Strasbourg, France

Strasbourg is the capital and principal city of the Alsace region in north-eastern France. Located close to the border with Germany, it is the capital of the Bas-Rhin department. The transnational Eurodistrict Strasbourg-Ortenau has a population of 884,988 inhabitants.

Strasbourg is the seat of several European institutions such as the Council of Europe (with its European Court of Human Rights, its European Directorate for the Quality of Medicines and its European Audiovisual Observatory) and the Eurocorps as well as the European Parliament and the European Ombudsman of the European Union. The city is the seat of the Central Commission for Navigation on the Rhine.

Strasbourg's historic city centre, the Grande ?le ("Grand Island"), was classified a World Heritage site by UNESCO in 1988, the first time such an honor was placed on an entire city centre. Strasbourg is fused into the Franco-German culture and although violently disputed throughout history, has been a bridge of unity between France and Germany for centuries, especially through the University of Strasbourg, currently the largest in France, and the co-existence of Catholic and Protestant culture.
Economically, Strasbourg is an important centre of manufacturing and engineering, as well as of road, rail, and river communications. The port of Strasbourg is the second largest on the Rhine after Duisburg, Germany. In terms of city rankings, Strasbourg has been ranked 3rd in France and 18th globally for innovation. The city has been largely omitted from top rankings based on quality of living.

The city's Gallicized name is of Germanic origin and means "Town (at the crossing) of roads". The modern Stras- is cognate to the German Stra?e / Strasse which itself is derived from Latin strata ("street"), while -bourg (French for "village") is cognate to the German -burg ("fortress, town, citadel") and English borough.

Winds coming from either direction being often deflected by these natural barriers, the average annual precipitation is low and the perceived summer temperatures can be inordinately high.

The first traces of human occupation in the environs of Strasbourg go back 600,000 years. And neolithic, bronze age and iron age artifacts have been uncovered by archeological excavations. But it was permanently settled by proto-Celts around 1300 BCE. Towards the end of the 3rd century BCE it developed into a Celtish township with a market called Argentorate. Drainage works converted the stilthouses to house built on dry land.

The Romans under Nero Claudius Drusus established a military outpost belonging to the Germania Superior Roman province at current Strasbourg's location, and named it Argentoratum. The Roman camp was destroyed by fire and rebuilt six times between the first and the fifth century AD: in 70, 97, 235, 355, in the last quarter of the 4th century and in the early years of the 5th century. It was under Trajan and after the fire of 97 that Argentoratum received its most extended and fortified shape.

While the centre of Argentoratum proper was situated on the Grande ?le (Cardo: current Rue du D?me, Decumanus: current Rue des Hallebardes) many Roman artifacts have also been found along the current Route des Romains in the suburb of K?nigshoffen, on the road that lead to it. Archeological diggings below the current ?glise Saint-?tienne in 1948 and 1956 have unearthed the apse of a church dating back to the late 4th century or early 5th century, and considered the oldest church in Alsace.

The Alemanni fought a Battle of Argentoratum against Rome in 357. They were defeated by Julian, later Emperor of Rome, and their king Chonodomarius was taken prisoner. On 2 January 366 the Alemanni crossed the frozen Rhine in large numbers, to invade the Roman Empire. Early in the fifth century the Alemanni appear to have crossed the Rhine, conquered, and then settled what is today Alsace and a large part of Switzerland.

In the 9th century it was known as Strazburg in the local language, documented in 842 by the Oaths of Strasbourg. This trilingual text is considered to contain, besides Latin and Old High German (teudisca lingua), also the oldest written variety of Gallo-Romance (lingua romana) clearly distinct from Latin, the ancestor of Old French. The town was also called Stratisburgum or Strateburgus in Latin, from which later came Strossburi in Alsatian and Strassburg in Standard German, and then Strasbourg in French.

A major commercial center, the Strasbourg came under control of the Holy Roman Empire in 923, through the homage paid by the Duke of Lorraine to German King Henry I. The early history of Strasbourg consists of a long conflict between its bishop and its citizens. The citizens emerged victorious after the Battle of Oberhausbergen in 1262, when King Philip of Swabia granted the city the status of Imperial Free City.

Around 1200, Gottfried von Strassburg wrote the Middle High German courtly romance Tristan, which is regarded, alongside Wolfram von Eschenbach's Parzival and the Nibelungenlied, as one of great narrative masterpieces of the German Middle Ages. A revolution in 1332 resulted in a broad-based city government with participation of the guilds, and Strasbourg declared itself a free republic.

Strasbourg Cathedral which began undergoing construction in the twelfth century, was completed in 1439 (though only the north tower was built) and became the World's Tallest Building, surpassing the Great Pyramid of Giza. A few years later, Johannes Gutenberg created the first European moveable type printing press in Strasbourg. In July 1518, an incident known as the Dancing Plague of 1518 struck residents of Strasbourg. Around 400 people were afflicted with dancing mania and danced constantly for weeks, most of them eventually dying from heart attack, stroke, or exhaustion.

Strasbourg was a center of humanist scholarship and early book-printing in the Holy Roman Empire and its intellectual and political influence contributed much to the establishment of Protestantism as an accepted denomination in the southwest of Germany (John Calvin had spent several years as a political refugee in the city).

After the invention of the printing press by Johannes Gutenberg around 1440, the first printing offices outside the inventor's hometown Mainz were established around 1460 in the Alsatian capital by pioneers Johannes Mentelin and Heinrich Eggestein. Subsequently, the first modern newspaper was published in Strasbourg in 1605, when Johann Carolus received the permission by the City of Strasbourg to print and distribute a weekly journal written in German by reporters from several central European cities.

The Free City of Strasbourg remained neutral during the Thirty Years' War. In September 1681 it was annexed by King Louis XIV of France, whose unprovoked annexation was recognized by the Treaty of Ryswick (1697). Strasbourg Cathedral, however, was restored from the Lutherans to the Catholics. The German Lutheran university persisted until the French Revolution. Famous students were Goethe and Herder.

In 1805, 1806 and 1809, Napoleon Bonaparte and his first wife, Josephine, stayed in Strasbourg. In 1810, his second wife Marie Louise, Duchess of Parma spent her first night on French soil in the palace. Another royal guest was king Charles X of France in 1828. In 1836, Louis-Napoleon Bonaparte unsuccessfully tried to lead his first Bonapartist coup in Strasbourg.

During a dinner in Strasbourg organized by Mayor Frédéric de Dietrich on 25 April 1792, Claude Joseph Rouget de Lisle composed "La Marseillaise". However, Strasbourg's status as a free city was revoked by the French Revolution. The tower was saved, however, when in May of the same year citizens of Strasbourg crowned it with a giant tin Phrygian cap. This artifact was later kept in the historical collections of the city until they were all destroyed in 1870. Source: Wikipedia