Lotharingia Quotes

“John of Bavaria, realizing the game was up and his throwing in the priesthood and marrying had just wasted everyone’s time, made Philip the Good his heir. He was shortly thereafter assassinated in The Hague with a poisoned prayer book (yes, really – nothing can beat the fifteenth century).”
― Simon Winder, Lotharingia: A Personal History of Europe's Lost Country

“It was in the fallout that one set of small territories banded together – Uri, Schwyz and Unterwalden – and, uniquely, remained together. The earliest elements in what became Switzerland coalesced partly by default: sheltered by the political incoherence of the rest of Swabia, by the underpopulated County of Burgundy (the Franche-Comté) and by the great spooky belt of the Black Forest – then made even more spooky by its being fronted by a much wider and more turbulent Rhine.”
― Simon Winder, Lotharingia: A Personal History of Europe's Lost Country

“German historians of the nineteenth century loved to talk about the five ‘tribal duchies’ or ‘stem duchies’, the great chunks of land created by the Frankish eastern conquests: Lotharingia, Saxony, Bavaria, Franconia and Swabia. This sort of stuff, with its flavour of winged helmets, rough fellowship, drooping beer-stained moustaches and warriors beating their swords on their shields to acclaim their chief, was enough to have followers of Wagner in ecstasies. In their different ways the ghosts of these five entities have endured to the present, but with only Bavaria maintaining a steady and substantial political shape. Swabia and Lotharingia detonated into fragments with parts of both coalescing into Switzerland.”
― Simon Winder, Lotharingia: A Personal History of Europe's Lost Country

“Philip the Handsome, like his mother, died young – possibly poisoned. But, also like Mary, he lived long enough to have a powerful impact on Europe’s future. In another sensational agglomerative Habsburg marriage he had wed a daughter of Ferdinand and Isabella and, following a series of surprise deaths, found himself as Philip I, King of Spain. He reigned only briefly before his own death, but he and his wife had six children, including future consorts of the French, Portuguese and Scandinavian kings, the Emperor Charles V, the Emperor Ferdinand I and Mary of Hungary. In terms of playing poker this falls outside the realms of the possible – a super-imperial-royal-cheat flush. It meant that Charles V inherited all the Burgundian, Habsburg and Spanish lands – including of course America, the potential of which was beginning to become apparent under Philip. Nobody had ever ruled so widely and on so rickety a set of chances.”
― Simon Winder, Lotharingia: A Personal History of Europe's Lost Country

“Mary’s father-in-law the Emperor Frederick III at the age of seventy-seven died after she did, disappearing into his strange, marmalade-coloured tomb in Vienna, having bridged in his own person the entire period from the Battle of Agincourt to the discovery of America. Her husband Maximilian had been elected King of the Romans in Frankfurt and crowned in Aachen during Frederick’s lifetime specifically to take over most of the running of the Empire from him. In doing so he created a tradition that the Habsburgs followed from now on, ensuring overlapping dynastic stability by having the electoral bit out of the way before the current owner’s death, then leaving the Pope’s ceremony that made him Emperor until whenever convenient.”
― Simon Winder, Lotharingia: A Personal History of Europe's Lost Country

“Mary’s marriage to Archduke Maximilian shifted the great tangle of Charles’s non-French lands across to a family who were not only Holy Roman Emperors but also the great landowners of Central Europe, making the Habsburgs the most powerful figures in European history since the Roman Empire. Their marriage was brief – Mary broke her back in a hunting accident aged only twenty-five, dying only five years after her father’s death on the battlefield. It is fair to say that the decisions she took in her short life, in cahoots with her stepmother Margaret of York, directed the history of the world.”
― Simon Winder, Lotharingia: A Personal History of Europe's Lost Country

“It is striking how much of France’s history is not involved with its sea coasts. During various points in the Hundred Years War, France had hardly any access to the Atlantic, with every harbour in English, Breton or Burgundian hands. It was only in the sixteenth century that the great port of Le Havre was founded and it was reckoned that Louis XIV in his entire, interminable reign only ever actually saw the sea himself on three occasions, all his bewigged adventures being played out in purely inland locations. A general theory could be proposed that the sea coasts were simply not vital organs of the French state and that it was a naturally inland power. In the centuries-long struggles between France and England, England won the immediate issue of the security of the English Channel because it was life-and-death for that country, whereas for France the Channel was always something of an optional extra.”
― Simon Winder, Lotharingia: A Personal History of Europe's Lost Country

“The Dukes loved their palace at Hesdin in Artois. It had wonderful machines to entertain visitors: they could create hidden voices, spray water, sprinkle snow. There was a trapdoor through which visitors would drop onto great piles of feathers; conduits were placed to squirt ‘women from below’. There were the mysterious but no doubt beguiling automata. There was a magical room celebrating the story of Jason and the Golden Fleece (to commemorate the chivalric order initiated by Philip the Good), which William Caxton saw while he was working as a printer in Bruges and which he thought ‘craftily and curiously depeynted’. The entire palace and its fortifications were razed by the Emperor Charles V and no trace remains. The Burgundian court was once famous for a special dance called the ‘moresca’, but we have no idea how it was danced, and in any event the music has not survived.”
― Simon Winder, Lotharingia: A Personal History of Europe's Lost Country

“One of the most striking and lasting communities of north-west Europe, the institution of beguinage, has left beautiful scatterings of buildings across Belgium and the Netherlands. These were places where men or women could withdraw from the world and without taking holy orders devote the rest of their lives to prayer. The surviving buildings in Breda, for example, or Bruges, enshrine the idea of perfect communities – often, indeed, focused around ideal gardens, providing food, healthy work and flowers linked to specific saints in the Lochner manner.”
― Simon Winder, Lotharingia: A Personal History of Europe's Lost Country

“This is just in brackets, but there remains in London today a very small convent where the nuns’ task is to pray for the safety of Londoners who are out at night. In a very ancient framework therefore, while the ostensible action around Piccadilly Circus is focused on carousing and throwing up, there is a separate invisible spiritual fight still being waged today in the air above.”
― Simon Winder, Lotharingia: A Personal History of Europe's Lost Country

“Spiritually I have always been a bit confused. Both my parents were Catholic and I was raised as Catholic. But from an early age I was sent away to very Protestant schools. I cannot swear that I noticed the difference for a long time, but it gradually and dumbly occurred to me that these were two faiths with very different flavours. This quirk in my religious background has pursued me as an adult and inflected my attitude towards history, culture and writing in curious ways. Much of this book is, at the hidden wiring level, about this topic – for the obvious reason that since the Reformation the story of Lotharingia has been its crazy-paving of faith. My own sympathies veer around pathetically, depending on where I am. If I walk into some vast Reformed hall-church in Gelderland, with the only decoration provided by the shapes of the lettering in the prayer book, I recoil as a Catholic: oh, the arrogance of man, the cul-de-sac of mere words, arid and cheerless. If I walk into some baroque Catholic church in the Rhineland, an explosion of whipped-cream stucco, paintings of tortured saints, sobbing Marys, I recoil as a Protestant: emotionalism gone mad, the empty bluster of a picture-book religion, oh but this is practically Filipino. Of course, both these responses are infantile, curiously unmediated and not malicious as such. But through an accident of upbringing I find myself equally drawn to and equally repulsed by the great schism that has for five hundred years torn this part of Europe apart – I am as moved by an old Bible in German as by a really splashy Rubens. In the astonishing encounter at Worms between the young Emperor Charles V and Martin Luther I am paralysed by indecision as to which side’s colours to wear. The iconoclasm that burns through the Netherlands in the 1560s is at one level a cultural and spiritual catastrophe, at another a welcome bit of tidying.”
― Simon Winder, Lotharingia: A Personal History of Europe's Lost Country

“Using plausible arguments on both sides, the next king could either be Philip VI, the closest but not very close male, or it could be the son of three French kings’ sister, Isabella. This, highly unfortunately, was not only a King of England but specifically the teenaged psycho Edward III. This argument over rival legitimacies would be picked up again whenever either side was in the right mood, resulting in the Hundred Years War, a ruined France and in the end with England expelled. The claim that the English king was actually also the French king was only given up in 1802, helpfully.”
― Simon Winder, Lotharingia: A Personal History of Europe's Lost Country

“The Capetian dynasty, which had reigned since 987, had a single core competence: an ability to have at least one son who lived to adulthood. This gave them an astonishing cumulative heft: they were not ex-Viking pirates like the Norman chancers in London; nor were they mere embarrassing elected officials like the King of the Germans or the Pope.”
― Simon Winder, Lotharingia: A Personal History of Europe's Lost Country

“Famine was very rare in Western Europe. A later chronicler in Louvain was able to state clearly (so etched were they in people’s minds) that there had been famine in 1146, 1197, 1316 and 1530. There were aftershocks (an Aachen chronicler talks of ‘tempests, hailstorms and epidemics’ as the flavour of 1322) but recovery seems to have been speedy before the second and completely overwhelming disaster of what came to be called the Black Death. A terrible cocktail of fatal illnesses, this plague was first mentioned in 1333 in China, and reached Sicily in 1346 and France and Germany in 1348. A reasonable estimate is that it killed 45–50 per cent of all Europeans, probably in greater numbers in the Mediterranean than further north. There was of course no understanding of how it killed or why.”
― Simon Winder, Lotharingia: A Personal History of Europe's Lost Country

“Ghent was particularly known for its gebuurten – neighbourhood associations usually based around a street and its associated alleys. They would organize the night watch, have fire drills (to escape from and to put out any fire) and contribute towards local and citywide festivals (floats, costumes) and the management of funerals, all paid from a central pot. They were key to the lives (now almost lost to official records) of the servants, small shopkeepers and artisans that made places like Ghent work. Many individuals wore uniforms of some kind, sometimes as simple as a ribbon to indicate a specific fraternity, but including of course the different-coloured outfits worn by different grades or types of churchmen, including the immediately distinctive monastic orders.”
― Simon Winder, Lotharingia: A Personal History of Europe's Lost Country

“While this would lead in due course to Bern’s wealth from long-distance trade, it also released into the wider world the tough, highly self-reliant and until then mercifully shut in mountain-men of Uri, Schwyz and Unterwalden, who would form the nucleus of the future Switzerland. The sense of the Swiss as relentlessly capable, implacable and sitting in a sort of ice fortress has been appropriated by what is now the country’s ‘northern rim’: cheery commercial cities such as Basle, Schaffhausen, Zürich and indeed Bern, southern bits of the Holy Roman Empire, at best sited on steep slopes. It was the genuinely inaccessible Uri, Schwyz and Unterwalden (the original three Forest Cantons) which really began the trouble as trade, men and concepts now fed up and down through Luzern and along the Saint Gotthard. There is no way to pinpoint why too precisely, but unlike other regional protection associations which formed across the Empire, the Swiss one became serious and permanent.”
― Simon Winder, Lotharingia: A Personal History of Europe's Lost Country

“This structure became formalized in the fourteenth century, reflecting much earlier practice. The document known as the Golden Bull specified all the steps required to elect each new German king – the somewhat restricted electorate being just seven individuals: the three Rhineland ecclesiastical rulers (Mainz, Cologne, Trier) and four secular rulers (in the west, the Count Palatine; in the east, the King of Bohemia, the Margrave of Brandenburg and the Duke of Saxony). With extremely rare changes, these electors remained in place until Napoleon arrived to sweep the whole lot away.”
― Simon Winder, Lotharingia: A Personal History of Europe's Lost Country

“The differences between West and East Francia were substantially those of geography. Whatever setbacks the ruler in Paris had to deal with, he had the confidence of much of his realm being defined by oceans and high mountains while in the east the border with the Empire was also clear. France proved almost impossible to invade, with even the persistent English seen off in the end. East Francia on the other hand was a colonial state, pushing further into Europe against innumerable Slavic, Viking, Magyar and Latinate peoples. In the later Middle Ages, the Emperor then became responsible for an enormous and permanent fighting frontier with Islam which settled the ‘capital’ (really, just the home town of the Habsburg family) at Vienna as the best place from which to watch the Ottomans – a role it would keep until the eighteenth century.”
― Simon Winder, Lotharingia: A Personal History of Europe's Lost Country

“The German ruler remained for centuries on the move, shifting from palace to palace, town to town, in a rather King Lear manner. This became a great source of shame to nineteenth-century German historians who saw itinerant monarchy as disgraceful and weak and the root of Germany’s misery. They came to focus on the ‘strong’ emperors, such as Otto the Great or Frederick Barbarossa, and treated the story as a tragedy whereby the failure of such imperially significant cities as Nuremberg, Aachen or Regensburg to become the German Paris doomed the Empire to enfeeblement and abasement. This rather spike-helmeted view of the world has for obvious reasons since been somewhat discredited.”
― Simon Winder, Lotharingia: A Personal History of Europe's Lost Country

“In Hildegard’s later years it all seems a bit hard lines on poor Jutta as Hildegard moved on, leaving behind the life of the anchorite, founding her own abbey, marching around flanked by an honour guard of young nuns with lavish veils and gold coronets. Hildegard lived to the age of eighty and everything she turned her hand to was remarkable. She was prostrated by searing visions, which she wrote down and which were drawn and illuminated by nuns in her convent at Rupertsberg.”
― Simon Winder, Lotharingia: A Personal History of Europe's Lost Country

“Hildegard was born in a small town near the west bank of the Rhine close to Worms. Her fate stemmed from being a tenth child. Following the universal requirement to ‘tithe’ – i.e. give a tenth of your goods (money, crops, wine) to the Church – her parents handed her when very young to a monastery.”
― Simon Winder, Lotharingia: A Personal History of Europe's Lost Country

“Some odd ancient scraps survive that give a sense of the harshness and uncertainty of families parted by the near-lemming-like need for men to head to the Holy Land.”
― Simon Winder, Lotharingia: A Personal History of Europe's Lost Country

“Throughout the following two centuries it was common for younger sons simply to disappear for years on end and quite often never return. It was a throw of the dice as to whether you ended up wearing perfumed robes in some top new castle, married to an Armenian heiress and tucking into a pomegranate breakfast, or chained up in a Seldjuk atabeg’s dungeon trying to lick moisture off the walls.”
― Simon Winder, Lotharingia: A Personal History of Europe's Lost Country

“At the heart of this crusade lay three remarkable brothers – the sons of Eustace II, Count of Boulogne, one of William the Conqueror’s companions at the Battle of Hastings and a man who must have created a suitably predatory and devil-may-care atmosphere within the family circle. One of the sons was Godefroy, who was beyond his associations with Bouillon also the Duke of Lower Lotharingia; the second, Eustace, who would inherit his father’s lands; the third, Baldwin, who would ultimately scoop the pool, becoming first the ruler of part of Armenia and then, on Godefroy’s death, the first King of Jerusalem.”
― Simon Winder, Lotharingia: A Personal History of Europe's Lost Country

“A grim start was made by Peter the Hermit, a compelling orator from Amiens, and the sinister visionary Count Emicho, who drew to them a huge mixed bag of pilgrims and set out to glory ahead of the Pope’s ‘official’ crusade. As they passed down through the Rhineland, communities of Jews were massacred at Trier, Mainz, Cologne, Worms and Metz. Exact numbers are unclear, but it seems probable that around eight hundred were killed just at Worms. As these were the very first military actions of the entire crusade movement, they tend to be passed over quickly by historians simply because the rest of the story is so long and complex, but in themselves they were a total catastrophe – the worst single recorded event in these communities, many of which had roots going back to the Roman Empire, until the Holocaust.”
― Simon Winder, Lotharingia: A Personal History of Europe's Lost Country

“There are many mysteries around the crusades and why they happened at all. They had a staggering impact on the twelfth, thirteenth and fourteenth centuries – but were in the end a total dud, with the Fall of Acre in 1291 ending the entire fighting-in-the-footsteps-of-Jesus aspect. The years before Pope Urban II gave his great speech in 1095 which launched the whole project had seen successful seaborne invasions of England and Sicily, the growth of Castile, the spread of Italian (Genoese, Pisan, Venetian) naval strength across the Mediterranean and the neutering of the Viking threat. There must have been a general sense of restlessness and enterprise in the air.”
― Simon Winder, Lotharingia: A Personal History of Europe's Lost Country

“Godefroy is a key nationalist hero both for France and for Belgium. His massive statue is the centrepiece of the royal quarter of Brussels and in the nineteenth century he became the focus of a rather dank Catholic cult, a sort of boy Joan of Arc, but with a colonial conquest flavour.”
― Simon Winder, Lotharingia: A Personal History of Europe's Lost Country

“Henry is principally known to us today as the bluff, firm-but-fair rugby-coach-like ruler in Wagner’s Lohengrin (1850), who is rather comically out of his depth with the more mystical, swan-oriented elements in the opera and keen only to get on with persuading the good people of Brabant to help him kill Hungarian raiders.”
― Simon Winder, Lotharingia: A Personal History of Europe's Lost Country

“Or there is the sight as the train passes over the bridges north of the awe-inspiring Holland Deep of Dordrecht, with its aptly named Great Church, a structure so huge it appears to be the result of some ancient feet-for-inches mistake in interpreting the plan. Even in earlier versions these churches were also vast – their building and then restless rebuilding would have been for centuries a town’s principal non-workaday goal. What we would view as the aim – their completion – was far less important than the process itself, with different parts under temporary roofs coming into use for different generations. To say that they were the ‘focus’ of life would be too narrow: they were the point of life and attracted much of the money that was not devoted to the lower-level business of simply staying alive and in reasonable comfort.”
― Simon Winder, Lotharingia: A Personal History of Europe's Lost Country

“Everybody always assumes that the disappearance of the Roman Empire was a universal disaster, but it could be that for many communities, no longer having to shell out huge taxes and contribute to legions, palaces and the high life in Italy was a fair deal. A great plus must have been no longer having to pretend to like the horrible Roman fermented ‘fish sauce’. Experts always claim that the empty clay fish sauce pots that litter the bottom of the Rhine can be dated to show there was a point when trade within the Empire seized up, but it seems just as likely that as soon as the last stern-faced legionary left, the locals joyfully chucked the whole lot off the docks.”
― Simon Winder, Lotharingia: A Personal History of Europe's Lost Country