Principality of Orange

The Principality of Orange was a small sovereign state in Provence, on the east bank of the Rhône north of Avignon. In 1163 the Holy Roman Emperor Frederick Barbarossa elevated the county of Orange, then part of the Kingdom of Arles, into a principality of the empire. The territory was compact but strategically awkward, surrounded by the papal Comtat Venaissin and exposed to the ambitions of neighbouring France. In 1544 the last prince of the House of Chalon died without heirs, and the title passed through his sister to William the Silent of Nassau, linking the principality to the family that led the Dutch revolt. The Orange title became one of the most prestigious in Europe even as the territory itself was repeatedly occupied by French armies in the seventeenth century. The Treaty of Utrecht in 1713 formally ceded the principality to France, but the House of Orange-Nassau kept the princely title, which survives today as a title of the Dutch crown.