Alsace

Alsace is part of France, the area right up against Germany.  But it has been under German control at least as much as French over the centuries, and although everyone speaks French there, and the schools are run in French (and the hotels give you croissants in the morning), the locals speak a dialect of German at home.

So how did Alsace end up in the middle, so that in much of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries it was handed back and forth multiple times between the two countries?  Since this is my Life in the Middle Ages blog, you won't be surprised to learn that a big reason is medieval political history.

Let's go back to that magical year of 843 and the Treaty of Verdun.  Although Charlemagne, Roman emperor, and king of what is now France, Germany, the Benelux countries, and northern Italy, only had one surviving son when he died in 814, he had three grandsons who all wanted to kill each other.  They decided instead to divide Europe between them (hence the treaty).  Charles "the Bald" got France, Louis "the German" got Germany (you probably already guessed that), and Lothar, the oldest, got Lotharingia, the strip between France and Germany and extending down into Italy.  He also got to be crowned Roman emperor.

In the map above, the pink area was under the French king, the yellow area under the German king, and the green area is Lotharingia.

Alsace was already a perfectly good duchy, and it was included in Lotharingia (so was Lorraine, whose name is a corruption of Lotharingia).  As you can imagine, both the French and German kings decided Lotharingia was rightfully theirs.  For most of the Middle Ages, the German kings (who elbowed their way into being Roman emperors too) held Alsace (though Lorraine was French, it's where Joan of Arc came from).

Because it was always a border area, Alsace is still thick with castles.  It also has extremely cute half-timbered villages, the way one imagines places like Bavaria might look like.  Because Alsace was taken very quickly during World War II, it was devastated much less than most of Germany.  Visit cute Germany while still getting croissants for breakfast!

© C. Dale Brittain 2019
For more on medieval kings, see my new ebook, Positively Medieval: Life and Society in the Middle Ages.  The cover image is a staircase cut into the bedrock in an Alsatian castle, Fleckenstein.