Comments by "Nattygsbord" (@nattygsbord) on "Fire of Learning"
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Prussia was the first state to enter the industrial revolution after Britain (and possibly Belgium). It was in the forefront in many areas like religious toleration and freedom of the press and abandonment of torture. Prussia was also early in introducing Conscription, and the Prussian school system have been copied by most countries in the world and many countries used modified copies of the same school system that Frederick the great created.
Frederick the great turned a backwater with no natural resources into the strongest economy in Germany and greatly increased the size of the population in his kingdom. Prussia have a reputation of being a warlike militaristic kingdom, but it spend less years in war than any of the other great powers during the 18th century. And many other countries would probably want to have the same economic model as Prussia, but the problem was that most German states did have a very small population and could therefore not have a large army of over 200.000 men as a reliable customer for mass produced goods in textiles, iron making, making of fire arms and leather. The huge Prussian army could mean large orders for companies and it would be possible to start mass producing things.
But for minor German states like Hannover and Baden this was simply not possible to do because their population and army was too small. So they could not have any strong state-led economic growth like Prussia. Instead did their governments have to rely on supporting existing industries, or having their governments creating a few new industries and then privatizing them after a few years because their countries did not have enough tax payers and economic muscles to support all new industries year after year like Prussia did. So Hannover had to rely on civilian products instead and selling sails for ships. And Baden produced low quality drinking glass.
And the Prussian rhineland was a purely civilian economy.
Saxony was an economy something in between militaristic Prussia and civilian Rhineland. Saxony did also make cannon balls like Prussia and invest heavily into making uniforms and opening new iron mines to secure the access to this important strategic resource in times of war. Saxony also had many flourishing civilian industries, and the Kingdom was one of the richest countries on the planet during the early 1700s thanks to its high-tech products of that day - the making of high quality luxury porcelain.
Saxony had learned the art of how to make porcelain, and the government tried to keep it a well guarded state secret how to make it since it didn't want other countries to also make it and get competition from other countries.
The kingdom of Saxony earned enormous amounts of money from their porcelain, and the King August the strong did have so much money that he not only could spend large amounts of money on making a large army, or bribing Polish nobleman so he could become the new King of Poland, but August could also spend large amounts of money on building projects in Saxony and on his personal luxury consumption. He was a fat guy who once upon a time was considered handsome by the women. He was the father of kids of many hundred different women, and he was called "the strong" because of his strong hands - he was able to bend a horse shoe with his own bare hands.
August and Frederick the greats daddy - Frederick Vilhelm, used to go out and party togheter and get drunk, and August could then order a salute of many hundreds of cannons, or feasting on cakes made with over 600 eggs. But August did suck at warfare and he lost the battles he fought against Sweden in the great northern war despite always having the odds in his own favour.
Anyhow, he would later on die.
And then Saxony was taken over by a new monarch, and the country got invaded by Frederick the Great who plundered the Kingdom. Frederick also used industrial espionage and tried to steal the technology of making Meissen porcelain.
And Prussia then learned to make porcelain on their own.
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Frederick displayed interest in many women - like the girl from England that someone proposed to be his bride. But his father instead married him away to an awkward ugly girl that he was not attracted to, and that can explain his lack of interest in her and his childless life. Frederick's servants did however hear the couple making love from outside the room, so all this talk about him being gay is probably just a way to either tarnish his reputation, or an attempt for the gay community to claim another celebrity into their own camp on very loose grounds.
His friendship was a very deep one. But being best friends is not the same thing as being homosexual.
Frederick's childhood was a terrible one where his father did beat him up and humiliated him, and denied his son all pleasures in life... music, philosophy, fashion, reading latin, speaking French, partying with friends, marrying a pretty girl etc.
And he was forced to endure pointless boring hunting trips with his father and his endless military inspections. And when his foolish father got outmanouvered in the game of world politics by Brits, Austrians and others, then he took out his on his son.
It simply felt better for him to take out all rage on someone else and blame him for all the faults in the world instead of fixing himself. His father was a simple man who hated fashion and philosophy, he was a christian fanatic while his son was an atheist. And he was a man who liked to live a spartan lifestyle and expected everyone else to do the same, and his entire Kingdom was forced to eat saurkraut so the government could save money and build a large military.
Fredericks father was a physchopath opressor who wished his oldest son to be dead. And Frederick's did beat him very badly, and encouraged him to commit suicide. And later on would he also murder Fredericks best friend in front Frederick's own eyes in an attempt to break his own son down and once again feeling sadistic joy in taking away everything that Frederick held dear.
Katte shared many of Frederick hobbies and he was a loyal servant to the Hohenzollern family so it became natural that this solidier became a close friend. And Frederick needed good friends in this harsh and lonely time when he was in the mercy of his father and no adult to stand up for him and protect him. So Frederick and his sister and Katte was of course then people who stood very close to Frederick.
And it is not hard to understand why Frederick feared for his own life and felt a desperate urge to seek freedom from his fathers opression.
At first did his father want to kill both Katte and Frederick, but in the last moment did massive diplomatic protests from Kingdoms from every corner in Europe come in and demanded that Frederick's life would be spared and many felt pity for the young prince. So Frederick William had not much other choice than to back off from his plans to kill his own son for high treason in a kangaroo court. So to safe face he would allow his son to live, but instead try to get him to admit desertion and get a confession that he was unfit to rule the Kingdom and force him to abdicate, and his best friend Katte would be murdered to break Frederick down and if not pushing him over the edge to commit suicide, so atleast break his will to fight on and give up his ambitions to become King.
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@aymarafan7669 "the Great" is a title used by bad men as well, like Charlemagne or "Karl the great" as he is known as in German. Charlemagne murdered heathens and did crusades and forced his religion on other people and he gained children with large numbers of women (and perhaps even his own sister according to some mythological tales).
Alexander the Great was basicly a Hitler of antiquity who destroyed mulitple cities like Thebe and Persepolis and commited genocide on one ethnic group after another.
So of course are many persons named "the Great" not so great people.
Frederick the Great on the other hand was a great person in my opinion.
He did not create constitutional democracy, but on the other hand would only an idiot judge a person from the 1700s with the same standards as we have for people of our own day. Abraham Lincoln would be called a racist if he presented the same views on blacks as he held back then, when the normal thing was to be a racist. But fact remains that Lincoln was a great man who abolished slavery and the blacks have him to thank for their freedom. And Aldous Huxley who fought for the rights of blacks in the civil rights movement also held quite racist views. And Fredrika Bremer who fought for womens rights here in Sweden, did see women as intellectually inferior to men. So I don't think we should judge people with the standards of our own time, but instead we should judge people for the standards of the time in which they lived.
And the same goes for Frederick the Great.
Frederick was a man way ahead of his time. He abolished torture, while other countries like for example Britain did use flogging as a punishment on their solidiers. Frederick the Great was raised by religious fundamentalist father and knew how opressive religion was, so he gave everyone religious freedom regardless if they were protestant, catholic, calvinist, jewish, muslim, or an atheist like himself.
In my opinion was this a great achievement, since other countries still burned witches and applied the Bible like sharia law. King Charles the XII in Sweden did for example take the law of Moses and make it the new Swedish law during his reign. And the Austrian emperor Josef II burned jews.
Frederick the Great also created freedom of the press, and he was the only King in Europe that was not interested in trying to improve stories about himself to make himself look better in history books.
While other countries like France did burn books and forced Voltaire to flee from the country for mocking religion and criticisng the government.
Prussia was also the great power that is today is known as aggressive and militaristic and the Sparta of Europe. But facts remains that this image is false, since Prussia was the great power in Europe with most years in peace during the 1700s, and the share of tax money the military got was less than in many other countries as for example Austria.
Frederick the Great also had another mindset than other rulers. Louis XIV of France said "I am the state" - which means that his will was the law and that he was not accountable to anyone but himself. Frederick on the other hand said "I am the first servant of the state"... which means that Frederick saw himself as equal to the rest of the people in his country to the duty of serving the country's interest. And as a servant he would be held accountable to his own country and his own people.
One could argue as you Frederick haters do and say that he was still a ruling dictator as the other kings. But on the other hand do I think it is undenible that Frederick took his job as King very seriously unlike other Kings who only took their farmers tax money to spend on luxuries and wasted their time on sex and delicious meals.
Frederick on the other hand woke up 6 AM every morning and began answering 30 letters or so by government officials. And later that day he would speak to his ministers or generals and inspect his troops or visiting farmers or merchants and listen to their concerns. So he worked very long hours each day, and the only few breaks he took was used for playing flute or having philosophical discussions.
Frederick the Great was also a man who fostered the industrial revolution in Germany, and the man possessed a great talent for finding great men for important positions in government. And Silesia would togheter with England and Belgium be the first place in Europe to enter the industrial revolution, thanks to the many succesful state-owned mining industries there. Frederick the Great was also interested in new technologies and he started to make porcelain in Prussia, and his country became the first in Germany to grow potatoes. So when Germany suffered from a great famine and millions were threatned by starvation, did Frederick and his military magazines filled with potatoes open up to share the food with the startving people and save many lives.
It is true that Frederick held contempt for the Polish, jews and despised the German language, and the idea of a unified Germany and that he mocked religion. But Frederick was on the other hand a man who also was capable to look beyond his own biases. He could respect the great talent of General von Ziethen, and he didn't turn him away only because he was a warm believer in Christianity. And eventough he thought that aristocrats would usally make up better officers, he would still not deny poor farmers the right to become officers if they could display great talent for the job. So he was indeed a believer in meritocracy.
He wanted to abolish serfdom, but the restistance towards such a reform was too hard for him to being able to finish that task within his own life-time.
So to summerize, do I think that Frederick the Great was one of the greatest rulers who have ever lived. He was a man way ahead of his own time - Almost like Leonardo da Vinci in that sense.
His ideas spread to the rest of Europe, and gave us all some of the freedoms we have today such as freedom of speech and freedom of religion. He created the enlightenment which would replace all opressive religious dogma. And his school system is still used in many modern countries around this world, including my own: Sweden.
He had a few flaws of course. He started one war of agression in 1740. But on the other hand was Europe in the 1500s, 1600s and 1700s a place where this was normal and every country had to decide if it would eat up other lands, or become eaten itself. So we should not judge Frederick by measurements of today, but rather see him and judge him according to the standards of the 1700s.
And in that light, one could say that he was actully a great King in many ways. And not just a brutal uncivilized warlord or a lazy wasteful indifferent King who drank wine and slept with women all day long.
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His father was very abusive. He behaded Frederick's best friend and forced him to watch.
Frederick William also forced Frederick to marry an ugly boring girl that he didn't like instead of a princess from England which was attactive and which Frederick liked and which would have given Frederick prestige and a confidence boost.
Frederick william however hated the idea of giving his son any joy in life, and Frederick William also sucked at the game of world politics and made a wrong bet to pick a pro-Austria marriage candidate for his son. And later on he regreted his pro-Austrian stance.
Personally I wonder if this could have given Frederick the Great an own personal reason for hating Austria and wanting revenge and starting the Silesian wars, but this is just a theory.
Frederick William was a bully and he did beat up Frederick's teacher for teaching him latin.
Frederick William hated such things as latin, philosophy, fashion, flute playing and culture - which all were things that his son loved.
Frederick William himself was more of a 1600s kind of person. He was very religious and intolerant and unopenminded. He was a simple man in that sense that he was totally uninterested in any deeper intellectual reasoning. He had 3 hobbies and those were in the following order; his solidiers in his army, drinking alchohol and hunting.
He was a very loyal husband to his wife, and a man of his position could easily have fucked around if he wanted to, but he didn't. He was a christian. And a bully and a tyrant. And life for his subjects were not a funny one. He never gave them anything. His only two things he cared about was his army and a good economy.
He had a strong sense of duty, and while other Kings in Europe wasted tax money on luxuries for themselves, so did Frederick WIlliam live a simple life without luxury.
Frederick the Great however was more generous towards his own people and opened military food depots whenever food prices got high so that the poor people could afford to eat. He hated his fathers religious intolerance and the instead tolerated all faiths, even if he contempted christianity in private.
Frederick also used his newly won freedom when his father died to live out his cultural and intellectual passions.
But he also kept surprisingly many of his fathers policies intact, and did keep budgetary dicipline for his government instead of wasting money of fun stuff. And he did anger many friends by refusing to give them nice jobs and titles within his government in a nepostic way.
Frederick the Great also inherited his fathers contempt for Austria, and the military and the economy were still top priorities for the nation. And many of his fathers advisors could keep their jobs thanks to their competance, eventhough Frederick did not like them in the past.
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German "education" is mostly only about world war II and the holocaust. Two important topics, but German history is much more than only that.
You got the germanic tribes fighting against Rome, you got Charlemagne, an the Baltic crusades, and the Hanseatic league, the reformation, the 30 years war, the silesian wars, Frederick the great, the industrial revolution in Germany and the scientific exploration, the cultural greatness of Germany and its many musicians and castles, and then of course Bismarck and the creation of Germany + its colonial empire...
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There were jews christians zorastians muslims and believers of ancient greek gods, and they lived everyware during the late antiquity and early middle ages. Vikings vistited ireland, spain, france, russia, ukraine, and byzantium. Muslim and jewish traders were active in Bohemia. The Khazaks in modern day Russia converted to judaism. And there were jews in Jerusalem and jews in modern day Saudiarabia. There was also jews in Mesopotamia left there after the jewish capitivity in Babylon. Christians also lived in Iraq, Persia, Saudiarabia, North Africa and a few enclaves were even so distant as in India.
The religion tended to get local variants, and the latin christians and the Byzantian christians started to despise each other over minor religious differences. In the 4th century was there a church meeting at Nicea where a bunch of theologians and politicians were assembeled and they designed a standardized version of the Bible and decided to burn all books they didn't deem to fit into the book collection known as the Bible. And everyone who disagreed with them was called a heretic and could suffer a terrible fate.
But Christians who lived in Persia had their own interpretation of christianity, and the intolerant Byzantines would murder those heretics during their military campaigns into Persia. So it was obviously not so that a christian group therefore would prefer a christian ruler, but instead did many welcome the first muslim rulers over the middle east because of their religious tolerance.
But later on would of course muslims start to behave the same way when Muhammed died and a war of succession occured a century later. The muslim world got a divide between shia and sunni muslims and non-muslims became encouraged to convert.
The jews aslo had their fair share of religious intolerance. The jews in Saudiarabia commited genocides against the Christians living there so they would have no competition over winning peoples souls. And the jews in Jerusalem was also happy when the Byzantines lost control over the city over to the Persians.
The jews helped muhammed wage his first wars. But they were also some of his victims, as Muhammed himself behaved like ISIS does today, when he commited a genocide on the jewish tribe Banu Qurayza living in Arabia. 800 people were killed.
Muhammed was basicly just a typical Djinghis Khan type of guy typical for the medieval times. He commited genocide, he plundered, and he thought that it was okay to treat people of a different faith badly. And ISIS today are just doing the same things he did during the 600s - they kill all men in a village, they loot, and Christian and jewish girls are forced to become sex slaves and forced to marry a man who murdered their husband, brothers, father and male friends. Prophet Muhammed himself took a 15 year old girl - Mariyah -as a sex slave for the pervy old man. And Muhammed was also a man who bought, traded and sold black slaves. So he was a typical man of his time.
The jews in Bohemia, the Vikings, and the Genoese christians were more than happy to sell other people as slaves as well. And slavery in the middle east was even more common than in Rome during its peak.
(Source: The silk roads - Peter Frankopan)
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@greggor07 I am not proud about religious opression. On the other hand can one say that this was a time and age when it was hard to say who was the attacker and defender. Sometimes Wendes attacked murdered, plundered and enslaved Danes and Swedes, and other times was the roles switched.
Screw that: we wuz vikings meme
I think the viking age gets too much attention in Swedish history. Personally I am more proud of Swedens military achievements during the 1600s and 1700s (ie a small country like Sweden beating Russia at their own hometurf and conquering Moscow, Prague, Bavaria and Poland), and the scientific progress it have done since the 1700s, and its strong performance in welfare and economic progress.
"it is important to note that the myth of the Norse vikings as especially brutal savages"
The vikings were religiously tolerant, had high levels of gender equality, and viking men had clean hair and showed high levels of bravery in battle - which are things we can all admire.
But on the other hand were they slave traders. DNA analysis show that Icelands population are sprung from Norwegian men and women from Ireland which they stole. And the gigantic slave trade the vikings did in the east turned the word slave into "slav" - as for the slavic people living in eastern Europe which were sold as slaved to the Muhammedans.
So is the viking age something to be proud of? meh, not much I say.
Yule, the enslavement and all the piracy are not things to be proud of.
But on the other hand did the vikings not commit murder and cruelty at the same levels as christians would commit.. when they killed 20 million native Americans, built death camps at Skythopolis, massacred jews, started the inquisition, launched the crusades, or when French protestants got opressed, beaten, raped and murdered by their catholic countrymen only because of their faith.
Who knows how many lives have been lost because of religion? I often wonder how far humanity could have gone if we never had christianity, the fall of Rome and the rise of the dark ages where christians burned down the library at Alexandria, closed down public baths and ruined public health, and destroyed sculptures and antique texts only because religious zealots thought they were incompatible with their stupid religion.
Edward Gibbon may have exxagerated when he said that the christian ruler Justinian was responsible for the death of 100 million people. But fact remains that his wars made the country vulnerable to the pest and his wasteful spending on church building ruined his country.
So just imagine if all this shit had never happened... We could maybe have had high tech healthcare centuries ago, started the industrial revolution centuries earlier and colonized space by now if it wasn't for the existance of a particular stupid religion which have caused so much waste of lives, money time and resources.
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@newtonia-uo4889
"The Crusades are a logical responses to ills against catholic europe"
" the levantine crusade was to respond to the eastern roman empire's call for help and to stop the abuse of christian pilgrims in the holy land"
The muslim rulers of Jerusalem had no interest in denying christians access to the city since those tourists meant large revenues for the muslim rulers. So the muslims had a policy of religious tolerance, while religious minorites got murdered in christian Europe.
The city stayed under muslim rule for some centuries and no one had much problem with it. Problems only started to emerge when Syria in 800 AD - the land north of Jerusalem - got involved in a civil war and the area broke up into 200 minor states fighting each other and plundering and murdering everyone. So it became unsafe for christian pilgrims to travel along the land route from Europe to Jerusalem, and taking a ship was too expensive for European peasants.
So your talking point about christian pilgrims does not make much sense. Why start a crusade in year 1095 a thing that happened in the 9th century?
"Lithuanian crusade was a reponse to the polish king wishing to extend their realm into pagan Lithuania and also to end the border conflict that was happening between orthodox europe and catholic europe"
Some truth to that. But the vikings did not have much idealistic noble goals when they plundered.
And all they did was to re-brand their viking raids as "crusades" to make those projects seem less criminal and barbaric, and instead hide them behind noble pure fasade - eventhough the first crusades they did was no different than classic viking raids. But this time with the approval from christian west.
And as barbaric the vikings were, one cannot say that they was as evil as the crusaders. The vikings only wanted to loot. While the crusaders wanted to permanently occupy land, and they wanted to murder every person guilty of "wrongthink".
The most scary part in all this is that christians murdered people not because they hated them. But rather because they loved people and wanted to prevent them from commiting sin by killing them so that they would not have to spend too much time in hell.
The entire logic is just completly twisted and wicked. And totally evil. The crusaders were psychopaths just the same way as ISIS is today - a movement which also likes to kill disbelievers for the same reason.
"Love your neighbour" and "love your enemy" turned into murder people who do not share the same religious faith. And not even orthodox christians, nestorians, albignese and such were pure enough.
"many contributors to the Scientific Revolution were themselves Christian"
Many scientists like Newton was christians, but the christian faith in itself have no value at all for scientific progress. Ibn Khaldun happened to be a muslim, but that doesn't prove that islam is a religion benificial to science.
Believing in easter bunny does not make me become a better scientist.
But what I can say is that religion have led to iconoclasm, book burning and murders of great thinkers. So the downsides outweight the upsides in my opinion.
"in the totality of the spanish inquisition (400 years) around 5000 people were executed through the inquisition"
Not many people died under Pinotchets dictatorship either, but the number of people who were forced to flee the country and lived in fear was much large. And many people got tortured. So I think the same applies here.
What killed more people was things like the crusades which killed a million people. The conquest of Americas costed 20 million native Americans their lives. The religious wars in France, the Netherlands, and Germany did cost millions of lives. And it can also be debated to what extent Martin Luthers and the church are guilty of providing a German anti-semite thought tradition which led to the holocaust.
Religion also provided justification for the slavery and for western imperialism, and even in modern days have people killed each other on Ireland and on the Balkans over beliefs from a stupid holy book.
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Austria was religious intolerant against the protestants - which was the reason the religious wars in Germany happened. The Habsburg monarchy in Austria and Spain was also seen as a threat to the rest of Europe - which thought that they were trying to take over the entire world.. and the enormous amount of silver from America that flowed into Europe was used to hire mercenaries and build huge armies.
And the rest of Europe came togheter to defend their own freedom which were under threat. The Netherlands hated the heavy taxation and the religious opression of Spain. Sweden felt threatened by Austria which was catholic and had a large population and if Austria had conquered northern Germany then Sweden would have gotten a hostile neighbour with so much new powers and more resources that it would impossible to defeat it. Denmark shared Swedens worries.
England and Spain was religious enemies and rivals in oceanic trade. France was catholic, but it was terrified of a united Germany, and if Austria would manage to get Germany unified then France would get a dangerous neighbour with resources larger than its own.
And the Ottoman empire did have friendly relations with England and it had fought wars against the habsburgs - both against Austria and against Spain. And the Ottoman empire didn't like the trade competition that Spain and Portugal gave it. And the ibrerian peoples arrogance and religious intolerance did not do much to help the relations with the ottomans either.
So the thirty years war 1618-1648 could be seen as a world war where the Habsburgers tried to take over the world - like other crazy Germans in history.
And if Frederick the great would have been defeated a century later the I doubt that Austria would have been a good empire. It was Frederick the Great who was first with religious toleration and freedom of the press, while Austria was just a lame half-assed copy of Prussia. Austria still burned jews to death under the rule of Joseph II.
And multiculturalism was not an easy thing. The Habsburg army proves the point. The Hungrian troops hated to by under the command of a German general and they strongly opposed any such attempts. And the German troops in turn did have the same feelings towards the Hungrians, so there was this feeling of mutual contempt and cooperation was uneasy, even if the Maria Theresia made several visits to Hungary and did her best to get their support.
Hungary was still a feudal barbarian land where the aristocrats plundered the country and opressed the peasants into the harshed form of serfdom. Hungary made up more than a third of Habsburgs population, but it contributed with less than 10% of the tax revenues to the empire. Partly because the Hungarians was selfish and didn't wanted to contribute too much to the Germans, but also partly because the Hungarian aristocrats wanted to steal things from their peasants themselves and they had no intention to share their loot. Hungary was economically backwards and underdeveloped.
The only real thing keeping togheter the Habsburg monarchy and all Hungarians, Croats, Czechs, Italians, Germans, French and Dutch living in it was their love and loyalty to their dictator/monarch. And the social order of the empire was not Prussian meritocracy, but more of aristocratic oppression.
The huge empire had been born out of royal marriage diplomacy which had given the Habsburg large amounts ot lands through inheritance. And many of the balkan states had joined the Habsburg's only because they thought that getting protection from Austria was a less bad choice than taking the risk of being occupied by the Ottoman empire.
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No. Their attempts only comes across as clumbsy and ridiculous. Only an insecure person without anything to be proud of would try to steal other peoples history.
Modern Greeks are the most pathethic people in Europe. They get butthurt about another naming their own country Macedonia. They get angry when people stay to historical facts and point out that Alexander the Great was a homosexual... I mean, what normal person does fucking care? Alexander lived 2000 years ago, and only an idiot would worship a Hitler of Antiquity that commited genocide after genocide and burned down Thebe and Persepolis.
He murdered Greeks, Persians, Indians, Medes, Pisidians, Cappadocians, Paphlagonians, Mesopotamians, Galatians, Armenians, Bactrians, Sogdians, Arachosians, and even some rare Uxians.
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In the western half of the Roman empire people spoke latin. And in the eastern half they spoke Greek instead.
Rome won North Africa, Spain and France by military conquests and could brutally impose their will and force the population to do everything that rulers in Rome wanted. The old culture was destroyed and people learned to speak latin instead.
In the eastern half of the empire things were different. Eastern provinces were gained by inheritance, royal marriages and alliances with friendly minded kingdoms and states. And Rome offered the peoples in the east many benifits if they joined the Roman empire, and they promised that many cities could keep their own laws and old culture and customs if they joined the Roman empire. And the population did not have to pay all the same taxes as the Romans did.
So the eastern half of the empire never became fully Roman. And the Romans never made any efforts to assimilate the Greek speaking population into the latin community. And the Greeks could keep their own Gods and traditions.
One could think of it like the failed integration of a modern day ghetto of immigrants in todays Europe.
If there are no forces that push for the immigrants to follow the law of the land, learn the language and trying to mix with the native population... then of course will the muslim immigrants then prefer to keep their own language, customs and traditions.
Likewise was the Greeks in the eastern half never interested in giving up their own language and use latin instead.
As long as Rome could conquer new rich lands and take enemy solidiers as slaves did the economy of the western half of the empire flourish and exceed the wealth of the Eastern half of the empire. But when Rome started to run out of slaves, then the slave economy in western Europe started to fall apart, and the power balance in the Roman empire swung over and the Eastern half of the empire became more important than the western half.
It now was in the east the big cities and riches were found. And it was in the east the great thinkers and intellectuals were found. While the new provinces the Romans conquered like Britain were more of an economic loss than a benifit to the Roman empire. Britain needed to be defended by 4 Roman legions, but the little island province could not afford to pay for the upkeep for all those units on its own. The land also lacked natural resources - except tin... while other provinces like Spain had plenty of useful natural resources and both France and Spain would provide Rome with more money than what they costed to defend.
And both Spain and France did also provide the Roman empire with philosophers, thinkers, celebrities and emperors. But Roman Britain did not provide a single one such person.
So as you see did the western Roman empire at one point reach its peak.
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King of Prussia is a cooler title than elector of Brandenburg, so doing a re-branding was all this title change was.
Prussia suffered harshly from the 30-years war and lost much of its population, so it took in immigrants from other countries to compensate some of the losses and took a pragmatic policy of religious tolerance to accomplish this.
Frederick the Great conquered Silesia from Austria - which was a small but very rich province.
Austria didn't like the idea of losing a province which contributed 25% of their country's tax revenues, so two wars was fought about this place. Frederick would also expand into Poland and give Prussia better control over its trade routs as well as linking together his scattered territories. Frederick also fostered the industrial revolution and created the most well ordered economy in all of Germany. He created the first modern education system and runned his country according to enlightenment ideals and introduced press freedom, abolished torture and went further with religious tolerance than any other country. The Prussian bureaucracy became the most well runned in the world. And the Prussian military got an excellent reputation after its performance in the wars. It was a conscription army, but very well trained and capable of swiftly performing complex maneuvers on a battlefield which no other army could accomplish without getting their formations turning into disorganized chaos. The rate of fire of Fredericks infantry was also superior and thanks to much training was Prussian troops able to reload and aim their muskets so fast that it happened reflexively.
But Frederick left no heir, and his successor was a useless weak King - which meant that noblemen took could take over the country and run it for their own special interests rather than caring about what was best for the country.
And the result became that the gigant budget surpluses Frederick had used decades to build up was squandered in only a few years. And the large army turned into shit and got humiliated in its wars against France.
Prussia would however rise again and become one of the winners of the Napoleon wars. Many tiny German states got merged into larger units when the French took over Germany. And when the Napoleon wars was ended did many states merge once again. And Prussia would thereby expand its territories much. And tiny Baden which nobody had heard of or cared about in the 1700s, had now become one of the largest German states.
Prussia continued with its state-led industrial revolution in the 1800s. And it wanted the tiny German states to agree to letting Prussia building railroads into their lands so that Prussia could could connect her heartlands with the Prussian provinces in the Rhineland. But the tiny states refused to agree to railroads and removed trade barriers, so the 2nd best solution was therefore considered - the Zollverein - which turned all of Germany into a free trade zone so that Prussia indirectly could connect all her provinces economically to each other. And Germany started to merge more and more and become one economy instead of multiple ones scattered all over all corners of the country.
The Napoleon wars had also created nationalist feelings. Many wanted a united Germany. The nationalist movement also wanted to create a large unprofessional army - a militia (a Landwehr). And it was a democratic movement.
But this movement was opposed by the rich and powerful establishment of conservatives which hated democracy and wanted a small professional army which they considered more politically reliable (and thus less of revolutionary threat) and they also considered it as more military effective since the Landwehr often had gotten slaughtered and humiliated in the Napoleonic wars. And the conservatives cared more about preserving their own titles and privileges than creating a new order and a new united Germany. And some conservatives cared more about things like serving God than about serving the national interest.
Much of the 1800s would be a power struggle between those two factions, the democratic nationalists vs. the Conservatives. Germany would however get created in 1871 under Conservative Bismarck which preserved much of the established order. Then did the established order fall in 1918 as the Kaiser was removed after the loss of world war 1. But the power struggle continued.
Many Germans hated the new Weimar democracy and wanted to go back to an authoritarian rule under the Kaiser - like for example Ludendorff, Ernst Jünger, Spengler and others. Hitler also hated the new democracy, but he did not want to restore the monarchy, but instead he wanted to create his own dictatorship.
And when Hitler got into power, then he solved power struggle between nationalists and conservatives once and for all. He simply combined the worst ideas of both movements. He borrowed the anti-democratic authoritarianism and fascism from the Conservatives. While he borrowed the intolerance nationalists had against ethic groups like Poles (which refused to assimilate and become Germans) and the intolerance against religious minorities like jews.
So Hitler basically just embraced outdated politics which were so typical of the 1800's. His race theories and views on women were also pretty outdated - even by the standards of the 1930's.
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I think people underestimate men like Frederick the Great, Gustavus Adolphus, and Leonardo da Vinci.
Those mens brains would have been of great usefulness regardless in which European country they would have been born into. Adolphus and Frederick were more than just warrior kings. The former spoke a half-dozen languages fluently and was a gifted administrator and a great speaker who could get his solidiers to follow him everyware, and he was a loved husband, and even the lowest ranked finnish farmers in the Swedish Kingdom loved him for his fairness, as he stamped out the plunder and opression the Finnish nobility caused their people.
And Frederick the Great was revolutionary with his ideas of religious freedoms and freedom of the press. He saved thousands of lives by introducing potatoes in Germany against the protests of superstitious farmers who thought they spread syphilis. Frederick built canals that improved trade, and he built up the first modern school system in the world. He was also a gifted flute player and a man who enjoyed the company of gifted men like Voltaire, Kant, and Bach.
So Frederick are one of those few men which I would consider to be a timeless genius. And he would still have remained a great man even if he had lost the seven years war. Just the same way as men as Hannibal deserves to be remembered as one the greatest Generals in history despite he ended up with losing the war despite his three masterpieces at Cannae, Lake Trasimene, and Trebia.
And now another topic. It is possible that history could have ended differently and that no one would have heard about our celebrities in history had they failed at a critical moment. George Washington could easily have lost the battle of Yorktown, and then USA would never have been created. Had the weather just been a few degrees warmer in 1658 then there would the ocean have not frozen into ice so that the Swedish army could have moved their forces to the island with Copenhagen on top of it and forced Denmark to sign the most humiliating and disasterous peace deal in their history.
Instead would the situation have been the total opposite. The Swedish army would have fallen into the ice cold ocean water and entire regiments would have drowned or frozen to death. And Charles X of Sweden would have been remembered as a reckless gambler who destroyed the Swedish army by throwing it into the ice cold water
while the country was at war with Poland, Russia, the Netherlands and Denmark at the same time, and while Austria and Brandenburg were also acting very hostile.
He won the war against Denmark and is now remembered as a great conqueror King and brilliant strategist. But in hindseight can we say that he was a gambler and unfit as a king when he took such large risks that could have totally destroyed the Kingdom. The Swedish navy was too weak to sail the men to Denmark without getting sunk by Danish and Netherlandic ships. So starting a winter campaign in the small hope of getting some ice on sea was a crazy gamble that easily could have gone wrong.
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"My opinion : the byzantine empire was a hypridic one : state organization was Roman, religion Christian, and language / education Greek"
You made the point earlier that things that seem important to us today may not have been so important to people in earlier times. And I think that point certainly apply here. As historian Oswald Spengler noted would religion matter extremely much to the Romans and if you would go back in a time machine and asked a Roman to learn you about what is would mean to be Roman he would not show you the aqueducts, the amazing architecture or other such wordly things that we admire the Romans for today.
Instead he would take you to a temple and tell you about some made up stories and mythology and such.
So a Roman would much define himself by his religion. So while hellenism or orthodox christianity might seem like an unimportant bullshit issue to us today, things were seen as very important in the past.
"As to "ethnicity", the problem is a fictitious one, since in the 11th - 15th centuries (and even much later, well into the 18th), "nation" or "ethnicity" the way we perceive them today, did not exist."
One should not exaggerate the amount of nationalism people felt in the past when people even rarely meet any fellow citizens outside their own home province. But it did however sometimes exist to some extent, even if the nationalist feelings rarely was a strong as they were during the 1800s or early 1900s.
The Swedish king Gustavus Adolphus in the 1600s spoke both to his advisors and to common people about the necessity to fight his wars to protect the beloved fatherland. And this is just one example among many.
In some way I also think a kind of nationalism existed in very early times as well. From what I can remember did the Greeks living around 400 BC like to think of themselves and other Greeks as part of a common cultural sphere. While people in balkans and rest of Europe were seen as barbarians, and Persia was considered to be a kind of common enemy for all the Greek city states.
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@isnotmimi I prefer democracy too I guess. And the food, healthcare, economic equality today is much better than back in the 1700s.
But there was of course things which I miss. The fashion, the music, the gallant gentlemen, and so on.
I also think that the ideals are better than the modern ones. A solidier which serves the country and unselfish risking his life for his country is worthy of more respect than a selfish rich dude who never did anything for his community and only got rich thanks to outsourcing and tax evasion.
Nationalism is worthy of praise, while egoism, greed, and materialism, is not.
The solidiers and officers should have a higher than mercants and bankers.
And serving the country, government and community is a virtue.
Men of the 1700s also endorsed enlightment ideals and had a very pragmatic view of economic and politics.
While today it is filled with dogma, and promotic globalistic ideologies is now seen as more important than
preserving companies and jobs, national independence, democracy and such things.
The respect for the principles of the Westphalian peace is starting to get erroded. And with that, and with all globalist crap we are pushing the world towards new disasters like ideological wars of the 1600s and economic catastrophes as the economy becomes an unregulated wild west as governments gets their powers taken away by globalist fanatics.
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