Saint Lambert’s Cathedral, Liège, Fire in 1185 A Total Disaster?

The Liège Cathedral fire of April 1185 has gone down in historiography as the pivotal moment of the forced shift from the Romanesque city to the Gothic city (J. Lejeune, 1967). This contribution takes stock of what is known about the event in the light of recent work and calls the contemporaneous testimony from the Breviloquium de incendio ecclesiae sancti Lamberti (ed. W. Arndt, MGH SS 20, p. 620) to be put in perspective.