Langres

 The city of Langres, located on the Burgundy-Champagne border, was an important city in Roman Gaul and a major bishopric during the Middle Ages, even though it's become a rather quiet provincial town in recent centuries, with a current population under 10,000.

 

It's located quite dramatically at the top of a steep hill, overlooking the countryside, and still has its Roman walls.  Traffic has to drive in and out through some of its Roman gates. The gates pictured above are the best preserved of the Roman gates and thus are closed to traffic.

 

The Romans liked Langres for its strategic location, and a number of Roman roads met there. The strategic location meant that Langres continued to be important militarily up through the nineteenth century.

Like most bishoprics in what is now France, Langres dates its Christianization and first bishop to the third century.  Autun was probably the original diocese covering what is now Burgundy, and other dioceses were carved out of it between the third and fifth centuries (Langres, Auxerre, Nevers, Mâcon, and Chalon-sur-Saône).

The bishops were important counselors to the Carolingian kings in the ninth century and continued to be major political players.  During the twelfth century the Capetian kings granted the bishops the right to hold Langres and its region directly from the crown, rather than having either the duke of Burgundy or the count of Champagne be in authority over their territory. The bishops liked to say they were dukes in their own right.

 The diocese of Langres was one of the most central in the early spread of the Cistercian order. A number of houses were founded on the Langres plateau.  Unlike the monastery of Cluny, which always tried to exempt itself from the authority of its local bishop (Mâcon), the Cistercians always got along well with their bishops—some of whom were Cistercians themselves.

During the Enlightenment of the eighteenth century, a son of Langres, Denis Diderot, established the first "Encyclopedia," volumes that purported to cover all of human knowledge, in the hope that educating the populace by whatever means possible would lead to a more rational and happier and prosperous population.

 The city of Langres commemorates Diderot (who also rates a statue and a central square named for him) with a park bench made to look like an encyclopedia volume.

© C. Dale Brittain 2026

For more on medieval social history and how it still affects us today, see my new ebook, Still Medieval After All These Years, available from Amazon and other major ebook platforms. Also available in paperback.