Lotharingia
A Personal History of Europe's Lost Country
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- USD 12.99
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- USD 12.99
Descripción editorial
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.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
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 Neuch tel, 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.
