Luxembourg

Luxembourg grew on a sandstone rock above the Alzette and Pétrusse valleys, the Bock, where the counts built a castle in the tenth century and the city became seat of the county. Countess Ermesinde gave it a charter of freedom in 1244. The counts rose high: Henry VII was elected King of the Romans and crowned emperor in 1312, and his son John the Blind married the heiress of Bohemia and became King of Bohemia. About 1340, under John, new fortifications were raised around the town, and the fair that is later known as the Schueberfouer was established in the same year.

John fell at Crécy in 1346, and his son Charles IV became emperor, so that the counts of Luxembourg held the crowns of Bohemia and the Empire. In 1443 the Burgundians under Philip the Good conquered it, and the duchy passed to the Burgundian, then the Spanish and the Austrian Habsburgs, who repeatedly strengthened the fortress so that by the sixteenth century it was one of the strongest in Europe. Charles V inherited the duchy and had borne the title of Duke of Luxembourg as a child.

On 11 June 1554 lightning struck the Franciscan church, where gunpowder was stored in the attic, and the explosion set the thatched roofs of the upper town on fire, destroying a large part of it. Spain began digging 23 km of casemate tunnels in 1644. Louis XIV's army besieged the city in December 1683, and Vauban directed the assault that took it on 4 June 1684. The Treaty of Ryswick returned it to Spain in 1697, and from 1714 it was Austrian. The French revolutionary army besieged it for seven months before the garrison surrendered in 1795; Carnot called it the best fortress in the world except Gibraltar, and the city became the capital of the department of Forêts.