great military roads met at this spot.
They called the place, surrounded by vine-
clad hills, Divodurum, but from the half
German tribe known as the Mediomatrici,
the name of the strong fort on the Moselle
became corrupted about the fifth century
to Mettis, from whence it slid easily down
to Metz, or Mess, as it is now pronounced.
Grey old Roman walls remain here and
there, and there are fragments near the
southern outworks of an amphitheatre and
naumachia (for sham sea-fights, on the
old Sadler's Wells principle), and a great
aqueduct once stalked away southward, of
which seventeen gigantic arches still
remain out of one hundred and sixty-eight,
to frame the pleasant landscape at Jouey
on the Moselle, eight kilometres off. Metz
was a good deal troubled about A.D. 70 by
some riotous troops of that wild boar,
Vitellius, and in 452, when it had quite
forgotten those troubles, by Attila, whose
Huns sacked, burned, and destroyed everything
portable, consumable, and destructible.
At the death of Clovis the city
became the capital of the kingdom of
Austrasia, and later the capital of Lorraine.
In 988 it was made a free imperial town,
and became a self-supporting neutral
fortress on the border of Charlemagne's old
domains.

Metz played an important part in the wars
between the daring Maurice of Saxony
and his crafty enemy, Charles the Fifth.
The French, as allies of Maurice, marched
into Lorraine in 1552, arid took Toul and
Verdun. The Constable Montmorency,
having artfully obtained permission to pass
through Metz with a small guard, so
quibbled about the word "small" that he
introduced troops enough to capture the strong
city. Charles almost immediately advanced
to besiege Metz, to which Francisco of
Lorraine (that young Duke of Guise who
afterwards took Calais from the English)
had already been sent by Henry the Second
to direct the operations of its sixty-six
thousand inhabitants. This brave, sagacious,
and ambitious prince had brought with him
Condé, several princes of the blood, and
many noblemen of rank, as volunteers to
aid in the chivalrous defence against one
hundred thousand Germans.

The duke found the town in a confused
and helpless state. The suburbs were
large, the walls in places weak, and without
ramparts. The ditch was narrow, the old
towers stood at too great a distance apart.
He at once ordered the suburbs to be pulled
down, without sparing the monasteries or
churches, not even St. Arnulph, where
several French kings had been interred, the
holy robes and sacred bones being, however,
all removed in solemn processions. The
duke and his officers laboured with their
own hands in pulling down the old houses
that impeded the fire from the walls. The
magazines were filled with provisions and
military stores, the mills in the nearest
villages burnt, and all the corn and forage
removed or destroyed. The young duke got
up such an enthusiasm in the town that
the people began to long to see the Spanish
banners approaching, and the moment the
Duke of Alva and the Marquis of Marignano,
Charles's generals, appeared, the
Metzers attacked the vanguard with great
success. The sallies of the French were
so hot and incessant that the duke had
indeed to frequently hide the keys of the
gate to prevent the young French
gallants, his companions, too rashly and too
frequently exposing their lives. Behind
every breach made by the German cannon
new works sprang up like hydras' heads.
Charles, against the advice of his generals,
for it was now October, determined to
press the tedious siege on through the
winter, in spite of the incessant rain and
snow. He himself, though ill with the
gout, was brought from Thionville to
Metz to urge forward the batteries.
Provisions now became scarce, for the French
cavalry were cutting off the convoys, and
disease was spreading among the Italians
and Spaniards, who suffered from the
climate. Charles, maddened at the delay,
ordered a general assault, but the
discouraged army, seeing the troops of the
enemy eager for the combat, refused to
advance, and the emperor, swearing they
did not deserve the name of men, retired
angrily to his quarters. Charles then tried
the slower but more secure way of sapping;
but the Duke of Guise sunk counter-mines,
and everywhere stopped his advance. After
fifty-six days before the town, the emperor
at last reluctantly consented to retire.
Thirty thousand men had fallen by the
enemy's steel and lead, or by the invisible
sword of the pestilence. The French, when
they broke out of Metz, found the imperial
camp full of the dead and dying.

"I now perceive," exclaimed the
emperor, bitterly, "that Fortune resembles
other women; she leaves the old for the
young."

The old Porte des Allemands on the
east of the town still bears traces of the
emperor's cannon-shot.