Stavelot

Stavelot grew around the abbey founded by Saint Remaclus around 650 on land between the dioceses of Cologne and Tongeren. Its abbots ruled the small imperial principality of Stavelot-Malmedy. In the twelfth century Abbot Wibald commissioned precious works for the monastery, including the gilded copper and enamel Stavelot Triptych made around 1156 to hold two fragments of the True Cross.

The abbey continued as the religious and political centre of its own principality through the centuries of the Empire. The French Revolution ended its temporal rule: the principality was dissolved in 1795 and the abbey secularized and its church later demolished. At the Congress of Vienna in 1815, Stavelot was assigned to the Kingdom of the Netherlands, while its neighbouring partner Malmedy passed instead to Prussia.