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National Geographic : 1970 Jul
Contents
centuries. His "small fortress" stood on a great stone promontory, known today as the Bock, which juts like the prow of a battle ship into the valley of the Alzette. I went to see the Bock, and the remains of the almost incredibly large fortress that grew out of the small fortress, one morning with Mr. Jean-Pierre Koltz, a Luxembourg engi neer who has been studying it and its history for most of his lifetime. It stands on the edge Green pearls, grapes spill from a picker's basket in the Moselle Valley, where ter raced vineyards have stepped the river banks since Roman colonists planted the first vines. Latin poets Ausonius and Fortunatus praised the light, dry wines of the north. Ausonius' poem Mosella extols the beauty of "the pleasant stream ... whose hills are overgrown with Bacchus' fragrant vines." of the old part of Luxembourg City (page 90). Mr. Koltz is a ferocious authority on every stone in the old fort and every battle in its stormy history. He carries a heavy walking stick which he converts like magic into a cannon, a rifle, a missing wall, gate, bridge, or a drawing tool to trace ancient battle lines on the floor. He raps on a stone battlement and sends its date of construction echoing through the dark fortress as if down the cor ridors of time. We looked at the site of Sigefrid's orig inal castle, a rectangular hole in the solid rock. Only his well, 145 feet deep, and a few walls remain-partially restored by the Gov ernment of Luxembourg in 1963 to celebrate its 1,000th anniversary. When Sigefrid owned it, it would have been perhaps five stories tall, a modest place as castles go. Eventually, with more walls, towers, bat tlements, drawbridges, gates, and rings of outer bastions, it grew to be one of the mighti est fortresses in Europe; it has been called the Gibraltar of the north. But that was not until several centuries after Sigefrid. John the Blind Lived Boldly During these centuries Sigefrid's dynasty thrived. The House of Luxembourg produced a brilliant succession of kings and princes, as well as four Holy Roman Emperors. But of all Sigefrid's descendants, the most audacious was John the Blind. Count of Luxembourg and King of Bohe mia, John was a rake and a hellion. He liked dice, horses, women, travel, high living but most of all he liked fighting. He sought out battles all over Europe, from Lithuania to Italy to Paris. When he lacked a real war rarely, in those days-he organized jousts involving hundreds of knights and nobles. This all cost money, and John recklessly mort gaged or sold castles and cities to raise it. He ruined one eye fighting in Lithuania, lost the other to a surgeon in Montpellier. Then, in 1346, he heard of a great struggle pending between the French and English forces in northern France. "Do you think," he asked his friends, "I am so blind that I can not find my way to France?" That was the battle of Crecy, the famous fight in which the clanging knighthood of the continent was matched against skilled English archers with longbows under Edward III and his son, the "Black Prince" of Wales. John, who could see neither bows nor arrows, found his way to the front by having his
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