Lotharingia: A Personal History of Europe's Lost Country

by Simon Winder

Overview

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.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781250251169
Publisher:	Picador
Publication date:	07/28/2020
Edition description:	Reprint
Pages:	528
Sales rank:	196,008
Product dimensions:	5.40(w) x 8.20(h) x 1.00(d)

About the Author

Simon Winder is the author of Germania, Danubia, and The Man Who Saved Britain. He works in publishing and lives in Wandsworth Town, London.

Table of Contents

Maps xiii

Introduction 1

A note on myself and France

A note on place names

Chapter 1 17

Ice-sheets to Asterix

The warlord

Bees and buckles

The rule of the saints

Rhinegold

The call of the oliphant

Chapter 2 47

The split inheritance

Margraves, landgraves, dukes and counts

Imperial grandeur and decay

Boulogne boy makes good

The Cistercians

Chapter 3 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 4 113

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 5 139

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 6 167

The New World

Margaret of Austria

The life and adventures of Charles V

The Oranges

Rebellion

The Catholic case

Chapter 7 197

The sufferings of Lady Belge

Life in 'the garden'

Birds, beasts and flowers

Croissants of crisis

Whitewash and clear glass

Chapter 8 223

'A harvest of joys'

Fencers and soap-boilers

Elizabeth and her children

Uncle Toby's hobby-horse

'Too late to be ambitious'

Chapter 9 253

Nancy and Lorraine

Rebuilding the Rhine

Sperm by candlelight

Gilt and beshit

Adventures in tiny states

In the time of the periwigs

Chapter 10 289

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 11 323

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 12 361

Kilometre pigs

French exiles

Metz and the nationalist frontline

Expanses of baize

Bullets, tusks and rubber

Rays and masks

Chapter 13 395

'Barracks, barracks, barracks'

War plans

The Battle of the Frontiers

Kilomètre 0

Red, yellow and blue

Shame on the Rhine

Chapter 14 433

Dreams of Corfu

Walls and bridges

The Kingdom of Mattresses

The road to Strasbourg

Armageddon

Charlemagne comes home

Postscript 465

Acknowledgements 471

Bibliography 473

Index 481

Editorial Reviews

Named a Best Book of 2019 by The Sunday Times

“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.” —Liesl Schillinger, The New York Times Book Review

“Interlacing history and travelogue, this prose journey from Lake Constance up through the Low Countries is an exuberant, exhaustive paean to ‘the richness and density of a region that is both the dozy back end of beyond, and central to the fate of humanity.’” —The New Yorker

"[Lotharingia is] a long cultural tour, led by a brilliantly witty guide who never stops talking, who constantly halts the group in the street to reminisce about his own experiences or digress into a wonderful anecdote, and who gets everyone into extraordinary places normally locked up." —Neal Ascherson, The New York Review of Books

“[Winder] is deeply read and endlessly curious, a man with the enviable ability to make one share his obsessions.” —Michael Gorra, The Wall Street Journal

From the Publisher

…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…[Lotharingia] will make you want to visit several hundred places upon which Winder's discerning, lionizing eye alights.

The New York Times Book Review - Liesl Schillinger

03/11/2019

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.)

Publishers Weekly

★ 2019-02-13

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 Europe—not 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 Switzerland—the 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 and…been 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 figures—e.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.

Kirkus Reviews