The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 03, No. 17, March, 1859

The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 03, No. 17, March, 1859 - A Magazine of Literature, Art, and Politics

At the northwest corner of Switzerland, just on the turn of the Rhine from its westward course between Germany and Switzerland, to run northward between Germany and France, stands the old town of Ble. It is nominally Swiss; but its situation on the borders of three countries, and almost in them all, has given to the place itself and to its inhabitants a somewhat heterogeneous air. "It looks," says one traveller, "like a stranger lately arrived in a new colony, who, although he may have copied the dress and the manner of those with whom he has come to reside, wears still too much of his old costume to pass for a native, and too little to be received as a stranger." Perhaps we may get a better idea of the mixed nationality of the place by imagining a Swiss who speaks French with a German accent. Ble is an ancient city; though Rome was bending under the weight of more than a thousand years when the Emperor Valentinian built at this angle of the river a fortress which was called the Basilia. Houses soon began to cluster round it upon the ruins of an old Helvetian town, and thus Basel or Ble obtained its existence and its name. Ble suffered many calamities. War, pestilence, and earthquake alternately made it desolate. Whether we must enumerate among its misfortunes a Grand Ecclesiastical Council which assembled there in 1431, and sat for seventeen years, deposing one infallible Pope, and making another equally infallible, let theological disputants decide. But the assembling of this Council was of some service to us; for its Secretary, Aeneas Sylvius, (who, like the saucy little prima donna, was one of the noble and powerful Italian family, the Piccolomini, and afterward, as Pope Pius II., wore the triple crown which St. Peter did not wear,) in his Latin dedication of a history of the transactions of that body to the Cardinal St. Angeli, has left a description of Ble as it was in 1436. ......Buy Now (To Read More)

Product details

Ebook Number: 11687
Author: Various
Release Date: Mar 1, 2004
Format: eBook
Language: English