Corpus of Electronic Texts Edition
The Flight of the Earls (Author: Tadhg Ó Cianáin)

section 67

The next day the princes set out on coaches which the Duke gave them to the church of Saint Nicholas, two leagues' journey from the aforesaid city. One of the hands of Saint Nicholas was shown to them. They advanced from there to a little town called Lunéville on the bank of the river we have already mentioned. On Tuesday, the eleventh of March, they proceeded from there eight leagues to the town named St. Die. The weather and the roads were very good throughout that period. On the next day they crossed the mountain of Saint Martin over hard, difficult roads covered with ice and snow. They stopped for a short time in a small town where the Duke's country and Germany meet and separate from each other. They left behind them the Duke's territory, with its abundance of


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vines and wheat and every good fruit, its beautiful rivers, its wide, many-rivered, watery plains, and its tall, fruit-laden woods on the river of Nancy, which is called Meurthe. The Duke has seven mines where salt is manufactured and prepared. He makes one million profit each year by the rent of the seven mines.

Give a blessing for the soul of the writer.

There is another small city in the country out of which he gets eleven hundred hogsheads of wine for rent every year. Gold and silver are being continually coined for him. It is not every crowned king in Christendom whose rent and profit out of his dominions each year exceeds his. His country is thirty-five leagues in length, and it is as a garden in the very centre of Christendom, giving neither obedience nor submission to any king or prince in the world, but ever steadfast, strong, and unbending in the faith of God's Church.