Burgundian-Habsburg Fortress & Counter-Reformation

Habsburg rule, the Dual Monarchy and the multi-ethnic Austro-Hungarian world.

1 chapter

1308 - 1443

The House of Luxembourg ascended from a Rhineland county to imperial dignity when Henry VII was elected Holy Roman Emperor in 1308. His son John the Blind — King of Bohemia, Count of Luxembourg, who died fighting at Crécy blind and tethered to his knights — founded the Schueberfouer on 20 October 1340. This market fair, timed to the feast of Saint Bartholomew (24 August), was originally a harvest-season trading event inside the city walls. Nearly seven centuries later, it still runs every late August as Luxembourg's largest public festival, drawing nearly two million visitors — a calendar-shift continuity from medieval market to modern funfair that preserves the Bartholomew timing even as the fair's Luxembourgish name (from Schuedbuerg/Schadebourg) distinguishes its civic identity from German Marktradition. At Vianden, one of the most impressive medieval castles in the Ardennes-Eifel region stands testament to the era's feudal architecture. Built from the 11th century and completed in the 14th, it was a seat of the powerful Counts of Vianden before passing to the House of Nassau-Oranje.

1795 - 1940

French Revolutionary armies occupied Luxembourg in 1795, ending the fortress city's old regime and inaugurating a century of transformation. The Dancing Procession, banned in 1786 by Emperor Joseph II, was revived in 1802 — its first revival after ecclesiastical suppression, foreshadowing the post-WWII revival that would inscribe it with national-resistance meaning. The Treaty of London (1867) granted Luxembourg independence and neutrality, and the fortress — that "Gibraltar of the North" — was demolished stone by stone between 1867 and 1883, opening the city to the modern world. From the 1850s, the red earth of the Minett region drew steel industrialists and immigrant workers. Esch-sur-Alzette grew from 810 inhabitants (1821) to an industrial powerhouse; Italians arrived from the 1890s, establishing their own theatre company and cultural associations. By 1910, immigrants constituted 15.3% of the population. The Centre de Documentation sur les Migrations Humaines (CDMH) in Dudelange, housed in the former Gare-Usines since 1993, documents this story. Meanwhile, the Éimaischen — the Easter Monday potters' market where Péckvillercher (clay cuckoo whistles) are sold in Luxembourg City's old quarter and Nospelt — was first documented in 1827, preserving a craft-seasonal rhythm where Easter's Christian calendar intersects with spring renewal.

698 - 1308

Anglo-Saxon missionaries and Frankish counts transformed the ritual landscape between the 7th and 13th centuries (the Migration Period of 400-700 left limited visitor-legible traces in Luxembourg). In 698, Willibrord — a Northumbrian monk who became the "Apostle to the Frisians" — founded a Benedictine abbey at Echternach, creating one of Europe's earliest centers of Christianization. The Dancing Procession (Sprangpressessioun) that still honors him every Whit Tuesday has contested origins: some scholars trace it to pagan ecstatic dance, others to a "dancing plague" of the 14th century, and a fiddler legend offers a folkloric third path. The Church itself has alternately banned and revived the procession — a tension that reveals the ongoing negotiation between popular ritual form and orthodox meaning. In 963, Count Siegfried acquired a rocky promontory known as the Bock and built a castle that would give its name to the entire territory: Lucilinburhuc, "little fortress." This act founded the County of Luxembourg. The original castle foundations are still visible inside the later casemates — climb down and you can touch the 10th-century stone where the county began.

1940 - 1945

Nazi Germany invaded Luxembourg on 10 May 1940 and annexed it into the Reich in 1942. The occupation programme aimed at total Germanisation: French was banned, Luxembourgish identity was persecuted, and young Luxembourgers were conscripted into the Wehrmacht. In October 1941, when occupiers conducted a census demanding declaration of nationality, mother tongue, and racial group, 95% of civilians answered "Luxembourgish" to all three — a collective act of defiance that remains one of the most powerful symbols of national identity. On 31 August 1942, a general strike broke out in Wiltz to protest conscription; 21 strikers were sentenced to death, and roughly 4,200 individuals were deported. The clergy kept the Octave and Dancing Procession alive secretly during the ban. Of 446 priests, 58 were arrested and 7 killed in Dachau for resisting Germanisation. Post-war, the Virgin Mary (Consolatrix Afflictorum) became a symbol of national resistance, and the Octave's closing procession — where the Grand Ducal family, government, and judiciary walk alongside parish pilgrims — fuses sacred and civic identity in a way forged directly by the occupation experience. The resistance narrative is central to post-war identity, though researchers should acknowledge that revival was both genuine popular practice and a statement of national identity — the two are inseparable but should not be presented as uncomplicated heroism. In Diekirch, the National Museum of Military History documents the Battle of the Bulge, which devastated northern Luxembourg in late 1944.