Burgundy is located between northern and southern Europe and has always been a crossroads of roads and civilisations.

Since the first merchants, 3000 years ago during the Bronze age, brought tin from Cornwall to the Mediterranean regions by the valleys of rivers Seine and Saône, but also through the Danube valley which they reached through Alsace and southern Germany. Doing so, they transported the basis of a civilisation : without tin, there is no bronze ! About one thousand years later the control of this major axis of communication permitted the Celtic people of the Eduans to assert their power upon most parts of what is at present Burgundy, around their capital, the oppidum Bibracte on top of Mont Beuvray in the Morvan mountains. This was the place where Vercingetorix was elected chief of the united Gallic peoples against the Roman army under Julius Cesar, only a few months before the battle of Alesia in Northern Burgundy put an end the the independance of Gaul in 52 B.C. After being administrated from Lyon in the south and from Sens in the north under Roman rule - but also from Trier, the capital of the province of Germania superior - Burgundy got its present name in the very last period of the Roman empire, thanks to the Germanic people, the Burgundians. The Burgundians, who had lost their kingdom and land on the Rhine after a terrible defeat by the Huns which was to become the subject of the German national epos, the "Nibelungenlied", had built up a new kingdom during the 5th century, spreading out from the Savoyan Alps where they had been allowed to settle. From the 10th century onward the name " Burgundy " meant a duchy belonging to the royal family of the Capetians.

Medieval Summits

At that time the most influential centres of monastic reform throughout Christian Europe, Cluny and Cîteaux, were located in Burgundy. Their influence, far from being purely spiritual, concerned artistic and intellectual subjects as well as social and political affairs and brought together the most influential people of their time, holding "summits" wich dealt with such important questions as the relationship between ecclesiastic and aristocratic power or geopolitical influence in the Middle east - in other terms, the quarrel of investitures and the crusades. Cluny abbey, founded in 910 not far from Mâcon, owed its success to the exemption from all other authority than that of the pope's, but also to the exceptional personality and long life of its first abbots. Among them Hugh of Semur (1024-1109), the great promotor of the Reconquista of Spain and of the pilgrimage to Santiago de Compostella who had the 3rd church of Cluny - the biggest church of Christendom until the reconstruction of Saint-Peter's in Rome in the 16th century - and was also the godfather of Emperor Henry IV. As such he intervened in 1077, making his excommunicated godchild meet his enemy in the quarrel of investitures, pope Gregory VII, at Canossa in the Alps, and surrender to the pope's authority. In the following century Vézelay in northern Burgundy became a major meeting point for leaders of the most important movements of the time, especially the crusades. Vézelay, the official starting point of one of the four routes to Santiago, was also the place where Saint Bernard of Clairvaux preached in favour of the second crusade in 1146. In 1190 the third crusade took its leave from Vézelay led by king Philip August of France and Richard the Lionhearted of England.

The Resurrection of Lotharingia

The Duchy of Burgundy, where the Valois family had succeeded the Capetians in the 14th century just as on the throne of France some decades before, became the most powerful state in Europe thanks to the skillful policy of its dukes and to the vanishing royal power in the One Hundred Years War. Open to northern and southern influences, combining urban and rural economy and mentality, the Burgundian conglomerate of states for the last time created a major political entity between France and the German empire. Beyond political and military actions, its influence was particularly strong in artistic and courtly life. The Burgundian court ceremonial survived at the Habsburg court for centuries. The duke's environment and especially the cartusian monastery of Champmol, founded outside Dijon by Philip the Bold as a burial-place for himself and his dynasty, bore the origin of an artistic current to be followed through Europe - particularly central Europe - transmitting, from one generation of artists to the next, models and types expressing, in a remarkably rich and refined language of forms, a solemn faith in mankind, which was entirely new at the time of Claus Sluter, "ymagier" of duke Philip the Bold around the year 1400, and can be found for more than a century until the works of Memling, Lochner, Stoss and Riemenschneider.

Deeply rooted modernity

The modern period, after the end of the independant duchy, brought a withdrawal of Burgundy into the kingdom of France, largely cut from the main currents of international exchange. But it also produced a modernization remodeling large parts of its geographic area, due to the growing influence of Paris. The most spectacular realisation in this context was the establishment of a company furnishing Paris with fire wood in the middle of the 16th century, which produced a profound change in the hydrography of the Morvan mountains, affecting the whole system from tiny streams to the newly created Canal du Nivernais and Lac des Settons, an artificial lake. Burguny, which furnished Paris not only with fire wood (80 % of the capital's needs were covered with wood from Burgundy), but also with stone from many quarries and with wine and other local produce, gave Paris its modern symbol: Gustave Eiffel, who built the famous tower, was originary from Dijon, descendant of a family immigrated from Germany, bearing the unpronounceable name of "Boenichhausen". When his parents decided to change their name, they simply took the name of the region where they had come from - the Eifel.