Bavay is a French commune located in the Nord department, in the Hauts-de-France region. During the Roman Empire, Bavay was the “capital” of the Nervians. The Gallo-Roman forum and the departmental museum bear witness to this. The city was formerly the capital of the canton of Bavay, also called Bavaisis, before it disappeared during the cantonal redistribution of 2014.
The legendary founder and the apocryphal story
After the Cordelier Jacques de Guyse, Jean Wauquelin in his
Chroniques du Hainault, manuscript of the fifteenth century tells
that Bavo, a cousin of Priam, fleeing the invested city of Troy,
gained after many adventures a hospitable land where he built a city
that he called the present Bavay "Belgians". According to Wauquelin,
Seven roads, dedicated to the planets Jupiter, Mars, Venus, Saturn,
Mercury, the Sun and the Moon, started from the seven temples of the
city. The establishment of an elective monarchy signaled the decline
of the "city of Belgians", and the Belgians lost their unity and
could not resist the Roman invasions. This episode has been
considered a fable by most historians since the nineteenth century,
and even more that of the bloody internal struggles between the
queen of the Belgians Ursa to the former king Ursus.
However,
more than a thousand years after the beginnings of the conquests of
Rome, Aubert Le Mire and certain chroniclers of Hainaut still evoke
Bavay under the name of "Rome la Belgique", or Roma Belgica that
before them, in an agglomerating apocryphal historiography of other
older sources, the chronicler and historian of Hainaut Jacques de
Guyse called more simply "Belgis" ("Belgian"), name deriving
according to him from Belis (from the God Bel).
Various
authors and more "modern" "antiquarians" (people studying
antiquity), including Joseph Adolphe Aubenas, while recognizing a
lack of evidence from archeology, recalled that other texts, older
and dating back at least to 1st century AD also told that Trojans
had come to Gaul and that they had founded a large city there. Thus,
Aubenas, member of the Royal Society of Antiquaries of France,
created in 1804 with the aim of studying the civilization of the
Gauls, French history and archeology, believes in 1839 that Jacques
de Guise did not nothing invented, but only reported, what the
ancient chroniclers had written long before him. Aubenas cites in
support of the thesis reported by J de Guyse: Amien Marcellin and
better Timagène according to whom “a part of the population of Gaul
(according to the Druids) had come from distant islands and
transrhenan regions, from where it had been driven either by
frequent wars or by maritime overflows ”. Rucleri, Hunibaud or other
medieval chroniclers did not invent this story says J Aubenas,
because Timagène said the same thing more than 2000 years ago, and
after him, the Trojan origin of the Franks was also affirmed in
France, “In the Epitome of Frédegaire and its fragments and the
chronicle of Hunibaud, and Fréculphe, which in the first half of the
ninth century is expressed in formal terms”.
Gallo-Roman
period
The birth of Bavay, after the conquest of Gaul by Caesar,
results from the reorganization of the territory by Augustus
(probably between -16 and -13). Gaul is then divided into three
provinces, divided into cities (civitates): the region located
between the Seine and the Rhine forms the province of Gaul Belgium
(capital: Reims), in which the city of the Nerviens occupies a vast
territory between the 'Scheldt, the Sambre and the Meuse. The city
of Bavay was then created to be the center of this city. Many
ceramic remains date from the 1st century BC.
Placed at a road junction, Bavay is the obligatory passage
between Germania and the port of war of Boulogne-sur-Mer, bridgehead
towards Brittany (current Great Britain). The other routes, seven in
total, link Bavay to the administrative centers of the neighboring
cities (Amiens via Arras, Tongres, Cassel, Trier to the east and
Reims to the south). Its position is obviously strategic, but very
quickly these military routes (the future Emperor Tiberius transits
to Bavay with his armies around the year 4) are used for commercial
purposes.
The city developed during the Julio-Claudian era
and especially under the Flavians (end of the 1st century). Large
monuments are built: a forum, thermal baths supplied by an aqueduct
bringing water from a fountain (Fontaine Saint-Éloi) located in
Floursies, about twenty kilometers away, and other buildings, it
seems to have character official, adorn the city.
Middle Ages
Excavations on the Roman forum have brought to light ceramics from
the 9th and 10th centuries. The history of the city at this period
being poorly known, we will refer for the broad outlines to the
history of the county of Hainaut. It is probable that the Roman
forum was converted into a defensive unit, certain later documents
referring to the old castel.
In the 12th century, the Bavay
region was part of the county of Hainaut, and the town was the
capital of a provost.
In the thirteenth and fourteenth
centuries, the city was fortified, the design of the medieval wall
and its important earthen wall still appears today. The city is the
seat of a provost.
Modern era
In 1433, the county of
Hainaut, of which Bavay was part, became an integral part of the
very prosperous Burgundian Netherlands. In 1519, the Burgundian
Netherlands became an integral part of the empire of Charles V, a
period that was also very prosperous. In 1555, Charles Quint divided
his empire and gave the Netherlands, of which Bavay was part, to his
son Philippe II, King of Spain. Bavay was then part of the Spanish
Netherlands until 1678 when, following the many conquest battles of
Louis XIV, a whole part of the south of the Spanish Netherlands was
attached to the kingdom of France. The confirmation of the
attachment of Bavay to the kingdom of France intervenes in 1678 by
the (treaty of Nijmegen). Louvignies-Bavay merged with Bavay in
1946.
French Revolution
The city was taken by the
Austrians, who entered the city on July 21, 1792.