🇧🇪 Belgium · Wallonia and the Ardennes
Tournai is one of those cities that surprise you with how much they hold and how little they are known. One of the oldest towns in Belgium, on the banks of the Scheldt and a step from France, it was nothing less than the cradle of the Frankish monarchy: Childeric I had his capital here and here, probably, his son Clovis was born, the first great king of the Franks. Twenty centuries of history have left Tournai an extraordinary heritage, crowned by two jewels that Unesco has inscribed on the World Heritage list.
The first is its cathedral of Notre-Dame, an imposing mass of stone that combines a Romanesque body with a Gothic choir and, above all, an unmistakable profile of five towers that makes it unique in Europe. The second is its belfry (beffroi), the oldest in Belgium, a symbol of the city's liberties and a viewpoint over the rooftops. Around them, a triangular Grand-Place, churches, museums, some of the oldest Romanesque houses in the West and the picturesque Pont des Trous over the river complete a city of astonishing historical density.
This guide walks you through Tournai with a practical, warm eye: the five-towered cathedral and its treasury, the climb up the belfry, the Grand-Place, the Pont des Trous and the museums, plus how to get here from Brussels or Lille and how to get around this human-scale city. Barely touristy and very genuine, Tournai is a perfect getaway for anyone who wants to discover deep, thousand-year-old Belgium far from the crowds.
Tournai (Roman Turnacum) was already an important settlement on the banks of the Scheldt in Roman times, on the great road linking Cologne with Boulogne. In the fifth century it became the capital of the Salian Franks: Childeric I reigned here, and his spectacular tomb was discovered in 1653, and the origin of the Merovingian dynasty of his son Clovis is linked to this city. In the Middle Ages it was a rich city and often tied to the kingdom of France (it was the only city in present-day Belgium to belong to the French crown for a long period), famous for its tapestries and its stone quarry. Its five-towered cathedral and its belfry, the oldest in the country, are Unesco World Heritage. Bombed in 1940, it was rebuilt. All of that is told on our history page.
Read the full history ↓French-speaking Belgium in the south: the old prince-bishopric of Liège, Merovingian Tournai, fortified Namur, the forests of the Ardennes and the industrial heartland of coal and steel, cradle of Walloon folklore and of Adolphe Sax.
Read the history of Wallonia and the Ardennes →No exact prices: a scale from $ (budget) to $$$$$ (luxury), with 2-3 options per category.
Origins, formation and what the sources say.
Tournai is one of the oldest cities in Belgium, and its history goes back to Roman times. Under the name Turnacum, it was a settlement on the banks of the river Scheldt (Escaut), at a point where the great Roman road linking Cologne with Boulogne-sur-Mer —one of the arteries of the north-west of the Empire— crossed the river. That combination of land route and waterway made Turnacum a hub of communications and trade, and the city prospered under Rome as the administrative centre of the region.
Through the centuries of Roman rule, Turnacum was a municipium with its buildings, its workshops and its Gallo-Roman population, part of the province of Gallia Belgica. Remains and necropolises from that period have been found that attest to its importance. When, in the third and fourth centuries, pressure from Germanic peoples and the crises of the Empire shook the Rhine frontier, Turnacum, like other cities in northern Gaul, was fortified and became a defensive point and a Roman military base.
It was precisely in that late-Empire context, with the Romans increasingly dependent on allied Germanic peoples (foederati) to defend their borders, that Tournai was about to live its most glorious hour. Because in the fifth century, as Roman power crumbled in the West, old Turnacum became the capital of a people who were about to change the history of Europe: the Franks.
In the fifth century, while the Western Roman Empire was in its death throes, the Salian Franks —a Germanic people settled in northern Gaul— had the centre of their power in Tournai. There reigned Childeric I (died around 481/482), king of the Salian Franks and a key figure in the emerging Merovingian dynasty. Childeric was both a Germanic warlord and a military ally of the last Romans, a man straddling two worlds, and from Tournai he ruled and fought in a Gaul in the middle of a transformation.
His son, born and raised in this setting, was Clovis I, one of the fundamental figures in European history. Clovis united the different Frankish kingdoms under his command, extended his rule over much of Gaul, defeated other peoples and, decisively, converted to Catholic Christianity (his baptism in Reims is a founding milestone), laying the foundations of what would, over the centuries, become the kingdom of France. That is why Tournai proudly claims to be one of the cradles of the Frankish monarchy and, in a way, of France.
The most spectacular proof of that past emerged many centuries later, in 1653, when the tomb of Childeric I was discovered by chance in Tournai. It contained a fabulous set of grave goods: weapons, jewels, a ring with his name and hundreds of small golden bees that decorated his cloak (bees that, in time, would inspire Napoleon's imperial symbolism). It was one of the most important archaeological finds of the European Early Middle Ages. Much of the treasure, taken to Paris, was stolen and melted down in the nineteenth century, but the discovery established Tournai for ever as the city of Merovingian origins.
In the Middle Ages, Tournai flourished again. It became an important religious centre, the seat of an influential bishopric, and a prosperous city of craftsmen and merchants. Two activities brought it fame and wealth: the quarrying of its famous blue-grey stone (the 'pierre de Tournai'), highly prized for building and sculpture and exported all over north-western Europe; and, above all, the making of tapestries. Between the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, Tournai's tapestry workshops were among the most celebrated in Europe, and their high-quality work decorated palaces and churches across the continent.
Politically, Tournai had a singular fate that sets it apart from every other city in present-day Belgium: for much of the Middle Ages it belonged directly to the crown of France, a kind of French enclave surrounded by lands of the Empire (Flanders, Hainaut). It was, in fact, the only city in what is now Belgian territory to belong to the kingdom of France for a long period. The French kings valued and protected it, and the city was loyal to the fleur-de-lis. That link left its mark on its culture and its identity.
As a coveted stronghold, Tournai was fought over and besieged. In the sixteenth century it changed hands: it was taken by Henry VIII's English (who occupied it for a few years) and then folded, with the rest of the region, into the Low Countries of Charles V and the Spanish monarchy. During the wars of religion and of Dutch independence, in 1581, Tournai lived through a famous siege in which Christine de Lalaing, Princess of Épinoy, distinguished herself by heroically leading the defence of the city; her statue presides over the Grand-Place today. The age of medieval splendour, however, was fading, and new masters and new wars lay ahead for Tournai.
Through the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, Tournai followed the turbulent fate of the Southern Netherlands, fought over by the great powers. It was taken by the armies of Louis XIV of France, who fortified it (the engineer Vauban worked on its defences), and then passed again, with the swings of the treaties, into the hands of the Austrian Habsburgs. Battles of the great European wars were fought around it, such as Fontenoy (1745), close to the city. With the French Revolution and Napoleon, Tournai was French once more; after the emperor's fall it was folded into the United Kingdom of the Netherlands and, from 1830, into the new Belgium.
The nineteenth century brought Tournai a period of stability and a degree of development, with industry (stone, the highly prized Tournai porcelain, textiles) and the railway. The city kept its extraordinary medieval heritage —the cathedral of five towers, the belfry, the Romanesque houses— as testimony to its long, rich history.
The twentieth century, by contrast, dealt it a terrible blow. In May 1940, at the start of the German invasion of Belgium in the Second World War, Tournai was heavily bombed. The old town suffered enormous destruction: whole districts were flattened, and many old buildings, including much of the area around the Grand-Place, went up in flames. Like Ypres or Dinant before it, Tournai had to rebuild its historic heart after the war, recovering its traditional look as far as possible, though many things were lost for ever.
Today's Tournai, with some 70,000 inhabitants, is a discreet city and one often overlooked by international tourism, which tends to concentrate on Bruges, Ghent or Brussels. And yet few Belgian cities hold a comparable density of history: twenty centuries of past, from Roman Turnacum to the Merovingian capital, from the French city of tapestries to the stronghold fought over by the whole of Europe.
Two of its monuments have been recognised by Unesco as World Heritage: the cathedral of Notre-Dame, with its unmistakable profile of five towers and its mix of Romanesque and Gothic, and the belfry, the oldest in Belgium and a symbol of medieval civic liberties. To these you can add the oldest Romanesque houses in the West, the picturesque Pont des Trous over the Scheldt, a triangular Grand-Place and a notable collection of museums, among them a Museum of Fine Arts housed in the only museum building constructed to the plans of Victor Horta, the master of Art Nouveau.
In recent decades the city has undergone major restoration work —the cathedral, damaged by a tornado in 2007, has spent long years under scaffolding— and has redeveloped its quays along the Scheldt, betting on making the most of its heritage. Its closeness to Lille and the French border keeps it connected to the vibrant metropolis of northern France. Tournai is, in short, a discreet treasure: a thousand-year-old city, cradle of Frankish kings and famous tapestries, waiting for the curious traveller ready to discover the oldest and most authentic Belgium, far from the crowds.