The Vanished Kingdom that Foreshadowed the EU

There can be few more damning or more useless terms than “the Dark Ages.” They sound fun in an orcs‐and‐elves sort of way and suggest a very low benchmark from which we have since, as a race, raised ourselves up into the light—with the present day using as its soundtrack the last movement of Beethoven’s Ninth. But the damage the term does is immense. A simple little mental test is just to quickly imagine a European scene from that era. Now: was the sun shining? Of course not. The default way of thinking about the long, complex era that lasted from the final decades of the Roman Empire to somewhere around the Battle of Hastings is to assume it all looked like the cover of a heavy metal album.

One problem is that the older the period the more chances there are for its material production to be destroyed. Across Lotharingia [ed. note: one of three filial kingdoms born of the Carolingian Empire]  there has been century after century of rebuilding (with the re‐use of every available piece of old dressed stone) with most evidence of earlier churches and palaces removed in the process. In practical terms one cannot imagine that the vast, humorless bulk of Cologne Cathedral is merely the latest in a series stretching back to a Roman temple. Many of the great religious buildings of the Rhine have a display table showing somewhat conjectural models of their ancient predecessors, usually starting with a patronizing little wooden block, looking something like a skew‐whiff Wendy-house.

So great is the weight of “the Dark Ages” on our shoulders that it is almost impossible not to think of the makers of this wonky church slithering about on the mud floor cursing the way the roof was leaking and how nobody could design a door that shut properly, resigned to the occasional fiasco when the walls would simply fall in on the gurning, fur‐clad, battle‐axe‐wielding communicants. In practice, these now non‐existent buildings would have been extremely beautiful—drawing on Roman and Byzantine models, and stuffed with all kinds of wonderful stuff from the Roman Empire which now no longer exists.

This is the related problem suffered by “the Dark Ages”—our towns often occupy exactly the same sites as they did then (the same river crossing, the same harbor) and are built on top of them, but there have been simply innumerable points at which older material has been destroyed. There is probably some rough mathematical calculation about how each passing century lowers your chance of anything much surviving at all. The famous fat boy of 1666—who was meant to be watching the baker’s oven, but instead gorged on pies, fell asleep and as a result burned down London—is only one of an elite group who caused mayhem through their momentary inattention over the centuries.

With every household routinely handling flames in wooden surroundings it is unsurprising that so many towns would often find themselves having to start again from scratch. We know far more about more recent horrors—for example, the gunpowder accident that destroyed much of Delft in 1654—but any 24‐hour period over the centuries was always fraught with some fumble‐fingered disaster somewhere.

The unrelenting impact of warfare has of course done far more damage, wrecking town after town. Any breakdown in order or lunge for supremacy ends up with further pyres of the material past. Simply looking at recent disasters, many thousands of ancient records, treasures, histories, valued for centuries by custodians, were destroyed in the 1870 Siege of Strasbourg and the 1914 destruction of much of the Catholic University of Leuven.

The true “dark age,” of course, was the early 1940s when, simply as a side effect of industrial killing, great swathes of the past disappeared. One small yet major example—the extraordinary series of paintings of the visions of Hildegard of Bingen, made in the 1170s either by the saint herself or under her supervision, disappeared in the general catastrophe that unfolded in Dresden in early 1945. We only know what they looked like (except from black‐and‐white photos) through accurate and beautiful copies painted by a group of nuns, by sheer chance, in the 1930s. So these frail little works of disturbing genius survived nearly eight centuries before succumbing, and exist today only through the most ancient form of devotional copying.

This is an over‐elaborate way of saying that in as much as the era after the Roman Empire is “dark” it is because it has been overlaid by many centuries of further things happening—and I have talked only about human agency rather than the terrors of mold, mice, lightning and damp. Our own “library” at home suffered catastrophic loss from a house‐rabbit called Dusty who in his short life ate the spines of innumerable books. My copy of Hermann Hesse’s Narcissus and Goldmund is cherished, partly because I have owned it for so long, but also because of its memorial teeth marks.

When was the very last beautiful Roman fabric so sun‐rotted that it was chucked away? And that is as nothing compared to the almost totally successful attempts during the early Christian centuries in Europe to erase all trace of native paganism. This last issue is often overlooked. At the back of our minds when thinking about the centuries when the Roman Empire mutated into medieval Europe we are unconsciously taking on the spurious guise of specific communities. We are happy to read about Charlemagne destroying the Avar Empire and taking all its gold because at some level we emotionally sneak ourselves into Charlemagne’s baggage‐train. But the Avars ruled Central Europe for over two centuries, and it is not a given that their civilization had no worth and did not represent a future we would have flourished in.

Or earlier, there are the Alemanni in what is now south‐west Germany and Alsace (and after whom the French call Germany Allemagne) who were broken by the Frankish ruler Clovis. Of course, we are the heirs of Christianity, but only in a passive, non‐contributive way—to see ourselves on one specific side in these ancient contests is awkward. I might hiss at the antics of the Saxons and Vikings, but as someone part English and part Irish I am much more likely to have their genes than Frankish ones.

These issues become vivid in the town of Tournai—for centuries a French‐ruled enclave squeezed between the County of Flanders and the County of Hainaut and now part of Belgium, a classic crossroads through which every army has marched, from the legionaries of the Roman Empire to Allied troops in 1944. I may as well say here that Tournai is a fantastic historical palimpsest and somewhere that always puts a spring in my step. I once found myself changing trains there late at night and realizing that I had just enough time to haul my bag up the road through the freezing dark to look in renewed wonder at the vast, somber drum—like a stonebuilt gasometer—of the Henry VIII Tower.

In this current context, however, what makes Tournai so remarkable is the discovery during routine repairs to the Hospice of St Brice in the 1650s of the tomb of Childeric I. This accidental find catapulted everything back some 250 years before Charlemagne, to the century after the Western Roman Empire had collapsed, a world which must have still been densely Roman in its appearance, probably with much smaller populations in towns and more limited trade. Childeric’s son, Clovis I, was baptized, united the Frankish tribes and founded the Merovingian dynasty which lasted until Charlemagne’s dad put the last of them into a monastery.

The management of Childeric’s tomb has not exactly been a curatorial model. It started well as by sheer good luck Tournai was then part of the Spanish Netherlands under the benign and intelligent leadership of Archduke Leopold Wilhelm, who as part of his vast expenditure on art objects commissioned a superb book on the tomb from Jean‐Jacques Chifflet, an antiquarian from the Spanish‐ruled Franche‐Comté. This has immaculate pictures of the heaps of extraordinary stuff Childeric was buried with—gold objects of great variety and beauty from a bull’s head to coins, buckles, a crystal globe, seal‐rings and intricate pieces of cloisonné. It was downhill for the hoard from then on. Leopold Wilhelm took everything back to Vienna when he retired and left it to his nephew the Emperor Leopold I. He gave it to Louis XIV as a present but, in one of the many instances where Louis is so disappointing, he took no interest in the gifts and simply stored them.

They survived the Revolution but were stolen in 1831 and dispersed or melted down. The hoard’s great aesthetic intervention came from its including dozens of small gold bees (or possibly cicadas), which must have decorated some object which had since rotted away, perhaps a cloak. In his search for an appropriate new symbol for his dynasty (the ancient fleur‐de‐lys being patently unacceptable to a new era) Napoleon decided to make these bees the imperial motif, scattering them on everything from coats of arms to Josephine’s slippers. They cluster all over the decorations of the French Empire and it is one of the sadder aspects of Napoleon’s defeat and exile that they disappear from the decorative arts until their rather wan revival under his nephew Napoleon III.

What remains in Tournai now however (aside from some reproduction bees) is a too‐good‐to‐be true archaeological museum which lays out everything we can still know about the huge scale of Childeric’s tomb and several associated burials. As his son Clovis turned Christian this was the last of the fabulous, full‐blown pagan Frankish affairs, with 21 cavalry horses buried nearby in an associated mound and what was clearly a sprawling sacred space with Childeric’s body at its center. An aristocratic woman buried nearby slightly later had objects such as scissors, amber and a wine‐strainer which linked her to trade across Europe.

Indeed, the more time spent looking at these shield‐bosses, necklaces and pins (and not least a debonair and alarming scramasax—a wonderful word for a long knife), the more clear it becomes that this was a highly sophisticated, confident civilization—which just happened to exist a very long time ago and whose achievements were about to be completely disregarded by the new Christian regime of Clovis, who moved his capital from Tournai to Paris. The process by which Childeric’s tomb became forgotten cannot be pieced together as his dynastic significance lasted so long. Somehow, the King of the Salian Franks and his favorite horses, his crystal globe, bees, scramasax and all sank into oblivion, eventually disappearing completely under church buildings, until being summoned back to the surface nearly twelve hundred years later.

Excerpted from Lotharingia: A Personal History of Europe’s Lost Country by Simon Winder.

The ‘Dark Ages’ Weren’t As Dark  As We Thought. By Simon Winder. LitHub , April 24, 2019

Many of us know Brussels to be a delightful city, almost the definition of what a city should be. But why was it once part of France, once part of the Netherlands, once part of Germany, to now be the capital of a country where half the population can’t speak to the other half? Why does the Duchy of Luxembourg exist? Why were some of the crucial battles of the last century fought out on the forest tracks of the Ardennes and on the muddy banks of a shallow river called the Meuse? The answer, as Simon Winder shows, in this informative and always entertaining book, is Lotharingia.

Lotharingia can be defined as that huge stretch of land, including the Netherlands, Belgium, and large parts of France, Germany and Switzerland, that runs down through the heart of Europe from the North Sea to the Alps. Squeezed between the great states of France and Germany, it long ago ceased to exist, becoming one of Europe’s vanished kingdoms, like the Grand Duchy of Lithuania. But it continues to lead a ghostly afterlife. Above all, as Winder shows, much of what we think of as the great cultural inheritance of medieval Europe, its building and its art, are Lotharingian.

It all started almost by mistake in AD 843 with the Treaty of Verdun. After the death of Charlemagne, Holy Roman Emperor and ruler of most of Europe, his lands were divided up between three grandsons. One got Germany, then known as East Francia, one got France, called West Francia, and the third Lothar got the bits in between, then called Middle Francia, but later named after him, and later still the Duchy of Burgundy. This division remained more or less stable until the arrival of Napoleon almost a thousand years later. This middle land was a patchwork of independent cities and Duchies, which often seemed to have gone their own, increasingly prosperous ways, not much troubled by the distant, not-always-all-powerful kings and emperors. The prosperity was staggering. Cities like Bruges and Antwerp grew to be among the richest in Europe.

Winder, who is known for his playful histories, Danubia and Germania, has a very personal approach to history. Despite the huge research that has gone into this book, he wears his learning lightly, and much of it written in the form of personal travel memoir, as he explores the enormous cultural riches of this place. He describes himself walking home late from obscure provincial museums in medieval towns centres, to his cheap B&B on the outskirts, passing, as he puts it, through periods of housing: “new estates from the 1920s, post-bombing quick rebuilds from the 1950s or new estates from the 1960s.” Because war is ever-present in this vanished kingdom. Down through the centuries it has witnessed endless wars, massacres, plagues, cities have been razed to the ground and raised up again.

But somehow, the art has survived. Or at least some of it. As Winder points out, the art we now possess is only a fraction of the original heritage. In the 16th century the Protestant iconoclasts swept through this region, destroying images, in the famous Beeldenstorm. Cathedrals were turned into vast, white, empty spaces, and huge bonfires lit with some of the greatest art ever made, about which we can only conjecture.

Winder is at his best when writing about people such as Dürer (“My favourite German”), Hieronymous Bosch, Holbein. His deep appreciation of their work allows irreverence. In Ghent he visits St Bavo’s to see Van Eyck’s astonishing Adam and Eve, naked in the Garden. He notices the later panels painted on the order of the Hapsburg Emperor Joseph II, which had them clothed in furs, so that, writes Winder, they are “transformed from being burdened, austere parents of humankind into Flintstones swingers”. Visiting Lille Museum, he ponders “whether modern Europe is simply too weighed down by the rubbish of the past. Should the whole lot be gathered in a huge net, picked up by a helicopter and dumped off the Florida Keys to create a fabulous basis for a new reef, for example?” A sentiment that even the most ardent cultural tourist in Europe has occasionally, shamefully, entertained.

In the end the rise of the nation state in the 19th century finished off Lotharinga, with the Grand Duchy of Luxembourg an anomalous chunk left over. But perhaps it lives on in other forms. After all, the six Lotharingian or semi-Lotharingian successor states went on to form the core of the European Union, and it cannot be by chance that its capitals are the three great Lotharingian cities of Brussels, Luxembourg and Strasbourg, with Charlemagne increasingly emerging as its patron saint. Many European thinkers still dream of a federal Europe, with a distant, benign leadership presiding over increasingly autonomous, self-ruling regions. That imagined Europe, with its patchwork of languages, religions and rulers, sounds a lot like Lotharingia.

Lotharingia review: Did the vanished kingdom foreshadow the EU? By Michael O'Loughlin. The Irish Times , April  27, 2019.

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.

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 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.

Lotharingia by Simon Winder review – the 'cockpit' of Europe.  By Stephen Moss. The Guardian ,  March 21 , 2019.

Your style of writing history, mixing it with personal recollections of travel, and various encounters with people both living and dead, is decidedly distinctive. Do you have a particular model for this, or did you invent a genre entirely by yourself for the trilogy?

SW : I made it up as I went along really, owing to a short attention span, and young and frantic family and overwork (I’m an editor at Penguin). I liked writing each book completely out of sequence, patching each section together at the point when I felt it was ready. My heroes are the 17th century English prose writers Aubrey, Burton and above all Sir Thomas Browne and I liked the idea of writing in their ambling, obsessive but readily distracted style!

Germania and Danubia are relatively interpretable. But what and where was Lotharingia? And why has it been erased from history?

SW : Lotharingia (Lothringen in German or Lorraine in French) was the ancient historical name for the vast chunk of land from the Netherlands and Belgium through the Rhineland to Alsace-Lorraine and Switzerland. It was ‘the lands of Lothar’, one of Charlemagne’s great-grandsons. The book argues that while it disappeared as a specific place after a couple of generations its legacy (a great split through Western Europe) has lasted until the present.

What is it that makes a country remembered? Was there a strong national movement in Lotharingia – did anyone think of themselves as Lotharingian?

SW : Lotharingia created some incredibly stubborn nationalisms within its borders – the Dutch in the north and the Swiss in the south have been giant-killers. One of my arguments is that the diversity and tolerance which sometimes emerges in Europe is largely because of these micro-places and the ease with which dissidents have been able to slip across borders and find protection when they could have found death or disgrace if they had stayed.

The area of Europe that once comprised Lotharingia has been the site of most of the continent’s most bitter territorial battles. What do you think has made this highly diverse area so hotly contested?

SW : The book has the conceit of each great European capital city being represented as an acquisitive and sometimes malevolent eye staring at Lotharingia and wanting to own or control it, or deny it to others. At different times London, Paris, Berlin, Madrid and Vienna have had these roles. And yet, Europe being Europe, a strange and invisible correction mechanism always kicks in to ensure that even Louis XIV or Napoleon or Wilhelm II or Hitler cannot rule it except very temporarily.

You’re quite strict about stopping at what is now the Italian border. Have you ambitions to venture further south? I’d love to read what you think about Spain and Portugal, for instance.

SW : Oh dear – my current plan is to do a book about the Alps in the same style, as so much goes on around and in the mountains and it would force me to learn a lot more about Italian history – particularly Savoy and its key role in Europe. I can’t quite tell though whether I am being honest with myself or just want to spend some time pretending to research there for a bit! I loved Sue Prideaux’s life of Nietzsche so was thinking of going to Sils-Maria to enjoy the site of his greatest inspiration. Spain and Portugal are too harsh and too relentlessly Catholic for me! I did spend some time wanting to write a book about Borneo as its size and intricacy and grandeur seemed a great subject – but this was defeated by slowly realising that the material on Borneo in English was too limited and I could not write it without properly learning Malay and Dutch which, given how many other languages I had failed to learn, seemed to be an objective which exhibited a near farcical lack of self-knowledge.

Finally, somewhat like Germania before unification, even more like the empire you call Danubia, 

Lotharingia was a multilingual, multi-ethnic entity. Do you think its creation, persistence and eventual demise have anything to tell us about the current state of the European Union?

SW : I think that the European Union is itself a Lotharingian invention. The six original states—Belgium, Luxembourg, Germany, France, the Netherlands and Italy (the last a bit semi-detached) were all part of the original Lotharingia and the EU’s key cities – Brussels, Strasbourg, Aachen – are all Lotharingian. I end the book (with a flourish!) pointing out that the logic of the world wars had to be that further fighting in and about the region was intolerable and that pooled sovereignty was an obvious and intelligent way to achieve this.

A sub-theme in the book is the English/British tendency to rat on its European neighbours at irregular intervals, so our leaving the EU has many antecedents. In the past though we tended to have a plan B, like invading India or settling North America, which we rather seem to lack now.

‘The European Union is itself a Lotharingian invention’ - Simon Winder answers our questions on ‘Lotharingia’. London Review Bookshop  , April 2019. 

Simon Winder's eclectic histories have ranged all over the Germanic countries, and he has concluded his Germania trilogy with Lotharingia, a book about the kingdom of Lothair, which was located mainly in the modern low countries, and stretched all the way to the Roman borderlands. Lothair I, a grandson of Charlemagne ruled a kingdom sandwiched between the land that would become France under Charles the Bald, and the land that would become Germany under Louis the German.

Dan Snow chats to Simon Winder about his tour of the region's eccentricities and how it served as the site of many bloody, protracted battles, from the War of the Spanish Succession to World War 1.

Dan Snow's History Hit. April 18, 2019