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 over parts of Brabant and Hainault, as well as over Namur, Limburg, and Upper Gelderland. In the principality the Diets were composed of representatives of clergy, nobility, and towns, but these last were in enjoyment of liberties resembling those possessed by the Flemish communes. In the city of Liege itself the struggle which had long been carried on between the old patrician families, relatively few in number but favoured by the Bishops, and the mass of the Walloon population, had been decided in favour of the latter, even before "a city of priests had been changed into one of colliers and armourers." The faction feuds between the Awans and the Waroux had ended with the utter extrusion of the patrician element from the city; and Liege became a democracy of the most advanced type, with a governing body based directly upon the suffrage of all the thirty-two trades. It was as a community swayed by leaders who gloried in their rupture with the past (haydroits), that Liege, with the support of the other "good towns" of the principality revolted against the Bishop-elect, John of Bavaria. The terrible chastisement inflicted by this "pitiless" prince, in which his kinsman the "fearless" John of Burgundy had hastened to have his share (1408), was followed by a reconstitution of the government, from which the trades were absolutely excluded (1414); but some concessions were made to them a few years later.

Half a century later the Liegeois, instigated by Louis XI of France, waged another struggle against another bishop, Louis of Bourbon, a nephew of Duke Philip of Burgundy. His son, the future Duke Charles, forced the principality to acknowledge the Burgundian Dukes as its hereditary protectors (mambourgs) (1465); but another insurrection speedily broke out, nor was the defiant spirit of the artisans who were masters of the city broken even by the bloody sack of Dinant, hitherto the seat of a flourishing industry in the working of copper and brass. In 1467, after defeating the Liegeois in the field, Charles, now Duke in his father's place, annihilated their privileges and reestablished the Bishop, but at the same time reduced the principality to the condition of a Burgundian fief. In the following year, when Louis XI had placed himself in the power of Charles at Peronne, and a fresh rising had taken place at Liege, the recalcitrant city was overtaken by a fearful doom, at the wreaking of which the French King assisted perforce. Leodensium clades et excidium became the most flagrant of Charles the Bold's titles to fame; and the pillaged churches, in which, formerly, according to Commines, as many masses had been daily said as at Rome, were virtually all that, after a seven weeks' sack, was left standing of Liege. But the principality, which had never been formally annexed by Charles, after his death recovered its political independence; and, with characteristic vitality, the great Walloon city rose rapidly from its ruins.

At Peronne Charles also made use of his strange opportunity to