March 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.