|Canton||Cambrai-Est and Cambrai-Ouest|
|Mayor||François-Xavier Villain (DLR)
|Elevation||41–101 m (135–331 ft)
(avg. 60 m or 200 ft)
|Land area1||18.12 km2 (7.00 sq mi)|
|- Density||1,861 /km2 (4,820 /sq mi)|
|INSEE/Postal code||59122/ 59400|
|1 French Land Register data, which excludes lakes, ponds, glaciers > 1 km² (0.386 sq mi or 247 acres) and river estuaries.|
|2Population without double counting: residents of multiple communes (e.g., students and military personnel) only counted once.|
Cambrai (French pronunciation: [kɑ̃bʁɛ]; Dutch: Kamerijk; German: Kamerich; old spelling Cambray) is a commune in the Nord department in northern France on the Escaut river. It is a sub-prefecture of the department.
Cambrai is the seat of an archdiocese whose jurisdiction was immense during the Middle Ages. The territory of the Bishopric of Cambrai, roughly coinciding with the shire of Brabant, included the central part of the Low Countries. The bishopric had some limited secular power.
Cambrai was the Duke of Wellington's headquarters, for the British Army of Occupation, from 1815 to 1818.
The Battle of Cambrai (20 November 1917 – 3 December 1917), a campaign of World War I, took place there. It was noted for the first successful use of tanks. A second Battle of Cambrai took place between 8 and 10 October 1918 as part of the Hundred Days Offensive.
Little is known with certainty of the beginnings of Cambrai. Camaracum or Camaraco, as it was known to the Romans, is mentioned for the first time on the Peutinger table in the middle of the 4th century. It was a town of the Nervii, whose "capital" was at Bagacum, present-day Bavay.
In the middle of the 4th-century Frankish raids from the north led the Romans to build forts along the Cologne to Bavay to Cambrai road, and thence to Boulogne. Cambrai thus occupied an important strategic position. In the early 5th century the town had become the administrative centre of the Nervii in replacement of Bavay which was probably too exposed to the Franks' raids and perhaps too damaged.
Christianity arrived in the region at about the same time. A bishop of the Nervii by the name of Superior is mentioned in the middle of the 4th century, but nothing else is known about him.
In 430 the Salian Franks under the command of Clodio the Long-Haired took the town. In the early 6th century Clovis undertook to unify the Frankish kingdoms by getting rid of his relatives. One of them was Ragnachar, who ruled over a small kingdom from Cambrai.
Cambrai began to grow from a rural market into a real city during the Merovingian times, a long period of peace when the bishoprics of Arras and Cambrai were first unified (probably owing to the small number of clerics left at the time) and were later transferred to Cambrai, an administrative centre for the region. Successive bishops, including Gaugericus (in French Géry), founded abbeys and churches to host relics, which contributed powerfully to giving Cambrai both the appearance and functions of a city.
When the treaty of Verdun in 843 split Charlemagne's empire into three parts, the county of Cambrai fell into Lothaire's kingdom. However, upon the death of Lothair II, who had no heir, king Charles the Bald tried to gain control of his kingdom by having himself sacred at Metz. Cambrai thus reverted, but only briefly, to the Western Frankish Realm. In 870 the town was destroyed by the Normans.
By 925 Henry the Fowler had regained control of Lothair's former domains. Cambrai henceforth belonged to the Holy Roman Empire, in an uncomfortable position on the border with France, until it was annexed by France eight centuries later after being captured by Louis XIV in 1677.
In the Middle Ages the region around Cambrai, called Cambrésis, was a county. Rivalries between the count, who ruled the city and county, and the bishop, ceased when in 948 Otto I granted the bishop with temporal powers over the city. In 1007 emperor Henry II, Holy Roman Emperor, extended the bishop's temporal power to the territory surrounding Cambrai. The bishops then had both spiritual and temporal powers. This made Cambrai and Cambrésis a church principality, much like Liège, an independent state which was part of the Holy Roman Empire.
In 958 one of the first communes in Europe was established in Cambrai. The inhabitants rebelled against the bishop's power and abuses. They were severely repressed, but the discontent flared up again in the 10th and 11th centuries. In 1226, following another period of unrest, the burghers of Cambrai finally had to give up their charters and accept the bishop's authority, while retaining some freedom in the running of the town.
In the Middle Ages the city grew richer and larger thanks to its weaving industry which produced woollen cloth, linen and cambric. Cambrai then belonged to a commercial hansa of seventeen low country cities whose aim was to develop trade with the fairs in Champagne and Paris. By the 11th century the city walls had reached the circumference they would keep until the 19th century.
Cambrai has a distinguished musical history, particularly in the 15th century. The cathedral there, a musical center until the 17th century, had one of the most active musical establishments in the Low Countries; many composers of the Burgundian School either grew up and learned their craft there, or returned to teach. In 1428 Philippe de Luxembourg claimed that the cathedral was the finest in all of Christianity, for the fineness of its singing, its light, and the sweetness of its bells. Guillaume Dufay, the most famous European musician of the 15th century, studied at the cathedral from 1409 to 1412, and returned in 1439 after spending many years in Italy. Cambrai cathedral had other famous composers in the later 15th century: Johannes Tinctoris and Ockeghem went to Cambrai to study with Dufay. Other composers included Nicolas Grenon, Alexander Agricola, and Jacob Obrecht. In the 16th century, Philippe de Monte, Johannes Lupi, and Jacobus de Kerle all worked there.
Hundred Years' War
Even though the bishop tried to preserve the independence of his small state of Cambrésis, the task was not easy, wedged as the county was between its more powerful neighbours the counts of Flanders, of Hainaut and the kings of France, especially during the Hundred Years' War. In 1339, in the early stages of the war, the English king Edward III laid siege to the city but eventually had to withdraw. By the 14th century the county was surrounded on all parts by Burgundy's possessions and John of Burgundy, an illegitimate son of John the Fearless, was made bishop. However what looked like an impending annexation of Cambrésis to the states of Burgundy was made impossible by the sudden death of Charles the Bold in 1477. Louis XI immediately seized the opportunity to take control of Cambrai, but left the city a year later.
The legend of Martin and Martine
Martin and Martine are two legendary characters who have come to represent the city which they are said to have saved. There are different versions of the story. The most commonly accepted version runs as follows: around the year 1370, at the time of Bishop Robert, Count of Geneva, Martin, a blacksmith of Moorish descent established in Cambrai, was among the burghers who left the city to fight the lord of Thun-Lévêque, who was then reputed to ransom the population around the city and generally to afflict the region. Martin, armed only with his heavy iron hammer, soon came face to face with the enemy. He dealt such a heavy blow on his opponent's head that, although the helmet of the lord did not break, because it was made of good steel, it was driven down to his eyes. Dazed and blinded, the lord of Thun quickly surrendered. Today the automatons of Martin and Martine, standing at the top of the town hall, strike the hours with a hammer as a reminder of that mighty blow.
The Renaissance and classical age
As the economic centre of northern Europe moved away from Bruges, the area became poorer, with an associated period of cultural decline. However the city's neutrality and its position between the possessions of the Habsburg Empire and France made it the venue of several international negotiations, including the League of Cambrai, an alliance engineered in 1508 by Pope Julius II against the Republic of Venice. The alliance collapsed in 1510 when the Pope allied with Venice against his former ally France. The conflict is also referred to as the War of the League of Cambrai and lasted from 1508 to 1516. Cambrai was also the site of negotiations in 1529 that led to France's withdrawal from the War of the League of Cognac.
In 1543 Cambrai was conquered by Charles V, Holy Roman Emperor, and annexed to his already vast possessions. He had the medieval monastery of Saint-Sépulchre demolished and a citadel built in its place.
In 1623, the community of nuns of the English Benedictine Congregation was founded at Cambrai, which was expelled during the French Revolution and its successor community has since 1838 been established at Stanbrook Abbey, near Malvern.
In 1677, Louis XIV, in an effort to "safeguard the tranquility of his borders for ever" ("assurer à jamais le repos de ses frontières"), decided to take Cambrai and supervised the siege in person. The city was taken on April 19, 1677. By the Treaty of Nijmegen of 1678 Spain relinquished Cambrai, which has remained to this day a part of France.
The first archbishop appointed by the king of France was François Fénelon. He came to be known as the "swan of Cambrai" ("le cygne de Cambrai"), in opposition to his rival Bossuet, the "eagle of Meaux" ("l'aigle de Meaux"), and he wrote his Maxims of the Saints while residing in the city. Despite this, the Flemish philosopher Robert Bénart said, as early as 1765, "Cambrai est un bourg souffrant d'une cruelle inactivité et aux habitants stupides." ("Voyages en Flandre", 1767.)
The French Revolution
The city suffered from the Revolution: Joseph Le Bon, sent by the Comité de salut public, arrived in Cambrai in 1794. He was to set up an era of "terror", sending many to the guillotine, until he was tried and executed in 1795. Most of the religious buildings of the city were demolished in that period: in 1797, the old cathedral, which had been dubbed the "wonder of the low countries", was sold to a merchant who exploited it as a stone quarry. Only the main tower was left standing by 1809, when it collapsed in a storm. However the cathedral's archives have been preserved (they are now at the Archives Départementales du Nord in Lille) and a new cathedral was later provided.
The arms of Cambrai are blazoned :
Cambrai was the birthplace of:
- Amé Bourdon (1636 or 1638–1706), physician and anatomist
- Charles François Dumouriez (1739–1823), French general
- Francisco de Carondelet (1747–1807), in Noyelles, Spanish governor of Louisiana, president of the Audiencia of Quito
- Charles Henri Joseph Cordier (1829–1905), sculptor of Ethnographic subjects.
- Marcel Lermoyez (1858–1929), otologist
- Louis Blériot (1872–1936), aviator
- Henri de Lubac (1896–1991), Jesuit and theologian
- Julien Torma (1902–1933), writer, playwright and poet
- René Dumont (1904–2001), engineer in agronomy, sociologist, and environmental politician
- Maurice Godelier (born 1934), social anthropologist, neo-Marxist, and French intellectual
- Marie-Georges Pascal (1946-1985), actress
Cambrai is twinned with:
|Wikimedia Commons has media related to: Cambrai|
- David Fallows, Barbara H. Haggh: "Cambrai", Grove Music Online ed. L. Macy (Accessed December 18, 2005), (subscription access) (source for the music history section)
- "Cambrai." Encyclopædia Britannica, 11th ed. New York, Encyclopædia Britannica Co., 1910.
- "Histoire de Cambrai", sous la direction de Louis Trénard, Presses Universitaires de Lille, 1982.
- 1911 Encyclopædia Britannica, "Cambrai"
- Cambrai website (French)
- Cambrai Public Library
- Webpage about the fortifications
- Webpage on the 1677 siege
- Silent short film from 1918 demonstrates the devastating effects of shelling
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