Luxembourg

From Siegfried's rock to the heart of Europe: a thousand-year fortress that lost two-thirds of its land yet became a founding capital of the Union.

Luxembourg's history is that of a tiny territory whose strategic rock made it one of Europe's most contested places. The story begins in 963, when Count Siegfried of the Ardennes acquired the promontory of Lucilinburhuc on the Alzette and raised the castle that gave the country its name. From his line sprang the House of Luxembourg, which in the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries gave the Holy Roman Empire emperors Henry VII, Charles IV and Sigismund. The rock grew into a fortress so formidable it was nicknamed the 'Gibraltar of the North', and for centuries it passed between Burgundian, Spanish, French and Austrian hands. Luxembourg was repeatedly partitioned: France took a slice at the Treaty of the Pyrenees in 1659; the Congress of Vienna in 1815 raised it to a Grand Duchy under the Dutch king while placing it in the German Confederation; the Treaty of London of 1839 handed the larger French-speaking half to the new kingdom of Belgium; and the Treaty of London of 1867, ending the Luxembourg Crisis between France and Prussia, guaranteed the country's perpetual neutrality and ordered the great fortress demolished. The crown separated from the Netherlands in 1890 under the Nassau-Weilburg dynasty. Twice occupied by Germany in the World Wars, Luxembourg abandoned neutrality after 1945 and became a founding member of Benelux, NATO, the European Coal and Steel Community and the European Union, its capital one of the three official seats of the EU.