Metz in the context of Grand Est

Lorraine is a historical area of Eastern France that today falls within the administrative region of Grand Est. It was the medieval kingdom called Lotharingia (855–959 AD), after Emperor Lothair I or King Lothair II, which extended further north and came to be ruled by the Holy Roman Empire as the Duchy of Lorraine, before the Kingdom of France annexed it in 1766.

From 1982 until January 2016, Lorraine was an administrative region of France. In 2016, under a reorganisation, it became part of the new region Grand Est. As a region in modern France, Lorraine consisted of the four departments Meurthe-et-Moselle, Meuse, Moselle and Vosges (from a historical point of view the Haute-Marne department is also located in the region), containing 2,337 communes. Metz is the regional prefecture. The largest metropolitan area of Lorraine is Nancy, which was the seat of the duchy for centuries.

Pottery was produced in enormous quantities in ancient Rome, mostly for utilitarian purposes. It is found all over the former Roman Empire and beyond. Monte Testaccio is a huge waste mound in Rome made almost entirely of broken amphorae used for transporting and storing liquids and other products – in this case probably mostly Spanish olive oil, which was landed nearby, and was the main fuel for lighting, as well as its use in the kitchen and washing in the baths.

It is usual to divide Roman domestic pottery broadly into coarse wares and fine wares, the former being the everyday pottery jars, dishes and bowls that were used for cooking or the storage and transport of foods and other goods, and in some cases also as tableware, and which were often made and bought locally. Fine wares were serving vessels or tableware used for more formal dining, and are usually of more decorative and elegant appearance. Some of the most important of these were made at specialised pottery workshops, and were often traded over substantial distances, not only within, but also between, different provinces of the Roman Empire. For example, dozens of different types of British coarse and fine wares were produced locally, yet many other classes of pottery were also imported from elsewhere in the Empire. The manufacture of fine wares such as terra sigillata took place in large workshop complexes that were organised along industrial lines and produced highly standardised products that lend themselves well to precise and systematic classification.

The Golden Bull of 1356 was a decree issued by the Imperial Diet at Nuremberg and Metz (Diet of Metz, 1356/57) headed by the Emperor Charles IV which fixed, for a period of more than four hundred years, important aspects of the constitutional structure of the Holy Roman Empire. It was named the Golden Bull for the golden seal it carried.

In June 2013, the Golden Bull was included in the UNESCO's Memory of the World Register.

Verdun (/vɜːrˈdʌn/ vur-DUN, UK also /ˈvɛərdʌn/ VAIR-dun; US also /vɛərˈdʌn/ vair-DUN; French: [vɛʁdœ̃] ; official name before 1970: Verdun-sur-Meuse) is a city in the Meuse department in Grand Est, northeastern France. It is an arrondissement of the department.

In 843, the Treaty of Verdun, which divided the Carolingian Empire into three kingdoms—considered the foundation of Germany and France—was signed there. An episcopal principality of the Holy Roman Empire since the 10th century, Verdun was subjugated by France in 1552, during the "Voyage to Austrasia". Along with the other free cities of the Empire, Metz and Toul, it formed the province of the Three Bishoprics, which was attached to the Kingdom of France in 1648 by the Treaty of Münster.

Paul the Deacon (c. 720s – 13 April 799) was a Lombard monk, historian, and scholar whose works were widely used throughout the early Middle Ages. Best known for the Historia Langobardorum, a narrative of Lombard origins and migrations, he is one of the most significant early medieval historians of Italy. Paul was educated in the Lombard kingdom and later became active within the intellectual circles of Charlemagne’s court, where he contributed to the broader scholarly activity associated with the Carolingian Renaissance.

In addition to his historical writings, Paul produced a continuation of Eutropius’s Breviarium, a collection of homilies for the Frankish church, a history of the bishops of Metz, poems and epitaphs, and an epitome of Festus’s De verborum significatu. His works drew on a wide range of classical, patristic, and early medieval sources and circulated extensively in monastic and ecclesiastical settings. Through both his Lombard identity and his Carolingian patronage, Paul played an important role in shaping the historical and literary culture of the eighth and ninth centuries.

The University of Lorraine (French: Université de Lorraine), abbreviated as UL, is a public research university based in Lorraine, Grand Est region, France. It was created on 1 January 2012, by the merger of Henri Poincaré University, Nancy 2 University, Paul Verlaine University – Metz and the National Polytechnic Institute of Lorraine (INPL). It aimed to unify the main colleges of the Lorraine region. The merger process started in 2009 with the creation of a Pôle de recherche et d'enseignement supérieur (PRES) and was completed in 2012.

The university has 51 campus sites, over the Lorraine region, the main ones are around Nancy and Metz. The other sites are in the towns of Epinal, Saint-Dié-des-Vosges, Bar-Le-Duc, Lunéville, Thionville-Yutz, Longwy, Forbach, Saint-Avold, Sarreguemines.

Paul-Marie Verlaine (/vɛərˈlɛn/ vair-LEN; French: [pɔl maʁi vɛʁlɛn]; 30 March 1844 – 8 January 1896) was a French poet, writer and critic associated with the Symbolist, Parnassianist, and Decadent movements. He is considered one of the paramount exponents of the fin de siècle in French and international poetry.

Born in Metz to a petit-bourgeois family, Verlaine bore a lifelong interest in the arts, whether literary, musical or visual. His début collection, Poèmes saturniens (1866), were released at the age of twenty-two; they were published by Alphonse Lemerre. Verlaine's tempestuous sexual relationship with young poet Arthur Rimbaud (ten years his junior and under eighteen years, and while he himself had a wife and infant son), a member of the Zutistes, aroused great controversy; the couple peregrinated throughout England and Belgium until their split in 1873, which was caused by him wounding Rimbaud with a revolver. Following trial, Verlaine was sentenced to two years in prison for battery and sodomy. During his sentence, Verlaine reverted to practising Catholicism and composed Sagesse (published 1880), Jadis et naguère (published 1884) and Parallèlement (published 1889). As his reputation grew, he became increasingly haunted by guilt and paranoia, lapsing into depression, alcohol and chemical abuse and disease, culminating in his death in Paris from acute pneumonia.

Midnight is the transition time from one day to the next – the moment when the date changes, on the local official clock time for any particular jurisdiction. By clock time, midnight is the opposite of noon, differing from it by 12 hours.

Solar midnight is the time opposite to solar noon, when the Sun is closest to the nadir, and the night is equidistant from sunset and sunrise. Due to the advent of time zones, which regularize time across a range of meridians, and daylight saving time, solar midnight rarely coincides with 12 midnight on the clock. Solar midnight depends on longitude and time of the year rather than on time zone. In ancient Roman timekeeping, midnight was halfway between dusk and dawn (i.e., solar midnight), varying according to the seasons.

Tobias Cohn or Tobias Kohn (in Hebrew, Toviyyah ben Moshe ha-Kohen, Tuvia Harofeh – Tuvia the doctor; in Polish, Tobiasz Kohn) (also referred to as Toviyah Kats) (1652–1729) was a Polish-Jewish physician of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. He was born at Metz in 1652.

Sigebert I (c. 535 – c. 575) was a Frankish king of Austrasia from the death of his father in 561 to his own death. He was the third surviving son out of four of Clotaire I and Ingund. His reign found him mostly occupied with a successful civil war against his half-brother, Chilperic.

When Clotaire I died in 561, his kingdom was divided, in accordance with Frankish custom, among his four sons: Sigebert became king of the northeastern portion, known as Austrasia, with its capital at Rheims, to which he added further territory on the death of his brother, Charibert I, in 567 or 568; Charibert himself had received the kingdom centred on Paris; Guntram received the Kingdom of Burgundy with its capital at Orléans; and the youngest son, the aforementioned Chilperic, received Soissons, which became Neustria when he received his share of Charibert's kingdom. Incursions by the Avars, a fierce nomadic tribe related to the Huns, caused Sigebert to move his capital from Rheims to Metz. He repelled their attacks twice, in 562 and c. 568. He was defeated and captured by Huns (Avars), but at the end he made peace with them.

Theuderic II (also spelled Theuderich, Theoderic or Theodoric; in French, Thierry) (c. 587–613), king of Burgundy (595–613) and Austrasia (612–613), was the second son of Childebert II. At his father's death in 595, he received Guntram's kingdom of Burgundy, with its capital at Orléans, while his elder brother, Theudebert II, received their father's kingdom of Austrasia, with its capital at Metz. He also received the lordship of the cities (civitates) of Toulouse, Agen, Nantes, Angers, Saintes, Angoulême, Périgueux, Blois, Chartres, and Le Mans. During his minority, and later, he reigned under the guidance of his grandmother Brunhilda, evicted from Austrasia by his brother Theudebert II.

In 596, Clotaire II, king of Neustria, and Fredegund, Clotaire's mother, took Paris, which was supposed to be held in common. Fredegund, then her son's regent, sent a force to Laffaux and the armies of Theudebert and Theuderic were defeated.

The Mediomatrici (Gaulish: *Medio-māteres) were according to Caesar a Gaulish tribe at the frontier to the Belgicae dwelling in the present-day regions Lorraine, Upper Moselle during the Iron Age and the Roman period.

European route E25 is a north–south European route from Hook of Holland in the Netherlands, to Palermo in Italy which includes ferry crossings from Genoa to Bastia (Corsica), from Bonifacio to Porto Torres (Sardinia) and from Cagliari to Palermo (Sicily).

It passes through the following cities:Hook of Holland – Rotterdam – Utrecht - Eindhoven – Maastricht – Liège – Bastogne – Arlon – Luxembourg City – Metz – Saint-Avold – Strasbourg – Mulhouse – Basel – Olten – Bern – Lausanne – Geneva – Mont Blanc Tunnel – Aosta – Ivrea – Vercelli – Alessandria – Genoa ... Bastia – Porto-Vecchio – Bonifacio ... Porto Torres – Sassari – Cagliari ... Palermo.

Jacques François Joseph Swebach-Desfontaines, known as Fontaine (19 March 1769, Metz - 10 December 1823, Paris) was a French painter and designer. He is best known for his genre and battle scenes.

Gerard (c. 1030 – 14 April 1070), also known as Gerard the Wonderful, was a Lotharingian nobleman. He was the count of Metz and Châtenois from 1047 to 1048, when his brother Duke Adalbert resigned them to him upon his becoming the Duke of Upper Lorraine. On Adalbert's death the next year, Gerard became duke, a position that he held until his death. In contemporary documents, he is called Gerard of Alsace (after the fact that he had some land in Alsace), Gerard of Chatenoy (after an ancestral castle near Neufchâteau), or Gerard of Flanders (after his wife's homeland).

He was the second son of Gerhard IV of Metz, count of Metz, and Gisela who was possibly a daughter of Theodoric I, Duke of Upper Lorraine. Henry III, Holy Roman Emperor, invested Adalbert with Lorraine in 1047 after confiscating it from Godfrey III. Godfrey did not back down, however, and killed Adalbert in battle. Henry subsequently bestowed it on Gerard, but the deposed duke continued to stir. Godfrey had the support of a faction of the nobles who did not want a strong hand at the ducal helm and Gerard was imprisoned. Gerard, however, had the support of the chiefest of his bishops, that of Toul, Bruno of Eguisheim-Dagsburg (later the sainted Pope Leo IX), who procured his liberation in 1049. The emperor gave him troops to assist him in his fight, for the rebels had the support of some elements in the church. Gerard himself remained, as his brother had, faithful to the end to the imperial dynasty and his descendants would remain so as well even into the Hohenstaufen years.

The Metz Epitome is a late antique summary of earlier historical fragments and covers the conquests of Alexander the Great between Hyrcania and northwest India. The only surviving manuscript was found in Metz, from which the text's name originates. The manuscript was destroyed during the Second World War, but there are two transcriptions of the original. The Epitome was part of the same manuscript as the so-called Liber de Morte Alexandri Magni Testamentumque (which may have been written by the same epitomator, as suggested by E. Baynham).

The sources of the anonymous author have much in common with the historian Cleitarchus, through the writings of Diodorus Siculus and Quintus Curtius Rufus. Non-Cleitarchan elements in the text seem to reflect a certain Hebraic view concerning Alexander.

Lorraine Regional Natural Park (French: Parc naturel régional de Lorraine) is a protected area of pastoral countryside in the Grand Est region of northeastern France, in the historic region of Lorraine. The park covers a total area of 205,000 hectares (510,000 acres). The parkland is split in two non-contiguous parcels of land between the cities of Metz and Nancy, and spans the three departments of Meuse, Meurthe-et-Moselle, and Moselle. According to the World Database on Protected Areas, it is an IUCN category V area.

Ancient ruins and modern monuments are common throughout the area. The land was officially designated a regional natural park in 1974.

Sankt Johann (German pronunciation: [zaŋkt ˈjoːhan]) is part of the city of Saarbrücken in Saarland, Germany. It lies on the right bank of the Saar, opposite historic Saarbrücken, and is 79 kilometres (49 mi) northeast of Metz, France.

Sankt Johann got its name from a chapel erected there. From 1321 to 1859 it formed a single town with Saarbrücken, and then was united to form one municipality with Saarbrücken and Malstatt-Burbach. It joined with the former Saarbrücken, Burbach-Malstatt, and Sankt Arnual to form the present-day city of Saarbrücken in 1909.