Between the Carolingian palace and the Belgium we know, eight centuries pass that our previous articles have left aside. Eight centuries during which Herstal was not quite like its neighbours, within a state that itself resembled no other in Europe.
Here is what happened between Charlemagne and the present day.
A state ruled by a bishop
In 980, or perhaps 985 (historians still debate the exact year), Bishop Notger obtained from Emperor Otto II the comital rights over the city of Liège. From that point on, the bishop was no longer only a religious authority. He became a temporal prince, ruling a state in the fullest sense: his own army, his own currency, his own courts, his own borders.
This is what is called the Prince-Bishopric of Liège, and it would last, without interruption, until 1795. Eight hundred and fifteen years.
The Prince-Bishopric was not part of the Duchy of Brabant, nor of the County of Flanders, nor of any of the great principalities that would later form the Southern Netherlands. It was a state apart, wedged between them, an ecclesiastical enclave answering directly to the Holy Roman Empire.
Herstal, an exception within the exception
Here is where our own history takes an unexpected turn. While the Prince-Bishopric extended across much of the Liège region, Herstal did not belong to it.
The land of Charlemagne remained, for centuries, a separate lordship, caught in the great feudal reshufflings of the Low Countries. It passed through the hands of the House of Brabant, then entered, through marriage and inheritance, into the vast and scattered domains of the House of Nassau.
The lineage is worth setting out, because it explains how a small Meuse town found itself, for a time, in company one would not expect.
A lineage that leads to Orange
Herstal passed to Engelbert I of Nassau in the fifteenth century, then descended within the same family: to Henry III of Nassau-Breda, then to his nephew René of Chalon, Prince of Orange, who died without an heir in 1544.
At his death, René of Chalon bequeathed his titles and estates, including Herstal, to his young German cousin, William of Nassau. History would remember him as William the Silent, founder of the House of Orange-Nassau and future leader of the revolt against Spain in the nascent Dutch Republic.
For a time, then, Herstal belonged to the same prince who would become the central figure of Dutch independence. It is a curious detour for a village standing on a Carolingian palatial estate, but it is well documented, and it explains why the estate later passed, by inheritance, into Prussian hands.
A three-year war for one town
The estate was not always held peacefully. In 1595, a first Herstal War broke out, opposing the Prince-Bishop of Liège, Ernest of Bavaria, to Philip William, Prince of Orange, over rights to the seigneury. The conflict, though limited in scale, lasted several years before a settlement was reached, underlining just how contested this small enclave, wedged against the Prince-Bishopric's own territory, had become.
An enclave the Prince-Bishopric could not absorb
For centuries, then, Herstal remained an anomaly: a foreign lordship, under Nassau and later Orange-Nassau authority, sitting inside or against the borders of an ecclesiastical state that could never fully absorb it.
This lasted until the eighteenth century. Through the complex chain of inheritance within the House of Orange-Nassau, the seigneury of Herstal eventually passed to the King of Prussia, Frederick II, who held it as one of many scattered territorial claims accumulated by his dynasty across the Empire.
11 September 1740: the day Herstal came home
It is a Prince-Bishop of Liège, Georges-Louis de Berghes, who finally puts an end to this anomaly. On 11 September 1740, he purchases the seigneury of Herstal from the King of Prussia, for a considerable sum.
The precise date deserves to be stated plainly, since the town's own historical accounts have long referred only vaguely to "the eighteenth century." The repurchase of Herstal by the Prince-Bishopric took place on that exact day, closing eight centuries during which the birthplace claimed for Charlemagne stood, administratively, apart from the state that surrounded it.
From 1740 onward, and until the French Revolution swept the Prince-Bishopric away in 1795, Herstal was, at last, fully part of the state of Liège.
What this teaches, and what it does not
This is not a story of continuity. It is the opposite: a demonstration of how discontinuous the map of the Low Countries could be, even around a single small town whose Carolingian past was already, by then, the object of local pride.
For eight centuries, the land associated with Charlemagne answered to Brabant, then to Nassau, then to Orange, then to Prussia, before finally joining, quite late, the ecclesiastical state that surrounded it on every side.
We make no claim on the strength of this. We simply note that Herstal's history did not move in a straight line from Charlemagne to Belgium. It passed through Nassau hands, through the House that gave the Netherlands its royal line, through a Prussian king's ledger of possessions, before a bishop bought it back for his own state, four years before Charlemagne's birthplace claim would even have had four centuries to settle into local memory.
The ground does not change. What holds authority over it does, repeatedly, and the record of those changes is worth knowing.