Lorraine was traded to a deposed Polish king so France could inherit it
In 1737 European diplomats solved a succession tangle with a strange swap. The Duke of Lorraine got Tuscany instead, and his duchy went to Stanislaw Leszczynski, a Polish king who had lost his throne and happened to be Louis XV's father-in-law. When he died in 1766, Lorraine quietly became French.
The name reaches back to Lothair II, who ruled a Carolingian kingdom between France and Germany from 855 to 869; Lotharingen roughly means Lothair's realm. In 953 King Otto I gave the duchy of Lotharingia to his brother Bruno, Archbishop of Cologne, who split it into northern and southern halves in 959. The division stuck after his death in 965, though scholars still debate how and when it happened. The northern, Lower duchy broke apart by the 12th century, leaving only a title, while the southern, Upper one, lying further up the river system along the Moselle, became simply the Duchy of Lorraine, with Nancy as its capital.
Sitting on the western edge of the Holy Roman Empire, it drew covetous neighbours. Charles the Bold of Burgundy campaigned for it in 1475 and died at the Battle of Nancy in 1477; after 1473 the House of Lorraine held the ducal seat. Meanwhile pieces fell away. Protestant princes handed the Three Bishoprics of Metz, Toul and Verdun to Henry II of France in 1552 in return for his support.
France pressed harder in the 17th century. Taking advantage of imperial weakness in the Thirty Years' War, it occupied the duchy in 1634 and held it until 1661, invaded again in 1670, and gave it back only under the 1697 Treaty of Ryswick. Duke Leopold, remembered as Leopold the Good, kept reigning from the Chateau de Luneville even when French troops held Nancy during the War of the Spanish Succession.
The final arrangement after the War of the Polish Succession had a lasting echo: Francis Stephen, the displaced duke, married Maria Theresa and kept the Lorraine title, so the Habsburgs became the House of Habsburg-Lorraine. The duchy produced painters Claude Lorrain and Georges de La Tour. Two local tongues, Romance Lorrain and Germanic Lorraine Franconian, survive among minorities after compulsory French schooling largely displaced them.
Source: Duchy of Lorraine
