Orange, a town in the French department of Vaucluse, on the left bank of the Aigne, 18 miles by rail N. of Avignon. The Arusio of the Romans, which contained 40,000 inhabitants, it retains two splendid Roman remains—a triumphal arch, 72 feet high, and a theatre whose façade was 340 feet long by 118 high. A neighbouring circus has been swept away. There is a Romanesque cathedral, and statues of two of the counts. Pop. 6904.
Orange was the capital of a small independent principality, which was ruled by its own sovereigns from the 11th to the 16th century. The last of these sovereigns, Philibert de Chalons, died in 1531 without issue. His sister, however, had married a Count of Nassau, and to that house the estates and titles passed. The Count of Nassau who obtained the principality of Orange was the father of William the Silent (see HOLLAND, Vol. V. p. 742). William
III., Prince of Orange and king of England, having died in 1702 without issue, there began a long-continued controversy as to the succession between Frederick I. of Prussia (as grandson of one of the last Princes of Orange), the representative of the older branch of the House of Nassau (q.v.), and the head of the younger line. At the Peace of Utrecht (1713) the king of Prussia took the settlement into his own hands, so far as the territory of Orange was concerned, by making it over for certain equivalents to the king of France. The title Prince of Orange, however, remained with the younger Nassau line, afterwards sovereigns of Holland. See Bastet's Histoire d'Orange (1856).