Template:Wp-Corbie-History

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Corbie Abbey

The town of Corbie grew up round Corbie Abbey, founded in 657 or 660 by the queen regent Bathilde, with a founding community of monks from Luxeuil Abbey in the Franche-Comté.

Its scriptorium came to be one of the centers of work of manuscript illumination when the art was still fairly new in western Europe. In this early Merovingian period the work of Corbie was innovative in that it portrayed images of people, such as Saint Jerome. It was also the place of creation, in about 780, of the influential Caroline minuscule script.

The contents of its library are known from catalogues of the eleventh and twelfth centuries. In 1638, Cardinal Richelieu ordered the transfer of the library's books to the library at Saint-Germain-des-Prés, which was dispersed at the end of the eighteenth century.

Town

In 1234, Floris IV, Count of Holland died at a tournament held here. In 1475, the town was taken by Louis XI. The Spanish took it after a short siege on 15 August 1636 but were ousted in November by Richelieu and Louis XIII of France after a siege of three months.

In 1918, Corbie was on the margin of the battlefield of Villers-Bretonneux at which the First Battle of the Somme (1918) of the German spring offensive came to a climax.