Exactly!… apart from the sanitation, the medicine, education, wine, public order, irrigation, roads, the fresh-water system, and public health, what have the Romans ever done for us?
Well, a small but significant element was Lichtenstein. It was a principality within the H.R.E. until 1806, independent of Austria (and of course of Switzerland) but owing suzerainty to the Emperor. When Franz I dissolved the Empire, Lichtenstein became independent of any higher authority – a state it has kept outside wars ever since.
Am I just being whooshed, or do a whole lot of people not know the difference between the Holy Roman Empire and the Just Regular Old Roman Empire?
Apparently way too many don’t…
OK folks:
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The Roman Empire. Founded by Augustus in the first century BC. Based in Rome. The one that split in half and the Western half fell in the Vth century while the Eastern half (Byzantium) held on.
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The Holy Roman Empire. Founded by Charlemagne in the VIII century AD. Based in… wherever the current Emperor happened to be at the time. For most of its over-1000-years-history, the Emperor was elected among the rulers of those countries that were members of the Empire. Emperor Charles V of Spain gets the title “Emperor” not because of the Spanish Empire but because of this one.
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The Third Reich (lit. Third Empire) gets its name from being intended as a continuation, revival or improvement of the other two. It didn’t last anywhere near as long, though.
I’ve always read that it was meant as a continuation of the HRE and the Prussian/German Empire, not the regular old Roman Empire. But moot because I don’t know how often they called themselves that (as opposed to just the german reich or the Thousand Year Reich.)
Ludovic is correct on this: the German Empire of 1871-1918 was referenced as “the Second Reich” (the H.R.E. presumably being the first).
Also, note that the Eastern Roman Empire hung on until 1453, though for the last hundred years or so, it consisted of present Turkey-in-Europe and a few enclaves including the Morea (Peleponesssus) and the area of Trebizon on the Black Sea coast of Turkey. (Tamerlane may be able to give better specifics here.)
Sounds like whomever came up with that couldn’t count very well, then, as the HRE itself was founded as a continuation of the RE and given the love of the Nazis for RE symbols…
Ahm but remember that in A.D. 800 there was no Roman Emperor (the Western Empire being 350 years defunct, and Empress Irene on the throne in Constantinople). Charlemagne’s imperium was seen as the restoration of the Empire, the throne being vacant.
This is, of course, not how we view it historically, looking back on a 1006-year H.R.E. that was for most of its duration a German-Czech state. But I believe it can be demonstrated that it was how the principals at the time viewed what they were doing (other than the practical politics of allying Papacy and Frankish kingdom for mutual benefit, of course).
the RE wasn’t a German empire, though, so for the Nazis, it didn’t count. And the Nazis may have liked RE symbols, but they didn’t like the Roman Empire itself…they took their attitude from Gobineau, contrasting the “civilized” Roman Empire (read, for civilized here, decadent, cosmopolitan, tolerant, racially mixed) with the “barbarian” German invaders (read, for barbarian here, pure, Aryan, morally upright).
Also claiming to be a descendant of the Western Roman Empire would have created a few problems with Adolf’s good friend Benny (Mussolini). He had already laid claim to that role.
I reiterate my point that the HRE largely consisted of Germany, which like Scotland, was an area that the Romans found a bit to much to handle - although Germany did provide a good recruiting ground …
But the Holy Roman Empire was never ‘mainly what is now Germany’. Even after the Treaty of Westphalia, it included East Pomerania, Silesia, Bohemia, Moravia, Austria and the other Habsburg hereditary lands, Salzburg, the Franche-Comte, Lorraine and the Spanish Netherlands. All of those lie outside the present boundaries of Germany. What is now Germany only covered about half of the Empire even in its slimmed-down, post-1648 form.
Of course, some of those areas were German-speaking. And some of them would be included in the Second Reich, to say nothing of the Third Reich. But that doesn’t make them part of what we would now call ‘Germany’.
Also, because the Empire always included so many lands outside what is now Germany, substantial chunks of it were areas which had been successfully colonised by the Romans. And that is even without counting the northern Italian territories.
But remember that the Third Reich had a *much *wider definition of what should be considered “German” than the rest of the world had.