Territorial Weirdness Circa 1700
Oddly enough, to our modern sensibilities, the Holy Roman Empire encompassed parts of Prussia, Denmark, Austria-Hungary, and France, while leaving other parts of each country outside the empire.
Libertarians, My Libertarians!
Cruel to be kind means that I love you . Because, while I think you are mistaken, your hearts are in the right place -- yes, even you, Silas -- unlike some people . This Breitbart fellow (discussed in the link above), by all appearances, deliberately doctored a video of Shirley Sherrod to make her remarks appear virulently racist, when they had, in fact, the opposite import. I heard that at a recent Austrian conference, some folks were talking about "Callahan's conservative turn." While that description is not entirely inaccurate, I must say that a lot of these people who today call themselves conservative give me the heebie-jeebies.
I wonder how the legal norm ever developed that some countries could be partly in and partly outside of the Holy Roman Empire.
ReplyDeleteI suppose it is comparable to the status of the Angevin Empire (England + Normandy + Aquitaine + etc.) in the 12th century, large chunks of which were theoretically vassals of the king of France & other chunks not. HRE failed to develop incipient proto-nation state model of other European powers and so retained the full weirdness of the high Middle Ages political system as an archaism up to the beginning of the 19th century. Especially weird since the Holy Roman Emperor (unlike the 12th century kings of France) himself possessed large territories that were theoretically outside of his own empire.