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OrleansFrance Commune of Orléans Orléans and the Loire River Région Centre (capital) Département Loiret (préfecture) Arrondissement Orléans Canton Chief town of 6 cantons Intercommunality Agglomération Orléans Val de Loire Mayor Serge Grouard (UMP) (2001-2008) Land area¹ 27.48 km² Population² (1999) 113,126 Populationdensity (1999) 4,117 pers./km² Altitude 90 m - 124 m (avg. 116 m) INSEE/Postal code 45234 / 45000 1 French Land Register data, which exclude estuaries, and lakes, ponds, and glaciers larger than 1 km². 2 Not counting those already counted in another commune (such as students and military personnel). Coordinates: 01° 54' 18" E, 47° 54' 11" N Orléans is a city and commune in north-central France, about 130 km (80 miles) south-west of Paris. It is the préfecture (capital) of the Loiret département and of the Centre région. Population (1999): 113,126. Orléans was founded as a Gallic civitas of the Celtic Carnutes tribe. It was refoudned by the Roman Emperor Aurelius who gave it his name, Aurelianum, as the city of Aureliani. In 451, Attila the Hun made an attempt to capture and sack the city, only to be driven off by the last-minute arrival of an army under the combined command of Theodorid, king of the Visigoths, and the Roman general Aëtius. It was the capital of the Merovingian king (27 November 511 - 25 June 524) Clodomir (Clodmer) (b. 495 - d. 524) of what was since known as the kingdom of Burgundy. The Siege of Orléans in 1428 - 1429 marked a turning point in the Hundred Years' War. Joan of Arc made her reputation here by lifting the siege nine days after she arrived. The schools of Orléans early acquired great prestige; in the sixth century Gontran, King of Burgundy, had his son Gondebaud educated there. After Theodolfus had developed and improved the schools, Charlemagne, and later Hugh Capet, sent thither their eldest sons as pupils. These institutions were at the height of their fame from the eleventh century to the middle of the thirteenth. Their influence spread as far as Italy and England whence students came to them. Among the medieval rhetorical treatises which have come down to us under the title of "Ars" or "Summa Dictaminis" four, at least, were written or re-edited by Orléans professors. In 1230, when for a time the doctors of the University of Paris were scattered, a number of the teachers and disciples took refuge in Orleans; when pope Boniface VIII, in 1298, promulgated the sixth book of the Decretals, he appointed the doctors of Bologna and the doctors of Orléans to comment upon it. St. Yves (1253-1303) studied civil law at Orléans, and Clement V also studied there law and letters; by a Bull published at Lyons, 27 January, 1306, he endowed the Orléans institutes with the title and privileges of a University (it has been founded as one of the very earliest universities outside taly in 1235, only two years after Cambridge and Toulouse, in France only Paris's Sorbonne was even older). Twelve later popes granted the new university many privileges. In the fourteenth century it had as many as five thousand students from France, Germany, Lorraine, Burgundy, Champagne, Picardy, Normandy, Touraine, Guyan, Scotland. Among those who studied or lectured there are quoted: in the fourteenth century, Cardinal Pierre Bertrandi; in the fifteenth, John Reuchlin; in the sixteenth, religious reformer Calvin and Théodore de Bèze, the Protestant Anne Dubourg, the publicist François Hotmann, the jurisconsult Pierre de l'Etoile; in the seventeenth, Molière (perhaps in 1640), and the savant lexicographer Du Cange; in the eighteenth, the jurisconsult Pothier. Check out the following recipes that are tagged "Orleans":
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