Bouillon Castle

The rock above the Semois has been fortified since the early Middle Ages. An earlier stronghold, possibly Celtic in origin, stood a little to the south-west of the present castle on a height called La Ramonette, and it is that fortified watchtower which appears in a letter of 988 from Archbishop Adalbero of Reims to his brother Godfrey the Prisoner. It belonged to the Ardennes-Bouillon family, who kept their treasure there and struck coin; the settlement around it was the only town in the lordship of Bouillon. The family put the castle's administration in the hands of a hereditary castellan and took the abbey of Saint-Hubert under their protection.

In the eleventh century the site belonged to Duke Gozelo I of Lotharingia, and between 1050 and 1067 his grandson Godfrey II the Bearded built a castle on the ridge the fortress still occupies, requisitioning the abbey's peasants for the work. It was dominated by a great donjon of three storeys, twenty-six metres by thirteen. The rock still holds a well sixty-five metres deep, which meant drinking water was always to hand during a siege. On his deathbed in 1069 Godfrey the Bearded made over a range of possessions to the monks; his successor, Godfrey III of Lotharingia, judged the bequest too generous to honour.

Godfrey of Bouillon inherited the lordship from his childless uncle Godfrey III. Shortly before leaving for the Holy Land with the First Crusade in 1096 he raised money on it from the prince-bishopric of Liège — pledged in one account, sold outright to Bishop Otbert in another. He did not come back alive, and as neither he nor his brothers left male heirs Bouillon passed to the prince-bishopric.

It stayed with the prince-bishops for five centuries, though not unchallenged. Renaud I of Bar claimed rights over Bouillon in 1129 through his kinship with the dukes of Lower Lotharingia, took the castle by force in 1134, and held it until Prince-Bishop Alberon II of Namur recovered it in 1141.

Through the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries the castle and the county of Bouillon were disputed between the prince-bishops and the House of La Marck, and in 1482 William I de la Marck seized the castle and the lordship. In the Franco-Habsburg rivalry running up to the Italian War, Robert III de la Marck attacked Luxembourg on behalf of Francis I of France; it belonged to the Emperor Charles V. In 1521 an imperial army of five thousand men and fifteen hundred horse entered La Marck territory and, in reprisal, destroyed every La Marck property. Bouillon was among them, and Charles V returned the lordship and its ruined castle to the prince-bishopric.

Prince-Bishop George of Austria rebuilt it. The donjon was kept as a residence and enlarged, and further platforms were laid out for guns; the Austrian Tower of 1551 dates from this work and still dominates the site. The La Marcks went on interrupting episcopal rule at intervals.

France took Bouillon in 1676 during the wars of Louis XIV and made it an autonomous duchy under French protection, with Godfrey Maurice de la Tour d'Auvergne as its first duke. Louis's military engineer Sébastien Le Prestre de Vauban was building a double line of defences along the northern frontier, raising new forts and strengthening towns and old strongholds. At Bouillon he turned the castle into a work capable of resisting modern artillery, wrapping it in an additional earth-filled enceinte carrying nine bastions, of which three survive.

The fortress kept its military function until after the Belgian Revolution, and each shift in the art of war forced another rebuilding. The last of them came under William I of the Netherlands, as Grand Duke of Luxembourg, between 1815 and 1830: barracks were put up to house troops, and the medieval donjon was pulled down in 1824 to make room for them.

After the revolution of 1830 Bouillon was assigned to Belgium; the castle's military importance dwindled and it fell into decay. In 1853 the abandoned fortress was put to tourist use. After the Battle of Sedan in 1870 the Prussian army used parts of it as a hospital, and in 1892–93 the buildings of the Dutch period, by then thought no longer to suit the castle, were demolished. The site was listed as protected heritage of Wallonia in 1975 and classed among Wallonia's exceptional heritage in 2009. The restored fortress serves as a museum.