After the collapse of the Western Roman Empire, and the occupation of much of Gaul by the Franks, Roman power never returned far enough to come into conflict with the Frankish kingdom (except, to an extent, in the South of Italy). Instead, as the advent of Islâm permanently ended the possibility of further Roman revival, when Pope Stephen III met Pepin the Short (753) and obtained help against the Lombards, we get a passing of the torch from Constantinople to the Franks. By 774, the Franks were virtually the only organized Christian kingdom between Islâm in Spain, the pagan powers to the east and north, and Romania -- the remaining Roman Empire, now Greek in character -- to the southeast. The core of Christian Western Europe thus became Francia. While forms of this name, from Francia in Spanish to France in French, have settled on what was originally West Francia -- Francia Occidentalis -- German allows a differentiation, with Frankenreich, the "Kingdom of the Franks," for the full extent of the Carolingian state, and Frankreich for the modern France. In English, where "France" is also used for modern France, "Francia" may be used without ambiguity for Frankenreich and for the greater Periphery of Francia.
Indeed, to many beyond Francia the Franks now were all the Western European states as far as ran the writ of the Pope. In Greek, the Franks are the 
, Phrangoi. Constantine VII Porphyrogenitus even refers to the empire of Charlemagne as 
, "Great Francia." The words for "European" in Arabic, al-'Ifranj, 
, "the Franks," 'Ifranjî, 
, "a Frank, Frankish, European," and Persian, farangi, 
, preserve the term. The word even appears in Ming China, with the arrival of the Portuguese, as 
. Initially, Christians and Jews arriving in China where grouped with the 
, meaning Turks, Uighurs, and Chinese Muslims.
In European languages, "frank" can mean open, forthright, and sincere, i.e. with the noble qualities of the Frank. It also can mean "free," as in the "franking" privilege of sending free mail, or as in "franchise," which is the grant of some privilege or immunity. "Frankish" -- Latin "Franciscus," masculine, and "Francisca," feminine -- also occurs as a very common given name in Western European languages, from "Francesco/Francesca" in Italian,
| Europa, c. 800 AD | |
|---|---|
| Francia | Romania |
| Franks | Romans |
| Latins | Greeks (Armenians, Vlachs, etc.) |
 [Holy] Roman Emperor |  Emperor ofthe Romans |
| Rome | Constantinople |
 Pope | Patriarchs of Constantinople, Alexandria, Antioch, & Jerusalem |
In two of the Star Trek series, Star Trek, the Next Generation and Deep Space Nine, we encounter extraterrestrials called the "Ferengi," a word which looks like the Hindi, 
, version of the Persian word. Since the Ferengi are obsessed with profit and under no scruple to only obtain it honestly, the use of the term may refect the leftist and anti-capitalist ideology of the Star Trek series -- not to mention an attendant cultural self-hatred on the part of the producers or writers.
Comparing Francia of Charlemagne's day to Romania, i.e. the remaining Roman Empire around Constantinople, usually called the "Byzantine" Empire by historians, it is noteworthy that while the cultural and religious center of the West is at Rome, that City would never again be the actual political capital of Western Europe. Indeed, the Popes ruled their own little domain, the Papal States, and prevented the unification of Italy until the 19th century. While they then wielded much influence in the West, and they wanted to install and dispose of secular rulers at their whim, it was only rarely that Papal political power amounted to much. Although it was sometimes used to humble even the Kings of England and France, and the German Emperor, its power drained quickly when overused. After Philip IV of France sent a gang of thuggish operatives to kidnap and rough up Pope Boniface VIII in his own palace, the Papal leviathan seemed to deflate like a punctured balloon. Meanwhile, Constantinople was a real capital, with resident Emperors of legally absolute power. The Western Emperor, elected by German princes who became increasingly sovereign, the non-resident ruler of increasingly detached and uncontrollable states like Italy and Burgundy,
| Europa | 1. Romania | 2. Constantinople |  |
| 2. Francia | 1. Rome |  | |
| 3. Russia | 3. Moscow |  | |
In the treatment here, "Francia" will mean all of Europe that in the Mediaeval period was subject to the Roman Catholic Church, with its Latin liturgy, headed by the Pope, the Bishop of Rome. (The Schism of 1054 separated the Latin Church from the Orthodox Churches of the East.) Since the Pope retained the right to crown Emperors in the area subject to his Church, the Emperors in Charlemagne's line retained an implicit primacy, if not sovereignty, over all of Roman Catholic Europe, however little actual authority they may have exercised.
For many centuries, Latin was the principal, sometimes the only, written language over an area, "greater" Francia, that came to stretch from Norway to Portugal and from Iceland to Catholic parts of the Ukraine. A Swede like Karl von Linné would be known by a Latinized name as Carolus Linnaeus, a Pole like 
Mikolaj Kopernik as Nicolaus Copernicus, and an Italian like Christoforo Columbo (Cristóbal Colón in Spanish) as Christophorus(-er) Columbus. These men were even, significantly, figures getting into the modern period, not of the deep Middle Ages. One consequence of the dominance of Latin was the universal use of the Latin alphabet, and the borrowing of Latin vocabulary for vernacular languages from Norwegian to Hungarian. 
In an age when alphabets went with religions, the only exception to this was the use of the Hebrew alphabet to write Spanish (Ladino) and German (Yiddish) by European Jews. Islâm was not tolerated in Mediaeval Francia, except in unusual circumstances, mainly in Spain and Sicily. 
The alphabet that had been developed to write Gothic disappeared with its language. The old 
Runic alphabet also largely disappeared with the Christianization of Germany and Scandinavia, though its values were not forgotten. The use of Latin and its alphabet contrasts with the official use of Greek and its alphabet in Romania (together with other special alphabets, like Armenian) and the use of the Cyrillic alphabet in Russia. Today, the cultural predominance of Europe has led to the use of the Latin alphabet for many languages around the world, including Indonesian/Malaysian (Malay), Vietnamese, Hawaiian, Samoan, languages in Africa like Swahili, and many others. World languages with their own traditional writing, like Chinese and Japanese, use Romanization extensively, both officially and unofficially.
The use of the Latin alphabet in Francia often goes along with languages, the Romance languages, that are themselves descended from Latin, like Italian, French, Spanish, Portuguese, and Romanian. On the other hand, Francia was the result of the West Roman Empire collapsing under the inroads of Germans and then of a new identity being formulated by the Germanic Franks. Even the major wars of the 20th century can be thought of as continuing conflict along the Romance/Germanic boundary 
in the heart of Francia. The balance of power then, however, ended up being determined by another Germanic speaking power, England, coming in on the side of Romance speaking France. Meanwhile, the language family that was displaced by the Romans in Gaul and by the Angles and Saxons in Britain persists in the "Celtic Fringe" of Ireland, Scotland, and Wales, including Brittany, which was actually colonized with refugees from Celtic Britain. Welsh betrays its heritage as the language of Roman Britain with Latin days of the week and other borrowings. In the East, the Slavic languages represent another boundary productive of conflict. After the initial migration of Slavic speakers that pushed Germans behind the Elbe and replaced large areas of indigenous languages in the Balkans, German speakers moved steadily east until World War II, after which the Russians expelled many Germans and returned the boundary to about where it was in the 12th century. Between the northern and southern Slavs, however, is a Romance speaking remnant in the Balkans, Romania, and the Hungarians, who were the only steppe people to first invade Europe but then settle down and even retain their linguistic identity, despite their country often being called after the earlier and unrelated Huns. The only other languages in Francia related to Hungarian, which is not an Indo-European language, are Finnish and Estonian, which are probably at the western end of a very ancient distribution of the Uralic languages. The language that has the best claim to being the autochthonous language of Francia is Basque, which has no established affinities with any other language in the world and whose people have been determined by genetic studies to have been in the area since the Pleistocene. On the southern edge of the map is a little bit of Francia, Malta, where a language is spoken, Maltese, that is descended from Arabic and so unrelated to other modern languages in Francia. This is a remnant of the Aghlabid conquest of Sicily, although now the Maltese have long been Catholic, and the language is written, of course, in the Latin alphabet.
The orange area on the map above merits special notice. Lithuanian and Lativian are the remaining Baltic languages. They are more closely related to the Slavic languages than to the others, but are significant for their conservatism. Lithuanian is the only surviving Indo-European language with a tone accent. Today, a tone accent is most conspicuous in Chinese. Of early Indo-European languages, tones are attested only in the similarly conservative Classical Greek and Sanskrit -- indeed, the accents used for several purposes by many languages, the ácute, gràve, and circûmflex, originally wrote the tones of Greek. Historically, Lithuania holds the prize as the last country in Europe to become Christian, not definitively converting until the Grand Duke Jagiello (1377-1434). Meanwhile, for a good two centuries it had played the role of a frontier, and a wild one, between Catholic Europe in the West and both Orthodoxy Muscovy and the Mongol Golden Horde in the East. In converting to Catholicism and marrying the Queen of Poland, Jagiello joined Lithuania to the West. In doing so, however, he defeated what had previously represented the frontier of the West, the Teutonic Knights. The Knights had occupied the territory of the Prussians and converted them, while their compatriots, the Livonian Knights, had occupied the territory of the Latvians and converted them. The Prussian language was also part of the Baltic group, but eventually the Prussians themselves became German speaking. Today, the original land of Prussia is divided between Poland and Russia, with most of the German speakers, including those who would have been ethnic Prussians, expelled. Modern Latvia, like Lithuania, has at long last again become independent.
The original core of Francia, the Frankish Kingdom that came to dominate the West under Charlemagne, can be identified as those areas upon whose ruler the Pope at one time or another conferred a crown as the Roman Emperor. Part of the Mediaeval theory of Papal power came to include this ultimate authority to create and legitimate secular authority. Outlying areas, Spain, Britain, Scandinavia, etc., 
are considered separately as the 
Periphery of Francia. Charlemagne himself ruled modern France, northern Italy, and most of modern Germany. After the death of Charles the Fat in 888, the imperial title was fitfully conferred on Kings of Italy, and then lapsed entirely in 922. The descent of King Otto I of Germany into Italy ushered in new combinations of territory and a new line of Emperors, as the Pope crowned Otto in 962.
The "Empire" came to be regarded as consisting of four crowns: (1) East Francia, or Germany, (2) Lombardy (the "Iron Crown"), or Italy, (3) Rome, and, after 1032, (4) Burgundy. Lorraine, which had been a separate kingdom in the inheritance of Charlemagne, soon become part of the system of "Stem Duchies" in Germany. Most of the Stem Duchies, like Saxony, Franconia, and Bavaria, corresponded to preexisting German tribes. The title dux ("leader"), which was the Roman title of a frontier military commander, thus achieves its elevated Mediaeval meaning as a feudal title in relation to these units. 
A duke is only inferior to a sovereign prince. The next highest title, marquis or margrave (Markgraf), signified the count (comes, Graf, or "earl" in English) of a march (Mark) territory. The marches were border territories that involved a great deal of fighting. In Charlemagne's day, that included marches in Spain contesting the Islâmic advance. Later, the German marches north and south of Bohemia extended German settlement far to the east. Brandenburg became the most famous northern march, remaining a margravate until becoming the Kingdom of Prussia. Austria (Österreich, the "eastern realm") was the most famous southern march, becoming a duchy, then the only "archduchy," and finally an empire.
As the authority of the German Emperors declined, and that of the Kings of France grew, the "Middle Kingdom" (Francia Media) of Lorraine, Burgundy, and Italy began to pass either from German to French control (Upper Lorraine, Burgundy) or from German control to separate status (Lower Lorraine, i.e. the Netherlands and Belgium, and Italy). This process continued well into the modern period, when we see a multiplication of kingdoms, reaching five in Germany (not counting Bohemia) and two in Lower Lorraine. 
The Dukes of Savoy, beginning with a county in Burgundy, acquired more land and a capital (Turin) in Italy, named their new Kingdom after Sardinia and ultimately succeeded as the modern Kings of Italy. After Mussolini conquered Ethiopia in 1936, one King of Italy was briefly, and fatally, associated with this as the Emperor of Ethiopia. Without otherwise going outside of Francia, we certainly see enough emperors.
The Holy Roman Emperors, especially after the title became nearly hereditary with the Hapsburgs, became less and less concerned with confirming their crown with the Pope. The last time the Pope was called upon to crown an Emperor was when Napoleon decided to reclaim the title for the Western Franks, the French (and himself), in 1804. Napoleon knew better, however, than to allow that the Pope really had the kind of authority that the coronation of Charlemagne implied: Napoleon took the crown from the Pope's hands and crowned himself. The Hapsburgs were not going to be left behind by this: They elevated Austria to the status of Empire without any help from the Pope -- apparently on the principle that they had a right to the status to which they had become accustomed. Napoleon then abolished the Holy Roman Empire, leaving a French and an Austrian Emperor in Francia. After Napoleon's fall, the French title was later revived by Napoleon III, but then in the aftermath of the Franco-Prussian War and his fall, Otto von Bismarck decided to transfer the dignity to a newly reunited Germany, with the King of Prussia as a new, entirely German and not even Catholic, German Emperor, ruling over Prussia and the three other remaining kingdoms (Saxony, Bavaria, and Württemberg -- Hanover had been absorbed into Prussia).
Except for the brief episode with Mussolini, emperors vanished from Francia, and from Russia, in the Götterdämmerung of World War I. This did not mean, unfortunately, the immediate triumph of democracy and liberty. Instead, the conservative oppression of regimes like Austria, which were said to be "despotism tempered by inefficiency," was followed by the far more oppressive, sinister, and murderous "evil empires" of Nazi Germany and Soviet Russia, both founded on 20th century totalitarian, collectivist ideology -- though Hitler did like to think of his regime as a "Third Reich" continuing the German empires of the past. Lenin and Stalin had no use for such historical romance, though their power would have been the envy of any Tsar and did continue police state devices begun by the Tsars. It is post-Communist Russia, struggling with corrupt democracy and a struggling economy, that now may be the most susceptible to Fascist romances about the Tsars.
The development of the core of Francia can be represented in )
this flow chart. Of the eight modern states of the region (not counting Monaco, San Marino, and Liechtenstein), France has the most continuous historical tradition. The Mediaeval Empire at one point drew in all of Francia Media, except for the French Duchy of Burgundy, but then slowly broke up. Parts of Lower Lorraine, assembled by the Dukes of Burgundy, have come down as the Low Countries, the Netherlands, Belgium, and Luxembourg. The original Kingdom of Burgundy, giving rise to Switzerland and Savoy, has mostly fallen to France, while Savoy went on to unite Italy. The principal German speaking states left over from the Empire, Prussia and Austria, assembled their own Empires, leading to the reduced modern republics of Germany and Austria, while Upper Lorraine is now entirely in the hands of France. Each kingdom and empire here is indicated with a crown, as in the Francia maps above. The colors here more or less match the color of the corresponding table of rulers and, to an extent, the map colors. This chart illustrates well, like the "early Mediaeval" core of Francia map above, the fact that for a long time there was only one Empire, Rome. France (i.e. Napoleon) and Austria broke that understanding, followed by the German Empire, which, like Napoleonic France, saw itself following Charlemagne. The "Third Reich," of course, had no Emperor. The only Empires external to Francia evident here are Mexico and that of Italy in Ethiopia. Mexico, however, was not a European possession, except that French troops supported the Emperor Maximilian, brother of the Emperor Franz Josef of Austria. When the troops withdrew, he was overthrown and killed.
This page continues and supplements the material in "Rome and Romania, 27 BC-1453 AD", Germania, 395-774 AD", and "The Ottoman Sultâns, 1290-1924 AD".
The sources for all these tables are varied and now sometimes hard to keep track of, since my own notes made from years ago do not always indicate their origin. References and difficulties in specific areas, as with Flanders, are usually discussed at the appropriate place. Here I will mention a few general sources. Some of the earliest lists are from An Encyclopedia of World History; Ancient, Medieval, and Modern, Chronologically Arranged, compiled and edited by William L. Langer [Houghton, Mifflin, Company; the Riverside Press, Boston, 1940, 1948, 1952, 1960]. This one volume compendium I borrowed from a high school friend in the Sixties and recently consulted it again when it turned out that a colleague at Valley College had a copy. Amazon.com has now found a used copy for me after some months of searching. At lot of this, however, now looks a bit dated. That drawback is remedied by a new edition by Peter N. Stearns, The Encyclopedia of World History; Ancient, Medieval, and Modern, Chronologically Arranged [Sixth Edition, Houghton Miffilin Company, 2001]. While Stearns' version has much of the genealogical information, and more, of the original, it does seems to be missing the chart of the Capetian descent of the Bourbons which Langer had -- it also drops rather than updates the lists of British Prime Ministers, French Presidents and Premiers, and Italian Prime Ministers that Langer included. This Encyclopedia is to be distinguished from the Encyclopedia of World History, by Patrick K. O'Brien et al. [George Philip Limited, Facts on File, 2000], which is arranged alphabetically -- including various lists of world leaders such as were dropped from the Stearns Encyclopedia. Other more recent information and extensive genealogies are in The New Cambridge Medieval History, Volume II, c.700-c.900 [Cambridge University Press, 1995] and The New Cambridge Medieval History, Volume III, c.900-c.1024 [Timothy Reuter, editor, Cambridge, 1999]. The most comprehensive lists of rulers I have found in print are in Kingdoms of Europe, by Gene Gurney [Crown Publishers, New York, 1982]. Gurney has some errors and obscurities, but I have not found any other work that has put so much together in one volume. I have also found a nice genealogical presentation, a chart, Kings & Queens of Europe, compiled by Anne Tauté [University of North Carolina Press, 1989]. This is not as comprehensive as Gurney, but seems to exhibit more careful scholarship.
Among prose histories, one which is of the most longstanding value has been a textbook I originally had for a class in Beirut, Medieval Europe, by Martin Scott [Longmans, Green and Co. Ltd., London, 1967]. It is hard to know what other such subsequent books to list. A Distant Mirror by Barbara W. Tuchman [Ballantine Book, 1978] is a marvelous history of the 14th century, a period not otherwise noted in most surveys except for the Black Death. Otherwise, some of the most comprehensive treatments and enjoyable historical reading I have ever had involved a couple different history of Europe series that used to be published by Harper Torchbooks. In one series, I had several of the books as textbooks in classes: Reformation Europe, 1517-1559, by G.R. Elton [Harper Torchbooks, 1963], Europe Divided, 1559-1598, by J.H. Elliott [1968], Europe of the Ancient Régime, 1715-1783, by David Ogg, and Revolutionary Europe, 1783-1815, by George Rudé [this was in the Harper series, but I have a British edition published as the "Fontana History of Europe," the same as the Harper books, Fontana Library, Collins, 1964]. Of another Harper Torchbook series, "The Rise of Modern Europe," I had a couple of volumes in classes but then took some pains to acquire many of the rest. These include, The Age of the Baroque, 1610-1660, by Carl J. Friedrich [Harper Torchbooks, 1962], The Triumph of Science and Reason, 1660-1685, by Frederick L. Nussbaum [1962], The Emergence of the Great Powers, 1685-1715, by John B. Wolf [1962], The Quest for Security, 1715-1740, by Penfield Roberts [1963], Competition for Empire, 1740-1763, by Walter L. Dorn [1963], From Despotism to Revolution, 1763-1789, by Leo Gershoy [1963], A Decade of Revolution, 1789-1799, by Crane Brinton [1963], Europe and the French Imperium, 1799-1814, by Geoffrey Bruun [1965], Reaction and Revolution, 1814-1832, by Frederick B. Artz [1963], Political and Social Unpheaval, 1832-1852, by William L. Langer [1969], Realism and Nationalism, 1852-1871, by Robert C. Binkley [1963], and A Generation of Materialism, 1871-1900, by Carlton J.H. Hayes [1963]. All by different authors, it can be imagined that the literary quality of these books is uneven. The Age of the Baroque, 1610-1660 and The Emergence of the Great Powers, 1685-1715 are very fine books. Many were also written even a couple of decades before the Sixties editions that I have. Some of the material might therefore be a little dated now; but there is also the virtue that these histories are going to be largely innocent of the brainless Marxism and the kinds of politically correct "race, class, and gender" analyses that have become popular in "post modern" academia.
On the internet, Brian Tompsett's Royal and Noble genealogy is invaluable, and the lists of the Dukes of Lorraine and of several other German dynasties were originally compiled using little else. The only drawbacks are that (1) Thompsett's lists are, indeed, genealogical, which means it is sometimes hard to find unrelated rulers in a succession, and (2) the entries are very summary, without any explanation of may be happening as, for instance, domains are divided among multiple heirs. Some of these drawbacks can now be remedied with Bruce R. Gordon's Regnal Chronologies. Gordon's chronological lists are no help with genealogy, or with events, but do give all of the successors. Gordon also has a large bibliographical page. Now there is also WW-Person, A WWW Data base of European nobility, which combines genealogy with chronological lists. This site, however, sometimes returns blank pages, and not every chronological page includes a link to the corresponding genealogical page, which means a great deal of hunting around is sometimes necessary to find the genealogical connection, and usually there is even less in the way of additional information on a page than in Thompsett. Nevertheless, this site does have genealogy that is missing with Thompsett.
Many of these genealogical sources themselves go back to German Stammtafeln editions. Since I've been able to obtain several volumes of the recent Erzählende genealogische Stammtafeln zur europäischen Geschichte, revisions and additions have been proceeding based on this, as noted where applicable. This source includes Volume I, Parts 1 & 2, Deutsche Kaiser-, Königs-, Herzogs- und Grafenhäuser I & II [Andreas Thiele, Third Edition, R. G. Fischer Verlag, 1997], Volume II, Parts 1 & 2, Europäiche Kaiser-, Königs- und Fürstenhäuser I Westeuropa & II Nord-, Ost- und Südeuropa [Andreas Thiele, R. G. Fischer Verlag, Part 1, Third Edition, 2001, Part 2, Second Edition, 1997], and Volume III, Europäiche Kaiser-, Königs- und Fürstenhäuser, Ergänzungsband [Andreas Thiele, R. G. Fischer Verlag, Second Edition, 2001]. This is a marvelous resource, but stupefyingly dense and, of course, in German. I have also recently drawn on the Regentenlisten und Stammtafeln zur Geschischte Europas, by Michael F. Feldkamp [Philipp Reclam, Stuttgart, 2002].
The maps are originally those of Tony Belmonte, edited to eliminate references to "Byzantium" and with corrections and additions. Tony's historical atlas (with Tony) has disappeared from the Web. It was painstakingly reassembled by Jack Lupic, but then his site has disappeared also. Corrections and additions are based on The Penguin Atlas of Medieval History (Colin McEvedy, 1961), The New Penguin Atlas of Medieval History (Colin McEvedy, 1992), The Penguin Atlas of Modern History (to 1815) (Colin McEvedy, 1972), The Penguin Atlas of Recent History (Europe since 1815) (Colin McEvedy, 1982), The Anchor Atlas of World History, Volume I (Hermann Kinder, Werner Hilgemann, Ernest A. Menze, and Harald and Ruth Bukor, 1974), The Anchor Atlas of World History, Volume II (Hermann Kinder, Werner Hilgemann, Ernest A. Menze, and Harald and Ruth Bukor, 1978), The Times Concise Atlas of World History (edited by Geoffrey Barraclough & Geoffrey Parker, Hammond Inc., Times Books Ltd., 1982, 1988, 1993, 1996), and various prose histories. My graphics programs do not seem to be quite as sophisticated as Tony's, so maps I have modified may not look as professionally done as his originals.
The flags are also based on several sources. Flags Through the Ages and Across the World, by Whitney Smith [McGraw-Hill, 1975], is a splendid book, as is The International Flag Book in Color, by Christian Fogd Pedersen, Wilhelm Petersen, and Lieu.-Commander John Bedells, Hon. F.H.S., R.N. [William Morrow & Company, 1971]. These books were originally recommended to me by Professor Norman Martin, for whom I was a teaching assistant at the University of Texas. Besides being a professor of philosophy (logic), computer science, and electrical engineering, Professor Martin was expertly knowledgeable about flags and military uniforms. More recent developments are covered by Flags, The Illustrated Identifier to flags of the world, by Eve Devereux [Chartwell Books, 1994, 1998]. I have been unable to reproduce some flags with complete accuracy, given the limitations of my graphics programs and artistic ability. On the Internet, almost all flags can be found at Flags of the World, with considerable history and discussion of each.
The foundation of Frankish power, and of the future identity of Francia, was laid by Clovis (Chlodwig, whose name independently, by way of Ludwig, also gives us the modern names "Louis" and "Lewis"). Some Franks had long been living in Roman territory. After the Caesar and future Emperor Julian defeated them in 358, he had settled some on the left bank of the Rhine as foederati of Rome. As the Western Empire collapsed, they expanded slowly at first. Then Clovis not only occupied northern Gaul (486), absorbed the Alemanni (505), and defeated the Visigoths (507), but actually converted to orthodox Catholicism, making the Franks the first major German tribe to accept the spiritual authority of the Roman Church (others were Arian Christians) and so, as the closest Patriarch, the Pope in Rome itself. This was later viewed as a portent for Frankish greatness, and it was later believed that a vial of oil descended from heaven to anoint and sanctify Clovis as King. The thus "anointed" Kings of France later stoutly maintained that their authority was directly from God, without the mediation of either the Emperor or the Pope (both of whom had different ideas).
| FRANKS, MEROVINGIAN KINGS | |||||||
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Merovech (Meerwig) | 447-458 | ||||||
| Childerich I | 458-481 | ||||||
| Clovis I (Chlodwig) | 481-511 | ||||||
| Chlothar I | 511-561 | Chlodomer | 511-524 | Childebert I | 511- 558 | Theuderich I | 511- 534 |
| Charibert I | 561-567 | St. Guntram, Gunthchramn, Guntramnus | Burgundy, 561-592 | Sigibert I | Aus, 561- 575 | Theudebert I | 534- 548 |
| Chilperich I | Neu, 561-584 | Chlothar II | Neu, 584-629; Aus, 613-629; Bur, 613-629 | Childebert II | Aus, 575- 595; Bur, 592- 595 | Theudebald | 548- 555 |
| Dagobert I | Aus, 623-638; Neu & Bur, 629-638 | Charibert II | Aquitaine, 629-632 | Theudebert II | Aus, 595- 612 | Theuderich II | Bur, 595- 613; Aus, 612- 613 |
| Clovis II | Neu & Bur, 638-657 | Sigibert III | Aus, 634-656 | Sigibert II | Aus, 613 | ||
| Chlothar III | Neu & Bur, 657-673 | Childerich II | Aus, 662-675 | Dagobert II | 656 | Childebert Adoptivus, Carolingian | 656- 661 |
| Theuderich III | Neu & Bur, 673-691; Aus, 687-691 | Clovis III | 675- 676 | ||||
| Clovis IV | 691-695 | Childebert III | 695- 711 | Chlothar (Lothair) IV | Aus, 717- 720 | ||
| Dagobert III | 711-715 | Chilperich II | Neu, 715- 721 | ||||
| Theuderich IV | 721-737 | ||||||
| interregnum, Carolingian mayors rule, 737-743 | |||||||
| Childerich III | 743-751 | ||||||
The division of the Kingdom, in time honored Germanic fashion, between the four sons of Clovis, fragmented Frankish power and slowed its growth. In the table above, sub-domains 
are abbreviated, "Aus" for Austrasia, "Neu" for Neustria, and "Bur" for Burgundy. After the conquest of the Thuringians (531), the Burgundians (534), Provence (536), and the Bavarians (555), there was little expansion of the Kingdom for the remaining period of the Merovingian Dynasty. As external threats appeared, like the inroads of Islâm from Spain, power began to pass to the Mayors of the Palace like Charles Martel, who retroactively can be called "Carolingian," though this, of course, is to name them after Charlemagne, who hasn't lived yet. Since the Merovingian dynasty had been hallowed by time, and the kingship was consequently not thought of as elective, a change of dynasty was not a step to be undertaken lightly -- but the last King is so ephemeral that it is not even certain who his parents were.
Beginning as full pagans, the Merovingians maintained an aura of the numinous and divine. They wore their hair long, and this became a characteristic of their status. The Carolingians had a great deal to overcome in replacing them. Getting the sanction of the Pope helped, though this might dangerously imply a Papal derivation of royal authority. Curiously, now that the Merovingians are as long gone and forgotten as anything in history, their numinosity has been revived: It is already a matter of popular culture, thanks to a book, a mystery novel, The Da Vinci Code by Dan Brown (2003). There we get the story that traditional Christianity has perpetrated a fraud. The truth is that Jesus wasn't God, that he married Mary Magdalene, and that they had children who subsequently became, or married, the Merovingian Kings. This "bloodline" was the true meaning of the Holy Grail (Sang Real, "royal blood," instead of San Greal). In bringing the Holy Grail to Gaul and Britain, Joseph of Arimathea was not bringing a cup or bowl, as is the old Grail legend, but Mary Magdalene herself. This "bloodline" story now seems to be a popular take on the Grail legends. As part of a story that debunks traditional Christianity, the "bloodline" legend curiously and ironically implies that there is some mystical quality or status to the descendents of Jesus and Mary, as though they are the proper rulers of the world ("her family's rightful claim to power," in Brown's words), or at least numinous authorities in true religion, like the Imâms of Shi'ite Islâm. Either way, it would put the Merovingians in a very different light. Without this mystical quality, or without an ideology of the Divine Right of Kings, it is not clear why the "bloodline" is important, except as a historical curiosity. Even if Jesus was married and had children, it is not obvious why this would prevent him from being the Savior and the Son of God -- though when Brown says that Jews in his day were expected to marry, this is false, since we know of virtual monasticism among the Essenes. The evidence for any of this, however, is slim to none. Part of the argument is the importance given to Mary Magdalene in the Gnostic Gospels, but then their interpretation is ambiguous and disputed -- and they mention no children. The Merovingian Kingdom itself is fully part of the Dark Ages. Its history is thinly documented and obscure. Where the "bloodline" legend depends on Merovingian marriages, the marriages are in fact very poorly attested. While there may be some historical information on descendants of the Merovingians, people who would continue the "bloodline," I haven't noticed any in reputable sources. This is especially striking in relation to the Carolingians. The long years of association between the Merovingian Kings and the Carolingian Mayors of the Palace should have resulted in some intermarriage -- it would have at any other point in European history -- but I do not see anything of the sort in, for instance, the Erzählende genealogische Stammtafeln zur europäischen Geschichte. The absence of information, of course, makes it possible to claim anything, or to imagine possibilities and become convinced of their truth. If the Merovingians were indeed the family of Jesus and Mary Magdalene, it does seem like they should have behaved in some way different from other Dark Age German tribal rulers. It isn't discernable that they did. They were better at killing and conquest (for a while), but this might not be the difference we would expect. The "bloodline" legend continues with the idea that Godfrey (or Godefroi) of Bouillon, leader of the First Crusade and first ruler of the Kingdom of Jerusalem, was himself a descendant of the Merovingians, specifically of Dagobert II. Brown even identifies Godfrey as a "King of France." Unfortunately for our confidence in Brown's scholarship, Godfrey was not a King of France (that would have been the Capetian Philip I), simply the Duke of Lower Lorraine. There is no evidence that Godfrey was of royal descent, or, for that matter, that there were any descendants of Dagobert II at all -- the Merovingian succession passes to his cousins (though some writers seem to think he was the last Merovingian). All in all, much of the "bloodline" legend, including unattested genealogies of the Merovingians, seems to be the fraudulent invention of a crackpot French anti-Semite and monarchist named Pierre Plantard (d.2000), who finally had to admit before a French judge in 1993 that he had made it all up. Nevertheless, there is no doubt that the wild claims now have taken on a life of their own.
These tables are based on Edward James, The Franks [Basil Blackwell, 1988], and Patrick J. Geary, Before France & Germany [Oxford U. Press, 1988]. Merovingian genealogy is also covered in the Erzählende genealogische Stammtafeln zur europäischen Geschichte, Volume I, Part 1, Deutsche Kaiser-, Königs-, Herzogs- und Grafenhäuser I [Andreas Thiele, Third Edition, R. G. Fischer Verlag, 1997].
| FRANKS, CAROLINGIAN MAYORS, KINGS, & EMPERORS | ||
|---|---|---|
| Pepin I | Mayor, 628-639 | |
| Pepin II | Mayor, 687-714 | |
| Charles Martel | Mayor, 714-741 | |
| Carloman | Mayor, 741-747 | |
| Pepin III the Short | Mayor, 747-751; King, 751-768 | |
| Carloman I | 768-771 | I of France |
| Charles I the Great, Carolus Magnus, Charlemagne, Karl der Große | King, 768-;Roman Emperor, 800-814 | I of France, Germany, Burgundy, Italy, & Empire |
| Conquest of Lombardy, 774; conquest of Saxony, 777-778, 785-790, 790-804; annexation of Bavaria, 788; Viking sack of Noirmoutier monastery (founded 674), mouth of the Loire, 799; annexation of the Alemanni, 806; Danish raid on Friesland/Frisia, 810 | ||
The Lombards would not stay defeated, and Pepin's son Charles eventually had to conquer them and annex their kingdom (774). His conquest of the pagan Saxons (782-804) and expansion in other directions began to turn the Frankish Kingdom into a superstate. This gave Charles and the Pope ideas, especially when the Empress Irene deposed and blinded her son, Constantine VI, in 797, assuming sole rule: the first time a woman ruled Romania in her own name. The Westerners were little disposed to regard a woman as a legitimate emperor -- women could not rule in the law of the Salic Franks (hence the "Salic Law" against female succession). So, on Christmas Day in the year 800 (this may actually mean 799 -- when 800 began is a little fluid), the Pope crowned Charles Roman Emperor, taking for himself a role and an authority that he had never had anything to do with before. In taking the title from the Pope, Charles (now "the Great," "Carolus Magnus," or "Charlemagne") fatefully assumed both pretensions, to Empire, and an obligation, to Popes, that would prove a source of endless dispute, grief, and hybris in the future.
In the tables of rulers an icon is used of an imperial crown with a yellow nimbus: . This indicates Emperors crowned by the Pope. This is not used in the genealogical tables until the German Emperors, since it is only then that we begin to speak of "Emperors" even if they were never crowned by the Pope. This is discussed below. While Charlemagne probably was not going to think of the Imperial dignity as contingent on the approval of the Pope, this is how the matter developed, in line with increasing claims of Papal authority.
While Charlemagne himself supposedly never quite learned to read and write, there was a revival of learning at his Court, enough to earn the characterization "Carolingian Renaissance." One permanent effect that could not have been anticipated at the time is that when printing was invented centuries later in the actual Renaissance (1440's), the uncial characters written in the Carolingian period would be adopted as the font for lower case letters (minuscules) in printing, while block Latin characters became upper case letters (majuscules). Written characters as they actually developed during the Middle Ages are now dismissed as "Gothic" and used only for special purposes -- although they were widely used in Germany (Fraktur) until recently.
While aspects of the Carolingian Renaissance look ahead to the future, other things remind us that the decline from Rome hasn't quite bottomed out yet. One of these was the 
coinage introduced by Charlemagne. This consisted of two coins, a silver denarius and half-denarius, the obolus -- which see at left in their later, British, copper versions. The most obvious and important thing about this, symbolic and substantive, is that both gold and copper coinage is missing. The lack of the former means that large capital transactions don't exist, and of the latter that a cash economy simply doesn't exist either for the daily life of most people. A cash economy, indeed, had been collapsing, in a wave spreading from West to East, since the 5th century. Nevertheless, German states, like Lombardy, had maintained a gold coinage. What finally drove things down to the bottom was the Arab Conquest, which crippled or destroyed trade in the Mediterranean, as this had been carried on by Romania. In Charlemagne's world, Francia was cut off from most international trade, in an economy of subsistent agriculture and taxes in produce and labor. Neither serious nor trivial money was necessary. With Charlemagne's coins, the denarius borrows its name from the silver coin of the early Empire, which had long been debased to nothing, while the obolus was originally a division of the Athenian drachma. The standard gold coin, the "dollar of the Middle Ages," had been the Roman solidus, which was minted without debasement from the days of Constantine until the reign of the Emperor Michael IV, in Constantinople, in the 11th century. There were supposed to be 12 denarii of Charlemagne for one gold solidus from Romania (i.e. 12d = 1s, twelve pence to a shilling). A practical gold coinage would not be revived in Francia until the 13th century.
Athough Charlemagne's obolus was soon forgotten, the denarius long survived, as the denier in France until the French Revolution. A different word was used in the Germanic languages, penny in English and Pfennig in German. The English penny was the direct descendant of the Carolingian denarius until, of all things, 1970. The character, history, and values of these coins and their successors is examined elsewhere.
The breakup of Charlemagne's kingdom was fateful to the history of Western Europe for centuries to come. Although soon surrounded by independent Christian states, in Britain and Ireland to the northwest, Spain in the southwest, Hungary and Poland in the east, and the Scandinavian states in the north (i.e. the Periphery of Francia), the Frankish kingdoms remained the central tentpole (we might even say the axis mundi) of European politics (axis Franciae). As neat halves of Charlemange's empire eventually formed, France in the West and Germany in the East, the stage for the greatest battles of modern war in the 17th, 18th, 19th, and 20th centuries would be set along the seam, from Nieuwpoort (1600) to Ramillies (1706), Waterloo (1815), Verdun (1916), and the Bulge (1944).
| Carolingians, Empire & Italy | |||||
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Louis I the Pious | France, Italy, Germany, Burgundy, & Empire,814-840 | Pepin | Italy, 781-810 | ||
| Bernard | Italy, 810-818 | ||||
| Lothar I | Italy, Burgundy, Lorraine, & Empire, 840-855 | ||||
| Vikings appear in the Seine, 841; sack of Ostia & Rome by the Aghlabids, 846 | |||||
| Lothar II | Lorraine 855-869 | Charles of Burgundy | Burgundy 855-863 | Louis II | Italy & Burgundy, & Empire 855-875 |
| Resident at Benevento, 866-871; ejects Arabs from Bari, 871; ejected from Benevento, 871; dies at Capua, 875 | |||||
Charles the Bald and Louis the German combined against their brother Lothar to produce a more equal division of the Empire. They defeated him in 841 and then pledged a common front against him with the Oaths of Strasbourg in 842. The Oaths provide us with one of the most striking documents of European history. Charles and Louis each swore their Oath in the spoken language of the domain of the other, and then the retainers of each swore an oath in their own language to honor the Oaths even if their own ruler broke them. I give the oaths sworn by the retainers below. The text derives from the historian Nithard (790-845), who of course was writing otherwise in Latin, where Charles is Karolus, Louis Lodhuvicus and Lothar Lodharius.
| Carolingians, Francia Orientalis, Germany | Louis II the German | Germany, 843-876 | |||
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Germany, 876-887; Italy, 879-888; Emperor,881-888 | Charles III the Fat | Carloman of Bavaria | Germany, 876-880; Italy, 877-879 | Louis III | Germany, 876-882 |
| Germany, 880/882-887; Italy, 879-888 | |||||
| Viking sack of Ghent, 879; sack of Cologne & Trier, 882; siege of Paris, 885-886, plunder of Burgundy, 886; Charles discredited, deposed, 887 | |||||
| Arnulf of Carinthia | Germany, 887-899; Italy & Emperor, 896-899 | ||||
| Louis IV the Child | Germany, 899-911 | ||||
| The Men of Charles the Bald | The Men of Louis the German |
|---|---|
| Romana lingua, Gallo-Romance | Teudisca lingua, Old High German |
| Si Lodhwigs sagrament que son fradre Karlo jurat conservat, et Karlus, meos sendra, de suo part n lostanit, si io returnar non l'int pois, ne io ne neuls cui eo returnar int pois, in nulla ajudha contra Lodhuwig nun li iu er. | Oba Karl then eid, then er sînemo bruodher Ludhuwîge gesuor, geleistit, indi Ludhuwîg mîn hęrro then er imo gesuor forbrihchit, ob ih inan es irwenden ne mag: noh ih noh thero nohhein, then ih es irwenden mag, widhar Karlo imo ce follusti ne wirdhit. |
| If Louis keeps the oath that he has sworn to his brother Charles, and Charles, my lord, on the other hand breaks it, and if I cannot dissuade him from it — neither I nor anyone that I can dissuade from it — then I shall not help him in any way against Louis. | If Charles keeps the oath that he has sworn to his brother Louis, and Louis, my lord, on the other hand breaks the oath he has sworn, and if I cannot dissuade him from it — neither I nor anyone that I can dissuade from it — then I shall not follow him against Charles. |
The text and translation here are taken off Wikipedia, which does not credit the original translator. It was frustrating over the years to have European history books that would talk about the Oaths but then not quote them in the original languages.
Soon enough this combination led to a settlement, the Treaty of Verdun (843), heavy with portent for the future. The division was equal enough, Charles the Bald in the West (Francia Occidentalis), Louis the German in the East (Francia Orientalis), and Lothar in the Middle and South (Francia Media). The domain of Charles would become France, and that of Louis Germany. It was a while, however, before the arrangement would evolve into such modern identities. All Charles and Louis were really doing was enforcing the ancient Frankish rules of succession. It need not have been permanent, as indeed it would not look to be when Charles III reunited nearly the whole Empire. His incompetence, however, allowed the reassertion of the centrifugal forces already evident at Strasbourg.
Italy and Burgundy were prestigious possessions for Lothar, but they were not centers of Frankish power, and the northern area looks precariously and ominously sandwiched between the compact realms of his brothers. 
This turned out to be especially unfortunate when Lothar not only predeceased his brothers by a good margin but left behind him his own problem of multiple sons. Natural fragments were distributed between them. Louis, who now became the Emperor Louis II, needed to have Rome and so received Italy. Charles got Burgundy, and Lothar got the rest, i.e. that precarious northern area, with which Lothar's name was now permanently associated: It became Lotharingia, reduced to Lothringen in German and Lorraine in French (and, usually, English).
None of the sons of Lothar I managed to outlive their uncles. But the older men pounced even while the Emperor Louis II still lived, dividing Lorraine between them and depriving Louis of part of Burgundy. All of Lorraine and Burgundy, of course, should have reverted to him. This reveals the relative strength of the Western and Eastern Frankish kingdoms, and the persistent ruthlessness of Charles the Bald and Louis the German. When the Emperor Louis then died, Charles got into Italy, to Rome, and to the Imperial crown first.
| Carolingians, Francia Occidentalis, France | |||
|---|---|---|---|
| Charles II the Bald | France, 843-877;Emperor, 875-877 |
||
| Viking sack of Nantes, on the Loire, 843; defeat of Charles, sack of Paris, 845 | |||
| Louis II the Stammerer | France, 877-879 |
||
| Louis III | France, 879-882 | Carloman II | France, 879-884 |
| Defeat of Vikings at Sancourt by Louis III, 881 | |||
| Charles III the Fat (Germany, no # for France) | Emperor, 881; France, 884-888 | ||
| siege of Paris, 885-886, plunder of Burgundy, 886; Charles discredited | |||
| Odo (Eudes/Otto), Count of Paris | France, 888-898 | ||
| Charles III the Simple | France, 898-922 | ||
| grants Normandy to the Viking Rollo, 911 | |||
| Robert I, Count of Paris | France, 922-923 | ||
| Rudolf/Raoul, Duke of Burgundy | France, 923-936 | ||
| Louis IV d'Outremer | France, 936-954 | ||
| Lothair V | France, 954-986 | ||
| Louis V | France, 986-987 | ||
the Fat managed to reassemble the entire Empire of Charlemagne -- except for Burgundy (but he also does not figure in the actual count of French kings -- Charles the Bald was Charles II of France, and Charles the Simple would be Charles III of France, though sometimes different numberings are seen). This apparent triumph was in fact hollow. The now Emperor Charles III was nowhere near up to the task of holding off the Vikings and Arabs who were currently ravaging even the inner parts of the realm. The Germans became so disgusted with him that he suffered the ignominy of being deposed as East Frankish king. The Germans elected an illegitimate nephew of Charles, Arnulf of Carthinthia, as the East Frankish king. The West Frankish nobility elected a non-Carolingian, Odo of Paris. 
This is the family that would soon become the long lasting Capetian house of France. Feeling for the Carolingian house, however, was still strong, and although the West Franks turned to Odo's family again before the end of the Carolingian period, he was followed by the last son of Louis the Stammerer, Charles (III) the Simple.
Meanwhile, Burgundy and Italy spun off to more local Carolingian in-laws, among whom the title of Emperor was passed around for a time. After Berengar (I of Italy), however, the title simply lapsed. Since the Popes could have bought some influence with an Imperial coronation, it is a good question why they stopped bothering. There was thus an Imperial interregnum from 922 to 962.
With the last of the main lines of the Carolingians, one connection that intrigued me involved the sister of Otto of Lorraine. Most histories don't even show a sister (if they even show Otto), but she originally came to my attention in From Scythia to Camelot by C. Scott Littleton and Linda A. Malcor [Garland Publishing, Inc., New York, 1994, p.298]. Littleton and Malcor identify her as "Irmengard," who married Albert of Namur. Their daughter, Hedwig, then marries Gerhard, Duke of Upper Lorraine; and their son, Dietrich, marries Gertrude, heiress of Flanders. Their descendants are subsequent Counts of Flanders. For some time this was the only source where I found this connection attested. Now, however, I have found it in the Erzählende genealogische Stammtafeln zur europäischen Geschichte, Volume I, Part 1, Deutsche Kaiser-, Königs-, Herzogs- und Grafenhäuser I [Andreas Thiele, Third Edition, R. G. Fischer Verlag, 1997, p.64]. There the sister of Otto is given as "Adelheid," not "Irmengard," but the marriage to Albert, Count of Namur, is shown. Their daughter, Hedwig (with a question mark), is then shown on page 66, married to Gerhard of Lorraine, as in Littleton and Malcor.
Charles the Simple's most famous and important deed was to cede some land, which became Normandy, to the Norse chieftain Rollo in 911. This was also about the time that the last Carolingian in Germany, Louis the Child, died, and the Germans turned to Conrad of Franconian. That was the end of the Carolingians in East Francia. The nobility of Lorraine decided to uphold Carolingian legitimacy by attaching themselves to the Western kingdom; but soon it looked like West Francia would follow the East, when Charles, as much over his head as his cousin Charles the Fat had been, was deposed and Robert of Paris, Odo's brother, was elected. Robert was followed by his son-in-law, Rudolf of Burgundy, but then the West Franks turned to the Carolingians again, bringing Louis IV back from exile in England ("outre mer").
This started to look like Carolingians getting established again, since one of Louis's son, Charles, even became the ruler of the new "duchy" of Lorraine (no longer a separate kindom, and in fact now divided; the Carolingians got Lower Lorraine). But these were not strong rulers, and the monarchy itself was becoming weaker and weaker.
| Carolingians, Francia Media, Lorraine | |
|---|---|
| Zwentibold of Lorraine | King, 895-900 |
| Charles of Lorraine | Duke, Lower Lorraine, 977-991 |
| Otto of Lorraine | Duke, Lower Lorraine, 991-1012 |
The Carolingians of Lorraine did not last much longer than the royal lines, though their blood continued in their in-laws among the local nobility, most importantly the house of Alsace, which succeeded to the Duchy of Lorraine and the County of Flanders.
The Carolingians of Lorraine were not alone as the last Carolingians. A line descended from Bernard, King of Italy, who had been killed in 818, became the Counts of Vermandois.
I was unaware of the descendants of Bernard of Italy until finding the book The Carolingians, A Family Who Forged Europe, by Pierre Riché [University of Pennsylvania Press, 1993, translated by Michael Idomir Allen from Les Carolingiens, une famille qui fit l'Europe, Hachette, 1983]. Brian Tompsett confirms the descent of the Counts of Vermandois as Carolingians, but WW-Person, A WWW Data base of European nobility does not. Riché ends the male descent of Vermandois with Herbert III of Vermandois, Herbert the Younger of Troyes, and Herbert of Meaux, which left Otto of Lorraine in place as the last Carolingian. However, both Tompsett and WW-Person list Stephen Count of Champagne, Meaux, and Troyes (Tompsett twice, as son of both Herbert the Elder and Herbert, Count of Meaux, identified as "Herbert the Younger"). Stephen beats out Otto.
But WW-Person shows Carolingian descent even beyond this, with descendants of Herbert III of Vermandois all the way down to the heiress Adelaide who marries Hugh, a son of King Henry I of France. There is also a line shown of Counts of Soissons, beginning with Guy I, given as a brother of Herbert III. This also ends with an heiress named Adelaide. If this is all correct, then the Carolingians continue for a century longer than I would have previously thought.
I have now been able to compare this previous information with the Erzählende genealogische Stammtafeln zur europäischen Geschichte, Volume II, Part 1, Europäiche Kaiser-, Königs- und Fürstenhäuser I Westeuropa [Andreas Thiele, R. G. Fischer Verlag, Part 1, Third Edition, 2001]. The Carolingian descent is confirmed. Guy I of Soissons is given, but with a note of uncertainty. Most importantly, many more descendants of Adelaide and Hugh the Great are given, including Capetian Counts of Vermandois down to 1214.
The many heiresses in this diagram, of course, continue Carolingian descent through their marriages, especially to the houses of Anjou, Flanders, and Blois. Descendants of all of these marriages continue until the present day.
Francia after the Carolingians most importantly means political divisions much more permanent and significant than the earlier ones. Of all those, the division at the death of Lothar I in 855 produced large elements that define much of what happens in later Mediaeval history.
| Divisions of Francia | |
|---|---|
| Francia Occidentalis, France | |
| Francia Media | Lorraine |
| Burgundy | |
| Italy | |
| Papacy | |
| Francia Orientalis, Germany | |
The western part of the great Frankish kingdom is the domain to which the Frankish name ended up sticking, as "France" -- even rendered faithfully as Frankreich in German. There is some irony in this, since the Germanic Franks there came to speak the local Romance language, descended from Latin, a language which then took its name, like the kingdom, from the Franks, as Français ("French" in English).
| HOUSE OF PARIS | |
|---|---|
| Odo (Eudes), Count of Paris | 888-898 |
| Robert I, Count of Paris | 922-923 |
| Rudolf/Raoul, Duke of Burgundy | 923-936 |
| CAPETIAN KINGS | |
| Hugh Capet | 987-996 |
| Robert II the Pious | 996-1031 |
| Henry I | 1031-1060 |
| Philip I | 1060-1108 |
| Louis VI | 1108-1137 |
| Louis VII | 1137-1180 |
| Philip II Augustus | 1180-1223 |
|
Fiefs of John declared forfeit, 1202; Battle of Bouvines, fiefs north of Loire secured, 1214; Albigensian Crusade, 1209-1229 | |
| Louis VIII | 1223-1226 |
 St. Louis IX | 1226-1270 |
| Albigensian Crusade ends, much of Toulouse ceded, 1229; Sixth Crusade, 1248-1254; England abandons claims outside Aquitaine & Gascony, 1259; Seventh Crusade, Louis dies, 1270 | |
| Philip III | 1270-1285 |
| Toulouse reverts to crown, 1271 | |
| Philip IV the Fair | 1285-1314 |
| Last Grand Master of the Templars, Jacques de Molay, tortured & burned, 1314 | |
| Louis X | 1314-1316 |
| Beginning of Little Ice Age, heavy rain for five years, famine, 1315-1320 | |
| John I | 1316 |
| Philip V | 1316-1322 |
| Charles IV | 1322-1328 |
The Capetians are usually reckoned to begin with Hugh Capet, but his family (the house of Paris or "Robertians," after Robert the Strong) had been nudging the Carolingians for some time, and his uncle (by marriage), grandfather, and great uncle had already been Kings of France. The line now, however, derives its name from an epithet of Hugh himself, "Capet" (Latin capa) being his, apparently, distinctive cape.By the time the Carolingians died out and Hugh was elected, 
little remained of the Royal Domain but the miniscule Île de France. However, this was held together and, without succession problems, the Capetians settled into legitimacy and bided their time.
The payoff, with Philip Augustus, was the recovery from England of Normandy, Anjou, and much else.
After Philip defeated John "Lackland" and his allies, including the Papal counter-Emperor, Otto (IV) of Brunswick, at Bouvines (1214), the English lost their possessions north of the Loire and thereafter steadily retreated in the south, until much diminished holdings were confirmed in 1259.
Meanwhile, Pope Innocent III had declared a "Crusade" against the heretical Cathari (or Albigensians) in the south of France (or Languedoc). One of the most infamous episodes of the Middle Ages, the Crusade was largely against and at the expense of the Count of Toulouse. In the settlement of 1229, much of the Count's land reverted to the Crown and his daughter and heiress, Joanna, married a son of Louis VIII. When they died without issue, all of Toulouse reverted to the Crown. Meanwhile, much of the distinctive and thriving Provençal culture had been destroyed.
The map above gives dates at least by which the indicated territories, those of England and of Toulouse, were recovered by the Crown. The boundaries south of the Loire should be taken as approximate, since I find disagreements in my sources -- at best an indication that boundaries were often redrawn during the period, at worst that they are not well understood. The second map shows the vast domains conferred on the brothers Charles and Alphonse of Louis IX. Charles acquired Provence by his marriage, and the conquered much in Italy by invitation of the Pope.
The success and prestige of Louis IX was matched only by his reputation for holiness, which won him canonization as early as 1297. His life ended, however, on one of his ill-advised and unsuccessful Crusades. Soon a very different kind of King was on the Throne: Philip (IV) "the Fair." Both the ruthlessness and success of Philip were extraordinary. The Crusading Order of the Knights Templars, who had essentially become bankers, was destroyed, its wealth seized, and its members tortured and judicially murdered (1307-1314). Meanwhile, Pope Boniface VIII had been asserting the strongest claims yet of Papal supremacy and power. Philip sent agents to capture and humiliate the Pope, who then died (1303). The election of a French Pope then led to the relocation of the Papacy to Avignon (1309) and the beginning of the "Babylonian Captivity" (1309-1377), during which few were deceived that the Popes had essentially become agents of the French Crown.
If the crimes of Philip IV merited divine retribution, this was visited only in the form of the extinction of his heirs, at least the male heirs. Thus, following the Salic Law, the French succession eventually jumped to Philip's nephew, Philip (VI) of Valois. However, Philip IV had married Jeanne I, the Queen of Navarre, and his grand-
daughter, Jeanne II, inherited that Kingdom. Her descendants would eventually return to the Throne of France through the Bourbons. His daughter Isabelle, married to Edward II of England, would also be the ancestor of subsequent Kings of England. So divine retribution seems somewhat imperfect in this respect.
| VALOIS KINGS | |
|---|---|
| Philip VI of Valois | 1328-1350 |
Battle of Crécy, 1346;  the Black Death arrives in Paris, 1348; Dauphiné sold to France, by last Count of Vienne, 1349; "Dauphin" becomes title of Crown Prince | |
| John II | 1350-1364 |
| Battle of Poitiers, King John captured & held for ransom, 1345 | |
| Charles V | 1364-1380 |
| Charles VI | 1380-1422 |
| Battle of Agincourt, 1415 | |
| Charles VII | 1422-1461 |
| Louis XI | 1461-1483 |
| Charles VIII | 1483-1498 |
Seeming to lose every major battle (Crécy, 1346, Poitiers, 1356, Agincourt, 1415), and with large parts of France sometimes occupied, the smart money for many years would have been on the English. Henry V was conceded the French Crown in 1420. But things turned around, Joan of Arc relieved Orléans in 1429, and England lost ground steadily afterwards. With all this not long out of the way, however, Charles VIII was predeceased by all his children. The succession passed, without too much dispute, to the Duke of Orléans.
Meanwhile, however, other mischief had been done. The brothers of Charles V had all been given major Duchies to rule, and the Royal cousins in Burgundy soon proved themselves a Royal pain for the Monarchy, attempting to reconstruct Francia Media, often as allies of the English. There would be hell to pay for this; but, strangely enough, by the end of the Valois period France was larger and stronger than at the beginning. Even during the reign of Philip VI a major step was taken in chipping away at the Empire to the east. Later France would take most of the 18th century to acquire Alsace and Lorraine, but most of the Imperial Kingdom of Burgundy would be acquired by the reign of Henry IV 
(numbers in blue are the dates of acquisition by France). The greatest and most fateful early French acquisition was of the Dauphiné. In 1349 Count Humbert II (d.1355), the "Dauphin," simply sold the territory to the grandson of Philip VI, the prince who would later become Charles V. Thus, Charles became the first "Dauphin" of France, and as he was the Crown Prince from 1350-1364, this now became the traditional title of the Heir Apparent of France. For some time, however, the Dauphiné was still legally part of the Kingdom of Burgundy rather than France and was held as a personal possession by the Dauphin. The Emperor Charles IV was still formally crowned as King of Burgundy at Arles in 1365. When the future Louis XI acted somewhat too independently, however, Charles VII (1422-1461) formally annexed the Dauphiné to the Royal domain of France (1457). (Other details of this map are described in relation to the Counts & Dukes of Savoy.)
Amid all the setbacks of the Hundred Years War, this was a portent for the future. The biggest break came when Charles the Bold, Duke of Burgundy, was killed in 1477 and Louis XI was able to secure the return of large parts of the Burgundian domain to France, since the heiress Mary of Burgundy would not inherit under the Salic Law. Mary's husband, however, the Emperor Maximillian of Hapsburg, was going to contest this. 
He was successful in the return of the Free County (Franche Comté) of Burgundy, which was not a fief of France, and of Artois, which was. In fact, Flanders, which had always been a fief of France, was now lost forever. Later, Louis XIV got back the Free County and part of Artois but failed to secure more of what later became Belgium. The Hapsburgs became the principal enemy of France until 1756.
Other major fiefs accrued to the French Crown by the end of this period. After the deaths of René the Good (1480), whose male heirs had predeceased him, and of Charles III, René's nephew, Louis XI secured the return of the Duchy of Anjou, the County of Provence, and, according to some sources, the French part of the Duchy of Bar. Provence was not a fief of France but, like the Dauphiné, of the Kingdom of Burgundy; but René's grandfather, Duke Louis I, had it gotten from Joanna I of Anjou. René's heirs were left with the (Imperial) Duchy of Lorraine, the (Imperial) Duchy of Bar, and the County of Guise. Anne, heiress and Duchess of Brittany (1488-1514), married King Charles VIII in 1491 and then Louis XII in 1499. The understanding was that Brittany would be enfeoffed to a junior line; but after Anne's daughter Claudia (Claude) died in 1524, her husband, King Francis I, kept the Duchy and incorporated it into the Royal domain in 1532.
In 1494 Charles VIII invaded Italy in order to retrieve the Kingdom of Naples for France. The Anjevian line ruling Naples had died out in 1435, and while Queen Joanna II willed the country to Duke René the Good of Anjou and Lorraine, by 1442 it was in the hands of Alfonso V of Aragón. As the possessions of the House of Anjou fell to the French Throne in 1481, Charles decided to go after Naples, which had been left by Alfonso to his illegitimate son Ferdinand. Charles raised hell in Italy and managed to occupy Naples until being forced back in 1495. This brief episode, however, is often considered one of the events, like the Fall of Constantinople in 1453 and Columbus's Discovery of America in 1492, marking the beginning of Modern History. It did this is in a double revelation: one that the Italian city states were so weak, and two that a national state like France had become so strong. It was the end of Mediaeval Italy. The sequel, however, was just as astounding: the French would be defeated by Spain, which in Charles's day had just managed to complete the Reconquista. But the matter was not settled easily.
| VALOIS KINGS, Orléans & Angloulême | |
|---|---|
| Louis XII of Orléans | 1498-1515 |
| Francis I of Angloulême | 1515-1547 |
| Henry II | 1547-1559 |
| defeat by Spain, St. Quentin, bankruptcy, 1557; Calais taken from English, 1558; Peace of Cateau-Cambrésis, 1559 | |
| Francis II | 1559-1560 |
| Charles IX | 1560-1574 |
| Huguenot Civil War, 1562-1563, 1567-1568, & 1568-1570 | |
| Henry III | King of Poland 1573-1574 |
| 1574-1589 | |
| assassinated | |
)
The succession of Louis XII of Orléans and Francis I of Angoulême brought the possessions of their houses with them. During the reign of Francis I, the line of the Dukes of Bourbon then died out with the Duchess Suzanne and her cousin Charles III, returning their domains. Finally, the succession of Henry IV, to anticipate a bit, brings with it the remaining possessions of the Kingdom of Navarre and the Duchy and Counties of Vendôme, Foix, Albret, etc. By then, few fiefs within West Francia were left outside the control of the King. One noteworthy territory was that around Avignon, which had never been a fief of France (Imperial Burgundy, again), was the seat of the Papacy from 1309 to 1377, had been bought outright in 1348 by Pope Clement VI from Queen Joanna I of Naples, and remained a Papal State until nationalized by Revolutionary France in 1791. Encompassed by the Papal enclave was the Principality of Orange, independent until 1713, significant as one source of the house that would come to champion and then rule the Netherlands.
Although the Orléans and Angoulême Kings are usually still considered part of the House of Valois, they were nevertheless more distantly related to the last Kings of the main succession than Philip VI was to the last Capetians. Francis I was only a third cousin of Charles VIII, marrying his second cousin, Claudia, the daughter of Louis XII. The House of Orléans was also descended from the Visconti of Milan, which helped motivate Louis XII's and Francis I's invasions of Italy, pursuing a claim to Milan. Louis's sister Marie married into the House of Foix and Navarre, but then his brilliant nephew, Gaston de Foix, was killed in what was actually a French victory at Ravenna in 1512. 
Amazingly, the many children of Henry II were mostly childless. This set the stage for a succession crisis with the largest element of civil war.
In 1572, Margaret, sister of all the last Angoulême Kings, married the probable successor to France, in the absence of other Valois heirs, the Protestant Henry of Navarre. This got off to a bad start when French Protestants were slaughtered shortly thereafterwards in the St. Bartholomew's Day Massacre. For whatever reason, Henry and Margaret never had any children, and the marriage was ended in 1599, long after it was of any political value. Meanwhile, however, Henry had had a number of children by his mistress, Gabrielle Estrées (d.1599). Gabrielle appears, together with her sister in their bath, in an intriguing painting in the Louvre.
Following the precedent of Charles VIII, Louis XII invaded Italy again in 1499 to press his claim to Milan as well as to Naples. This was at first successful. The French held Milan 1499-1512. Louis then went on against Naples and obtained an agreement in 1500 to divide the Kingdom. But Ferdinand of Aragón was not going to leave that alone. He deposed his cousin, Frederick IV of Naples, in 1501 and then defeated the French at Garigliano in 1503. Louis was driven out of Italy altogether in 1512. When Francis I became King in 1515, he immediately invaded Italy again, defeating the Swiss, and occupying Milan (1515-1522, 1524-1525). French possession of Milan was confirmed by Spain with the Treaty of Noyon in 1516. However, the new King of Spain, Charles I (in 1519 Emperor Charles V), repudiated the Treaty. In 1525 Charles not only defeated but captured Francis at the Battle of Pavia. Francis agreed to the Peace of Madrid in 1526, was released, and immediately broke the treaty, as well as his parole, and went back to war. The mutinous Spanish army sacked Rome in 1527 (Pope Clement VII was allied to the French), Francis again occupied Milan in 1528, but then Charles crushed the combined French forces at Landriano in 1529. The French adventure in Italy, and one of the first great exercises in modern power politics, was largely over. There were, indeed, some further wars until the French defeat at St. Quentin in 1557 and Peace of Cateau-Cambrésis in 1559, but this netted France only Calais and some toeholds in Lorraine (garrisons at Metz, Toul, & Verdun), not any gains in Italy (though Savoy was occupied, 1536-1559).
| BOURBON KINGS |
|---|
Not just civil war was the problem, but invasion by Spain.
Since I have rarely come across the full illustration of Bourbon descent, it is given here. The line of the Kings of Navarre, although going all the way back to King Louis X of France, is given separately under Spain as a note on "The French Kings of Navarre."
Henry of Guise was of the house of Anjou and Lorraine, descendants of King John II of France. Henry of Navarre's connection was more distant, as the Dukes of Bourbon were descendants of King St. Louis IX, but their line was then more senior. The Catholics also put hope in Navarre's uncle, Charles the Cardinal of Bourbon, but he died just a year after the King. The line of the Bourbon House of Condé is continued in a separate popup.
Henry of Navarre had a much more immediate claim on the throne than Guise. His grandmother was a sister of King Francis I, so he was actually the second cousin of the Kings Francis II, Charles IX, and Henry III, all brothers. Although the female connections couldn't pass muster of the Salic Law governing the French succession, the close relationships helped, as was confirmed when he married Margaret, sister of the then King Charles IX. But this reconciliation was followed shortly by the St. Bartholomew's Day Massacre of 1572, when perhaps as many as 10,000 French Protestants were killed. Civil war raged again. In 1588, just as the Catholics and the Duke of Guise seized Paris and humiliated King Henry, the Duke and his brother, the Cardinal of Guise, were murdered on the King's orders. The King himself was then assassinated (1589), and Henry of Navarre became King, followed by a Spanish invasion of France. Henry then suddenly (1593) disarmed the opposition by converting to Catholicism. Cynicism was widely suspected (Paris vaut bien une messe, "Paris is worth a Mass"), but the move was effective, especially as the opposition was seen as agents of Spain. Although Henry himself was subsequently assassinated, the Bourbons were firmly on the Throne -- until the fateful events of 1789.
| BOURBON KINGS | |
|---|---|
| Henry IV of Bourbon | 1589-1610 |
| War with Spain, 1595-1598; Edict of Nantes, 1598 | |
| Louis XIII | 1610-1643 |
| Thirty Years War, 1618-1648 | |
| Louis XIV | 1643-1715 |
| Treaty of Westphalia, 1648; War of Devolution, 1667-1668; Dutch War, 1672-1678; Revocation of the Edict of Nantes, 1685; War of the League of Augsburg, 1688-1697; War of the Spanish Succession, 1701-1713 | |
| Louis XV | 1715-1774 |
| War of the Polish Succession, 1733-1735; War of the Austrian Succession, 1740-1748; Seven Years War, 1756-1763; Corsica ceded by Genoa, 1768 | |
| Louis XVI | 1774-1792; d.1793 |
| War of American Independence, 1778-1783; French Revolution, 1789; First Republic, 1792-1804; the Convention, 1792-1795; King & Queen executed, 1793; Reign of Terror, 1793-1794; The Directory, 1795-1799; Consulate, 1799-1804; First Empire, 1804-1814, 1815 | |
| Louis XVIII | 1814-1824 |
| Charles X | 1824-1830 |
| Revolution of 1830, ORLÉANist KING | |
| Louis Philippe of Orléans | 1830-1848 |
| Second Republic, 1848-1852; Second Empire, 1852-1870 | |
Under the Bourbons, France rose to be the most powerful state in Europe, and a paradigm of Royal Absolutism. Troubled by episodes of Huguenot and noble opposition under Louis XIII and Louis XIV, the Monarchy nevertheless went from success to success. Entering the Thirty Years War on the side of the faltering Protestants, under the advice of the Cardinal Richelieu, it became clear that raison d'état had trumped loyalty to the Catholic cause.
Louis XIV, who completed and consolidated France's position, foreign and domestic, and under whom the prosperity, power, and splendor of the country, and his Court, became the envy and admiration of Europe, nevertheless began to dissipate and undermine these achievements, mainly through the series of incessant wars that he began in 1667 and that continued nearly to his death. These wars in fact resulted in permanent additions of territory to the Kingdom (and the installation of a Bourbon line in Spain), long the object of French policy, but the cost was permanent damage to the prosperity of the country and the finances of the government -- and Louis topped it off, forgetting raison d'état, by revoking the Edict of Nantes (1685) and expelling the Huguenots, who immediately added their considerable enterprise to his Protestant enemies.
"Those who didn't live in the eighteenth century before the Revolution do not know the sweetness of living." Charles Maurice de Talleyrand-Périgord |
The France of Louis XV then had nothing like the position in Europe that Louis XIV had once had. Now England was waxing in power. French naval power and colonial possessions in America and India were permanently broken and subordinated in the Seven Years War (1756-1763). Meanwhile, Madame de Pompadour developed for the King a veritable production line of young mistresses, whom he would visit at the notorious "Deer Park" (Parc aux Cerfs), with their many bastards pensioned off.
The cost of the continuing wars was ultimately beyond the resources of the government, and the French Revolution began when Louis XVI merely called the Estates General to try and get more revenue (1789). New revenue there would be, the first example of national mobilization for total war, but Louis XVI would derive no benefit from it. 
Republican France then lept into European hegemony, of a kind that had not been seen in many centuries, perhaps not since Charlemagne, a precedent not lost on Napoleon. The opposition, however, still led by England, ground this down. The Bourbons were restored, to rather underwhelming enthusiasm. They could never again be accepted as truly representing the Nation, rather than an imposition on it. The "bourgeois" King, Louis Philippe, with the Liberal tradition of the House of Orléans behind him, was one way of trying to resolve this, but the Royal monarchy ended with its failure in 1848. The Pretenders to the French Monarchy are today still of the line of Orléans.
The French Revolution had two major unexpected results, the Reign of Terror and the dictatorship of Napoleon. Thomas Jefferson thought that the violence might actually be worth it, if only one man and woman were left, to get rid of the Old Regime. However, he then realized that the power of the Terrorists was not, after all, being used for any worthy end. Napoleon at first "saved the Revolution" but then produced his own version of the Old Regime. In 1803 he began handing out new Imperial Electorships to his supporters (e.g. Baden, Württemberg) in Germany, perhaps looking forward to being elected Holy Roman Emperor. However, his patience with this didn't last more than a year. He would have had a long time to wait, since the Emperor Francis II lived until 1835 (though, to be sure, he might have been deprived of his crown, or his life, a bit earlier if Napoleon had really wanted either). Instead, with the blessing, but not the authority, of the Pope, he crowned himself Emperor, as the new Charlemagne, in 1804. He soon abolished the old Empire (1806), gave his supporters elevated titles (Baden became a Grand Duchy, Württemberg a Kingdom, etc.), and established other monarchies, often for his relatives, in the territories brought under the control of France. The Revolution had already begun to radically transform the map of Europe, but under Napoleon especially the familiar boundaries of European states appeared to melt and run with an alarming fluidity and frequency.
The symbolism of the new tricolore flag of the Republic can have many explanations. However, one coincidence is that the three colors match the colors of the three principal dynasties in French history. The banner of Charlemagne and so the Carolingians was the red oriflamme. The Capetians may have begun with red, but blue became the background of their "Banner of France." Finally, the Bourbons quite formally and explicitly used white, even for military uniforms. 
It seems improbable that the Revolutionaries wanted a flag to commemorate the French monarchy, and they may have just liked the colors, but then the Kings had liked these colors also.
At right was see Thérèse Tallien (1773-1835, née Cabarrús) in the Greek revival clothing that soon became the Empire style of high waisted dresses. Tallien is a good representative of the influence of French woman on both culture and politics in both the Ancien Régime and the Revolutionary period.
| French Revolution, 1789; First Republic, 1792-1804; the Convention, 1792-1795; King & Queen executed, 1793; Reign of Terror, 1793-1794 | |
|---|---|
| Directory, 1795-1799 | |
| Étienne-François Le Tourneur | 1795-1797 |
| Jean-François Rewbell | 1795-1799 |
| Louis-Marie de La Révellière-Lépeaux | 1795-1799 |
| Paul Barras | 1795-1799 |
| Lazare Carnot | 1795-1797 |
| François Barthélemy | 1797 |
| Coup of 18 Fructidor | |
| Philippe-Antoine Merlin de Douai | 1797-1799 |
| François de Neufchâteau | 1797-1798 |
| Jean-Baptiste Treilhard | 1798-1799 |
| Directory of 30 Prairial | |
| Paul Barras | 1795-1799 |
| Emmanuel-Joseph Sieyès | 1799 |
| Louis-Jérôme Gohier | 1799 |
| Pierre-Roger Ducos | 1799 |
| Jean-François- Auguste Moulin | 1799 |
| Consulate, 1799-1804 | |
| Napoleon Bonaparte | First Consul |
| Jean-Jacques-Régis de Cambacérès | Second Consul |
| Charles-François Lebrun | Third Consul |
| BONAPARTE EMPERORS | |
| First Empire, 1804-1814, 1815 | |
| Napoleon I | Emperor, 1804-1814, 1815; last Emperor crowned by Pope, d.1821 |
| Second Republic, 1848-1852; Second Empire, 1852-1870 | |
| Napoleon III | President, 1848-1852 |
| Emperor, 1852-1870; last French Emperor, d.1873 | |
French power had shaken Europe under Louis XIV, but Louis himself ran up against the limits to which French power could be mobilized, and his wars damaged the basis of that power. For the rest of the century, France declined in its ability to focus its resources, until the Revolution began as the King simply appealed for more taxes. The Revolution then introduced two specifically modern innovations: (1) the destruction of all traditional limitations on power; and (2) the total subordination of all activity to politics and the state. This was the essence of modern totalitarianism, already implied by Rousseau, later theoretically formulated by Hegel and Marx, and practiced by Lenin, Hitler, and Stalin. It enabled France to wash over her enemies -- all except England, which had had its Revolutions back in the 17th century, and Russia, which was simply too big and inert to be conquered in Napoleon's fashion. Napoleon, although reconciling with the Pope (until annexing Rome and arresting him in 1809), supposedly reintroducing some of the limitations on government of traditional society, marrying a Hapsburg and producing a half-Hapsburg heir (Napoleon II), nevertheless was still ruthless beyond most precedent.
A memorable example of Napoleon's ruthlessness was his kidnapping and execution of the Duke of Enghien, the heir of the Bourbon House of Condé. Enghien was a young, handsome, appealing, and largely apolitical Royal, living quietly in neutral Baden. Frustrated over Royalist plots, Napoleon decided, or was misinformed,
Napoleon Bonaparte, |
Even Napoleon, however, began to run up against the limits of French power. The British "nation of shopkeepers" frustrated him at sea and poured arms, money, and men into Spain to help in the 1808 national rising against the French -- something rather like the Sicilian Vespers of 1282. Looking to perfect his Continental boycott of Britain, Napoleon unfortunately (for him) turned on an uncooperative Russia. The size of Russia and the punishing winter (or, as it happens, just the autumn -- by December Napoleon was already back in France) destroyed Napoleon's Grande Armée. While the parallel with Hitler's invasion of Russia is oft noted, it is less often recognized that each of them, wanting to ultimately defeat Britain, nevertheless turned resources away from active combat with the British. In Napoleon's case this was in Spain, as in Hitler's it was in North Africa. The result in each case was to forfeit the Mediterranean theater of the general European War while taking on an impossible strategic task in Russia.
With everyone allied against Napoleon, and losing the "Battle of the Nations" at Leipzig in 1813, the collapse then came rapidly enough. Abdicating, Napoleon was unhappy as the Prince of Elba (1814-1815), tried to return to power, and was defeated at Waterloo after only 100 days. His few remaining days were then spent on distant St. Helena, dying in only his 52nd year (1769-1821).
In 1840 Napoleon's body was brought back from St. Helena and enshrined in the Hôtel des Invalides, Louis XIV's home for disabled veterans. Napoleon II, the "King of Rome," was only 21 when he died of tuberculosis. Buried with his Hapsburg family in Vienna, France vainly sought reburial with his father. This was finally effected, in a remarkable show of Imperial collegial affection, by no less than Adolf Hitler, who united son with father in December 1940.
Looking backwards and forwards from this point, the French colonial Empire went through two major phases, the original expansion of the 17th and 18th centuries, and the conquests of the 19th century. North America, the West Indies, and India were the venue of the earlier activity. In North America, French efforts centered on the St. Lawrence River, whose watershed was New France, and the Mississippi River, whose watershed was Louisiana. Newfoundland and Acadia (henceforth Nova Scotia) were ceded to Britain in 1715. All of New France (except two islands) and Louisiana were lost, however, in the Seven Years War (1756-1763). The British only demanded Louisiana east of the Mississippi, but France ceded the western part to Spain in compensation for Spanish losses in the war. To this day, however, a French speaking state remains in Quebec, and a smaller French speaking community remains in southern Louisiana (the Cajuns). The Seven Years War also broke the French position in India, where the project of establishing French control over native states was then taken over by Britain. France retained five cities in India, however, until surrendering them to the Republic of India in the 1950's. Although little of the French position was redeemed, French arms made a more creditable showing, and British interests were gravely damaged, when France went to war in 1778 in league with the American Revolutionaries. Although finally defeated in the classic battle of The Saintes in 1782, the French Navy gave the British as hard a time as they had ever had. Most noteworthy was the brilliant campaign of Pierre André de Suffren de Saint-Tropez, a Knight of Malta, for two years in the Atlantic and then in Indian waters. Aggressive as only a British admiral was expected to be, Suffren's greatest problem was infusing his own spirit into his captains.
| French Colonial Possessions |
|---|
|
The 19th century French colonial activity was mainly in Africa and East Asia. A fateful move came in 1830, when forces began to occupy Algeria, in great measure to end the piracy that had plagued the Mediterranean for decades. In time this led to the settlement of a French colonial population. A few French possessions on the coast of West Africa led, in the "scramble for Africa" in the 1880's to the huge domains of French West Africa and French Equatorial Africa. Notions that these West African territories might be linked to French Somaliland led to the confrontation of an expedition under Jean Baptiste Marchand with the British at Fashoda in the Sudan in 1898. The British, however, had an army, Lord Kitchener's, on the spot, and there was little France could do.
Another focus of French activity was in Indochina. Involvement in Vietnam even at the beginning of the century was extended to control, not just over Vietnam but, at the expense of Siam, over Cambodia and Laos. This all would come to a catastrophic end at Dien Bien Phu in 1954.
In the Pacific, France came into possession of the heart of Polynesia -- Tahiti and all the surrounding islands. When independence was offered in 1960, French Polynesia voted to remain part of France.
The New Hebridies had one of the most curious arrangements in all of imperialism, the Anglo-French "Condominium," or join rule. The islands became independent in 1980 as Vanuatu. Nearby New Caledonia remains part of France.
Some final additions to French possessions came with the end of World War I. The German colonies of Togo and Cameroon were both divided between Britain and France, with the French getting the larger shares (since Tanganyika went to Britain and Southwest Africa to South Africa). Similarly, the infamous Sykes-Picot agreement with Britain gave the French a free hand in Syria, which the British had taken from Turkey. The French regarded themselves as the particular protectors of Lebanese Christians. In 1920 they occupied all of Syria by force, and
| Kings of Tahiti | |
|---|---|
| Tu-nui-ea-i-te Atua-i-Tarahoi Vaira'atoa Taina [Outu] Pomare I | 1791-1803 |
| Tu Tunuiea'aite-a-tua Pomare II | 1803-1821 |
| Te-ri'i-ta-ria Pomare III | 1821-1827 |
'Aimatta Pomare IV Vahine-o- Punuateraitua  | 1827-1877 |
| French Protectorate, 1842 | |
| Teri'i Taria Te-ra-tane Pomare V | 1877-1880, d.1891 |
| Sovereignty surrendered to France, 1880; Overseas Territory, 1956 | |
While French colonialism may have had less of the racism and racial separateness that now seem characteristic of British practice, it nevertheless was rather more intent on imposing French "civilization" and less tolerant of taking "no" for an answer -- while the British condescended to allow quaint native customs and institutions to survive, within limits. Thus, the French history with Syria contrasts with the British relationship to Egypt, where the British penchant for indirect rule reached its highest state (Egypt was thus never more than a British Protectorate, and that only from 1914-1922 -- the military occupation of 1882 had not ended de jure Ottoman suzerainty and the pretext of local Egyptian autonomy). France, to be sure, had tolerated the continuation of
| Kings of Madagascar | |
|---|---|
| Adriantsimitoviaminandriana | 1710-1735 |
| Andriambelomasina | 1735-1760 |
| Andrianjafy | 1760-1783 |
| Andrianampoinimerina | 1783-1809 |
| Radama I | 1809-1828 |
| Ranavalona I | 1828-1861 |
| Radama II | 1861-1863 |
| Rasoherina | 1863-1868 |
| Ranavalona II | 1868-1883 |
| Ranavalona III | 1883-1896, d.1917 |
| French Protectorate, 1895-1958; Overseas Territory, 1958-1960 | |
The Kings of Tahiti are from a website of Tatihian history by Christopher Buyers. The Kings of Madagascar are from the Oxford Dynasties of the World, by John E. Morby [Oxford University Press, 1989, 2002, p.237]. Although the names do not look very similar, the languages of Tahiti and Madagascar are actually, like Hawaiian, Malayo-Polynesian
| Governors of Kwangchouwan | |
|---|---|
| Charles Louis Théobald Courrejolles | 1898-1900 |
| Gustave Alby | 1900-1902, 1903-1906 |
| Théophile Henri Bergès | 1902-1903 |
| Jean Edme Fernand Gautret | 1906-1908 |
| Henri Victor Sestier | 1908-1910 |
| Paul Edgard Dufrénil | 1910-1911 |
| Jean Ernest Moulié | 1911-1912 |
| Pierre Stéphane Salabelle | 1912 |
| Henri Jean Auguste Caillard | 1912-1915 |
| Marius Albert Garnier | 1915-1919 |
| Jean-Félix Krautheimer | 1919-1922, 1922-1923 |
| Paul Marie Alexis Joseph Blanchard de la Brosse | 1922, 1925-1927 |
| Paul Michel Achille Quesnel | 1923-1925 |
| Louis Félix Marie Édouard Rivet | 1927-1929 |
| Achille Louis Auguste Sylvestre | 1929-1932 |
| Pierre Charles Edmond Jabouille | 1932-1933 |
| Paul Delamarre | 1933-1934 |
| Maurice Émile Henri de Tastes | 1934-1936 |
| Camille Fernand Chapoulart | 1936-1937 |
| Jacques Henri Paul Le Prevôt | 1937-1942 |
| Louis Frédéric Claire Guillaume Marty | 1942 |
| Pierre Marie Jean Domec | 1942-1943 |
| Japanese occupation, 1943-1945; returned to China, 1946 | |
At left we have the French governors of Kwangchouwan (Kuang-chow-wan, Guangzhouwan, modern Chankiang or Zhanjiang), which France leased from China in 1898. This anchored the French sphere of influence and Treaty Ports in southern China. After the fall of France in 1940, the Governor placed his loyalty in the Free French. The Japanese weren't going to like that, but then it didn't make much difference anyway. The Japanese also occupied Vichy controlled territories, and eventually they got around to occupying Kwangchouwan. After the War, the city was simply returned to China. The list of Governors is from a page at the World Statesmen site.
A curious survival of French colonialism is the French Foreign Legion, the Légion Etrangère. This was formed in 1831, soon after the occupation of Algeria, and its headquarters remained in Algeria as long as that was a French possession. It is now based in the south of France, but with installations in French Guiana, Djibouti (no longer a French colony, but requiring French protection from claims by surrounding countries, Ethiopia and Somalia), and elsewhere. French nationals are not allowed to enlist in the Legion, although it is mostly commanded by French officers. Up to one hundred different nationalities are found among the men. Knowledge of French is not necessary, but the men are expected to learn French quickly, under the Legion's demanding instruction. On entering the Legion, one is given a new identity, and this has always meant that anyone with a criminal background could find sanctuary. A harsh kind of sanctuary, since enlistment is for five years, discipline is harsh, and the danger is considerable. France, even now, feels less concern about sending the Legion into dangerous situations, rather than French Army units consisting of French citizens. Historically, about 10% of the Legion have died in service. Although much of the 19th century romance of the Legion is associated with its desert duty in the Sahara (as in the many movie versions of the novel Beau Geste, 1926, 1933, & 1966, at least), its most famous battle has probably been the catastrophic defeat at Dien Bien Phu. Nevertheless, now it has the reputation of an elite and tough unit without peer. It was among French forces in the Gulf War that liberated Kuwait. On completion of successful service, a Legionaire can return to his former national identity, or he can claim French citizenship under the new identity. Reenlistment and career service can lead to retirement at the Legion's own soldiers home.
The French Second Empire developed when Napoleon's nephew, Louis Napoleon, transformed himself from the President of the Second Republic to the Emperor of the Second Empire. Napoleon III's France was a much more conventional, politic, and durable state than Napoleon I's. Napoleon III ironically obtained territorial additions to France from his ally, Sardinia, after defeating their mutual enemy, Austria. He was even an ally of England in the Crimean War (1853-1856), though there was otherwise a great deal of friction with France's ancient enemy. In short, the Second Empire was no upheaval of Europe the way that the First Republic and the First Empire had been. The end of Napoleon III, however, was the consequence of Otto von Bismarck's plan for the coming German upheaval. Defeated by Prussia, Napoleon abdicated and left France to its fate, but at least his last years of exile, in England itself, were rather more comfortable and honorable than Napoleon I's had been; but his son, sadly, died fighting the Zulus in the British Army.
The Imperial crown for Napoleon is shown with an orange nimbus. This is to indicate that Napoleon was crowned by the Pope (Pius VII), as with the Mediaeval Emperors, but with the irregularity that it was not in Rome and, well, Napoleon actually took the crown out of the Pope's hands and crowned himself. This was to avoid the kind of claims that the Popes had made since Charlemagne, that the imperial title was the Pope's to bestow, but it was a bit gratuitous at a time when everyone knew that Napoleon was the kind of ruler who might have killed the Pope as easily as invited him to his nice coronation -- though at this point, to be sure, Napoleon was making a bid for legitimacy and trying to find a place for himself among the traditional families and authorities of Europe. By the time of Napoleon III, the Pope (Pius IX) was dependent on French troops holding Rome for him against the new Kingdom of Italy. When the French withdrew to fight Prussia in 1870, the Italians rolled in and made Rome the capital of Italy. This officially ended the existence of the Papal State, after 1114 years (756-1870). The Popes then regarded themselves as hostages in the Vatican until, of all people, Mussolini worked out a treaty in 1929 establishing the independence and boundaries of the Vatican City.
| PRESIDENTS OF FRANCE | |
|---|---|
| Third Republic, 1871-1940 | |
| Adolphe Thiers | 1871-1873 |
| Patrice M. de MacMahon | 1873-1879 |
| Francois P.J. Grévy | 1879-1887 |
| Marie François Sadi-Carnot | 1887-1894 |
| assassinated by anarchist, 1894 | |
| Jean Casimir Périer | 1894-1895 |
| François Félix Faure | 1895-1899 |
| Émile Loubet | 1899-1906 |
| Clement Armand Fallières | 1906-1913 |
| Raymond Poincaré | 1913-1920 |
| World War I, 1914-1918, recovery of Alsace-Lorraine, 1918 | |
| Paul E.L. Deschanel | 1920 |
| Alexandre Millerand | 1920-1924 |
| Gaston Doumergue | 1924-1931 |
| Paul Doumer | 1931-1932 |
| Albert Lebrun | 1932-1940 |
| World War II, 1939-1945, conquest by Germany, 1940 | |
| Henri Philippe Pétain | Chief of State, 1940-1944, d.1951 |
| Vichy State & German Occupation, 1940-1944; Allied Liberation, 1944; Provisional Government, 1944-1947 | |
| Charles de Gaulle | 1944-1946 |
| Félix Gouin | 1946 |
| Georges Bidault | 1946-1947 |
| Fourth Republic, 1947-1958 | |
| Vincent Auriol | 1947-1954 |
| René Coty | 1954-1958 |
| Fifth Republic, 1958-present | |
| Charles de Gaulle | 1958-1969 |
| Georges Pompidou | 1969-1974 |
| Valéry Giscard d'Estaing | 1974-1981 |
| François Mitterrand | 1981-1995 |
| Jacques Chirac | 1995-2007 |
| Nicolas Sarközy de Nagy-Bocsa | 2007-present |
was through with both Kings and Emperors. With the Third Republic, France settled in to a modern democratic normalcy. Eventually the great enemy even ceased to be England. A dangerous and aggressive unified Germany drew France into alliances with Russia and then England. When the Germans attacked in 1914, the result was appalling carnage such as had not been seen in war before, and it took the Americans to win the war, but then Germany was defeated and, better, Alsace and Lorraine, taken in 1871, were returned.
Unfortunately, the job would have to be done all over again, and France was not quite up to it. Defeatism and even Fascist sympathizers drained the élan vital that, in 1914, the French had once thought was all they needed to win wars. Enough it was not, but its absence altogether was disastrous. In 1940 Hitler accomplished the swift and crushing victory that the Kaiser had only dreamed about in 1914.
The humiliation and the mortification of the Germans marching into Paris was almost more than the French spirit could bear, but, what's worse, there were plenty who were more than happy to welcome Fascism and cooperate with the German occupation and the harrowing of the Jews. The old anti-Semitism that had once framed Alfred Dreyfus as a spy for Germany now joined with Germany to continue the project. 
The Free French of Charles de Gaulle, who used the "Cross of Lorraine" as their symbol, were almost an embarrassment. Indeed, when the British attacked elements of the French fleet in 1940, fearful that the Germans would gain control over them, many French may have remembered older fulminations about "perfidious Albion." But de Gaulle organized whole Free French units to fight with the Allies. They landed at Normandy and were later able to liberate Paris -- after the French had scuttled their own fleet in 1942 when the Germans moved to occupy all of France.
Liberation was a confused combination of relief, joy, shame, and the dangerous temptation of a pro-Soviet French Communist Party. Disastrous defeat in Indo-China, another nasty war in Algeria, along with raging inflation, served to discredit the new Fourth Republic. The solution, again, came from Charles de Gaulle, who created a Fifth Republic with a strong Presidency and abruptly cut loose the French colonial empire (1960), including even Algeria (1962). This actually led to a conspiracy of military men and attempts at a coup d'état and assassinations against de Gaulle. These failed, and the large French colonial population of Algeria left the country for France. This was very harsh medicine, but France came out the better for it under de Gaulle's firm hand. The worst was perhaps suffered by the French educated Algerians who ended up tortured and murdered by the new regime. Algeria has never been the better for that, and France now suffers tension over the Algerians who eventually followed the colonials, looking for a better life -- unfortunately finding it in a form that has created its own problems.
The tension over Algerian immigration, besides some inevitable cultural friction, has in great measure been the result of the high unemployment and poor to negative economic growth that have followed from the heavy burden of socialist economic policies. The 1990's (and now half the 2000's) were very nearly a decade that never happened for the French economy, despite all the fireworks over European unification and freer trade. This is perhaps France's greatest challenge today, a crushing tax burden (54% on as little as $45,000, plus 16% social security), labor unions that evidently would prefer a mediaeval guild system, and farcical policies like prohibiting people from working more than a certain number of hours (even for themselves). Ironically, the French seemed to like America best, despite their own socialist President Mitterrand, when Ronald Reagan was President, despite his standing for almost everything that France wasn't. While America had its Reagan, and Britain its Thatcher, France is still waiting for a leader who can save the country from itself. Meanwhile, the new woman to be chosen "Marianne," the symbol of France, model Laetitia Casta represents something else of some danger to France. She is Corsican. Indeed, Napoleon's mother was
named "Laetitia" also. Coriscan nationalism, or perhaps Italian irredentism as expressed by Corsicans (only part of France since 1768), simmers pretty constantly on the island, occasionally expressing itself in riots or minor terrorism, like Basque nationalism in Spain. Late in 2005 there were major strikes and riots on Corsica, which began with protests against the French government privatizing the ferry service that runs to the island, but quickly reached a severity out of proportion, even given the popularity of socialist principles, to such a proposal. As with similar ethnic separatism in Brittany, the French government is never in too tolerant a mood with such things, and any real autonomy or independence is probably beyond consideration.
For all that the trouble in Corsica might mean, it has now paled beside the riots of disaffected immigrants, and their children, that began on 27 October 2005. The dismal Stalinist housing projects that ring Paris, known as the cités or la Zone, the scene and source of an increasing French crime rate, and areas that the police venture into, if at all, only in force, became nightly scenes of burning and looting that continued through the middle of November. The violence also spread to over 300 other towns in France, with some incidents in Belgium, Germany, and elsewhere. Thus we see the glory of the welfare state, which supports people in a minimal and dismal existence, without jobs, ambitions, or hope. As many of the immigrants are Muslims, it is a ripe field for Islamic Fascism, and the looters have been heard chanting "Allahu Akbar!" It is also a case study in the activities of the press. The French press, eager to expose riots or disaffection in America, suppress the more provocative images of their own rioting. The (Francophile) American press, disoriented by the whole business, repeats leftist boilerplate about poverty, housing, racism, unemployment, etc., that it borrows from anti-American rhetoric, apparently without realizing that the French welfare state provides the housing and a minimal income, while also suppressing job creation. And I've read through more than one Associated Press story that did not use the words "Muslim" or "Islam" to describe people whose ideology and identity, to the extent that it exists at all, has little other inspiration. Most instructive events, and reactions.
In late March 2006 In 2007 we now get something (entirely?) different, the election of Nicolas Sarkozy, a "conservative" of Hungarian Jewish ancestry, as President of the Republic. However much a free market reformer or friend of America Sarkozy may prove to be, socialists, anarchists, and Muslim radicals immediately rioted. Always a hopeful sign. It will be nice if Sarkozy has the courage to deal both with the radicals and with the follies of the French economy and foreign policy. The French Revolutionary Calendar
)
Laetitia Casta (as seen at right), immediately moved to Britain to avoid French taxes. Smart girl. French resistance and obstruction leading up to the American campaign against Iraq in 2003 has resulted in considerable anti-French feeling in the United States, probably matched by anti-American feeling in France. It would not be so bad if French foreign policy didn't look so much like it did in 1938 -- and if attacks against synagogues were not something considerably more frequent in France than in the United States. What is missing in contemporary France and Germany both is an appreciation for classical liberalism -- i.e. free markets as well as social tolerance. It is noteworthy that "liberalism" (or "neo-liberalism") is a bad word in nearly all fashionable ideology, whether derived from Hegel, Nietzsche, or Marx. Napoleon's contempt for Britain as a "nation of shopkeepers" continues today in countries that could stand a great deal more shopkeepers; but the French and Germans know that the "Anglo-Saxon" model of liberalism is what contradicts their stupefying socialist institutions. They resent and envy it even as they feel a moral superiority for their own circumstances, however awkward for them those are. Since nearly every evil of the 20th century resulted from a rejection of liberalism, this all reflects a continuing unwillingness to learn from history that is astounding in its obstinacy and folly.
)
there were demonstrations in Paris, this time over a minor attempt by the government to reform labor law. The idea that workers younger than 26 might be fired without cause within the first two years of employment provoked great indignation, including sympathy strikes by transport workers across France. When general unemployment in France hovers around 10% and youth unemployment is something like 22%, this popular response to so timid a liberalization is a tragicomic tribute to the level of folly in French political culture. The socialist rejection of liberal economics is now so instinctive and fundamental to French identity that there is even a word for it, dirigisme, "interventionism." The word is related to the word "dirigible," from Latin dirigere, "to arrange, direct" (an so by implication, "steer"). We get the word "direct" from the participle. Indeed, an image of the Hindenberg might be apt for the French economy and society. The demonstrators know, of course, that the success of a small initial reform might lead to others, and others, and perhaps ultimately to an American free market in labor. They can't have that.
Copyright (c) 1996, 1997, 1998, 1999, 2000, 2001, 2002, 2003, 2004, 2005, 2006, 2007, 2008, 2009, 2011 Kelley L. Ross, Ph.D. All Rights Reserved
FRANCIA MEDIA
The central kingdom of the Emperor Lothar I did not survive him. Divided between his three sons, each part went its separate way. All, as it happened, end up for a while in the hands of the German Emperors, but only parts of Lower Lorraine are today part of Germany,
| Francia Media |
|---|
| Lorraine Burgundy Italy Papacy |
"Burgundy" is a name that has applied to many things. 
In his The Holy Roman Empire [1904, Schocken Books, 1961, 1964], James Bryce lists ten different applications. Bryce's list of ten Burgundies has been expanded to fifteen by Norman Davies, in the Burgundy chapter, "Burgundia: Five, Six or Seven Kingdoms (c.411-1795)" in Vanished Kingdoms, The Rise and Fall of States and Nations [Viking, 2011, p.143]. The five extra domains identified by Davies are shown below as sub-entries under Bryce's list. Note that in the schematic at right, the Duchy of Burgundy is not shown because is was part of Francia Occidentalis, while, inconsistently, Switzerland beyond the Reuss is shown, even though it was part of Francia Orientalis.
| Fiefs of Burgundy |
|---|
|
Kingdom of Burgundy, Arelate County & Duchy of Savoy Principality of Orange Principality of Monaco Free County of Burgundy Counties of Viennois & Dauphiné County of Provence |
They even had ambitions of reviving the Arelate Kingdom proper and being crowned monarchs -- an aspiration that died on the battlefield at Nancy in 1477. Because of this period, Burgundian identity came to overlay much of what was properly Lower Lorraine. Although the Duchy proper reverted to France, most of the rest of the Burgundian holdings passing to the Hapsburgs, whose subsequent acquisition of Spain meant that elements of Burgundian identity, such as the knotty ("raguly") Cross of St. Andrew, ended up used by the Spanish. The Cross was even used as a patch on Spanish uniforms.
| Kings of Burgundy | |||
|---|---|---|---|
| Upper Burgundy | Lower Burgundy, Provence | ||
| Boso | 879-887 | ||
| Rudolf I | 888-912 | Louis III the Blind | 887-928 901-905 |
| Italy, 899-905 | |||
| 912-937 | Rudolf II | Hugh of Arles | Italy, 926-947 |
| 928-933 | |||
| Italy, 922-926 | 933-937 | ||
| The Arelate Kingdom | |||
| Conrad the Peaceful | 937-993 | ||
| Fleet of Arab pirates destroyed by Romans off Provence, 941 | |||
| Rudolf III | 993-1032 | ||
| Burgundy Inherited by Conrad II the Salian | |||
It does not help that the history of the Kingdom is mostly during an exceedingly obscure and dangerous period, the "Second Dark Age," and that the Kings were not able to do a very good job of protecting it from the raids of Vikings from the North, Arabs from the South, and even Magyars from the East. Luxeuil, in the far north of the Kingdom, was actually sacked by both Vikings coming up from the Seine and Arabs coming up the Rhône. On the map, we see that Magyar raids passed close by Luxeuil and might well have joined in the fun. The difference between the Magyars and the others, of course, is that they were on horseback. The raid of 910 had swung down from far in the north of Germany. Although Henry the Fowler defeated the Magyars at Riade in 933, the raids would not stop until Otto the Great inflicted a heavier defeat on them at Lechfeld (or Augsburg) in 955.
While it might sound nice to have been "Conrad the Peaceful" (Conradus Pacificus, Konrad der Freidfertiger), this was really not an era to have been peaceful in, and especially through such a long reign. However, Conrad may have been wiser than contemporaries gave him credit for, since he seems to have arranged for the Magyars to attack the Arabs even while he was arranging for the Arabs to attack the Magyars. He then was able to clear out Arab bases in Provence with his own forces. Also, Conrad at one point received some unexpected help, from Constantinople. The Roman Navy destroyed an Arab pirate fleet off Provence in 941 -- although this was for the benefit of Hugh of Arles, who by this time was King of Italy. This may be the last time that serious power was projected from Romania so far west.
Burgundy was never a strong kingdom, never had a distinct cultural or national identity, and was not much of a player in larger European politics, although geographically it may largely be defined by the Rhône/Saône system and their Eastern tributaries. After the inheritance of the whole by the Emperor Conrad II, the most successful dynasty to come out of the area was the House of Savoy, which went on to unify Italy but, ironically, lose Savoy itself in the process. The role of the House in Italy, while the place of its origin passes to France, bespeaks the liminal or betwixt-and-between place of Burgundy in the histories of France and Italy. Modern nationalism demand a sharp break and boundary, but this is false to the history and to the cultural situation on the ground.
The story of the independence and unification of the Kingdom of Burgundy is a little complicated. The Duchy of Burgundy had been detached, permanently, as part of the Treaty of Ribemont in 880 (or, already, in the Treaty of Verdun, in 843). The Lower Kingdom (or Provence) broke away with a Carolingian in-law, Boso (a son-in-law of the Emperor Louis II), in 879. Boso had trouble maintaining his position, and was not effectively in power for the last five years of his life. His son Louis was not able to secure the Kingdom until 890.
By then, the last unity of the Carolingian domains was lost with the death of the ineffectual Charles the Fat in 888, Upper Burgundy became independent under local nobility, Rudolf of Auxerre, a member of the house of Welf whose cousins continued for centuries as major players in German history.
Boso's son, Louis, ended up involved in Italy (899-905), after King Arnulf of Germany had come and gone. This won him the Imperial crown from the Pope (901) and, according to some sources, a Roman wife, a daughter of the Emperor Leo VI in Constantinople. 
That was the extent of his good fortune, however. He lost the throne of Italy to one of the local players, Berengar I (a grandson of Louis the Pious), who also blinded him. Living out his years in Burgundy, he was unable to pass the throne to his son; and Lower Burgundy went to a cousin, Hugh of Arles (928). Meanwhile, Rudolf II of Upper Burgundy had entered Italy himself and overthrown Berengar (922), and Hugh had already made his own claim there too (926).
The conflict between Rudolf and Hugh was fixed up amicably enough (933). Hugh kept Italy, Rudolf got Lower Burgundy, and Hugh's son married Rudolf's daughter. Ruldolf, however, seems to have been slow to exert authority over Lower Burgundy, where Hugh's brother Boso ruled as Count of Arles. After Hugh's death, however, Rudolf's son, Conrad, reunited the Kingdom (often called the "Arelate" after the new capital of Arles). 
Hugh also ended up with a Roman connection, with his daughter Bertha wed to the young Emperor Constantine VII. Hugh's son, King Lothar II of Italy (the Emperor Lothar I had been King Lothar I of Italy), was later overthrown by Berengar II, who, just like the villains of the old silent movie cliff-hangers, tried to force the widowed Queen, Adelaide, into marrying him. To prevent this outrage, the German King Otto I rode to the rescue, killed the villain, married the Queen himself, and then was crowned Emperor by the Pope. They became the ancestors of all the German Emperors until Conrad IV. Adelaide didn't get along with the Greek wife of her son, Otto II, and spent some years with her brother Conrad back in Burgundy. Later (1097), she was Canonized.
Burgundy lost its independence just because of the failure of the male line -- the sort of problem we see in monogamous Europe but not in polygamous Islam or China. Rudolf III's heir became his niece, Gisela, who had married the Emperor Conrad II, who was himself a descendant of Adelaide and Otto I. This put together the classic Holy Roman Empire of the "four crowns," but 
it also made Burgundy a peripheral concern of its titular ruler. The feudal fragmentation of the Kingdom began to erase its identity, and when parts of it began to be acquired by Aragon and then France, the process started whereby most of it would end up French. The House of Savoy, indeed, ended up with the throne of Italy, but Savoy itself was then lost to France. Only Switzerland and Monaco are today independent fragments of what had been the Kingdom of Burgundy.
There was one salient and distinguishing cultural characteristic about Burgundy. Mostly within its borders was one of the distinctive regions of the French language, consisting of the dialects of Franco-Provençal or Arpitan. These contrasted with the other principal linguistic regions of Mediaeval France, the Langue d'oïl of the North and the Langue d'oc (Lenga d'òc) or Occitan of the South. From the Langue d'oïl 
(named after the word for "yes" which has become oui) of the North, we get the standard Parisian dialect of Modern French. The Langue d'oc, as "Languedoc," gave its name to a province or even to the whole South, particularly associated with the literary culture of the Provençal dialect and the political culture of the County of Toulouse. The status of the language and the power of Toulouse were broken by the infamous Albigensian Crusade (1209-1229). The Franco-Provençal dialects (where "yes" is ouè) can be distinguished from both the Langue d'oïl and the Langue d'oc. On the map we see how the dialect area covers the central lands of Burgundy, including all of Savoy, the French speaking part of Switzerland, much of the Dauphiné and the Franche Comté, and a slice of the Duchy of Burgundy. The areas around Aosta and Susa, originally part of Burgundy and Savoy, and today in Italy, nevertheless retain, to some extent, their Franco-Provençal language. Mostly, however, Parisian French has been replacing Franco-Provençal, even in Switzerland. The most prestigious form of Franco-Provençal was the dialect of Lyon (sometimes "Lyons" in English). Lyon is now one of the principal cities of France, but this has provided no leverage for the survival of its Mediaeval language. The political triumph of Parisian French leaves one with the impression that Burgundy, as a Francophone region, properly belongs, of course, to France. However, this is the result rather than the cause. As with the Langue d'oc, what was originally a distinct language has been supressed by the dominance of a government that was based in the North and imposed its language. The loss of the Franco-Provençal language is thus of a piece with the loss of Burgundian identity within the French State. I see that some dialect maps of France put the jurassien language with the Northern dialects rather than with Franco-Provençal. The dialect map of The Romance Languages, edited by Martin Harris and Nigel Vincent [Oxford University Press, 1988, map V, p.481], shows the Jura region within the Franco-Provençal area. Indeed, it shows more of the Franche Comté, all the way up to Alsace, with Franco-Provençal than I see on other maps. Otherwise, the Franche Comté has its own dialect of Langue d'oïl, the franc comtois, as the Duchy of Burgundy also has its own dialect, bourguignon.
A striking feature of the Kingdom of Burgundy is that it contained all of the highest mountains in Western Europe -- in Francia. They are the peaks of the Pennine Alps, the range south of the Rhône River before it flows into Lake Geneva (the Swiss Canton of Wallis/Valais). The highest point is Mt. Blanc, at 15,771 ft. (4807 meters), now on the border between France and Italy but formerly well within the County (later Duchy) of Savoy. As Mt. Blanc is the highest point in both France and Italy, the highest point in Switzerland is Mt. Rosa (the Dufourspitze), at 15,203 ft. (4634 m), about fifty miles east of Mt. Blanc. There the eastern boundary of Burgundy would more or less have followed north the present Swiss-Italian border, by the Simplon Pass and around the headwaters of the Rhône. Note that the valley of Aosta was part of Burgundy, and Savoy, though it is now in Italy. Sometimes Mt. Blanc is regarded as separate from the Pennines, although it is contiguous with that range and with no others. This is high country, perhaps not in comparison to the Andes or the Pamirs, but certainly in relation to Colorado or California. (Click on the )
map for a better resolution popup.) There are at least five other peaks in the Swiss Pennines that are higher than the highest point in the 48 States (Mt. Whitney, 14,494 ft.): the Matterhorn (Mt. Cervino), 14,690 ft., Täschhorn, 14,733 ft., Weisshorn, 14,780 ft., Liskamm (Lyskamm), 14,852 ft., and Dom, 14,913 ft. Around Mt. Blanc are subsidiary peaks that can be counted also. Three of them are higher than Mt. Whitney: Mont Blanc de Courmayeur, 15,577 ft., Pointe Luis-Amadeo, 14,662 ft., and Mont Maudit, 14,649 ft. Mt. Rosa (whose principal peak in Italian is Punta Dufour) also has a subsidiary peak, Punta Ghifetti, 14,941 ft. On the other hand, Liskamm and the Täschhorn can be considered subsidiary peaks of Mt. Rosa and Mt. Dom, respectively. Burgundy also contained the Bernese Alps, north of the Rhône Valley, which rise to 14,026 ft. (4274 m) at the Finsteraarhorn (about the same height as Mt. Langley in the Sierra Nevada) -- though the Jungfrau at 13,642 ft. is more conspicuous from the north.
Apart from the Pennines and Bernese Alps, There are no other 14,000+ ft. peaks in Western Europe. If the Kingdom of Burgundy had survived until today, it could present itself as the Culmen Franciae, the "Roof" or "Summit" of Francia (not the Culmen Europae, since peaks in the Caucasus are the highest in Europe as a whole, albeit at the very edge, between Europe and South-West Asia). Just as noteworthy as the peaks are the passes. The Simplon Pass, at 6592 ft. (2006 m), is at the east end of the Pennines (to the east is the St. Gotthard Pass, near the sources of the Rhine, the Rhône, the Reuss, and the Aare, where a tunnel was completed in 1882 at a cost of 310 lives). My only visit to the area involved a train trip through the Simplon Tunnel, 12.45 miles long, passing from Italy to Switzerland. At the west end of the Pennines is the Little St. Bernard Pass, at 7170 ft. (2188 m). The only real road over the Pennines, even now, is the historic Great St. Bernard Pass, which reaches 8110 ft. (2469 m -- though a tunnel now bypasses the actual summit). 
The comparison with the Sierra Nevada is interesting. The most famous Sierra pass is Donner Summit, at 7239 ft. This, however, is north of the really high parts of the Sierra. There, the last usable pass before a very long stretch south is Tioga Pass, at 9941 ft., which leaves Yosemite National Park to the east. I have driven across that and the Monitor Pass, at 8314 ft., which is roughly halfway between Yosemite and Lake Tahoe. The higher passes are all, of course, closed in Winter. Keeping Donner Pass open often requires heroic snowplowing. I had long assumed that the St. Bernard passes were named after the illustrious St. Bernard of Clairvaux (1090-1153), but this is not the case. St. Bernard of Montjoux (c.996-c.1081), a much more obscure figure historically, is the eponym of the passes. A canon in Aosta, this St. Bernard had the care of the Alpine passes and did his job in a vigorous and epic fashion, founding hospices at the very summit of both St. Bernard passes and staffing them with Augustinian monks, who henceforth welcomed and rescued travelers. The familiar St. Bernard dogs were bred by the monks for help in their mountain patrols and rescues. These institutions still exist, though there is now certainly much less need for them.
For a long time the 
only book I could find for general information on Burgundy, both the Kingdom and the Duchy (also the County of Burgundy and Savoy), with lists, genealogies, and maps, was Phoenix Frustrated, the Lost Kingdom of Burgundy, by Christopher Cope [Constable, London, 1986; Dodd, Mead & Company, New York, 1987]. The large maps above and below are based on Cope. I could always, of course, have asked for more, but that would be ungrateful for the attention and love that Mr. Cope has devoted to a country that seems to correspond to no natural unit in modern Europe, whose memory is largely eclipsed, and whose very name has drifted elsewhere. A good narrative history of Burgundy, with genealogies, can also be found in The New Cambridge Medieval History, Volume III, c.900-c.1024 [Timothy Reuter, editor, Cambridge, 1999, pp.328-345]. Now there is also a detailed Burgundy chapter, "Burgundia: Five, Six or Seven Kingdoms (c.411-1795)" in Vanished Kingdoms, The Rise and Fall of States and Nations, by Norman Davies [Viking, 2011]. Davies is alert to the obscure and protean nature of Burgundian history and, like Cope, also devotes attention to the Franco-Provençal language.
The subsequent history of the Kingdom of Burgundy is covered by pages on the Counts of Burgundy, the Free County, the Counts of Viennois and Dauphiné, the Counts of Provence, the Counts & Dukes of Savoy and the Grimaldi Princes of Monaco. As it happens, Rudolf I of Burgundy was from the German House of Welf. In time, his cousins would play a large part in the history of Germany, become the Dukes of Brunswick and the Electors and Kings of Hanover, and finally Kings of England. The last British Welf was, of all people, Queen Victoria.
| Kings of Italy & Emperors | |
|---|---|
| Berengar I of Friuli | 888-891 |
| Wido (Guy/Guido) of Spoleto | Emperor, 891-894 |
| Lambert of Spoleto | Emperor, 894-896 |
| Arnulf, King of Germany | Emperor, 896-899 |
| Louis III of Lower Burgundy, III of Italy, Burgundy, & Emperor | 899-905;Emperor, 901-905 |
| Berengar I (restored) | 905-922;Emperor, 915-922 |
| Rudolf (II) of Upper Burgundy | 922-933 |
| Hugh of Arles | 933-947 |
| Fleet of Arab pirates destroyed by Romans off Provence, 941 | |
| Lothair II of Arles | 947-950 |
| embassy of Liutprand of Cremona to Constantine VII, 949 | |
| Berengar II of Ivrea | 950-961 |
| overthrown by Otto I, 961 | |
reestablished a bit of an independent identity that had been lost when Charlemagne conquered the Lombards in 774. This continued to be complicated by the interests of the Popes, who wanted a strong protector but also one who would not desire the Papal enclave itself. A good protector could be honored with Imperial coronation, but a less than faithful one could find someone else called in against him. The Popes were thus best served by external protectors -- too distant to threaten Papal independence, but ready to be called in against local threats. In this era, only one King came in from Germany, Arnulf, but there was then considerable involvement with nearby Burgundy. Crowning the local Italian princes Emperor now looks absurd and pathetic, but the practice does seem to have been abandoned after Berengar I, fighting his way back into power after being on a sidelines for a few years, was crowned in 915. Berengar blinded Louis III of Burgundy. Just when it looked like another Burgundian house (Arles) might make Italy its own, another Berengar (the grandson of the first) took over (950). This time the German King Otto I was called in, to marry the widowed Queen (Adelaide, of Lothair II), and assume the crown of Italy (951-952). Berengar was left, however, with Italy as a fief of Germany. Predictably, he was not very obedient, and Otto returned, newly victorious over the Magyars (955), to dethrone (kill?) Berengar (961) and then be crowned Emperor by the Pope (962).This ended the independent existence of the Kingdom of Italy, which would not be revived in similar form until Napoleon. Now the German Kings would 
become the nearly permanent protectors and/or antagonists of the Popes, mainly serving in the long run to inhibit the growth of local power that might threaten Papal independence. This also served to keep Italy split between North and South, with the South continuing to interact more strongly with Romania and Islâm.
The genealogical diagram leaves out the Emperor Arnulf and Rudolf II of Burgundy. Their descent can be examined under the Carolingians and Burgundy, respectively. St. Adelaide, it should be noted, was a daughter of Rudolf II. Since the succession jumps around so much, the Kings of Italy are numbered, next to the green crown, from Berengar I to Berengar II. An anomaly I now find in my sources is that Gisela is listed as a daughter of Lothar I by The New Cambridge Medieval History, Volume III, c.900-c.1014 [Timothy Reuter, editor, 1999, p.702]. This contradicts Volume II of the History [Rosamond McKitterick, editor, 1995, p.858], which showed Gisela as the daughter of Louis the Pious. Now I have found confirmation of Gisela as the daughter of Louis the Pious in the Erzählende genealogische Stammtafeln zur europäischen Geschichte, Volume I, Part 1, Deutsche Kaiser-, Königs-, Herzogs- und Grafenhäuser I [Andreas Thiele, Third Edition, R. G. Fischer Verlag, 1997, p.9]. I had previously gathered that a daughter of Lothar, Rothilde, married Wido of Spoleto, King of Italy, but I now find this contradicted in that volume [p.9] and in Volume II, Part 2, Europäiche Kaiser-, Königs- und Fürstenhäuser II Nord-, Ost- und Südeuropa [Second Edition, 1997, p.169], where "Rotrud" is shown married to Lambert II of Nantes, an uncle of Wido.
| Kings of Italy | |
|---|---|
| Victor Emanuel II | King of Sardinia, 1849-1861 |
| King of Italy, 1861-1878 | |
| Franco-Sardinian War, Lombardy ceded by Austria, 1859;  Savoy & Nice ceded to France, 1860;Rome occupied, Quirinal Palace official residence of the King of Italy, 1870 | |
| Umberto I | 1878-1900 |
| assassinated by anarchist, 1900 | |
| Victor Emanuel III | 1900-1946, abdicated, d.1947 |
| Mussolini Dictatorship, 1922-1943; German Occupation, 1943-1945 | |
| Umberto II | 1946, d. 1983 |
Italy remained divided until the 19th century, when unification was brought about by Sardinia. The Kingdom of Sardinia, however, was never really, by itself, a Great Power, and Austria and the other possessors of Italian territory could not be defeated without help. 
After disappointing results from the revolutions of 1848, help came in the form of the French Emperor Napoleon III, who could do the heavy lifting required to defeat the Austrians. This won Milan for the House of Savoy (1859), but at the cost of Savoy itself, and Nice, ceded to France. But now the stage was set for the unification of Italy, which was achieved in 1861. Garibaldi's conquest of the Kingdom of the Two Sicilies (1860) brought the North and South of Italy together for the first time since the invasion of the Lombards in 568 AD. Florence became the capital of a united Italy, as Victor Emanuel II of Sardinia became the first King of an independent Italy since Berengar II in 961 -- exactly 900 years before. The country was not completely unified, however. The Pope still held out in Rome with the protection of the French Army. Napoleon III may even have thought of this as helping to secure the legitimacy of his Imperial crown. Venice also remained in the hands of Austria. The problems of Venice and Rome would both be solved by Prussia. When Bismarck got Austria into a war in 1866, he told the Italians he could get them whatever they wanted. Just as well, since Austria was still able to defeat Italy on land and sea. So Prussia won the war anyway, and Italy got Venice. Then Bismarck got France into a war in 1870. Italy didn't join that one but benefited anyway. Napoleon III had to withdraw from Rome, and the Pope no longer could resist the Kingdom of Italy. Rome became the capital of a united Italy for the first time since perhaps the 3rd century. Italian policy then continued to focus on Italia irredenta, "unredeemed Italy." 
Thus, although one might think that Corsica would count as the last remaining part of historic Italy to acquire (not to mention Savoy and Nice), and even though Italy was actually an ally of Austria and Germany, it was Austria against which demands were made at the outset of World War I -- namely that any place in the Adriatic that had ever had an Italian name should be turned over. This absurd demand was rejected, and so Italy came in on the side of the Allies. Although again unable to defeat Austria in battle, the Allied victory delivered to Italy the Austrian provinces of Trent and Istria and part of the Tyrol. Much of Istria and some of the Tyrol, however, were not Italian speaking. This impropriety was corrected for Istria after World War II, but Austria was never in a position, as Yugoslavia was, to insist on such a correction. Hitler, indeed, had annexed all of the Austrian cessions after Mussolini was overthrown in 1943, but the postwar settlement restored the pre-war status quo. Otherwise, World War II was a very bad time for Italy to return to the German alliance, and it turned out that Italy wasn't even strong enough to conquer Greece, much less contend as an equal with Germany or Britain. Clearly, it was time to focus on humdrum internal development instead of glorious adventures.
Unfortunately, as ideology had tempted the Italians into a disastrous love of Mussolini in the 20's, Italian development remained hampered by the popularity of communism after World War II. That the country has grown greatly anyway is a tribute, in part, to the ability of Italians to ignore the government and run entire businesses in an underground economy. Because of this, it is hard to know exactly how large the economy is and what the true level of employment is. On the other hand, this does not make for as secure an environment as would be necessary for Italy to reach its true potential. There is also the lingering problem of the cultural differences between North and South, where gangsterism, rather than entrepreneurialism, while troubling the North through its ideological political manifestations (both fascist and communist), troubles the South in the far cruder form of the continuing traditional Mafia. Extortion and blood feuds do not make for a modern economy, much less a liberal society.
Italy's first attempt to acquire colonial possessions netted Eritrea and Somalia (1889) but then encountered an ignominious check when defeated in an attempt to conquer Ethiopia in 1896. The threat to Ethiopia was renewed and conquest effected in 1936, but by then Ethiopia was a member of the League of Nations, which was supposed to prevent such aggression. Italy was then, not just one among many in a general scramble for Africa, as in the earlier era, but a nasty dictatorship waging unprovoked war against an innocent nation.
| Prime Ministers of Italy | |
|---|---|
| Count Camillo Benso di Cavour | 1860-1861 |
| Baron Bettino Ricasoli | 1861-1862 |
| Urbano Ratazzi | 1862 |
| Marco Minghetti | 1862-1864 |
| General Alfonso La Marmora | 1864-1866 |
| Baron Bettino Ricasoli | 1866-1867 |
| Urbano Ratazzi | 1867 |
| Federigo Menabrea | 1867-1869 |
| Domenico Lanza | 1869-1873 |
| Marco Minghetti | 1873-1876 |
| Agostino Depretis | 1876-1878 |
| Benedetto Cairoli | 1878 |
| Agostino Depretis | 1878-1879 |
| Benedetto Cairoli | 1879-1881 |
| Agostino Depretis | 1881-1887 |
| Francesco Crispi | 1887-1891 |
| Marquis di Rudini | 1891-1892 |
| Giovanni Giolitti | 1892-1893 |
| Francesco Crispi | 1893-1896 |
| Marquis de Rudini | 1896-1898 |
| General Luigi Pelloux | 1898-1900 |
| Giuseppe Saracco | 1900-1901 |
| Giuseppe Zanardelli | 1901-1903 |
| Giovanni Giolitti | 1903-1906 |
| Baron Sidney Sonnino | 1906 |
| Giovanni Giolitti | 1906-1909 |
| Baron Sidney Sonnino | 1909-1910 |
| Luigi Luzzatti | 1910-1911 |
| Giovanni Giolitti | 1911-1914 |
| Antonio Salandra | 1914-1916 |
| Paolo Boselli | 1916-1917 |
| Vittorio Orlando | 1917-1919 |
| Francesco Nitti | 1919-1920 |
| Giovanni Giolitti | 1920-1921 |
| Ivanoe Bonomi | 1921-1922 |
| Luigi Facta | 1922 |
| Benito Mussolini | 1922-1943 |
| Marshal Pietro Badoglio | 1943-1944 |
| Ivanoe Bonomi | 1944-1945 |
| Ferruccio Parri | 1945 |
| Alcide De Gasperi | 1945-1953 |
| Giuseppe Pella | 1953-1954 |
| Mario Scelba | 1954-1955 |
| Antonio Segni | 1955-1957 |
| Adone Zoli | 1957-1958 |
| Amintore Fanfani | 1958-1959 |
| Antonio Segni | 1959-1960 |
| Fernando Tambroni-Armaroli | 1960 |
| Amintore Fanfani | 1960-1963 |
| Giovanni Leone | 1963 |
| Aldo Moro | 1963-1968 |
| Giovanni Leone | 1968 |
| Mariano Rumor | 1968-1970 |
| Emilio Colombo | 1970-1972 |
| Giulio Andreotti | 1972-1973 |
| Mariano Rumor | 1973-1974 |
| Aldo Moro | 1974-1976 |
| Giulio Andreotti | 1976-1979 |
| Francesco Cossiga | 1979-1980 |
| Arnaldo Forlani | 1980-1981 |
| Giovanni Spadolini | 1981-1982 |
| Amintore Fanfani | 1982-1983 |
| Bettino Craxi | 1983-1987 |
| Amintore Fanfani | 1987 |
| Giovanni Goria | 1987-1988 |
| Ciriaco De Mita | 1988-1989 |
| Giulio Andreotti | 1989-1992 |
| Giuliano Amato | 1992-1993 |
| Carlo Azeglio Ciampi | 1993-1994 |
| Silvio Berlusconi | 1994-1995 |
| Lamberto Dini | 1995-1996 |
| Romano Prodi | 1996-1998 |
| Massimo D'Alema | 1998-2000 |
| Giuliano Amato | 2000-2001 |
| Silvio Berlusconi | 2001-2006 |
| Romano Prodi | 2006-2008 |
| Silvio Berlusconi | 2008-2011 |
| Mario Monti | 2011-present |
The Italians had their hands full just subduing the Libyans. This turned out to be a mixed blessing. When Italy entered World War II, the possession of Libya gave Mussolini an opportunity to invade Egypt and take the Suez Canal. The Italian army, however, was thoroughly defeated and driven entirely out of Cyrenaica. This embarrassment was redeemed by Hitler, who sent some German troups, henceforth the Afrika Korps, with a brilliant commander, Erwin Rommel. This was more than a match for the British, and more than once Rommel looked on the verge of taking Alexandria. The British knew how serious this threat was, but apparently Hitler didn't. North Africa was always a sideshow to him, despite the fact that it was the only place he was actually fighting British ground forces; and resources that would end up wasted in Russia were never diverted to a campaign that could have overturned the strategic balance in the Middle East and gravely affected the course of the War. When the United States entered the War, and then invaded North Africa in November 1942, Rommel was overwhelmed both in Egypt and in his rear. Libya itself ended up abandoned as he retreated into Tunisia, where the final battles of the campaign were fought. Significantly, the Italians fought better under Rommel than they ever had under their own commanders. Meanwhile, Mussolini had tried invading Greece, jumping off from Albania, which he conquered in 1939. Again, this was more than the Italians could handle, and Hitler delayed his invasion of Russia just to conquer Yugoslavia and Greece. This all was strategically a lot less important than North Africa, and it meant that the Germans did not come within sight of Moscow until snow started falling. Thus, Mussolini, through his ill considered attacks, brought Hitler one strategic opportunity, that was not sufficiency exploited, and perhaps fatally compromised Hitler's own (and ill considered) pet operation against Russia. Meanwhile, a British expedition in 1941 returned Haile Sellassie to power in Ethiopia. After the War, Italy was divested of all foreign possessions, except for a brief administration of Somaliland.
The list of pre-World War II Italian Prime Ministers is from An Encyclopedia of World History; Ancient, Medieval, and Modern, Chronologically Arranged, compiled and edited by William L. Langer [Houghton, Mifflin, Company; the Riverside Press, Boston, 1940, 1948, 1952, 1960; pp. 1242-1243] and of post-World War II Prime Ministers from www.polisci.com (which now seems to have vacated its domain).
Of interest about the list of Prime Ministers is that the brief tenure so familiar in post-War Ministries has been consistently the case ever since the creation of the Kingdom of Italy. Few Prime Ministers have ever served more than a couple of years. The great exception, of course, was Benito Mussolini, who styled himself il Duce, "the Leader," but who constitutionally was never more than Prime Minister. This formally and de jure subordinate position later led Italians to blame the King for tolerating the dictatorship. Tolerate it the King may have done, but it is not clear just what he was expected to do if he had not. King Constantine of Greece was blamed for the Greek dictatorship even thought he supported an attempted coup against it and had to flee the country.
After the loss of Sicily to the Allies, Mussolini was overthrown and the new government immediately offered to surrender to the Allies. The scepticism and dithering of the Allies gave the Germans the opportunity to occupy most of Italy and restore Mussolini as dictator in the North. The Germans, however, now treated the Italians as enemies rather than true allies, and many Italians who had fought with the Germans in North Africa and Sicily now actually found themselves in German prison camps (cf. the Lina Wertmüller movie, Seven Beauties, 1976). The Italian surrender, however, did mean a continuity of government, unlike the later complete abolition of the government in Germany under the Allied Occupation. Mussolini himself met a grisly end, summarily tried and shot by partisans, then hung up by the heals in Milan. His granddaughter Alessandra, interestingly, has become active in Italian politics.
| Presidents of Italy; Quirinal Palace official residence of the President of Italy, 1946 | |
|---|---|
| Enrico de Nicola | 1946-1948 |
| Luigi Einaudi | 1948-1955 |
| Giovanni Gronchi | 1955-1962 |
| Antonio Segni | 1962-1964 |
| Giuseppe Saragat | 1964-1971 |
| Giovanni Leone | 1971-1978 |
| Alessandro Pertini | 1978-1985 |
| Francesco Cossiga | 1985-1992 |
| Giovanni Spadolini | 1992 |
| Oscar Luigi Scalfaro | 1992-1999 |
| Carlo Azeglio Ciampi | 1999-2006 |
| Giorgio Napolitano | 2006-present |
The post-War power of the Communist Party in Italian politics, together with the instability of the governments and the volatility of Italian politics in general, with periods of terrorist violence and kidnappings (like the kidnapping and then actual murder of former Prime Minister Aldo Moro in 1978), not to mention the grim reign of the Mafia in Sicily, has been a continuing source of concern for both all Italians and the Western Allies. The geopolitical danger of the Communists has passed, but their evil influence continues, and there really seems to be no more in the way of stability and consensus in Italian politics than there ever has been. Some regions, like Venice, are beginning to talk about independence. After the tenure of a former Communist, Massimo d'Alema, in 2001 Italians voted back in colorful millionaire Silvio Berlusconi. As the Left in Italian politics reminds us of Communism, the Right reminds us of Fascism. Berlusconi was betrayed by Rightist allies in his first tenure as Prime Minister, and they actually lost power in the 2001 election. It was possible that Berlusconi would even push Liberal, free market policies, to the distress of the leftist governments in most of the European Union; but both the future and the man were very unpredictable. Italian Prime Ministers have typically failed to serve more than a year or two, but Berlusconi, serving five, seemed to spend most of his time staying out of jail. Just what Berlusconi was up against, besides himself, was evident after April 16, 2002, when an apparently effective general strike was staged in Italy, all to protest government moves to make it easier to fire workers. A sort of instinctive, idiotic socialism is thus revealed, despite years of experience and evidence all over Europe that the harder it is for businesses to fire workers, the more reluctant they are to hire them,
Silvio Berlusconi, |
Berlusconi's finest moment may have been a statement he made, quoted at right, after the attack on America on 9/11/01, asserting the superiority of Western civilization in comparison to the present state of Islamic countries. This assertion of the plain truth was regarded as outrageous, however, both by the self-hating European Left and by those in the Islâmic world either self-deceived on the issue of its backwardness or infected with the poison of Islâmic Fascism (which had led to the attack itself). Berlusconi apologized, apparently for his ethno-centrism, but there is no good reason why he should have. Meanwhile, Berlusconi managed to get a law passed protecting him from judicial inquiry into his shady or corrupt business practices. This did not exactly strengthen his reputation, though it may have helped him stay in office. By late 2004 he had the longest serving Italian Government since World War II. Whether he accomplished anything substantial in reforming the economy is the question. His legal troubles ended up dominating the program of the government. In 2006, he was turned out, by a thin margin, but then returned in 2008. Afterwards, his agenda again mainly has seemed to consist of protecting himself from legal trouble, with little energy left over for constructive reforms. Quite the opposite. Italy is one of the "PIIGS," whose welfare spending has now placed it, with Portugal, Ireland, Greece, and Spain, in the sovereign debt crisis of the Euro zone. With all this going on, including a (marvelously titilating) sex scandal, it is remarkable that Berlusconi has stayed in office, although, perhaps the most like a gangster of anyone since Mussolini, that is precisely the trick.
Berlusconi's luck finally ran out in 2011. Surviving no-confidence votes, he nevertheless resigned because of the continuing sovereign debt crisis involving the PIIGS. In 2011, this has now resulted in new governments in all the PIIGS countries, with changes of leadership in Greece, Italy, and Spain all within a month. Whether this will really make any difference remains to be seen. The temptation to raise taxes rather than cut spending or reform labor law and business regulation is politically viable on both sides of the Atlantic. In the United States, it is still possible to deceive the voters enough to make the privileges and undue influence of public employee unions acceptable, even though they represent an interest totally adverse to the citizens and supportive of the otherwise unpopular Big Government. The situation can only be worse given the political culture of Europe.
While Mussolini's ambition was really to recreate the Roman Empire, it has often been noted that modern Italians seem to have little of the stoicism, discipline, and ferocity of the Romans. They seem, indeed, rather more like the Etruscans, as we know them from their tombs -- enjoying life, prizing decorative style, and, in general, just more excitable. Italy is now distinguished for art, architecture, music, food, and fashion, but also for the irrational vendetta, the Mafia, and even just for loud, demonstrative arguments. Why things should have come out this way, and Italian cultural habits developed the way they did, is a good question. As it happened, the Italians ended up as the most sensible members of the Axis. By 1943, when the cause was obviously lost, Mussolini was overthrown and surrender tendered, while the Germans and Japanese fought on until their countries were devastated. Most of the damage to Italy proper resulted from German resistance to the Allies, after the Italian surrender. Indeed, Mussolini himself had seemed a responsible enough person that politically naive Americans, like Ezra Pound, were enamoured of both him and his regime. Mussolini, who had originally been hostile to Hitler's annexation of Austria, was done in by his opportunism, stabbing France in the back after Hitler was clearly the winner in 1940. Hitler's genuine admiration for the founder of Fascism then temped Mussolini away from his own better nature, such as it was. With nothing whatever against the Jews, indeed at one time a bit of a Zionist, Mussolini eventually went along with Hitler's plans and allowed Italian Jews to be rounded up -- mainly after the German occupation, when Mussolini had almost no leverage against German wishes (as memorably seen in the movie, The Garden of the Finzi-Continis, 1971). He ended up paying a terrible price, as did all Italians -- not to mention Italian Jews -- though, as it happened, to the credit of Italians again, about 85% of Italian Jews were sheltered from the Nazis.
The eastern part of the great Frankish kingdom has undergone great ebbs and 
flows in its fortunes, in its borders, in its identity, and in its reputation -- alternatively admired as a source of the highest culture (Mozart, Kant, Beethoven, Goethe, Thomas Mann, etc.) and the most nauseating tyranny and barbarism (Naziism).
| FRANCONIAN KING | |
|---|---|
| Conrad I of Franconia | 911-918 |
| SAXON KINGS & EMPERORS | |
|---|---|
| Henry I the Fowler | 918-936 |
| defeats Magyars at Riade, 933 | |
| Otto I the Great | 936-973; King of Italy, 951; Emperor,962 |
| defeats Magyars at Lechfield, 955; Embassy of Liutprand of Cremona to Nicephorus Phocas, 968; Embassy of Liutprand to John Tzimisces, arranges marriage of Otto II to Theophano Scleraena, 971 | |
| Otto II | 961-983;Emperor, 967 |
| Otto III | 983-1002;Emperor, 996 |
 St. Henry II "the Saint" | 1002-1024; Italy, 1004 Emperor,1014 |
The weak start of East Francia, however, seemed to be soon remedied. Henry I and Otto I asserted Royal authority over the great nobles and gained great prestige, as well as an experienced fighting force, by defeating the Magyars, who had been raiding deep into Francia for years. This was one of the tribulations of the Second Dark Age, with Magyars (a Uralic steppe people) attacking from the East by horse and Vikings and Arabs from the North and South, respectively, by boat. Henry first defeated the Magyars at Riade in 933; and then Otto did so again, decisively, at Lechfield in 955. The Magyars soon settled down as the Christian Kingdom of Hungary. Meanwhile, Charles the Simple of West Francia had granted what became Normandy to the Viking Rollo in 911.Otto was strong enough to interfere in Italy, attaching its affairs to Germany for centuries, and to receive the Imperial Crown from the Pope. Thus, Otto created the classic Mediaeval Empire, whose very identity is a lesson in confusion and retrospection. The easiest thing is to call it "Germany," but that was not done at the time. The Kingdom was East Francia, and the Empire was the Roman Empire, both of which now sound confusing. More confusing, the Kingdom was soon called that of the Romans, as a way for the Kings to expess their claim on the Empire even before being crowned by the Pope, without which they were not legally Emperors. This is discussed more thoroughly below, but it is convenient to resolve that the Kingdom is what became Germany. The Empire is also conveniently called, retroactively, the "Holy Roman Empire" (Sacrum Imperium Romanum), though it was in practice, as the Germans themselves later thought, Germany also (claims to Italy and Burgundy were formally surrendered in 1648).
What was going to be the continuing problem for this new Empire was just money. Without much in the way of trade, cities, or industry, there just wasn't any. Without money there could be no paid army or paid administrators. For military force the Kings were thus dependant on feudal loyalty, which was rarely entirely reliable and depended on the personality of individual rulers. For administration, however, the Kings could long use the Church, educated and self-supporting, until the Popes decided that the Church should be independent. Thus, feudalism came rather later to Germany than it did to France, but when it did come, it was with a thoroughness that made it all the more difficult for the monarchy to recover. Even worse, where the male line of Capetians never failed in France (where even the last Kings, of the House of Orléans, were still direct male heirs of Hugh Capet), Germany was periodically left without a male heir. This preserved the elective principle of the Throne where, in the Middle Ages, nothing was easier than that any office or holding should become hereditary, as it did in France, as long as there was an obvious hereditary candidate. The shift from the Saxons to the Salians and then to the Hohenstaufen was bad enough, but the end of the Hohenstaufen left the country without leadership altogether. The elective principle became permanent, even after the effective hereditary succession of the Hapsburgs. This rendered Germany as a whole ungovernable, as it would remain until 1871.
| SALIAN/FRANCONIAN EMPERORS | |
|---|---|
| Conrad II the Salian | 1024-1039;Emperor, 1027; Burgundy, 1033 |
| Henry III the Black | 1039-1056;Emperor, 1046 |
| Henry IV | 1056-1106;Emperor, 1084 |
| [Rudolf of Swabia] | 1077-1080, rival |
| [Hermann of Luxemburg] | 1081-1088, rival |
| [Conrad of Franconia] | 1087-1093, rival, d.1101 |
| Henry V | 1106-1125;Emperor, 1111 |
| Lothar II of Saxony | 1125-1137;Emperor, 1133 |
The Salian Emperors (from, as Dukes of Franconia, the "Salian" Franks) probably stood the best chance of maintaining Germany as a coherent and stable Kingdom, with a chance to progress easily to modernity. The domain attained its classic form when Conrad II inherited the Kingdom of Burgundy, rounding off the "four crowns" of the Emperor. However, the use of the Church, with its literate clergy, as an arm of the government introduced a fatal flaw. The Popes wanted an independent Church, which they fought for in the Investiture Controversy of 1076-1122. An excommunicated Emperor Henry IV, standing penitently barefoot in the snow outside the Tuscan castle at Canossa, is one of the most striking images of the Middle Ages. To the Germans this would later be one of the most humiliating events in their history. Actually, Henry was forcing the Pope's hand, since the Pope could not refuse a penitent. But the excommunication had legitimized rebellion in Germany. This, indeed, would be the pattern for many years, the Pope seeking allies in the rear of the Emperors, and it would end up gravely damaging the future of Germany. The country would enter modern times fragmented and backward. In the early 19th century this would often appear comical and harmless, but by the end of the century the country would finally reachieve unity in the most politically threatening and ominous way.
Henry V achieved what looked like a favorable compromise to the Controversy, but the damage had been done and the precedents set. The Imperial grip in both Germany and Italy had been loosened, many concerns neglected, and the Popes knew what they could do to preserve their independence and powers, however little they were able to maintain themselves sometimes even against the people of the city of Rome. The spirit of resistance in both Germany and Italy was heartened; the German Church began to exercise even its own territorial sovereignty (with independent states, like that of the Archbishop of Salzburg, that persisted until Napoleon); and subsequent history would be a steadily losing battle for the Monarchy. Just as bad, the lapse again of the male line perpetuated the elective principle of the Throne, which never became truly hereditary, as it had in France (in truth, nothing was easier in the Middle Ages than for things to become hereditary, if only obvious heirs existed). The elections then became a drain on the finances and even the powers of the Emperors, since sovereign concessions as well as money could be used to buy votes.
| SWABIAN/HOHENSTAUFEN EMPERORS | |
|---|---|
| Conrad III | 1127-1135, rival; Italy, 1128; 1138-1152, uncrowned |
| Defeats Welf VI at Weinsberg, 1140 | |
| Frederick I Barbarossa | 1152-1190; Italy, 1155; Emperor,1155; Burgundy, 1178 |
| Defeat at Legnano, 1176; Third Crusade, 1189-1192; sacks Seljuk capital of Konya, but dies fording a river, 1190 | |
| Henry VI | 1169-1197;Emperor, 1191 |
| Otto IV of Brunswick (Welf) | 1198-1212;Emperor, 1209; d.1218 |
| [Philip of Swabia] | 1198-1208, rival |
| marries Irene Angelina, 1197 | |
| Frederick II | 1212-1250;Emperor, 1220 |
| [Henry Raspe of Thuringia] | 1246-1247, rival |
| [William of Holland] | 1247-1256, rival |
| Conrad IV | 1237-1254, uncrowned |
| [Manfred] | Regent of Sicily, 1250-1266 |
| [Conradin] | invades Italy, 1267-1268 |
| interregnum, 1254-1273 | |
An Imperial Party, however, existed even in Italy, deriving its name, Ghibelline from the Waiblingen castle of the Hohenstaufen. The Papal Party, in turn, got its name Guelf, from the Welf house of Germany. When a Welf candidate, Otto of Brunswick (son of Henry the Lion), finally was elected Emperor, however, the Popes were not much better pleased at his pursuit of Imperial interests. This, however, paled beside the position of the next Hohenstaufen, Frederick II, who inherited the domain of the Popes' erstwhile allies, the Normans of Naples and Sicily. Frederick all but abandoned the position of the Throne in Germany, in order to take advantage of his powerful southern Kingdom. This worked well enough in his lifetime, but writing off Germany was of no benefit at all, and the southern Kingdom, eventually in the hands of his bastard son Manfred, was the target of every device that the Popes could bring to bear. Before long that meant Charles of Anjou, whose French invasion extinguished the house of Hohenstaufen.
In the 12th century, which probably means under the Hohenstaufen, we get the appearance of the Vexillum Roseum Imperiale, the Blutfahne or Blutbanner, a red banner that signified the Blutgerichtsbarkeit (Jus Gladii, "Right of the Sword"), or the judicial and penal jurisdiction of the Holy Roman Empire. By the 13th century, the banner and its authority were bestowed on the Princes of the Empire, the feudal vassals and representatives of the Empire, but whose power, of course, would grow in time into virtual and then actual sovereignty. This authority was extended to the Free Cities of the Empire, and to the Canton of Schwyz in 1240 (which became the core and the eponym of the Swiss Confederation). The use of red in the various coats of arms and banners of the Empire often signified this Blutgerichtsbarkeit, as we see in the early banners of the 
Free Cities of Hamburg, Lübeck, and Danzig -- although Danzig itself was otherwise subject to the Teutonic Knights, signified by the crosses, 
and then to Poland. Poland's own flag looks like that of an Imperial state in this sense, not to mention of Switzerland itself. Indeed, the flag of Bohemia was initially identical to that of Poland, and Bohemia was an Imperial state. Unfortunately, the term Blutfahne later would refer to an artifact of the Nazi Party, a flag that supposedly was stained with blood during the failed Nazi Putsch of 1923. This "Blood Banner" was used at Nazi functions as a relic and touchstone for oaths and acts of reverence to the Party.
The end of the Hohenstaufen makes a natural break in the history of Germany and Italy. The German princes did not want to elect a new Emperor, and the Popes would just as soon not deal with one again. Also, the genealogy of all the Emperors to this point forms a natural unit, since they are all related, at least by marriage. A distinction is introduced in this chart not seen with the earlier, Carolingian and Italian, Emperors. The Emperors actually crowned by the Pope are indicated in the genealogical diagrams by a little yellow (Papal) nimbus around the cross of their Imperial Crown -- -- while those never crowned are shown without the nimbus. In the tables of ruleraar an icon of Crown and nimbus is only given with those actually crowned -- with date of coronation, usually somewhat 
later than the beginning of the reign, since a trip down to Rome was usually an involved and difficult undertaking. On the basis of the practice introduced with Charlemagne, no king was an Emperor without being crowned by the Pope. While Charlemagne probably was not going to think of the Imperial dignity as contingent on the approval of the Pope, this is how the matter developed, in line with increasing claims of Papal authority. As the Empire became traditional in Germany, however, the customary idea became established (no small thing, to say the least, in the Middle Ages) that the King was Emperor by right, with the crowning by the Pope a legal formality. It was never that much of a formality, since the Popes made demands, and it became increasingly difficult to exert authority in Italy, because of the resistance both of the Italians and of the Popes themselves. Consequently, so as to assert their claim without the presumption of prematurely calling themselves "Emperor," the Kings of the Eastern Franks began to call themselves "King of the Romans" (Rex Romanorum) on election. Between Henry II and Henry IV this became standard. As the title "Rex Francorum Orientalium" lapsed, the "Rex Francorum Occidentalium" became increasingly, to himself and to others, simply the "Rex Franciae," King of France. By 1353 a German bishop was complaining about this presumption by the Western King. Eventually, the Emperors found themselves with no business and no interest in Italy, so in 1508 Maximilian I got permission from the Pope to call himself "Imperator electus." This became the official title on election from then on, and is in effect retroactively applied to the earlier uncrowned Emperors, just because we commonly call them "Emperors," which they would not have been by the practice of their own day. Maximilian also, for the first time, called himself "Germaniae Rex," King of Germany, and so may be thought of as beginning the retrospective view that the Mediaeval Empire was the German Empire, i.e. the "First Reich," to be followed by the Hohenzollern "Second Reich" and the Hitlerian "Third." With more modest retrospection, we can simply equate "Germany" with the old East Frankish kingdom (Francia Orientalis).
The crown of Lombardy, or Italy, involved no Italian institutions or effective power and was assumed perfunctorily with the Imperial crown; so it is not indicated after Otto I acquired it through his marriage to the Italian heiress Adelaide, who had been imprisoned after her husband, Lothar II of Italy, had been murdered by Berengar II of Ivrea. Of potentially greater value was the crown of Burgundy, claimed by Conrad II by inheritance in 1032. The Kingdom, however, was off the beaten track and was neglected by the Emperors. Only four were ever actually crowned in Arles, ending with Charles IV in 1365. The other two, besides Conrad II himself, were Henry III and Frederick I, both indicated in the chart with the numbered Burgundian crown. Burgundy soon was largely in the hands of France, with Savoy and Switzerland heading for independence, though this was not formally recognized until 1648.
| Crowns of the Holy Roman Empire | |
|---|---|
| 1 | King of Francia Orientalis, or Germany  |
| 2 | King of Lombardy, or Italy |
| 3 | Emperor, conferred by the Pope |
| 4 | King of Burgundy |
| 5 | King of Naples & Sicily |
A fifth crown, obtained by Henry VI through marriage to Constance, daughter of Roger II of Naples and Sicily (the Regnum), was a great strategic coup. The Popes had been cultivating the Normans in southern Italy and Sicily as a counterweight to the Emperors, but now the Emperors would have that very power. The real center of the rule of Frederick II, the Stupor Mundi, "Wonder of the World," became Palermo. Unfortunately, this meant neglect of Germany, where power flowed easily to local princes, and it persuaded the Popes that the Hohenstaufen must be destroyed at all costs. Eventually, Charles of Anjou was recruited and killed Frederick's son Manfred and grandson Conradin. Charles' triumph was brief, however, as one of the most dramatic events of the Middle Ages, the revolt of the Sicilian Vespers (1282), tore Sicily from his grasp. Peter III of Aragón, who had married Manfred's daughter Constance, jumped in and was offered the crown of Sicily. There was little the Pope, let alone non-existent Emperors, could do about this. Naples and Sicily, never formally part of the Empire, now passed back into the dynamic of Mediterranean politics. An Emperor, Charles V, returned later only because both Sicily and Naples passed to him from his Aragonese inheritance.
The crowns of the Emperors, usually thought of as just the first three, were the subject of considerable symbolic discussion. The Sachsenspiegel (Saxon Mirror), a legal text of 1230, described them this way:
Dy erste ist tho Aken: dar kronet men mit der Yseren Krone, so is he Konig over alle Dudesche Ryke. Dy andere tho Meylan, de is Sulvern, so is he Here der Walen. Dy drüdde is tho Rome; dy is guilden, so is he Keyser over alle dy Werlt.
This is quoted by James Bryce [The Holy Roman Empire, 1904, Schocken Books, 1961, p.194], who doesn't bother to give a translation. Perhaps he thought everyone has on hand a dictionary for 13th century Low German. The charm of the passage, however, is that it sounds just enough like English to make it look like a parody of modern German. Of interest here is that the first crown is already said to be of the "Dudesche Ryke," i.e. the German Reich (here clearly "kingdom" or "realm," not "Empire") -- "Aken" is Aachen, the capital of Charlemagne. Italy is called "Wales" (Walen), for the same reason, being non-Germanic, as the word is used in Britain. Milan (Meylan), in Lombardy, was one of the places for the Lombard/Italian coronation. "Here" is Herr, originally "Lord," in Modern German. Although the German crown is said to be iron and the Milanese silver, this was sometimes reversed, and the latter was typically called the "Iron Crown of Lombardy" in any case because it was supposed to contain a Nail from the True Cross. The Roman crown (gold) conferred rule of "alle dy Werlt." Unmentioned here, Burgundy was widely recognized as providing a "fourth crown"; but the Regnum of Naples and Sicily, although in effect providing a fifth crown for Henry VI, Frederick II, and Conrad IV, was not an Imperial possession long enough for this to become a traditional claim.
Philip of Swabia, son of Frederick Barbarossa, who contended with Otto of Brunswick for the Empire, had no sons; but the marriages of his four daughters are among the most interesting in European history. In a reconciliation of their feud, his oldest daughter, Beatrice, married Otto himself. But they had no children. The younger daughters, Kunigunde, Marie, and Elizabeth, married King Wenceslas I of Bohemia, Duke Henry III of Lower Lorraine and Brabant, and King & St. Ferdinand III of Castile and Leon, respectively. All of these marriages produced children with living descendants, especially among the Hapsburgs and the royal families of Spain, as can be traced at the linked genealogies. This is all of particular interest because of Philip's wife, Irene, who was a daughter of the Roman Emperor Isaac II Angelus. Isaac, a disastrous Emperor, himself was a great-grandson of the outstanding Emperor Alexius I Comnenus, the restorer of Romania after the Turkish invasion. This means that a large part of modern European royalty have been descendants of the Comneni. My impression is that Roman (Byzantine) Imperial descent for recent royalty has often been claimed through the Macedonians, but the only genuine line seems to be from Macedonian in-laws. On the other hand, descent from the Comneni appears to be well attested and with multiple lines, all from Irene Angelina.
| non-dynastic EMPERORS | |
|---|---|
| [Richard of Cornwall] | 1257-1271, candidate, uncrowned; d.1272 |
| [Alfonso X of Castille] | 1257, 1273, candidate, uncrowned; d.1284 |
| Rudolf I of Hapsburg | 1273-1291, uncrowned |
| First Swiss Cantons, 1291 | |
| Adolf of Nassau | 1292-1298, uncrowned |
| Swiss Confederation recognized, 1297 | |
| Albert I of Hapsburg | 1298-1308, uncrowned |
| Henry VII of Luxemburg | 1308-1313; Italy, 1311; Emperor,1312 |
| Swiss Confederation recognized, 1309 | |
| Louis IV of Bavaria | 1314-1347; Italy, 1327; Emperor,1328 |
| Swiss defeat Hapsburgs, Morgarten, 1315; Beginning of Little Ice Age, heavy rain for five years, famine, 1315-1320 | |
| [Frederick of Hapsburg] | 1325-1330, rival |
| Charles IV of Luxemburg & Bohemia | 1347-1378; Italy, 1355; Emperor, 1355;Burgundy, 1365 |
| the Black Death arrives at Lübeck, 1349, spreads to northern Germany, 1350 | |
| |
| [Günther of Schwarzburg] | 1349, rival |
| Wenzel of Luxemburg | 1378-1400, uncrowned, d.1419 |
| Swiss defeat Hapsburgs, Sempach, 1386 | |
| Rupert of the Palatinate | 1400-1410, uncrowned |
| Sigismund of Luxemburg | 1410-1437; Italy, 1431; Emperor,1433 |
| [Jobst of Moravia] | 1410-1411, rival |
With the Elective principle of the German Monarchy now firmly established, Charles IV, through the Golden Bull, at least rendered the process regular and comprehensible. Seven Electors were specified, four secular and three ecclesiastical. As noted below, the Duke of Bavaria would eventually be added as an Elector (1623), initially as a replacement for the Prince Palatinate (1621-1648), who had been in rebellion at the beginning of the Thirty Years War. The Duke of Hanover would be made an Elector (1692), right in the middle of the War of the League of Augsburg (1688-1697).
Without having any real effect on the history of the Empire, Napoleon added the Margrave of Baden, the Duke of Württemberg, the Landgrave of Hesse-Cassel, and the Archbishop of Salzburg, all as Electors in 1803. In the same year, however, the original eccelesiastical Electorates, Mainz, Trier, and Cologne, were all annexed by France. The Archbhishop of Salzburg was actually Ferdinand III, Duke of Tuscany, who had lost his realm in one of Napoleon's rearrangements. He would get rearranged again, as Napoleon removed him from Salzburg and installed him as Elector of Würzburg in 1806. Adding the Electorates was apparently in preparation for Napoleon being elected Holy Roman Empire, but then Napoleon simply crowned himself Emperor of the French and abolished the Empire in 1806. The Elector of Hesse-Cassel rather liked his new title and so kept it even after the end of the Empire. Ferdinand of Tuscany become Grand Duke of Würzburg until restored to Tuscany in 1814.
During this period we see the rise of the Swiss. The "Forest Cantons" of Schwyz, Uri, and Unterwalden united (1291) against the expansion of the Hapsburgs (remembered in legends like that of William Tell) 
and soon were able to defeat them (1315). This may have seemed like a fluke, but then the Duke Leopold III was actually killed at the Battle of Sempach (1386). What was going on? It was, indeed, the greatest triumph in history of "a well regulated Militia," and the proof of infantry with a new weapon, the pike, against the Mediaeval levy of cavalry. This created a sensation, and for more than a century Swiss mercenaries were considered essential for any serious army. Swiss arms reached their peak of influence on European history when a Swiss army defeated and killed Charles the Bold of Burgundy at the Battle of Nancy (1477). This turned to the benefit of Charles' son-in-law, Maximilian of Hapsburg, who obtained most of the Burgundian lands and in short order (1499) accepted Swiss autonomy. The prestige of Swiss arms reached a check when the Swiss were defeated by Francis I of France at Marignano in 1515. It was then agreed that the Swiss would henceforth only fight with France; but then Francis and the Swiss were defeated at Biocca in 1522. The Swiss decided not to fight for anyone. Since then, Switzerland has avoided external conflicts and has maintained its independence (recognized in 1648) and neutrality against all except Revolutionary France (1798-1815). The neutral policy of Switzerland has made it the headquarters over the years of various international organizations, such as the International Red Cross, the League of Nations, and certain United Nations agencies. The old reputation of the Swiss in battle, however, lingers in the symbolic "Swiss Guard" of the Popes. Since Switzerland has four official languages (German, French, Italian, and Raeto-Romansch), its name is often given in Latin, as the Confoederatio Helvetica (C.H.), from the local pre-Roman Celtic tribe of the Helvetii.
The principal rivals of the Hapsburgs turned out to be the house of Luxemburg. It was the Luxemburg Emperor Charles IV who regularized the system of Election, and then his son Sigismund who revived the role of no less than Constantine in calling a general Church Council to end the Great Schism. All this came to naught, however, with the failure of the male line. The heiress of Luxemburg, Elizabeth of Hungary, then married a Hapsburg. That line of Hapsburgs also died out but, yes, there were others.
The election of Frederick III, who became the last Emperor crowned at Rome by the Pope, put the Hapsburgs in virtual hereditary possession of the title, with but one exception, for the rest of its history. The marriages then contracted for Maximilian and his heirs, with Burgundy, Spain, and Hungary, made the Hapsburgs for long the preeminant ruling family of all of Europe, turning Vienna into one of the great cities of history and one of the great centers in the history of philosophy.
| HAPSBURG EMPERORS, of "Holy Roman Empire of the German Nation," German "First Reich" | |
|---|---|
| Albert II | 1438-1439, uncrowned |
| Frederick III | 1440-1493; Italy, 1452; Emperor, 1452;last Emperor crowned at Rome |
| Maximilian I | 1493-1519, uncrowned: Imperator Electus, 1508 |
| Peace of Basle, de facto Swiss Independence recognized, 1499; Swiss Confederation of the "13 Cantons," 1513 | |
| Charles V, I of Spain | King of Spain, 1516-1556 |
| 1519-1556; Italy, 1530; Emperor, 1530,last German Emperor crowned by Pope, at Bologna; d.1558 | |
| Peace of Augsburg, 1555: cuius regio, eius religio; bankruptcy, 1557 | |
who moved the Hapsburg Court to the Low Countries -- the inheritance of his wife, Mary of Burgundy. This inaugurated a period in which the Empire was more of a European institution than it had been in several centuries, with Emperors (Charles V, Ferdinand I) whose first language was not even German. The Court of Maximilian, living off the commercial wealth of Flanders, was a center of Renaissance culture. Machiavelli did not think much of Maximilian's qualities as a ruler, but then the fruit of the actions of someone he thought of as a much better ruler, Ferdinand II of Aragón, ended up in Hapsburg hands thanks to the marriages arranged by Maximilian. This great accomplishment by dynastic marriages led to a clever poem:
| Bella gerant fortes. Tu felix Austria nube. Nam quae Mars aliis, dat tibi regna Venus. |
|---|
"The strong wage wars. You, happy Austria, marry. Thus the kingdoms that Mars gives to others, Venus gives to you." This put in the hands of Charles V the inheritance of Austria, Burgundy (meaning the French Dukes of Burgundy, of course), and the recently united Spain, with which came the empire and revenue of the New World. His own marriage to Isabella of Portugal led to his son, Philip II, claiming the throne of that country. His brother Ferdinand's marriage to Anna of Hungary led to his claim to Hungary and Bohemia.
With his vast inheritance, Charles, the last Emperor crowned by the Pope (in Bologna [1530], to avoid the awkward reminder that his Spanish army had recently sacked Rome [1527]), had to contend with France, with the Protestant Reformation, and with the Turks. The first he handled pretty well, even capturing King Francis I in battle at one point (1525), but did less well with the second, irritated that he had to mess with it at all, since he wanted the religious issues settled at a general Church Council (which became the Counter-Reformation Council of Trent, 1545-1563). As Emperor, he could have called his own Council, like Constantine or Sigismund, but he deferred to the Pope, who only wanted a Council to argue orthodoxy and defend the Church against heresy, not reconcile Protestants. Charles defeated the Protestant League of Schmalkalden at the Battle of Mülhberg in 1547, but then suffered a surprise attack in the Tyrol by his own erstwhile (Protestant) ally, Maurice of Saxony in 1552. The Treaty of Passau restored the Protestant position in Germany, and then in the end Charles conceded, in the Peace of Augsburg (1555), that German princes could establish whatever Church they wanted (well, either Lutheran or Catholic, at first), on the famous principle cuius regio, eius religio, "of whom the realm, of him the religion."
)
Here we see a great portrait, by Titian (d.1576) from 1548, of Charles V, the most powerful Emperor since Charlemagne, and the first, as well as the last, with vast Imperial possessions beyond Europe. He is showing some evidence of the large lower "Hapsburg Lip." Otherwise, his short hair and beard are characteristic of the 16th century -- long hair and goatees or Vandykes would take over in the 17th century.
Although Charles died in Spain and is thought of as German, he grew up in the Low Countries. His facility with the languages of his various possessions is commemorated in an interesting quote attributed to him, "I speak Spanish to God, Italian to women, French to men, and German to my horse" (Je parle espagnol à Dieu, italien aux femmes, français aux hommes, et allemand à mon cheval). German doesn't seem to come out too well in this. While one might suppose that Charles learned some Dutch (now called "Flemish" in Belgium) in his childhood, and indeed he is often known as "Charles of Ghent" or the Kezer Karel in Flemish, the first language of the Court was probably French. Nevertheless, the books that Charles is supposed to have kept by his bedside, besides the Bible (in Latin?), were The Courtier [1528], by Baldassare Castiglione, and The Prince [1532], by Niccolò Machiavelli. Both of these were in Italian -- Il Cortegiano and Il Principe, respectively. Presumably Charles was not discussing courtly manners and politics just with women.
When Charles became King of Spain in 1516, he moved to Spain and founded his own capital, the hitherto unimportant town of Madrid, the meaning of whose very (Arabic) name (Majrît.) is uncertain. This place had little to recommend it, except that it was centrally located. And Charles thought it would be healthy. Others weren't even sure about that, saying that it had "nine months of winter, three of hell." It began as an Omayyad fortress in the 9th century, overlooking the Manzanares River, to guard approaches to the Tagus (Tajo) valley, which contained the original Visigothic capital of Spain, Toledo. Madrid was then made the permanent capital of Spain by Philip II in 1561. Meanwhile, Charles's brother Ferdinand had grown up in Spain, with a Spanish name. His eponymous grandfather, Ferdinand II of Aragón (V of Spain), toyed with the idea of leaving Aragón independently to Ferdinand, which was in his power to do. But his dislike of foreigners (Hapsburgs) ruling Spain was not as strong as his desire to preserve the unity and power of the country. Since Charles was now in charge in Spain (although his insane mother Juana, the last of the Trastámarans, remained the nominal sovereign until her death in 1555), he sent off Ferdinand to take over the German Hapsburg possessions (i.e. Austria). Although Charles got Ferdinand crowned King of the Romans, making him Heir Apparent to the Empire, he may not have intended for Ferdinand to detach the German domains from the Spanish; but this is what happened, in part because Charles was unable pay much attention to Austria and its dependencies and also because the Germans wanted (the Spanish speaking) Ferdinand and not some foreigner(!). Also, Ferdinand, with claims to Bohemia and Hungary from his wife, Anna of Hungary, liked what he had.
Charles's third problem turned out to be a fiasco, since the Ottomans actually conquered most of Hungary (1526). This got the Hungarian and Bohemian inheritance, after some hard fighting, for Ferdinand, who had to withstand the epic siege of Vienna in 1529. Vienna thus stood as the high water mark for the Turks, as it had been centuries earlier for the Mongols (1242). But the Ottomans were at the time far too powerful to be really defeated or chased back whence they came. This would be an unsolved problem for some time -- more than a century and a half.
Charles' power, although considerable, turned out to be less effective than one might think, since his great inheritance was of many constitutionally independent realms, each with its own history, its own laws, its own local parliaments, and its own local tax systems. This made organizing a uniform and unified power a nightmare -- a problem that would persist all the days of the Hapsburgs, right down to the "dual monarchy" of Austria and Hungary. There were even limitations on the vast stream of silver that soon poured in from Mexico and Peru, since the Spanish economy literally was not large enough to absorb it, and a raging inflation resulted. Even so, Charles still had to borrow. This broke the Fuggers banking house when Spain defaulted on its debts in 1557. Wearied by all this, Charles retired, one of the few historic monarchs, and perhaps the first Emperor since Diocletian, to do so.
Since Charles was ruling when Mexico was conquered in 1521 and Peru in 1533, we might wonder what curiosity he might have had about these new civilizations, unknown to either the Ancient or Mediaeval worlds. It looks like he had none. When he was shown a great engraved golden plate from Mexico, he instructed that such things simply be melted down and not shown to him. Today this seems a shocking callousness and criminal vandalism. But at the time, nothing the Aztecs or Incas had to offer would have seemed like anything less than works of the Devil. In the same spirit Aztec priests, red with the blood of human sacrifice, were slaughtered, and Aztec and Mayan codices (bound books) were burned. The loss to history is appalling and incalculable, however unlikely it was that people of the era would have had a disinterested curiosity or respect for such things.
| Ferdinand I | 1558-1564, uncrowned |
| Peace of Cateau-Cambrésis, 1559 | |
|---|---|
| Maximilian II | 1564-1576, uncrowned |
| Rudolf II | 1576-1612, uncrowned |
| Matthias | 1612-1619, uncrowned |
| Thirty Years War, 1618-1648 | |
| Ferdinand II | 1619-1637, uncrowned |
| 8. Duke of Bavaria Elector, 1623 | |
| Ferdinand III | 1637-1657, uncrowned |
| Peace of Westphalia, Swiss Independence, Dutch Independence, separation of Italy and Burgundy from Empire, 1648 | |
| Leopold I | 1658-1705, uncrowned |
Conquest of Hungary, 1686-1697; War of the League of Augsburg (Nine Years War), 1688-1697; Prince Eugene of Savoy (1663-1736), supreme commander of Imperial Armies, 1697; War of the Spanish Succession, 1701-1713; 9. Duke of Hanover Elector, 1692 | |
| Joseph I | 1705-1711, uncrowned |
| Charles VI | 1711-1740, uncrowned |
| Peace of Utrecht, 1713; War of the Polish Succession, 1733-1735 | |
| Maria Theresa | 1740-1780, heiress of Austria |
| War of the Austrian Succession, 1740-1748 | |
| Charles VII of Bavaria | 1742-1745, uncrowned |
| Francis I of Lorraine | Duke of Lorraine, 1729-1737 |
| Duke of Tuscany, 1738-1745 | |
| 1745-1765, uncrowned | |
| Seven Years War, 1756-1763 | |
| Joseph II | 1765-1790, uncrowned |
| Leopold II | 1790-1792, uncrowned |
| Francis II | 1792-1806, uncrowned; last "Holy Roman" Emperor |
| I, Emperor of Austria, 1804-1835 | |
|
10. Margrave of Baden Elector, 1803 11. Duke of Württemberg Elector, 1803 12. Landgrave of Hesse-Cassel Elector, 1803 13. Archbishop of Salzburg Elector, 1803-1806 13. Duke of Würzburg Elector, 1806
| |
The subsequent period continues the Golden Age of Spain, as the Spanish and Austrian Hapsburgs worked together for their own interests and for those of the cause of Catholicism. The struggle with Protestantism, which for Spain mainly meant dealing with the revolt in the Netherlands, and then war with England, for Austrians came to mean the devastating Thirty Years War (1618-1648). This began with the marvelously named "Defenestration of Prague" in 1618. That meant throwing Austrian tax collectors out of windows. The Hapsburg response to enforce their authority became an opportunistic effort to suppress the heterodox religious practices that had been tolerated in Bohemia. The Bohemians called in Frederick V of the Palatinate to be their new King, but Frederick was defeated so quickly (1619-1620) that he came to be called the "Winter King." German Protestants did not do well in supporting the Bohemians. Imperial forces were led by able and flamboyant figures like Albrecht von Wallenstein (d.1634) and were on the verge of defeating the German Protestants more than once; but Imperial ambitions were checked first by the entry of Sweden, with her gifted warrior King, Gustavus Adolphus, and then by the cynical intervention of France, which thought that defeating the Hapsburgs was more important than defending Catholicism. When the French destroyed the Spanish Army at Rocroi in 1643, it was the end of Spanish hegemony and the beginning of French predominance in Europe. For Austria, it then became a matter of holding off France, especially once Louis XIV began his wars. This was eventually effected in alliance with England, in the course of the War of the League of Augsburg (or Nine Years War, 1688-1697) and the great War of the Spanish Succession (1701-1713). This was at the cost of the Spanish Hapsburg line; but the failed second siege of Vienna in 1683, directed in support of France, resulted in Hungary being liberated from the Ottomans and thus rebounded with new power, possessions, and prestige for the Hapsburgs, whose domain now grew into the "Danubian" Monarchy.
A nasty surprise subsequently came from Prussia. With so much of Germany outside effective control of the Throne, it was inevitable that a rival should arise. At first, it looked like this would be Bavaria, which went over to the French in the War of the Spanish Succession (until smashed by the Duke of Marlborough and Prince Eugene of Savoy), and then which briefly obtained the Imperial Crown in the War of the Austrian Succession. But when Frederick II fell on Silesia in 1740, starting the War of the Austrian Succession, on the pretext of disputing the female succession of Maria Theresa to Austrian possessions, it became clear who the real rival would be. It was because of Prussian arms that the Imperial election was subverted, with Charles VII of Bavaria becoming the only non-Hapsburg Emperor after Sigismund of Luxemburg -- later, a new Imperial Germany would be the creation of Prussia. After retrieving the situation only at the cost of Silesia, Maria Theresa effected an epic "revolution in alliances," trading Britain for France, to surround Prussia with enemies -- including Russia & Sweden. The resulting Seven Years War (1756-1763) was a near thing for Frederick the Great of Prussia, but it did not defeat him. What it damaged the most was France, which lost its colonial empire and its solvency -- the seed of the French Revolution. The last years of the Empire then left the Emperors uncomfortably sharing Great Power status with a Kingdom, Prussia, that was formally a vassal. But soon enough, the old system was swept away by Napoleon, and the Hapsburgs would reduce their pretensions to the possessions of Austria.
The Imperial crown shown for Charles V has an orange rather than a yellow nimbus. This is to indicate that he was in fact crowned Emperor by the Pope, the last one, but there was the irregularity that this was done in Bologna rather than in Rome.
The infamous intermarriage of the Spanish and Austrian Hapsburgs can been seen on the chart. After two Kings of Spain had married their own nieces, the result was the deformed, sickly, and sterile Charles II. It has been said that Charles V and Philip II were great Kings, that Philip III and Philip IV at least looked like Kings (with Philip IV immortalized by the great portraits of Velázquez), but that Charles II was scarcely a man. The intermarriages produced several infirmities, but most conspicuously exaggerated the swollen, even grotesque, "Hapsburg Lip." The succession dispute could be seen coming a long way off; and when it came, as the War of the Spanish Succession, it was possibly the greatest European war until the Revolutionary Era, and comparable in some ways to the World Wars of the 20th Century.
The Emperor Charles VI, originally the Hapsburg Pretender to Spain, was left without male heirs, and spent a good part of his time getting everyone to agree to the "Pragmatic Sanction," whereby the Salic Law was set aside and his daughter, Maria Theresa, could inherit the possessions of Austria. Accepted by all, Maria Theresa's succession was nevertheless cynically disputed by Frederick of Prussia once it could be seen to provide a pretext for aggression (the War of the Austrian Succession). Despite the loss of Silesia, the Empress otherwise maintained the Austrian position and proved herself a great leader in her own right, completely eclipsing her weak husband, Francis I. With the end of the Empire, Austria continued as an independent Great Power, and Germany was reorganized as the German Confederation.
The contempt and derision of historians for the Austro-Hungarian Empire is often palpable. The multi-national, polyglot personal domain of the Hapsburgs -- "despotism tempered by inefficiency" -- came to seem so anachronistic, unnatural, and absurd in the 20th Century that its continuation so long is taken as an offense against every rational criterion of history. This attitude began before the demise of the Empire, since its "Royal and Imperial" (Königlich Kaiserlich) abbreviation, K.K. ("Ka Ka" in German), began to be used as a term for absurdity both in and outside the Empire. This then gets confused with kâkâ in Hawaiian, which can mean "excrement," though this is glossed by Pukui and Elbert as "a euphemism, taught to children" [Mary Kawena Pukui & Samuel H. Elbert, Hawaiian Dictionary, Hawaiian-English, English-Hawaiian, University of Hawaii Press, 1973, "kâkâ," pp.109-110].
The breakup of the Empire after World War I, however, led to consequences, down to the present, that hardly seem a vindication of the alternative political arrangements that followed. Instead, one might remember Tallyrand's remark that if Austria didn't exist, we would have to invent it. The messiness of states based on ethnicity or language, in an area of great mixtures and interpenetrations of ethnic, linguistic, and religious communities, has produced a record of conflict whose rationality is in no way evidently superior to the personal union of the communities under the venerable Hapsburgs. 
And while the Empire may be thought of as tottering, weak, and vulnerable because of its defeat by Prussia in 1866 and its collapse after World War I, a case can also be made that, although it was not a first rate power, it really wasn't all that weak. Thus, although quickly defeated by Prussia in 1866, Austria had no difficulty fighting a second front and inflicting decisive defeats, on land and sea, against Italy.
One of those 1866 victories was the most important naval battle that occurred between Trafalgar in 1805 and Tsushima in 1905: the Battle of Lissa, which was the first fleet action between armored and steam driven warships. The climax of the battle came when the Austrian flagship, the Erzherzog Ferdinand Max, rammed and sank the Italian flagship Re d'Italia.
| HAPSBURG EMPERORS, of "Austrian Empire" | ||
|---|---|---|
| Francis (II) /Franz | 1804-1835 | last "Holy Roman" Emperor |
| Ferdinand | 1835-1848, d.1875 | |
| Franz Josef | 1848-1916 | |
| Empress Elizabeth of Bavaria assassinated by anarchist, 1898 | ||
| Karl | 1916-1918 | last Austrian Emperor, one of last 2 Emperors in Francia |
| Provisional Government, 1918-1920; Union with Germany, 1919 | ||
If Austria managed to stumble through a few years of World War I without collapse, it began with a terrible failure in what used to be its forte -- diplomacy. The whole war started because Austria would not take "yes" for an answer from the Serbs. Serbia had been wisely advised by the Russians to accept the Austrian ultimatum that had followed the assassination, with Serbian complicity, of the Archduke Francis Ferdinand in 1914, however outrageous and humiliating it was. The Serbs did not unequivocally accept the whole ultimatum, but it was enough that it should have at least mollified the Austrians. The Austrians, however, made outrageous and humiliating demands in the expectation that they would be refused. When they weren't entirely, Austria went to war anyway -- the Austrian ambassador had actually left Belgrade before the deadline of the ultimatum. This would be a war that was ultimately Germany's to lose and America's to win. No one, of course, knew how catastrophic the conflict would be, but it is hard to imagine the Austria of Metternich deliberately setting off a conflict of such proportions just to get something more than what had even been asked for. The real absurdity of the "Dual Monarchy" was not its incommensurability with nationalism (however much the tide of the age), but this finally embarrassing and blockheaded statesmanship. After Metternich had helped negotiate a century of general peace in 1815, the failures of 1914 and 1919 must have been particularly galling to his spirit -- even apart from the mass death that attended them. It is hard now to think of the last days of Austria-Hungary without recollecting the intellectual productivity of Vienna. The Logical Positivism of the "Vienna Circle" was no blessing, and the heritage of Ludwig Wittgenstein was really little better, but both Karl Popper and F.A. Hayek were not only great philosophers but thinkers with a Friesian connection. All of these men, along with Sigmund Freud and Ludwig von Mises (whose personal papers were successively stolen by the Germans and then by the Russians, to reappear after the fall of the Soviet Union), thought better of living in Austria after the Nazis had taken over the country.
Austria-Hungary had only one colonial possession. 
If Austria did just fine against an arguably more "modern" state like Italy in 1866, its performance in World War I still looks reasonable. Unlike any other combatant, Austria-Hungary had to fight a war on three fronts: with the Italians again, the Russians, and against the Allied states, like Greece and Serbia, in the Balkans. Again, even after fifty years of development, the Italians made no headway. The Russians did rather better, but then German victories helped take off some of the pressure. In the Balkans, Austria initially was unable to successfully invade Serbia. German help was required; but then Austria and Bulgaria managed to occupy most of Romania and Albania, all of Serbia and Montenegro, and a bit of Greece. This was rather better than what Italy alone would be able to do in World War II in the same area, and was accomplished despite what one might imagine as ethnic dissention, if not sabotage, in the Austrian army. Late in the war, the addition of a couple of German divisions on the Italian front made for a breakthrough that almost reached Venice. Austria's constant need for German help, however, left the Germans with the feeling that Austria as a ally was almost as bad as Austria as an enemy. One bitter German remark was that it was like carrying a corpse. The end of the War, indeed, swiftly led to death being pronounced for the Empire.
This was grandly named Franz Josef Land, but its value seems commensurable with all the other absurdities customarily associated with the Dual Monarchy. For Franz Josef Land, as it happens, was a group of Arctic islands almost entirely above 80 degrees latitude, at the northern end of the Barents Sea, beyond Norwegian Spitsbergen and the long Russian island of Novaya Zemlya. This is about the same latitude as the northern end of Greenland and cannot have offered any advantages to its owner, unless as an advanced base for Arctic exploration. Merely surviving the winter would be a challenge for anyone staying there. After the breakup of the Austrian state, Franz Josef Land fell to the Soviet Union, and now to Russia.
| Republic of Austria, 1920-1938, 1946-present | |
|---|---|
| Presidents | |
| Michael Hainisch | 1920-1928 |
| Wilhelm Miklas | 1928-1938 |
| Occupation and Annexation by Third Reich, 1938-1945 | |
| Karl Renner | 1945-1950 |
| Leopold Figl | acting, 1950-1951 |
| Theodor Körner | 1951-1957 |
| Julius Raab | acting, 1957 |
| Adolf Schärf | 1957-1965 |
| Josef Klaus | acting, 1965 |
| Franz Jonas | 1965-1974 |
| Bruno Kreisky | acting, 1974 |
| Rudolf Kirchschläger | 1974-1986 |
| Kurt Waldheim | Secretary-General of the United Nations, 1972-1981 |
| 1986-1992 | |
| Thomas Klestil | 1992-2004 |
| Heinz Fisher | 2004-present |
| Republic of Slovenia | |
|---|---|
| Yugoslavia, 1918-1941, 1945-1991 | |
| German Occupation, 1941-1945 | |
| Milan Kucan | 1991-2002 |
| Janez Drnovšek | 2002-2007 |
| Danilo Türk | 2007-present |
With the breakup of the Empire in 1918, Slovenia joined Yugoslavia. That was the situation, except for German occupation during World War II, until 1991, when Slovenia became the first constituent Republic to leave Yugoslavia. Despite all the war and terror that followed, as other Republics left, Slovenia was largely insulated from the action, since the only border Slovenia shared in Yugoslavia was with Croatia. One might wonder how economically viable the tiny country can really be (with a population of less than two million), but other small states do quite well (e.g. Luxembourg), and in fact Slovenia has the highest per capita income of any of the former Yugoslavian Republics. Indeed, Slovenia has the highest per capita income of any Balkan country, including Hungary, outside of Greece. If it wants to join any other federation, that is likely to be the European Union -- as it has done in 2004. HOHENZOLLERN EMPERORS,of German "Second Reich," only non-Catholic Emperors in Francia | |||
|---|---|---|---|
| Emperor | Chancellor | ||
| Wilhelm I | King of Prussia, 1861-1888 | Prince Otto von Bismarck | 1862-1890, d.1898 |
| 1871-1888 | |||
| Frederick | 1888 | ||
| Wilhelm II | 1888-1918, d.1941 last German | ||
| Count Leo von Caprivi | 1890-1894 | ||
| Prince Chlodwig von Hoh.-Schillingsfürst | 1894-1900 | ||
| Prince Bernhard von Bülow | 1900-1909 | ||
| Theobald von Bethmann-Hollweg | 1909-1917 | ||
| George Michaelis | 1917 | ||
| Count George von Hertling | 1917-1918 | ||
| Prince Maximilian of Baden | 1918 | ||
| Friedrich Ebert | 1918 | ||
| World War I, 1914-1918; abdication of Kaiser, loss of Alsace-Lorraine, West Prussia, etc., 1918 | |||
Prussia, which became a Great Power as the nemesis of Austria, eventually came to dominate post-Napoleonic Germany. Under the leadership of Otto von Bismarck, Prussia defeated Austria (1866) and France (1871) and then created a new unified Germany, without Austria, as a new German Empire, a "Second Reich."
The genealogy of the Hohenzollern Emperors can be found under the treatment of Brandenburg and Prussia. The further genealogy of the Hohenzollern family can be seen under The Descent of the Hohenzollern and Counts & Princes of Hohenzollern Henchingen-Sigmaringen.
After unification, Germany swiftly grew into the strongest state on the Continent. Although Bismarck wasn't enthusiastic, a modest colonial Empire was even assembled. Unfortunately, peace and prosperity evidently weren't good enough. A dream of crushing France again, apparently just for the hell of it, and something little short of envy against Britain, which had been an ally of Prussia since 1756, began to poison German policy and preparations. Ironically, much of this began to flow from an Emperor who was actually the grandson of Queen Victoria, Wilhelm II. His father, Frederick III, who had married Victoria's eldest child, also Victoria, had all the liberal instincts of this English connection. Tragically, cancer took him after less than a calendar year on the Throne, and Wilhelm had no sympathy with British ways, except that he wanted a navy as big as his grandmother's. This ill considered aspiration soon turned a traditional ally into a bitter rival in one of the greatest arms races in history, driving the British into the arms of their own traditional enemies, France and Russia. When the ball dropped, over some damn thing in the Balkans (as Bismarck had predicted), the Germans declared war on Russia and so, logically, attacked France, dragging a reluctant Britain into the war by invading Belgium (to get at France), violating guarantees of neutrality that had been in force since 1830.
This pointless exercise brought on the, until then, worst war in history, with more than a million dead each in France, Germany, Russia, and Austria, and nearly a million each in Britain and Turkey. For the first time ever, the United States became an active belligerent in a European war, throwing its weight decisively against Germany -- something that would be done all over again twenty-four years later. Both winners and losers, except the United States and Japan, were all but destroyed. Russia collapsed into anarchy and then totalitarian terror for decades, Britain was hurt, staggered, and bankrupted as never before, and Austria disintegrated into a confusion of petty states. All this (very nearly) just so that the Kaiser could have boats like grandmother. Sadly, all the folly and horror of the war were merely a preview of what the 20th century had to offer. And the damn things are still going on in the Balkans.
The last days of World War I, with the men out of the trenches, retreating (Germans) and pursuing (Allies), were among the bloodiest of the War. While trench warfare is properly remembered as a horror, the trenches nevertheless did protect the men more than when they were just running around out in the open. This is why more than 100,000 Americans died (as much as in the Korean and Vietnam Wars combined), even though the United States was only in the War for 19 months. The slaughter was called to a halt at 11:00 hrs on 11 November 1918. The Armistice was more than just a cease fire, since it required Germany to withdraw from its occupation of France, Belgium, and Luxembourg and surrender its fleet for internment by Britain.
The subsequent Treaty of Versailles in 1919 may instructively be compared to the work of the Congress of Vienna (1814-1815) which had settled Europe in the wake of the French Revolution and the Napoleonic Era. Since there was not a general war in Europe for a century, the work of the Congress of Vienna in that respect may be considered a success. Since Versailles was followed within twenty years by a World War even more terrible than the first, it cannot be said to have been as successful.
The most conspicuous difference between Vienna and Versailles is the treatment of the defeated Power. France was restored to Louis XVIII with the full sovereignty and territory that it had had under Louis XVI -- in fact more, since Avignon was not returned to the Papacy. This made perfect sense. Louis XVIII was not responsible for what France had done under the Republic and the Empire, and it would not have helped his legitimacy or popularity to have been restored under punitive conditions. By the same token, the Germany that was represented at Versailles was no longer the one that had started and waged World War I. The Kaiser had abdicated, a Republic declared, and a parliamentary government sent representatives to the Allies. This was supposedly what Woodrow Wilson wanted out of the War: the triumph of democracy.
Unfortunately, France, Italy, and Britain wanted revenge and spoils. The peace would be punitive, and the Weimar Republic would suffer in legitimacy and popularity because of it -- providing more than enough ammunition of grievance for people like Adolf Hitler to discredit democracy and the Peace. Where Louis XVIII was respected, helped, and protected, the new Sovereign People of Germany would not be. Germany was deprived of territory through plebicites, but there was no appeal to popular will in the territories taken by France, Italy, or Britain. The sizes of the German Army and Navy were severely limited, with the Army forbidden tanks and aircraft, and the Navy forbidden ships larger than 10,000 tons. Louis XVIII labored under no such curtailment of his sovereignty. And Germany faced massive reparations. This reciprocated the reparations imposed by Prussia on France in 1871, but, of course, nothing of the sort had been expected of France in 1815. The reparations led the German government to a massive inflation of the currency, which broke the economy, wiped out the savings of the middle classes, and created the conditions that, with the addition of the Great Depression, produced a level of misery that popularized the previously insignificant Nazis. Ironically, much of the reparations ended up being paid with loans from the United States.
The approach at Versailles proved to involve a high order of folly. This was not unappreciated at the time. John Maynard Keynes, later an influential economist, called the Treaty a "Carthaginian" peace ("The Economic Consequences of the Peace," 1919) -- like the treaties imposed by Rome on Carthage, before her complete destruction. Keynes may not have known that German commanders were already speaking of a "Second Punic War," hoping, like Hannibal, to avenge the defeat of the First. The terrible War that began with the folly of Austrian diplomacy thus ended with the folly of Allied diplomacy.
Having helped discredit democracy in Germany, the Allies then compounded the problem by choosing an Appeasement policy with Hitler. The British, especially, were having second thoughts about the justice of Versailles, and in conjunction with a popular pacifist movement, this led to one folly being heaped upon the other.
Germany was quite late in the competition for colonial possessions, and it shows. It wasn't too late in the "scramble for Africa," however, and the most substantial acquisitions are found there. Tanganyika was probably the prize, and in German hands it foiled the British ambition for continuous territories from Cape Town to Cairo -- Cecil Rhodes had wanted to build a railroad between just those cities, something that has still never been done. Outside Africa, the Germans got a city in China and, otherwise, nothing outside the Pacific. There, the most extensive acquisitions were simply a purchase from Spain of her three islands groups, the Marianas, Carolines, and Marshalls, east of the Philippines (which the United States took in 1898). In 1884 Germany divided eastern New Guinea with Britain, taking the northeastern part, renamed Kaiser Wilhelmsland. The adjacent island group then became the Bismarck Archipelago, a name that has stuck since. To the Bismarcks Germany was able to attach the northernmost of the Solomon Islands, Bougainville. In World War I, most German possessions were rapidly overrun. An exception was Tanganyika, where the German commander, Lieutenant Colonel Paul von Lettow-Vorbeck (d.1964), managed to elude defeat or capture for the entire period of the war, raiding into Portuguese Mozambique when the British made Tanganyika itself too hot for him, and in the process of invading Rhodesia when the war ended. This little known but striking episode bespeaks a remarkable devotion on the part of his African troups, whom otherwise we do not gather were treated so well by Germans. That the Japanese scooped up most German islands in the Pacific was bad news for the future, since it gave them a strategically advanced position for expansion in World War II. Also, when the Japanese occupied the formerly German Bismarcks and Bougainville in that later war, they found the locals less hostile, as having only recently come under British rule (after World War I, of course), than further down in the Solomons.
Indeed, the representatives of German democracy were not even allowed to attend at Versailles, and the Treaty was subsequently presented to them, in the words of people like Hitler, as a Diktat whose rejection would precipitate a renewal of the War. How different from Vienna, where France was represented by the brilliant Talleyrand. Although the victorious Powers of 1814 did indeed contemplate marginalizing the French representative, in short order Talleyrand maneuvered himself into full participation. I doubt that the Germans of 1919 had a diplomat available of the genius of Talleyrand (who had survived and served all of the regimes since Louis XVI), but even a lesser man might have talked some sense into the Allies, or at least awakened Wilson to the spirit of his own promises.
Niccolò Machiavelli, The Prince [Daniel Donno translation, Bantam Books, 1981, p. 20] |
As it happened, Hitler, although finally losing as did Hannibal in the original Second Punic War, would prove to be a far more terrible enemy and would inflict an unprecedented level of suffering, destruction, and carnage on Europe and her peoples -- thanks in great measure to the advantages he enjoyed from the fecklessness of the Allies. The only consistent feature in Allied policy from Vienna to Versailles was, perhaps, a deference to autocrats, Louis XVIII and Hitler, in comparison to democratic representatives, who were cut off at the knees.
The Germans had often behaved badly under the Kaiser, but this was the merest foretaste of what would aptly be called the "crimes against humanity" of World War II. The taste for revenge of the Allies in World War I would thus rebound upon them with unimaginable ferocity. They had little taste for it after World War II, though by then they realized that they wanted a democratic Germany as an ally against the remaining, and triumphant, totalitarian power, the Soviet Union. Truncated by Russian conquest, the Federal Republic of Germany nevertheless emerged as a sovereign and equal Power in the modern world.
The Iron Cross -- -- came to be used to symbolize, not only the German Empire, but every single regime in modern Germany since then -- the Weimar Republic, Nazi Germany, and the Federal Republic of Germany -- with sole exception of Communist East Germany. 
There actually had not been much call for such a symbol before the introduction of aircraft. Armies and navies had always used flags for recognition, as with the Imperial German Naval Ensign at right. A flag, however, is not going to work very well on an aircraft, and during World War I we see the introduction of special insignia painted on wings and fuselage. Considering the radical changes in regime, from Empire, to Republic, to Dictatorship, to Republic again, the Iron Cross represents an extraordinary constant in Germany identity despite all the other changes in symbolism. 
As it happens, however, the Iron Cross has nothing to do with the earlier history of Germany in general. It was inherited by the Margravate of Brandenburg, as the Kingdom of Prussia, from the Duchy of Prussia, which itself derived from the domain of the Teutonic Knights. With the Knights, the Cross was simply the standard Cross of a Crusader, and the black on white colors were just a variation of those used by other Crusading Orders. For instance, the Hospitallers used white on red, 
, or white on black, 
. There was no particular symbolism in the choice of colors for the Teutonic Knights. The only symbolism it would ever have, a particularly unfortunate one, would be for the Nazis with death. This has now been conveniently, and not inappropriately, forgotten.
| Weimar Republic | |||
|---|---|---|---|
| President | Chancellor | ||
| Friedrich Ebert | 1919- 1925 | Philip Scheidemann | 1919 |
| Gustav Bauer | 1919-1920 | ||
| Hermann Müller | 1920 | ||
| Konstantin Fehrenbach | 1920-1921 | ||
| Joseph Wirth | 1921-1922 | ||
| Wilhelm Cuno | 1922-1923 | ||
| Gustav Stresemann | 1923 | ||
| Wilhelm Marx | 1923-1925 | ||
| Paul von Hindenberg | 1925- 1934 | Hans Luther | 1925-1926 |
| Wilhelm Marx | 1926-1928 | ||
| Hermann Müller | 1928-1930 | ||
| Heinrich Brüning | 1930-1932 | ||
| Franz von Papen | 1932 | ||
| Kurt von Schleider | 1932-1933 | ||
| Adolf Hilter | 1933-1934 | ||
| no EMPERORS, of German "Third Reich"; President & Chancellor = "Führer" | |||
| Adolf Hitler | 1934-1945 | ||
| Karl Dönitz | 1945, d.1980 | ||
| Allied Occupation, 1945-1949; German Democratic Republic, 1949-1990 (joins Federal Republic, 1990) | |||
Napoleon III foundered on its own foolish adventure in the uncharted realm of 20th century warfare. The bitterness of German defeat and the willingness of the Germans to accept dictatorship, since they had never known real democracy [note] and widely disparaged the Liberal, capitalist society of Britain (as do modern leftists and many conservatives), made it possible for Hitler to revolutionize a fundamentally conservative country, which had never fully accepted the legitimacy of the Weimar Republic. Unlike Napoleon, Hitler did not ride the whirlwind of the preexisting Revolution, he created his own whirlwind -- though most Germans probably did not quite have this in mind when they acquiesced to the Nazi regime: There were no celebrations when World War II started in 1939 as there had been in 1914.
Although Hitler was reviving the "Reich," and had the dying wish of President Hindenberg that the Kaiser be restored, he left the throne vacant 
(as Fascist Franco did in the "Kingdom" of Spain), even though Wilhelm II was still alive until 1941. When Germany occupied the Netherlands, where Wilhelm was living, in 1940, contact with him was carefully prevented lest Monarchist sentiment be aroused. Thus, while Hitler was reactionary in the sense of wishing to revive Germany's Imperial fortunes, he was enough of a revolutionary, or even enough of a Marxist, to despise the system of aristocratic class privilege in the Second Reich. One of the bitter ironies of the German Army in World War II was that, within the limitations of its racial criteria, it was fairly effective at promoting talent and maintaining an egalitarian spirit. This made for a force far more formidable than it deserved to be. The British Army was probably more limited by class consciousness than the German.
Unlike the French Revolution and Napoleon, the theory and the practice already existed for what Hitler did. He had the venerable precedent of Mussolini for a nationalistic dictatorship with economic controls by the State (where the controls actually inspired Franklin Roosevelt's quasi-fascist When Hitler came to power, Albert Einstein was visiting for a semester (for the third time) at the California Institute of Technology. He had already arranged to take up a position at the new Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton, but did return to Europe that summer. Hearing that the Nazis had already searched his residences, including his beloved summer house, Einstein never returned to Germany. His holiday, largely in the Netherlands, included a quiet visit to Winston Churchill in England. Churchill, who almost alone knew what Hitler was all about, was out of the government and out of favor at the time as some kind of warmonger. Yet, Einstein, a life long pacifist, agreed with Churchill's assessment and suspended his pacifism for the duration. I don't know if Einstein and Churchill ever met again. It must have been an extraordinary moment.
It is noteworthy that Hitler's outright territorial annexations to Germany in the west were relatively modest, just Alsace and Lorraine from France, as in 1871. He did not have the racial animus against his western enemies that he did against the eastern -- it is there, where Germans were supposed to find their Lebensraum (after enslaving or sweeping away the Slavic or Jewish Untermenschen who were there already), that the boundaries display the same degree of rearrangement conspicuous in Revolutionary Europe and that Germany assumes the same kind of bloated and unnatural outline as Napoleonic France. In a way, Hitler's heart just really wasn't in the project of subduing England. His restless ambition in the East is then what brought him down. He couldn't wait to invade Russia, but then ran into many of the same problems as Napoleon. Like Plato's classic case of the "tyrannical" personality, neither Hitler nor Napoleon had the patience to limit their goals and limit their risks. Stalin, in the end, did, and so became the most successful of all such dictators, despite the very same hatred of democracy and Liberal society.
On this 1942 map of the "high water mark" of Nazi Germany, several points of strategic failure are noteworthy. While Napoleon could not have invaded England without naval control of the English Channel for a few days, Hitler, with no strategic navy, could have accomplished the same job with air power. The air Blitz against England came close to doing this, by attacking Royal Air Force bases and the radar sites that directed British aircraft. However, a British bombing raid on Berlin infuriated Hitler. He redirected attacks to London and civilian targets. Although spectacular, this was strategically ineffective, and spared the military means that the British had to preclude German air superiority. Without such superiority, an invasion could not be attempted. So Hitler turned on Russia. Meanwhile, he regarded the only place where there was ground combat with British forces, in North Africa, as a sideshow. Deep in Egypt, within hailing distance of Alexandria and the Suez Canal, Erwin Rommel, the "Desert Fox," if he had had only a tithe of the forces in the Balkans, could have taken the heart out of British Imperial communications and put the whole Middle East, with its strategic oil reserves, into the hands of pro-Nazi Arabs. Instead, Rommel's own communications could not be secured, as the German airborne forces that could have taken Malta were ruined in a Pyrrhic victory on Crete. Substantial German forces were only committed to North Africa after the Americans landed in Morocco and Algeria in November 1942. With Rommel already in retreat, the result was simply the surrender of another German Army (May 1943). Meanwhile, Stalingrad (16 September 1942 to 2 February 1943) had really broken the ability of Germany to mount any other large or effective offensives. Despite the undoubted importance of Stalingrad, where 250,000 Germans had been trapped and killed or captured, it should be remembered that a good 350,000 Germans and Italians had been killed or captured in North Africa.
If the Western Allies had lost their taste for revenge in 1945, quite the opposite would be the case in the East. If Keynes had been concerned about a "Carthaginian Peace," and if the German Army wanted a "Second Punic War," what Germany got from the Russians in the East was a Third Punic War and a genuinely Carthaginian "Peace," i.e. The Soviets were not even following their own ideology, since they did not distinguish between German capitalist warmongers and the innocent German proletariat. All Germans were blamed; all German women were raped; and so what it looked like was not good Marxist class enemies, And it was not only Germans who experienced Soviet terror in 1945. In the Baltic states, Poland, and elsewhere a police state apparatus shut down the restoration of pre-War governments. The Soviets deported many populations as well as those of Germans, 
"National Recovery Act," wisely declared unconstitutional by the Supreme Court in 1935), but he also had the practice of Lenin in creating a totalitarian police state, where everything is expected to serve the political ends of the Party, and opposition is ruthlessly suppressed. When Hitler started his great war, the boundaries of Europe again began to melt and run, as they had with the French. 
Napoleon, however, although not above murders and massacres, by no means had the project of mass murder and genocide in mind that Hitler did. Thus, Winston Churchill said, "I certainly deprecate any comparison between Herr Hitler and Napoleon: I do not wish to insult the dead." Easy comparisons there are, however, between the two, as explored in Desmond Seward's Napoleon and Hitler, a Comparative Biography [Touchstone, Simon & Schuster, 1988]. Comparisons are also easy between Hitler and the mirror image leftist dictator and mass murderer of the Soviet Union, Josef Stalin -- see Hitler and Stalin, Parallel Lives, by Alan Bullock [Alfred A. Knopf, 1992] and The Dictators, Hitler's Germany and Stalin's Russia, by Richard Overy [W.W. Norton & Company, 2004].
the Russians actually treated East Prussia and Königsberg the way the Romans had treated Carthage. The city and the land were largely destroyed, the population was deported or annihilated (perhaps 100,000 civilians were "disappeared"), and Russian colonists were brought in to give birth to a generation that often was not even told in the schools that where they lived used to be part of Germany. 
To be sure, this is no less than what the Nazis wanted to do to Russia; so if our moral principle is collective guilt and an eye-for-an-eye retribution, the Germans got what they deserved. However, if the Soviet Union was doing what the Nazis wanted to do just because that is the way they operated anyway, and we reject the collective guilt of the German citizens of East Prussia -- not to mention the other lands in Eastern Europe from which ethnic Germans were expelled or disappeared -- then World War II ended as it began, with the war crimes of two, not one, ruthless and totalitarian powers.
but precisely the sort of race enemies already infamous from Nazi ideology. It was not a German class liquidated East of the Oder; it was the German people liquidated East of the Oder; and this only made sense in terms of the pan-Slavic ambitions that had already been expressed by Tsarist Russia in 1914, with practices that were already infamously associated with Russian Cossack cavalry. In short order, the democracies realized that the Soviet Union was simply picking up again the practice of the tyrannies in which it had been happy to cooperate with the Germans until June 1941.
both to create "realities" to match the post-war borders drawn by Stalin, and to punish populations, like the Crimean Tartars and Chechens, believed to have cooperated with the Germans. Poland, an active Ally whose partition by Germany and Russia began the War, and whose citizens had fought heroically in Allied armies and air forces throughout, was left to the merciless process of transformation into a Soviet puppet state. That the democracies more or less acquiesced to Soviet domination in Poland rendered the causus belli of 1939 and the whole moral content of Allied war aims vacuous. To rescue Poland from murderous German Nazis, it was betrayed to murderous Russian Communists -- even as Soviet and Marxist propaganda undermined the confidence of the democracies in their own principles, a process that, long after the fall of the Soviet Union, continues to corrupt and undermine the political, economic, intellectual, and moral health of the West. In other words, Leninism is alive and well in American universities; and American Communists who spied for the Soviet Union and betrayed, not just their country, but humanity and civilization, are celebrated as heroes and martyrs.
| Federal Republic | |||
|---|---|---|---|
| Presidents | Chancellors | ||
| Theodor Heuss | 1949-1959 | Konrad Adenauer | 1949-1963 |
| Heinrich Lübke | 1959-1969 | Ludwig Erhard | 1963-1966 |
| Kurt Georg Kiesinger | 1966-1969 | ||
| Gustav Heinemann | 1969-1974 | Willy Brandt | 1969-1974 |
| Walter Scheel | 1974-1979 | Helmut Schmidt | 1974-1982 |
| Karl Carstens | 1979-1984 | Helmut Kohl | 1982-1998 |
| Richard von Weizsäcker | 1984-1994 | ||
| Roman Herzog | 1994-1999 | Gerhard Schröder | 1998-2005 |
| Johannes Rau | 1999-2004 | ||
| Horst Köhler | 2004-present | Angela Merkel | 2005-present |
in the Communist "German Democratic Republic" (Deutsche Demokratische Republik, DDR), had been fleeing to the West, until the Berlin Wall was built in 1961. Once East Germany then settled down, it became the strongest economy in Eastern Europe. The level of success there led to it being called das kleine Wunder ("the little wonder") for many years. A "wonder" it may have been in Communist terms, but it was a miserable place indeed, with many buildings still showing the scars of World War II, and the prosperity of West Berlin visible right across the Wall. The whole business began to collapse in 1989 when East Germans discovered that they could vacation in Hungary but then simply walk across the border into Austria, without the Hungarians trying anymore to enforce the prison discipline of Eastern Europe. Almost before the World knew it, the East German government had collapsed and the reunification of Germany had been voted. The Federal Republic was now the entire country.
Unfortunately, the flexibility that had enabled the German economy to recover from World War II was now gone, and the East Germans themselves, never part of the industrial heartland of Germany, had lost such drive and entrepreneurialism as they might ever have had. The East German economy grew very slowly indeed, dragging down a West Germany that was already stagnating under the burden of Welfare State costs and the stupefying power of the labor unions. Unhappiness with all this in 1998 tempted the Germans, like the Americans, British, and French to turn further Left, asking for more of the policies that were causing the stasis in the first place. The Fall of Communism thus really wised up few voters. Meanwhile, the "temporary" capital of Bonn was abandoned and Berlin restored as the capital of Germany, with the Reichstag, which lay abandoned since burning down under Hilter, rebuilt with modern architecture amid the old building. This may have been inevitable, but it seems like a bad sign. The poor economy has gravely stimulated protectionistic, nativistic, xenophobic, and even racist sentiments, especially in the East. An economically troubled socialist government, opposed by violent young racists, sounds rather too much like the situation in Germany in the early 1930's for comfort [note]. What is missing in contemporary Germany and France both is an appreciation for classical liberalism -- i.e. free markets as well as social tolerance. It is noteworthy that "liberalism" (or "neo-liberalism") is a bad word in nearly all fashionable ideology, whether derived from Hegel, Nietzsche, or Marx. Napoleon's contempt for Britain as a "nation of shopkeepers" continues today in countries that could stand a great deal more shopkeepers; but the French and Germans know that the "Anglo-Saxon" model of liberalism is what contradicts their stupefying socialist institutions. They resent and envy it even as they feel a moral superiority for their own circumstances, however awkward for them those are. Since nearly every evil of the 20th century resulted from a rejection of liberalism, this all reflects a continuing unwillingness to learn from history that is astounding in its obstinacy and folly.
The Government of East Germany
I have received a complaint about this statement that Germany "had never known real democracy," since there had been Mediaeval commercial republics, like the cities of the Hanseatic League. This is true. And there is a modern descendant of Mediaeval German republicanism: It is called "Switzerland." But the Mediaeval republicanism was not particularly democratic -- more oligarchic. And Germany itself lost all historical connection to it. Modern German states owed more to 17th century absolutism, as found in Prussia and Austria, than to any form of republicanism. After the Congress of Vienna, when there were only four Free Cities left, Prussia and Austria moved to suppress nationalist and republican opinion and activism. 1848 didn't alter the success of that very much. The ideology of Imperial Germany and the German universities was all of statism, authority, and obedience. This was not good material for the Weimar Republic. Indeed, German statist ideology, as formulated from Hegel to Heidegger, has now compromised and undermined the liberal theory of government in states with real democratic traditions, like Britain and the United States. The practice of American government now owes more to Otto von Bismarck than to Thomas Jefferson.
Another recent correspondent (April 2002) has informed me that the German economy is not in such bad shape and that conflict with immigrants is not a problem. Well, the German Federal Statistical Office shows national unemployment in February 2002 as 10.4%. Unemployment in the former East Germany is 19.2% and in the former West Germany 8.3%. These numbers are up from last year, since there has been a recession, and are slightly higher than in January 2001 (10.0%, 18.7%, and 8.0% respectively). The former East has thus been suffering depression levels of unemployment. There is going to be dissatisfaction and trouble over that, whether it is with immigrants or not. But even the original area of the Federal Republic has the typical Euro-socialist levels of high unemployment. When American unemployment was 6% in the middle of 1930, Herbert Hoover thought that drastic action was needed (so he drove it up to 18%). But now in European terms even 8% is looking good. Since it has been more than a decade since the reunification of Germany, something is clearly not working in East Germany. A decade after World War II, West Germany had very nearly rebuilt its industry and infrastructure, despite being bombed back to the Stone Age during the War. But the wisdom that removed price controls to allow Germany growth then has now been forgotten. Indeed, for six years, Germany has had one of the lowest growth rates in Europe (where the average annual European Union growth since 1995 has only been 2.6%), and there are actually laws prohibiting companies from cutting prices without government permission. Some are willing to eat the fines and cut prices anyway, but the insanity of such rules almost defies belief -- though it does sound like the miserable Nehruist "Licence Raj" regime that India has finally been trying to get rid off. Comparison with discredited Indian economics is something that should really trouble Germans.
After the reelection of Mr. Schröder late in 2002, he backed away from promises of labor and other economic reform. It was a "bait and switch" election, which has disillusioned many with the Social Democrats. The Economist [November 30th - December 6th, p.45] says, "only the unions seem happy," with slow growth, high unemployment, and high taxes. Indeed, a union leader, Michael Sommer, is quoted as saying, "The government is on the right path. Germany is now on the way to being modernised in a socially just way." The only way this makes any sense is if Mr. Sommer is looking forward to ever more socialism, if not sovietism. This is the "modernisation" that a rent-seeking labor movement looks for. Some have even begun to call Germany the "Sick Man of Europe" -- a term originally applied to the Ottoman Empire, and just over 20 years ago to pre-Thatcherite Britain.
In 2005 a more conservative government, with an implicit promise of reform, was elected, headed by Angela Merkel. While the German economy seems to be doing better (as of 2007), it is not clear how far reforms have, or are likely to have, gone.
Germany was divided between three brothers, and the West Frankish kingdom, after the brief reign of Louis (II) the Stammerer, passed to his two young sons. Again, this was bad news for the strength and stability of the Frankish realm. Italy ended up in the hands of one of the German heirs, Charles the Fat, who attained the Imperial honor after a brief hiatus (877-881). Meanwhile, part of Burgundy had been detached by a son-in-law of the Emperor Louis II. It is a sad comment on the state of the Carolingian dynasty that Charles the Fat should have ended up as the most vigorous and successful member of his generation.){kind=link}
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