STRASBOURG owes both its name - "the city of the roads" - and its wealth to its position on the west bank of the Rhine, long one of the great natural transport arteries of Europe. The city's medieval commercial pre-eminence was damaged by too close an involvement in the religious struggles of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, but recovered with the city's absorption into France in 1681. Along with the rest of Alsace, Strasbourg suffered annexation by Germany from 18... [More]