Europe's Fountainhead

“Three Rivers

 

By Robert Winder

 

Pegasus, 352 pages, $29.95

 

'Three major rivers, flowing in three different directions, carving out the three valleys gave rise to three great civilizations -- French, German, and Italian." It may have been a "geological fluke," yet "without the pattern laid down by these waters, Europe would simply not exist in the form we know it."

 

So suggests Robert Winder in "Three Rivers: The Extraordinary Waterways That Created Europe." Mr. Winder, the former literary editor of the Independent and the author of "Bloody Foreigners: The Story of Immigration to Britain" (2004), is consumed with how rivers affect the fates of those who live near and depend on them. Tracing a river's meandering course, the author believes, can reveal the historic transformation of the lands it courses through, from its glacial origins above, to the riverbanks and landscapes below, and the settlements and cities that formed nearby.

 

Mr. Winder applies his thesis to the Rhine, the Rhone and the Po rivers. Although their routes are distinct, they emerge from "the same patch of Swiss mist" a few miles apart, sharing a tangled, interconnected history and a future that cannot be disconnected from the well-being of the countries they pass through.

 

The author begins with the observation that all three monumental waterways originate near the Alpine pass of St. Gotthard, about 100 miles southeast of Basel, Switzerland.

 

Alternating sparkling wit with sobering erudition, he surveys the geology, geography, ecology, and social and cultural history that came to define the rivers. He points to the particular features of their different regions, the local climate and soils that allow them to produce the singular foods, flavors and fragrances the lands are known for.

 

"The Rhone is a land of olive oil," he writes, "the Rhine a pasture full of butter, the Po alive with the aromas of Parmesan and prosciutto."

 

All too frequently, though, the waterways have been turned into rivers of blood. Sometimes the fatalities resulted from catastrophic natural disasters. Among the most horrifying, Mr. Winder recounts, were the massive floods above the Rhone, along the Gietro Glacier in the Swiss Alps, that broke through the ice dams and killed 140 in 1595 and 36 in 1818.

 

But it was war that stained the rivers most darkly. The Rhine -- which, as Mr. Winder writes, served "both as a frontier and a highway," simultaneously connecting and separating Germany, France and Italy -- was the most unquiet of the three. Rome's ancient rulers were among the first and most frequent combatants to cross and recross the Rhine in their futile quest to conquer Germania.

 

The brutal wars that followed the fall of Rome rarely paused over the next 2,000 years, ranging across the Middle Ages, the Reformation, Napoleon's rise and fall, World Wars I and II, and numerous episodes in between. The profusion of killing leads Mr. Winder to describe the contested Rhineland, across which so many rival armies have fought, as "a battlefield interrupted, every now and then, by a truce."

 

By comparison the Rhone and Po rivers were relatively calm. Hannibal may have "skipped across [the Rhone] without a fight," Mr. Winder notes; and after Julius Caesar conquered Gaul, the Rhone Valley accepted Roman rule for several hundred years. But in the 14th century the contested presence of the Papal States near the Rhone led to repeated skirmishes between the king of France and the Vatican. The Po, too, was not immune to war, especially in the 16th century, when neighboring France, Switzerland and the Vatican quarreled over ownership of crucial crossroads to Milan and other parts of Italy.

 

And yet out of all the savagery and destruction, Mr. Winder asserts, also came the distinctive intermingling of customs, cultures and ideas that marked the future of all three river regions.

 

The Roman legacy, for instance, included the construction of roads, bridges, aqueducts and amphitheaters; the introduction of the Roman legal system; the spread of Latin, which morphed into the Romance languages spoken across Western Europe; and an expanded taste for drinking, developing and trading the diverse wines cultivated across the area. Artistic and scholarly interchanges helped nurture the Renaissance, expanding interest, knowledge and expertise in the arts and sciences.

 

The Po Valley in particular, Mr. Winder writes, "became an exhilarating center of learning and scholarship, a cloistered yet vibrant domain in which all sorts of advances could germinate. The damp land was a seedbed not just for rice and cheese, but for ideas, too."

 

Good scientific intentions can backfire, however, even when aimed at maintaining precious waterways. Such is the cautionary tale of the German engineer Johann Gottfried Tulla (1770-1828), who oversaw the 1817 "rectification" of the Rhine. His grand goal was to reduce flooding, ease navigation and expand commercial shipping capacity by straightening the river's course and shortening the distance between Basel and Bonn by 50 miles. His alterations produced mixed results, in some places accelerating the flow too sharply and in others increasing the risk of flooding. Such problems led to agreements among the perpetually warring European countries bordering the Rhine to cooperate in fixing them. "The concept of the river as a shared resource," Mr. Winder writes, "was starting to present Europe with a glimmer of an idea regarding how, in theory at least, it might find a less bloody way forward."

 

As the rivers, and the world, churned onward, new threats to the health of the waterways have emerged. One is fish-killing pollution from farmlands' fertilizer and pesticide runoffs. In 1850, we are told, the Rhine was home to more than 300,000 tons of salmon; by 1950 "there were none left." Warming temperatures risk drying up the reservoirs necessary to run the world's power plants.

 

After repeatedly warning of the rivers' endangerment, however, Mr. Winder concludes with only the briefest summary of the projects currently aimed at guarding against the dire outcomes he foresees. Readers are left without answers to the very question his book raises.

 

With the glaciers that feed the rivers receding, he writes, "the taps that have kept Europe's rivers full for thousands of years are running dry." But if we don't sustain their vitality, how will they sustain ours?

 

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Ms. Cole is the author of the memoir "After Great Pain: A New Life Emerges."” [1]

 

1. REVIEW --- Books: Europe's Fountainhead. Cole, Diane.  Wall Street Journal, Eastern edition; New York, N.Y.. 22 Aug 2026: C12.