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PODs of the Thirty Years War XXII

THIRD BLOODY TIME TRYING TO WRITE THIS I HATE SODDING LIBRARY KEYBOARDS

Alex, Senator Chickpea wrote again, you know that bit at the beginning of Henry V where the Bishops lay out the case for invading France?

There is no bar
To make against your highness's claim to France
But this, which they produce from Pharamond,
'In terram Salicam mulieres ne succedant:
No woman shall succeed in Salic land.'

And how it's normally played for comedy? So you have them making this ridiculous and obscure legalistic case that no one on stage or the audience can follow but sounds learned?

Reading about this dispute made me feel like that. I have no idea if what you wrote is correct or not, or if you knew that at a certain point the word 'Hesse' stops having any meaning and the audience would sit slack-jawed, not wanting to ask questions lest they betray their own ignorance.

How do you research this stuff without your brain turning into cottage cheese?
 
THIRD BLOODY TIME TRYING TO WRITE THIS I HATE SODDING LIBRARY KEYBOARDS

Alex, Senator Chickpea wrote again, you know that bit at the beginning of Henry V where the Bishops lay out the case for invading France?

There is no bar
To make against your highness's claim to France
But this, which they produce from Pharamond,
'In terram Salicam mulieres ne succedant:
No woman shall succeed in Salic land.'

And how it's normally played for comedy? So you have them making this ridiculous and obscure legalistic case that no one on stage or the audience can follow but sounds learned?

Reading about this dispute made me feel like that. I have no idea if what you wrote is correct or not, or if you knew that at a certain point the word 'Hesse' stops having any meaning and the audience would sit slack-jawed, not wanting to ask questions lest they betray their own ignorance.

How do you research this stuff without your brain turning into cottage cheese?

There's two methods.

Either start off with the Badens to acclimatise and work your way up.

Or start off with the House of Reuss, and if you're not driven mad by their 12 different branches split across three different dynastic lines where every single man is named Heinrich and both the lines who lasted into the 20th Century have different ways of numbering the Heinrichs, then nothing will.
 
I will be honest however, I did consider expanding on the non-territorial branches of the House of Hesse (Hesse-Kassel-Eschwege, Hesse-Kassel-Rotenburg, Hesse-Kassel-Rheinfels, Hesse-Darmstadt-Homburg, Hesse-Darmstadt-Braubach and Hesse-Darmstadt-Butzbach), but while many of the individuals involved are interesting characters in their own right (such as Philip III of Hesse-Darmstadt-Butzbach who was an astronomer of minor note who corresponded with Keplar and the young Galileo), only the Hesse-Darmstadt-Homburg branch was actually of any lasting consequence whatsoever, and that only later.
 
There’s a reason why when I went to conceive the idea of Europe in FMS, I decided “This is the Federation of the Rhine and no we are not going to be talking about the member states in any detail even if they are all technically their own sovereign entities.”
 
There’s a reason why when I went to conceive the idea of Europe in FMS, I decided “This is the Federation of the Rhine and no we are not going to be talking about the member states in any detail even if they are all technically their own sovereign entities.”

I have a love-hate relationship with Napoleon, and helping to sort this mess out is the love side.

The hate side is changing the administrative/territorial borders of places like Switzerland every 5 minutes.
 
The Germans being known as organised disciplined and logical people really is one of the stereotypes that would just be baffling to any time traveler from any period up until 1933 or so isn't it?
 
The Germans being known as organised disciplined and logical people really is one of the stereotypes that would just be baffling to any time traveler from any period up until 1933 or so isn't it?

It's up there with 'the French are terrible at fighting wars' yes.

Though I'd say the earliest it would apply to 'Germans' rather than 'Prussians' would be 1870.
 
I have a love-hate relationship with Napoleon, and helping to sort this mess out is the love side.

The hate side is changing the administrative/territorial borders of places like Switzerland every 5 minutes.

If the Swiss had had a bloody acceptable franchise and constitutions which not consistently screwed over their minorities, it would not have been necessary. He seems to have taken his Defender title fairly seriously.

The Germans being known as organised disciplined and logical people really is one of the stereotypes that would just be baffling to any time traveler from any period up until 1933 or so isn't it?

Literally a running joke in Eric Flint.

EDIT: my genealogy work was the easiest thing to do for my family in France to at least a century before the Revolution. The Belgian side was a bit harder (mostly because of the change of owners, the thing being in Latin, and some of it not online yet), but not much. The German Jews in my family? Oh, yeah, dropped that like a hot potato mid 1850s, it's an administrative nightmare.
 
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