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Summary
Summary
Following Germania and Danubia , the third installment in Simon Winder's personal history of Europe
In 843 AD, the three surviving grandsons of the great emperor Charlemagne met at Verdun. After years of bitter squabbles over who would inherit the family land, they finally decided to divide the territory and go their separate ways. In a moment of staggering significance, one grandson inherited the area we now know as France, another Germany and the third received the piece in between: Lotharingia.
Lotharingia is a history of in-between Europe. It is the story of a place between places. In this beguiling, hilarious and compelling book, Simon Winder retraces the various powers that have tried to overtake the land that stretches from the mouth of the Rhine to the Alps and the might of the peoples who have lived there for centuries.
Author Notes
Simon Winder is the author of Germania , Danubia , and The Man Who Saved Britain . He works in publishing and lives in Wandsworth Town, London.
Reviews (6)
Publisher's Weekly Review
In this combination travelogue and history, third in a trilogy, Winder (Danubia) leads an informative, often funny, but overly long tour of part of Charlemagne's ninth-century empire, making a good case for its importance as "a key motor for so much of European history" up through WWII. In 843, Charlemagne's grandsons Charles, Louis, and Lothair divided his vast empire. The western swath became France, the eastern Germany-and the "in-between" land, Lotharingia, gradually was absorbed into those two nations, plus Belgium, the Netherlands, Luxembourg, and Switzerland, over centuries of political and military tug of war. Winder defines Lotharingia, which didn't last as a unit beyond Lothair's death, as extending from the Rhine's source in the north to the Alps in the south and guides readers to sites like Neuchâtel, whose young women were sought-after as governesses in Russia due to their speaking pure French, and Metz, known for its fortresses, with stops at cathedrals, museums, tombs, and other sites along the way. He also tells of characters like France's "tiny, painfully awkward" Charles VIII, to whose futile conquest attempts in the 1480s and 1490s he credits the spread of both Parmesan cheese and syphilis. Readers may wish Winder's editors had insisted on excising some minutiae, but they will both learn from and be entertained by this enthusiastic, outside-the-box European history. (Apr.) © Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved.
Booklist Review
The final volume, following Germania (2010) and Danubia (2014), in Winder's personal history of Europe's Germanic language-speaking regions brings his subject to life with sympathy, verve, and erudition. One of the kingdoms carved from Charlemagne's empire in the ninth century, the territory of Lotharingia ultimately became Belgium, the Netherlands, parts of Switzerland, France, Germany, and Luxembourg. Tracing its history from the 840s until the current national borders were drawn after WWII, Winder offers vivid descriptions and reflections on the places, artworks, material cultures, and ideas that the region's various peoples created during a millennium of economic, religious, and technological innovation. He also clarifies the obscurities of its political history as a patchwork of disjointed small states sandwiched between France, the Habsburgs, and later Germany, all of which, along with the British, sought to turn it to their own purposes but failed to establish permanent control despite their meddling. Winder highlights the contrasts between readers' modern perspectives and those of the Lotharingians and their peers with a deft combination of personal observation, historical anecdotes, and humorously straightforward summaries of complex military, dynastic, and ideological conflicts. This work is highly recommended for fans of European and world history.--Sara Jorgensen Copyright 2019 Booklist
New York Review of Books Review
what do you need to know about the places you're going? A dozen new books answer this question in strikingly idiosyncratic ways, wreathing their authors' wanderings in vivid back story - sometimes emotional, sometimes empirical, sometimes imperial - enveloping the reader in a kind of legible Sensurround. These books ought to come with 3-D glasses and a soundtrack. Five years ago, the Manhattanites Erik and Emily Orton, beleaguered but buoyant parents of five children between the ages of 6 and 16, hadn't even plotted an itinerary when they bought a 38-foot catamaran (sight unseen), flew to a Caribbean harbor and set sail on a Swiss-FamilyRobinson-style adventure. "Based on our best budgeting," Erik calculated, "we'd saved enough money to sail for a year. After that we'd be broke." Like her husband, Emily wanted to "pursue a dream so big there was room for my whole family" before their eldest left for college. Their time on the boat would be that dream. Where would they go? They didn't know, but their shipboard byword became, "It Will emerge." In SEVEN AT SEA: Why a New York City Family Cast Off Convention for a Life-Changing Year on a Sailboat (Shadow Mountain, $27.99), husband and wife take turns narrating the story of their voyage, chronicling the crests and troughs of their seaborne experience. Five months in, anchored in Virgin Gorda Sound, they woke to "the blue and green water rolling past, the sun coming up in the east, the trade-wind breeze cooling the morning, the flag flapping." Where would they go next? Anegada? Tortola? Puerto Rico? It would emerge. In THE SALT PATH (Penguin, paper, $17), Raynor Winn and her husband embark on another kind of sea-hugging journey. Theirs will not be on water but alongside it, walking England's rugged South West Coast Path, 630 miles from Somerset to Dorset, battered by rains, blasted by the sun, and shielded from the elements only by a thin tent. Their guide? A 30-year-old book called "Five Hundred Mile Walkies," written by a man named Mark Wallington, who'd undertaken the saunter with his dog. Unlike Wallington, they made this trip not because they wanted to but because they saw no other option. In middle age, they had become homeless as if by thunderclap: In the space of two days, they lost the farmhouse that had provided both their home and their livelihood and learned that Winn's husband had a terminal illness. Not wanting to be a burden on their children or to move into a "soul-destroying" council house, they headed for the path and closed the door behind them. Along the way, passers-by in coastal villages mistook them for drunken tramps and even the birds seemed to jeer at them: "Herring gulls calling daylight calls, tossed up by the air currents, mocked our slow progress." Winn possessed only one assurance: "If I put one foot in front of the other the path would move me forward." Her language makes their arduous trek luminous with the mingled menace and providence of a Hirner painting. "I'm a farmer and a farmer's daughter; the land's in my bones," Winn writes. "I'm cut free from that connection, from the meter of my existence, floating lost and unrooted. But I can still feel it_All material things were slipping away, but in their wake a core of strength was beginning to re-form." During the Raynors' long ramble, British dogs frequently burst through the gorse at awkward moments. But for the doughty park ranger Kristin Knight Pace, dogs are no mere detail; they stand, howling zestfully, in the foreground of her explorations of the Yukon wilderness. In 2016, at the age of 32, she mushed a dog team through the Iditarod, from Anchorage to Nome. This was a remarkable feat for a woman who had arrived in Alaska in tears only seven years earlier, fleeing the breakup of her marriage in Montana by taking a sled-dog-sitting gig in a small mining village near Denali National Park. Her memoir, this much country (Grand Central, $27), retraces her experiences in Alaska, where she remains today, working for the National Park Service and running a kennel with her new husband, whom she met when he helped dig her S.U.V. out of a snowbank the day after her divorce papers landed. By then, her heartbreak had just begun to heal, helped along by a forceful nudge from the dogs. The week before, on a day that reached minus 15 degrees ("a perfect temperature for mushing"), she had hitched the team to a sled unassisted for the first time. The animals "went berserk" with joy when she brought out their harnesses. No sooner had she pulled the quick-release knot than the sled hurtled forward, the dogs yanking her "violently forward into the unknown"; memories of her ex-husband fell off the sled as the team surged ahead, "the sun sinking low in the early afternoon, casting a brilliant orange glow on a frozen lake, silhouetting my dog team as Denali's slopes rise indomitable and massive in the great blue distance." Awe at the wonders of nature revives her confidence: "I have no past, no history. I am this very moment, I am excitement, I am intuition, I am love between a woman and her dogs. I am pure and undiluted. I am the world that surrounds me." Intuition and dogs can also help you get a bead on present-day Russia; Bulgakov's short novel "Heart of a Dog," a satire of Bolshevik officialese, still resonates today. Far more useful, however, is to read in PUTIN'S footsteps: Searching for the Soul of an Empire Across Russia's Eleven Time Zones (St. Martin's, $28.99), Nina Khrushcheva and Jeffrey Tayler's fascinating account of their travels in 2017 between Kamchatka and Kaliningrad. In its pages, you'll learn that you can see China quite clearly from Russia in the harbor city of Blagoveshchensk, six time zones east of Moscow and 500 yards across the Amur River from the Chinese city of Heihe. Ferries transport Chinese and Russian traders back and forth daily. Khrushcheva made that shuttle trip and does not recommend it - the pushing and shoving and rude border control brought her to tears. Khrushcheva (a granddaughter of Nikita Khrushchev), who teaches at the New School (as do I, though we've never met), collaborated with Tayler, an American journalist who lives in Moscow and is married to a Russian, to write this book. They were inspired by a suggestion Vladimir Putin floated during the first year of his presidency: that he should fly across the Russian Federation one New Year's Eve, making pit stops at midnight local time in all 11 time zones to "show our nation's greatness, our riches, the diversity of our Mother Russia, our unity, our worth." The authors sample that diversity and report back. Exploring dozens of points along the 6,000-mile-long Trans-Siberian Railway and beyond, they find contemporary evidence of a revival of national pride, not unmixed with habitual Slavic cynicism and resignation. As one contemporary joke they cite goes, "Before you make fun of children who believe in Santa Claus, please remember that there are people who believe that the president and the government take care of them." The double-headed eagle, a czarist symbol suppressed during Soviet times, now replaces the Communist red star in many city squares, along with cult-of-personality-style portraits of Putin. The triumphant cry "Crimea is ours!," referring to Putin's 2014 annexation of Crimea, met the authors in many places, reflecting, they thought, "feelings of insecurity and superiority all at once." Their book delivers a unified impression of a "coherently incoherent" Russia. They bring fresh eyes to cities that usually get too little attention and share fascinating revelations. Who knew that the city of Yakutsk held the world's only woolly mammoth museum, or that its icy river Lena inspired the young Vladimir Ilyich Ulyanov to mint his nom de revolution, Lenin? They knew. But nobody knows more than the erudite and entertaining Simon Winder. If you could plug your brain into his, you wouldn't need Google. Then again, your head might explode. After entering the literary fray a dozen years ago with a stirring tribute to James Bond, he hopped the Channel and wrote two volumes of Hapsburg and Teutonic social and political history, "Germania" and "Danubia." Winder now crowns his Continental trilogy with LOTHARINGIA: A Personal History of Europe's Lost Country (Farrar, Straus & Giroux, $30), a book that enfolds a geographic sprawl even a framer of the Almanach de Gotha would be at pains to chart. The title, at least, can be explained. In 814, when the great emperor Charlemagne died, he was notionally the ruler of "everywhere between the Pyrenees and Denmark, the mountains of Bohemia and central Italy." As anyone who has watched (or read) "Game of Thrones" can understand: That's a lot of land to hold onto. In 843, Charlemagne's grandsons split the empire into chunks to give them a better chance at keeping it in the family. Charles 11 took the west, which today is basically France. Louis 1 took the eastern chunk, which today is basically Germany. The third brother, Lothair 1, took the middle, from the North Sea to northern Italy. Lothair f's chunk was still a lot to wrangle, so when he died, his sons divided it further; one took north Italy, one took Provence, and Lothair 11 took everything north of Provence, giving rise to the word "Lotharingia." Today Lotharingia, like a Delphic riddle, is nowhere and everywhere. To give a sense of what a notional map of Lotharingia might look like, Winder supplies the metaphor of a dog that has swallowed a jigsaw puzzle, then thrown it up. To those who say, like Forster, "Only connect," this brilliant and maddening book prompts the thought, "Must we?" Nonetheless, it will make you want to visit several hundred places upon which Winder's discerning, lionizing eye alights. The journalist Alev Scott knows all about the intricacies of Cypriot politics. Though she grew up in England, her mother and grandmother were born in the northern half of Cyprus, an island long divided between Türkey and Greece. In ottoman odyssey: Travels Through a Lost Empire (Pegasus, $27.95), Scott tracks the vine of Turkish influence, "architectural, political and social," that laces through the Levant and the Balkans, finding Turkish words "scattered like Ottoman souvenirs" in the speech of the people. She also encounters physical offshoots - "haunted wooden mosques" in Bulgaria; Turkish flags and a whirling dervish lodge in Bosnia-Herzegovina; TUrkish-speaking car mechanics in Kosovo; and in Serbia, a middle-aged Erdogan fanboy who serves her Turkish cay in a tulip glass. "The Ottomans made us," he tells her. In 2016, Scott made a pilgrimage to Thessaloniki (formerly Salonika) in Greek Macedonia to visit the childhood home of Turkey's founding father, Kemal Atatürk. Afterward, trying to book her flight home to Istanbul, she discovered that her Turkish visa had been suspended, a result of her reporting on Erdogan's crackdowns. Feeling the sting of exile, she moved "masochistically" to the Greek island of Lesbos, where she could see the Turkish coast from the distance. From there, she flew to Lamaca, in Greek Cyprus, and managed to cross the border into Turkish Cyprus. She met Greek holdouts who spoke Turkish; TUrks who spoke Greek. They shared a culture and a landscape, but were powerless to change their borders. "What is 'homeland' - a place or an idea?" Scott asks. "The more 1 traveled, the more powerful and yet obscure 1 found the emotional connection between geography and identity." The power of the connection a person feels with a place can have nothing at all to do with bloodline or citizenship, fn VOLCANOES, PALM TREES, AND PRIVILEGE: Essays on Hawai'i (Overcup, paper, $15.95), Liz Prato, an Oregonian, racks her conscience over the strong attachment she feels to balmy Hawaii. Most visiting American mainlanders throw aside worries about political correctness, seeking only to bask in the sun and surf the indigo sea, accompanied by the plinking of ukuleles. Not Prato. Such uncomplicated pleasureseeking makes her nervous. She first visited the archipelago at 12, soon before her parents' divorce. Scott's father took her and her brother back to Maui countless times; after her parents and her brother died, Hawaii became her refuge. She dreamed of living there, but was afraid of being seen as an interloper. Her book is a rebuke to cultural appropriation, combined with tribute to a place she loves too much to make her own. Italy's isle of Capri owes its cultural heritage to the famous and infamous outsiders who claimed it for their own: emperors and painters, writers and revolutionaries, prodigies and prodigals. Jamie James's splendid history, pagan LIGHT (Farrar, Straus & Giroux, $28), presents a pageant of these decadent invaders and illustrious exiles: from the Emperor Tiberius to Oscar Wilde and Pablo Neruda. If you read James's book, you will know that you should do more than sail through the narrow entrance of the Blue Grotto: You must hunt down the former Villa Behring, near Capri's main square, where Gorky and Lenin played chess, and seek out the homes of the lesser-known figures of Capri's past, whose rich stories are the true focus of this marvel of nuanced, connected biography. Frances Mayes learned long ago that Italy was her second true home. Indeed, she has lived longer in her villa in Cortona (the subject of her 1996 memoir "Under the Tuscan Sun") than anywhere else, fn see you in the piazza (Crown, $27), she invites ftalophile readers to accompany her and her husband on their visits to out-of-the-way spots. Reading this book is a vacation in itself; it proceeds geographically, not chronologically, pausing in nearly 80 towns and villages in 13 regions so readers can single out chapters that harmonize with their own travel plans. But why take a shortcut, with so many unexpected pleasures to discover? How else would you have known to add the Alto-Adige to your itinerary? There, in the alpine Dolomites, Mayes takes a cable car up a mountainside: "Like the birds, we skim through the larch forest." For Beppe Severgnini, a bona fide, passport-carrying Italian, trains are the preferred mode of travel, "rolling theater, where the scenery and actors change constantly." A train "isn't a vehicle: ft's a place," he explains, a place where talkativeness is "inversely proportional to velocity." fn OFF THE RAILS: A Train Trip Through Life (Berkley, $26), Severgnini reverses down the thousands of miles of tracks he has covered, from Baikal to the Bosphorus and across America and Australia, retrieving memories that emerged along the way. He begins in Washington, D.C., where he lived when he was a foreign correspondent for an Italian newspaper. Twenty years on, he returns with his 20-year-old son, intending to pass along his grand passion for Amtrak via a 5,000-mile ride from Washington, D.C., to Washington State. "Look at America out there," Severgnini enthuses. As Papa rhapsodizes, his son communes with his iPhone, listening in "rapt silence. A little too silent," he realizes. "1 lean over: He's asleep." The American writer John von Sothen crushed out on a more universally recognized source of allure, a beautiful Frenchwoman, whom he met in a bistro in Brooklyn at the turn of the millennium. Soon his love for that woman, Anais, launched him across the Atlantic to Paris, where he remains today, monsieur mediocre: One American Learns the High Art of Being Everyday French (Viking, $25) records his love affair with France and with Anais (whom he married), and his continuing, bumbling attempts to carry off la vie Parisienne with something approaching grace - or, at least, skirting calamity. With Anais in Paris, he bought a disused spice warehouse in a dodgy section of the 10 th Arrondissement and converted it into a cavernous New York-style loft. At the housewarming party, von Sothen committed a flight of faux pas, from cutting the Camembert the wrong way to tucking in to dinner before his wife, the hostess, had raised her fork. All these years later, he has made his peace with his Franco-American improvisations: "fn a land not my own, 1 really could choose my own adventure and aliases." Few places are better than France for trying on new identities. The Australian John Baxter moved to Paris almost 30 years ago in pursuit of a Frenchwoman (what is it about Frenchwomen?), whom he married. Since then, he has written a number of books about his new home. He begins his latest tribute, A YEAR IN PARIS: Season by Season in the City of Light (Harper Perennial, paper, $17.99), with a dreamlike, only-in-France civic action. On an August Sunday in 1990, he woke to find the Champs-Élysées covered with a field of wheat. Farmers had "planted" it to remind the government to value those who work the land. The message was implicit: "Defy them, as Louis XVI had done in 1789, and you risked being handed your head." As Baxter shows, France's republican instinct lives on. fn "A Year in Paris," he strings together the beautiful beads of the French everyday, all held together by the invisible act of imagination that makes a country cohere and endure. LlESL schillinger, a critic and translator, is the author of "Wordbirds: An Irreverent Lexicon for the 21st Century."
Choice Review
This volume focuses upon territory that was, in 843, the inheritance of Charlemagne's grandson Lothar. The region was composed primarily of what are now the Benelux countries and parts of eastern France and western Germany, including northern Italy (although the peninsula is excluded from the author's treatment). Winder (publisher and independent scholar) is also the author of Germania (2010, treating the Germans) and Danubia (2014, the story of the Habsburg lands). The geographic area treated in this book has been crucial in European history, in part because of great power rivalries, especially in the 19th and 20th centuries when major wars were fought here, and the book's subject is important. Chapters are organized around brief essays that include narrative history along with personal reflection and experience, and they are always entertaining, emphasizing the human experience. Winder's tone is witty and informal. Scholars may not find a great deal that is original (though there are often subtle insights and new angles), but the author's style masks a deep, reliable knowledge of the subject. A brief, solid bibliography and well-chosen illustrations enhance the volume. Summing Up: Recommended. All readership levels. --Paul W. Knoll, emeritus, University of Southern California
Guardian Review
A personal look at the long arc of European history finds a continent perpetually torn between unity and division Simon Winder's trilogy - Germania , Danubia and now Lotharingia - is rather remarkable. A synthesis of a couple of thousand years of European history produced over little more than a decade by a writer with a full-time job in publishing (he is an editorial bigwig at Penguin) who is not a professional historian and takes every opportunity in his self-deprecating narrative to tell us that his facility for languages is non-existent. It is an insane undertaking, yet somehow he has got away with it and come to the end of his "personal history" largely unscathed. He has managed it because, for all the self-mockery, he has a serious purpose. In Germania , he explores the idea of German-ness that culminated in the deadly fantasies of the Nazis. Danubia examines how the dysfunctional Habsburg family could hold together a sprawling empire of competing national groupings for almost half a millennium. And Lotharingia tells the story of that part of Europe - what is now the Netherlands, Belgium, Luxembourg, Lorraine in northern France and most of northern Germany west of the Rhine - that has been labelled the "cockpit", so central has it been to Franco-German rivalry and the course of the continent's history. The titles of the books are cleverly chosen. Germania was an unfortunate invention of the Roman historian Tacitus that became a deadly ideological weapon. Danubia was a fantasyland that needed a comic book family to keep it intact. Lotharingia was a real place, but one that few will have heard of because it was little more than a vacuum, one that other powers - first the emerging state of France and the raggle-taggle Holy Roman Empire, but ultimately the modern war machines of France and Germany - sought to annex. Winder resurrects Lotharingia and explains how the creation of this slice of dynastic nonsense by the Treaty of Verdun in 843 has determined so much of Europe's history, right up to the creation of the EU, which can be seen as an attempt to recreate the Carolingian empire and nullify the nationalist antagonisms that led to the European wars of 1870 to 1945. Charlemagne, the principal begetter of that empire, is the necessary starting point for Winder's history. Would-be successor to the imperial Romans, - on Christmas Day 800 he had the Pope declare him emperor of the Romans, precursor of the title of Holy Roman Emperor - Charlemagne created a vast empire that fell victim to family feuding after his death in 814. In 843, his grandsons - Charles "the Bald", Louis "the German" and Lothair I (nicknameless, as Winder characteristically points out) - carved up the empire. Charles got the west, Louis the east and Lothair the bit in the middle, which at that point stretched all the way from the North Sea to the middle of Italy. Winder is a jolly guide, playing the part of spirited history teacher for a set of recalcitrant GCSE students Lothair, as the eldest of the three, had tried but failed to keep Charlemagne's empire intact, and even the large tract of Europe that did fall to him proved unsustainable. On his death in 855, his territory was in turn divided between his three sons: Louis II inherited Italy, the young and short-lived Charles received Provence, and Lothair II got the rest - a mishmash that came to be known as Lotharingia. Lothair II died in 869, leading to a further carve-up between his powerful uncles to the east and west, and in 880 the treaty of Ribemont formalised the split, awarding the lion's share of Lothair II's former lands to East Francia, which later evolved into the Holy Roman Empire, while giving West Francia (the forerunner of modern-day France) some territory and enduring aspirations to much of the rest. The treaty of Ribemont also created the kingdoms of upper and lower Burgundy and a host of towns, territories and ecclesiastical institutions claiming some degree of autonomy, producing what Winder describes as "a map which looked like a jigsaw a dog had tried to swallow and then thrown up". Europe's messy cockpit was born, with parts of Lotharingia managing to eke out an independent existence of sorts as the fortunes of East and West Francia fluctuated and the competition between them presented opportunities for the mosaic of proud towns and stroppy nobles caught in the middle to exercise what they saw as their rights. The dynastic twists and turns are at times hard to follow, and I could have done with better maps than Winder has supplied. A separate chronology might also have been handy, but perhaps "personal histories" frown on such academic apparatus. On the plus side, he is a jolly guide, playing the part of spirited history teacher for a set of recalcitrant GCSE students who are struggling to tell their Charles the Balds from Charles the Bolds, and offering shafts of illumination that make the distant, knotty past come alive. "Luxembourg's continuing existence in the 21st century as effectively a dynastic and territorial coelacanth is," he points out, "a simply astonishing instance of Lotharingian persistence. So many proud conquerors have held Luxembourg's huge fortress system, but they all, every one, went home." The humour comes close to the tone of 1066 and All That with tales of bloodthirsty nobles and long-suffering peasants The organisation of the book resembles the Holy Roman Empire in its apparent randomness - and great wodges of text are devoted to the places he has visited on his wanderings, with details of what he ate and drank as well as what he saw. His reluctance to follow chronology and his liking for unexpected byways - a section on the Crusades here, a portrait of Hildegard of Bingen there, descriptions of churches and the contents of museums everywhere - mean you have to be on your toes and piece together the key developments yourself. The central role of the increasingly confident and cohesive French state, the way the Dukes of Burgundy prepare the ground for Dutch self-determination, the travails of the ever more centrifugal Holy Roman Empire, the epic (if accidental) splitting of his Spanish and central European empires by Charles V - all come in and out of focus as Winder tries out the different pieces of the jigsaw. Winder overdoes the knockabout humour and at times comes close to the tone of 1066 and All That with his tales of bloodthirsty nobles and long-suffering peasants. But his strength is that, ignoring what pusillanimous academics might think, he trusts himself to have a go at reframing European history. Ever since Voltaire's quip that the Holy Roman Empire "was neither holy, nor Roman nor an empire", it has rarely been taken seriously, and it did collapse like a pack of cards in the face of Napoleon's assault. By making it pivotal to his trilogy and, in this book, by rescuing Lotharingia from historical oblivion, Winder looks afresh at the long arc of European history, with its perpetual interplay between defiant local units and grandiose attempts at unifying schemes. Even now, in the battles over Brexit and the future of the EU, we see those opposites at war. In that sense, we are all the heirs of Charlemagne.
Kirkus Review
The final volume in London-based author and publisher Winder's trilogy about the history of Europe, following Germania (2010) and Danubia (2014).In this history of an ill-defined region of Europenot quite Germany, not quite France, running along both sides of the Rhine, encompassing northern reaches of the Netherlands and including Flanders, Luxembourg, and Alsace-Lorraine all the way to Switzerlandthe author brings the material rivetingly alive with the sheer elasticity of his imagination and prose. This region, "a mass of illogicality," was first defined after Charlemagne's death in 814 and named for one of his three grandsons, Lothair (thus, Lotharingia, created by 843), and it has "provoked wars in every century andbeen the site of many of the events which have defined European civilization." Moving chronologically, Winder marvels at how little we know about this region before the onslaught of Julius Caesar. When the Roman general lifted the veil in The Gallic War, it appeared as "a series of highly organized, sophisticated societies, in terms of military technology hard for the Romans to defeat and with large, complex and tough ships designed for the harsh weather of the Atlantic." Tracing the disintegration of the invading marauders and the early Christian centuries' attempts to "erase all trace of native paganism," Winder enlivens his accounts with chronicles of his visits to many of these ancient archaeological grounds. Sifting through massive amounts of information covering centuries, he wisely structures the narrative around certain spots, such as Amiens or Beaune, and sharp profiles of notable historical figurese.g., Hildegard von Bingen, "an obscure mystic from the twelfth-century Rhineland," or Dutch painter Hieronymus Bosch, whose paintings were created "to drive you onto your knees, to think about our fate in a fallen world." Throughout, Winder infuses his account with such energy and wit that readers may be pleasantly unaware of the many history lessons he imparts.A meandering and highly entertaining amble through fascinating bits of history that culminates in the horrors of the invading armies of the world wars. Copyright Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
Table of Contents
| Maps | p. xiii |
| Introduction | p. 1 |
| A note on myself and France | |
| A note on place names | |
| Chapter 1 p. 17 | |
| Ice-sheets to Asterix | |
| The warlord | |
| Bees and buckles | |
| The rule of the saints | |
| Rhinegold | |
| The call of the oliphant | |
| Chapter 2 p. 47 | |
| The split inheritance | |
| Margraves, landgraves, dukes and counts | |
| Imperial grandeur and decay | |
| Boulogne boy makes good | |
| The Cistercians | |
| Chapter 3 p. 77 | |
| The Sibyl of the Rhine | |
| Some nuts and bolts | |
| Stories of Wolf Inngrim | |
| Street scenes | |
| Amiens Cathedral and its aftermath | |
| Famine, plague and flood | |
| The bold and the mad | |
| Chapter 4 p. 113 | |
| The fearless and the good | |
| Prayer nuts | |
| A word of advice from Mehmet the Conqueror | |
| Poor local decision-making | |
| The bold and the Swiss | |
| Chapter 5 p. 139 | |
| The great inheritance | |
| Mary the Rich and the future of the world | |
| New management at Hawk Castle | |
| 'Beware, beware, God sees!' | |
| Uses for paper | |
| Chapter 6 p. 167 | |
| The New World | |
| Margaret of Austria | |
| The life and adventures of Charles V | |
| The Oranges | |
| Rebellion | |
| The Catholic case | |
| Chapter 7 p. 197 | |
| The sufferings of Lady Belge | |
| Life in 'the garden' | |
| Birds, beasts and flowers | |
| Croissants of crisis | |
| Whitewash and clear glass | |
| Chapter 8 p. 223 | |
| 'A harvest of joys' | |
| Fencers and soap-boilers | |
| Elizabeth and her children | |
| Uncle Toby's hobby-horse | |
| 'Too late to be ambitious' | |
| Chapter 9 p. 253 | |
| Nancy and Lorraine | |
| Rebuilding the Rhine | |
| Sperm by candlelight | |
| Gilt and beshit | |
| Adventures in tiny states | |
| In the time of the periwigs | |
| Chapter 10 p. 289 | |
| Heroic and ominous | |
| 'The old times have gone' | |
| The great French gingerbread-baker | |
| Armies of the Ocean Coast | |
| Europe reordered | |
| 'What is there to fear if you are a slave?' | |
| Chapter 11 p. 323 | |
| Strange happenings underground | |
| The New Rhine | |
| The Translation Bureau of Barbarian Books | |
| Baden in turmoil | |
| A Newfoundland dog in Luzern | |
| Grand Duchies, Empires and Kingdoms | |
| Chapter 12 p. 361 | |
| Kilometre pigs | |
| French exiles | |
| Metz and the nationalist frontline | |
| Expanses of baize | |
| Bullets, tusks and rubber | |
| Rays and masks | |
| Chapter 13 p. 395 | |
| 'Barracks, barracks, barracks' | |
| War plans | |
| The Battle of the Frontiers | |
| Kilomètre 0 | |
| Red, yellow and blue | |
| Shame on the Rhine | |
| Chapter 14 p. 433 | |
| Dreams of Corfu | |
| Walls and bridges | |
| The Kingdom of Mattresses | |
| The road to Strasbourg | |
| Armageddon | |
| Charlemagne comes home | |
| Postscript | p. 465 |
| Acknowledgements | p. 471 |
| Bibliography | p. 473 |
| Index | p. 481 |
