Orléans Through 1,400 Years: Attila, Joan of Arc and Two 1870 Battles

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A single Wikipedia disambiguation page for the Battle of Orléans becomes a map of how one French city kept ending up on the front line. The reason is geography: Orléans sits at the northernmost bend of the Loire, the river crossing closest to Paris, so any army moving between northern and southern France had to take its bridge. The list opens in 451, when Attila's Huns besieged the Roman city and failed, and continues in 463, when the Visigoths, already settled in southern Gaul, fought the Roman general Aegidius there as the Western Empire collapsed.

Nearly a millennium later came the siege of 1428 to 1429, when the English ringed the city with bastilles and Joan of Arc broke the deadlock by leading direct assaults on the forts holding the bridge. In 1563 the threat came from inside France, as a royal Catholic army besieged a Huguenot stronghold during the Wars of Religion. In the Franco-Prussian War the city was fought over twice in a single season, and the name itself crossed the Atlantic to Orleans, Massachusetts, and New Orleans.

The Loire acts as a natural moat across France, and Orléans guards its crossing nearest Paris.
Aegidius operated as a Roman magister militum but behaved more like an independent warlord holding northern Gaul.
Joan of Arc's attacks went against the advice of veteran commanders who were fighting a slow war of attrition.
Prussian railways and Krupp breech-loading steel guns allowed battles at Orléans in both October and December 1870, with the French retaking the city in between.
In 1918 a German U-boat shelled tugboats off Cape Cod near Orleans, Massachusetts, during the First World War.

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