Flavigny : LAND of TRADITION...
The region we know today as BURGUNDY is made up of five départements : the Yonne, the Côte d’Or, the Saône et Loire, the Nièvre. Burgundy is in some sense the centre of Western Europe ; nowadays, it the place where the roads, railways and waterways linking northern and southern Europe come together. Since the beginning of time, the region has been a crossroads, a place where different peoples, different products, different languages come together.
It’s a long story. It takes tin to make bronze, and back in the Bronze age, tin from Cornwall was the essential raw material upon which a whole civilization depended. Cornish tin travelled along the valleys of Seine to the Saône and on to the Mediterranean, or was carried through the pass at Belfort and on from there to the Danube. Somewhat later, the Lingons, the Eduens and the Sequanes, all Gallic tribes of Celtic origin, speaking Celtic languages, gained control of the major axes of this system. The Eduens made themselves masters of most of Burgundy. The Roman Empire, in its turn, established a military base (castrum) at Divio (Dijon) to guard, protect and supervise the traderoutes which radiated out towards the four corners of the Empire. In the third century CE, Burgundy became a bridgehead for the evangelization of the Gauls by St. Benignus of Dijon and others. In the eleventh century, it was the centre of the Cistercian monastic reforms based at Cluny and Citeaux; the influence of Cistercian thinkers like Bernard of Clairvaux touched every aspect of the human endeavour. In the twelfth and thirteenth centuries, Crusades set out from Vézelay. The fourteenth and fifteenth centuries witnessed the extraordinary rise and fall of the Great Dukes of Burgundy, whose last Prince, Charles the Bold, styled himself Grand Duke of the Western World.
It’s a long story. It takes tin to make bronze, and back in the Bronze age, tin from Cornwall was the essential raw material upon which a whole civilization depended. Cornish tin travelled along the valleys of Seine to the Saône and on to the Mediterranean, or was carried through the pass at Belfort and on from there to the Danube. Somewhat later, the Lingons, the Eduens and the Sequanes, all Gallic tribes of Celtic origin, speaking Celtic languages, gained control of the major axes of this system. The Eduens made themselves masters of most of Burgundy. The Roman Empire, in its turn, established a military base (castrum) at Divio (Dijon) to guard, protect and supervise the traderoutes which radiated out towards the four corners of the Empire. In the third century CE, Burgundy became a bridgehead for the evangelization of the Gauls by St. Benignus of Dijon and others. In the eleventh century, it was the centre of the Cistercian monastic reforms based at Cluny and Citeaux; the influence of Cistercian thinkers like Bernard of Clairvaux touched every aspect of the human endeavour. In the twelfth and thirteenth centuries, Crusades set out from Vézelay. The fourteenth and fifteenth centuries witnessed the extraordinary rise and fall of the Great Dukes of Burgundy, whose last Prince, Charles the Bold, styled himself Grand Duke of the Western World.
Our region is a land where ideas and cultures meet and mingle; it is the heart of the Western World.
