Tongeren (in Flemish Tongeren)

TONGEREN (in Flemish Tongeren). - City and ancient diocese in Limburg (Belgium), on the banks of the river Icker, a tributary of the Meuse. It is the ancient Adnatura Tungrorum, capital of the Civitas Tungrorum in the Roman province of "Germania inferior."

The diocese was established as early as the 3rd century, but the first known bishop is St. Servatius (344-84), who took refuge in Maastricht (v.). With the invasion of 406 the city lost its importance and was administered by representatives of the bishop of Liège. A serious fire damaged it in 1677.

The ancient cathedral of Notre-Dame is in the Gothic style of the 13th century, erected over the earlier Romanesque church, of which the crypt and the 12th-century cloister survive, the latter restored in the 14th century; the apse and the last part of the three naves with the chapels belong to the 14th-15th centuries; the transept is from 1456; the portico, the facade and the tall tower were built between 1444 and 1586. The brass paschal candlestick is the work of J. J. De Dinant; a Romanesque Crucifix of the early 12th century is admirable. The attached treasury preserves a 6th-century ivory representing St. Paul with, on the reverse, a list of the bishops of Liège from 1840 to 956; originally this ivory was part of a diptych containing on the right the figure of St. Peter, today preserved in the Cinquantenaire Museum in Brussels, but partly restored (J. Helbig, L'art mosan depuis l'introduction du christianisme jusqu'à la fin du XVIIIe siècle, Brussels 1906, p. 23; M. Laurent, Les ivoires prégothiques conservés en Belgique, ibid. 1912, pp. 6-7, fig. 2); there are furthermore two evangeliaries, one of the 9th century and the other of the 11th; a triptych with a relic of the Holy Cross of c. 1170. Also noteworthy are the church of the hospital of St. James (1660-62) and that of St. Catherine, erected in 1294 but restored, together with the adjoining béguinage of 1257.

Pope Pius XI, by apostolic letter of 20 February 1931, raised the ancient cathedral of Notre-Dame, erected in honor of the B. V. M. "Causae nostrae laetitiae," to the dignity of minor basilica (AAS, 23 [1931], pp. 373-75).

Explorations carried out in 1912 in T. have confirmed its Roman origin and that its circuit of walls from that period was more extensive than the medieval one. Important studies on T. and its monuments have been published in the Bulletin de la Société scientifique du Limbourg since 1906.

Enrico Josi