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CHAPTER 3 Water Sorcery ~nineteenth and twentieth centuries marked the high point ofRhine -.1 ~:gineering. But some modest modifications did occur well before then, almost always when a powerful imperial lord, or a coterie ofambitious local rulers, ruled on its banks. The Romans boldly spoke of bullying the Rhine-"coercendo Rheno" in Tacitus's memorable phrase.' In actuality, they just tweaked the river here and there, constructing a few short-lived bridges and dams, mostly in the delta region, where the river's mercurial braids interfered with the movement of their troops. For centuries they relied on the river to transport wine, salt, fur, marble, and amber, but they never realized their dream of linking the Rhine to the Mediterranean by way of a Mosel-Saone-Rhone canal. Charlemagne, the great Frankish king, thought in similarly grandiose terms. After bringing most ofthe river and its watershed under his control by A.D. 800, he tried to build a canal to link the Rhine and the Danube via the Main river. But all that his workers managed to construct was a useless ditch, and as soon as his grandsons divided the imperial inheritance the Rhine returned to its more familiar role as a fluid boundary between contested terrains. The Holy Roman Empire also brought some semblance of unity over the Rhine. Yet always lurking behind the empire's unified facade were the innumerable little states that made a journey down the river a web ofborder crossings. During the medieval period, the Hanseatic League also established a presence on the Rhine, which acted as a stimulus to trade (mostly in wine and herring) between Cologne and the Baltic Sea. There was even enough trans-Alpine trade in the early modern era for Fernand Braudel to call the Rhine "an arm of the Mediterranean Sea." 2 But because the river remained noted more for its transportation chokepoints-toll booths, 47 WATER SORCERY cliffs, and reefs-than for its transportation links, it languished as a commercial backwater, at least by Baltic and Mediterranean standards.3 Modest navigational improvements did occur slowly over time at a few key locations, almost always where an ambitious local prince or warlord held sway. Oxbows and curves were removed at Liedolsheim, Germersheim, Neupotz, Jockgrim, Kembs, Daxland, Dettenheim, and elsewhere during the medieval era. A nine-meter gap, known as the Binger Loch, was painstakingly carved into the Bingen reef (the quartzite vein that cuts across the Middle Rhine channel) to ease shipping during low-water periods. Small dams were emplaced here and there to control local flooding, and towpaths were built to pull boats upstream along commercially lucrative river stretches.4 In 1707, the United Provinces of the Netherlands constructed the Pannerden canal, which gave the Dutch the ability to regulate the distribution of Rhine waters at the point where the Waal and Nederrijn-Lek bifurcate.5 A remarkable feat of eighteenth-century engineering, it was a harbinger of things to come. Not long thereafter, Prussia under Frederick the Great constructed a series of dams on the Ruhr tributary to make it serviceable for coal transportation-yet another feat of engineering that bespoke the future.6 It was, however, far more characteristic of Rhine inhabitants simply to accommodate themselves to the rhythms and whims ofthe river. In Roman times, the town of Breisach lay on the left bank of the Upper Rhine, but by the tenth century the river's banks had shifted to such an extent that Breisach was situated on an island. By the thirteenth century it lay on the left bank again, and after the fourteenth century it was once again on the right bank.7 Such were the vagaries ofthe natural flowing Rhine until Tulla began to reengineer it. Tulla and the Upper Rhine Tulla was for the Rhine what Napoleon was for Europe: the remaker of worlds and the redrawer of maps. Though later engineers would have a greater impact on the river's profile, no one is more closely associated with the creation of the modern Rhine than Tulla. Born on the right bank, in Karlsruhe, he devoted his entire life to shortening and straightening the Upper Rhine stretch from Basel to Bingen. In his youth, Tulla showed a gift for mathematics and a bent for engineering. Under the patronage of the local prince, the Margrave Karl Friedrich, he studied and traveled in Saxony, Holland, and elsewhere. He rounded out his education from I80! [18.191.5.239] Project MUSE (2024-04-24...

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