A Picard cathedral city where Charlemagne was crowned king of the Franks in 768 and Hugh Capet in 987, and where Ferrand of Flanders died in 1233 after nineteen years as Philip II's prisoner.
Noyon stands on the Oise in Picardy, north-east of Compiègne, in the country between the royal domain around Paris and the counties of Flanders and Vermandois. Bishop Medardus moved the diocesan seat there from Vermand in about 531, choosing a place still protected by its late Roman walls, and Noyon remained an episcopal city for the rest of the Middle Ages.
Its bishops mattered out of proportion to the town's size. Eligius, the goldsmith and royal counsellor who became bishop in 641, is the most famous of them, and the see was held jointly with Tournai for five centuries, giving its holder authority on both sides of the Frankish-Flemish frontier.
When Pepin the Short died in 768 his kingdom was divided between his sons, and each was raised to kingship in his own half. Charlemagne was crowned king of the Franks at Noyon in October of that year while his brother Carloman was crowned at Soissons — an arrangement that lasted only until Carloman's death in 771 left Charlemagne sole ruler of the Franks.
Two centuries later the town saw the beginning of the dynasty that replaced the Carolingians. After Louis V died in a hunting accident in May 987, an assembly at Senlis, pressed by Archbishop Adalbero of Reims, passed over Charles of Lorraine and elected Hugh Capet. Hugh was crowned at Noyon in 987, and had his son Robert crowned before the year was out to secure the succession — the manoeuvre that made the Capetian line hereditary in practice long before it was in theory.
The Romanesque cathedral burned in 1131, and the rebuilding begun about 1145 produced one of the earliest Gothic churches in France, substantially complete by 1235. Its four-storey elevation — arcade, gallery, triforium and clerestory — and its rounded transept ends put it in the experimental first generation of the style, alongside Laon and Senlis and before the mature scheme at Chartres.
The building survived the Middle Ages better than the modern period: it was damaged in the Revolution and severely so in the First World War, when Noyon lay on the front, and was restored afterwards. The chapter library, a timber-framed building of 1506 beside the cathedral, is one of the few surviving medieval capitular libraries in France.
Ferrand, a younger son of the king of Portugal, became count of Flanders by his marriage to Countess Joan in 1212. Resentful of Philip II of France, who had seized Aire and Saint-Omer as the price of recognising the marriage, he joined the coalition of King John of England and the Emperor Otto IV against the French king.
The coalition was destroyed at the Battle of Bouvines on 27 July 1214, and Ferrand was taken on the field and carried to Paris in chains. He was imprisoned in the Louvre for twelve years, released on harsh terms in January 1227, and died at Noyon on 27 July 1233 — nineteen years to the day after his capture. He was buried at the abbey of Marquette near Lille, which his wife had founded.
Noyon received a communal charter in the early twelfth century, among the first in northern France, and the long negotiation between commune and bishop over jurisdiction is unusually well documented there.
The town's other famous son belongs to the sixteenth century: John Calvin was born at Noyon in 1509, the son of a cathedral notary, and held a benefice from the chapter as a young man before the Reformation carried him to Basel and Geneva.