men of Franchimont tried to seize Charles the Bold in his camp above the town; Liège was plundered and burned from 3 November, only a few religious buildings being spared, and the perron was carried to Bruges as a humiliation.

After Charles's death Liège regained its perron and relative independence in 1478. Prince-Bishop Érard de la Marck, a friend of Erasmus, rebuilt the Palace of the Prince-Bishops over twenty years. In 1789 the people of Liège rose against their prince-bishop, and in 1795 the French Republic annexed the principality and Saint Lambert's cathedral was demolished.