Orange was settled as a colony for veterans of the second legion around 35 BCE, on a plain where a Roman army had been destroyed by migrating Cimbri and Teutones sixty years before. Two structures from the colony survive in exceptional condition. The theatre retains its stage wall almost to full height, a rarity anywhere in the Roman world, and is still used for performance; the triumphal arch on the northern road carries reliefs of naval and military trophies. Both were inscribed on the UNESCO World Heritage List in 1981. The town became a bishopric early and held several church councils, of which the second, in 529, is the one that matters outside the region. In the middle ages the county became a small sovereign principality, and it passed by inheritance in the sixteenth century to the house of Nassau, which is why the ruling house of the Netherlands is called the House of Orange, and why the word attached itself to Protestant political identity in Ireland and to the Orange Free State in southern Africa.
The principality itself was ceded to France in 1713. The town today has fewer than thirty thousand inhabitants, and its name travels a great deal further than it does. Two other councils met at Orange before the famous one, in 441 and in 529 at the dedication itself, and the canons of 441 deal with practical church order, asylum, the ordination of deacons and the treatment of penitents, which is a useful reminder that most councils in this period were local, administrative and unremembered.