Comments by "Nattygsbord" (@nattygsbord) on "Was Charlemagne French or German?" video.

Karl the Gross
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Venice, the Teutonic order, The Polish-Lituanian commonwealth, The Swedish empire, Moscowy were all non-western important states of Europe, so no, I don't feel any ties with this man. Nor do I see how he would be relevant for Britain, Spain, Portugal or Genoa.
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@greggor07 What matters in this discussion is that Charlemagne is not the founding father of most European countries. Not the British islands, not the nordic countries, not countries of the warzaw pact, not the PIIGS countries. So Charlemagne is not the father of Europe.
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Richard could only speak french
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@lewistaylor2858 it is not western, but rather central european. Its empire was on the balkan coast around the adriatic sea - which people consider to be eastern europe today. Yugoslavia is eastern Europe, so by that logic should Venice also be called eastern europe.
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The Norwegian vikings settled Iceland, Greenland and America centuries before Columbus took his first trip across the atlantic. They brought democracy to Iceland - which today got the oldest parliament in the world. Danish vikings managed to conquer England unlike the Franco-German peoples, and the Danes not only managed to take Normandy and the British islands and raid Paris and Spain... but they also influenced the language in those regions - for example does the English word "window" come from old norse. And then we have Swedish Vikings which founded the country Russia and traded with Constantinopel and the muslims and provided the Byzantine emperor with his elite lifeguard force of vikings. France on the other hand did not have much things going for it until the viking age started to reach its end between year 1000 and 1200. It was only then it started to build Carcassone and Notre-dame and started to think that waging war in the holy land and settle it, and then invent modern love by chivalric tales. But if one should start going so deep into late medieval history, then one could on the other hand say that the Scandinavian countries had the strongest navy in Europe and that Swedish crusaders took over Finland and organized multiple crusades against Novgorod and the Russian heartland and helped German knights settle the baltics. And Denmark was truely one of the mightiest powers in Europe at that time. But then did the bubonic plague change everything, and disproportionatly hit Denmark very hard compared to the other nordic countries so the power balance in northern Europe started to shift. Norway and Sweden was also very hard hit, and the preparations for the largest Swedish anti-Russian crusade had to be cancelled becuase of all the problems the black death caused. And that meant a permanent end to Scandinavian crusades.
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iLonghornful "Without Christianity, you wouldn't dream of scientific progress. Lol! What kind of rubbish neo nazism is this?" I am not a nazi. I also notice that many nazis were christians btw. And no christianity in itself have not contributed anything to science, just as little as islam or and most other religions. Religious tolerance and not murdering people with different beliefs is a good thing in my opinion, and it also benifits scientific progress to not censor and burn books in the name of religious intolerance - which is a thing that monotheistic middle eastern religions tend to do. I much prefer the old European religions (like the Norse and Greek gods) over the intolerent middle eastern religions for that reason. "There were no dark ages" After western Rome fell did Europes population fall by half. Trade declined, and therefore did the division of labour also dissapear, which in turn led to many old Roman technologies being lost. The Roman built aqueducts to get clean water. They loved to bath while Jesus himself said that it was not important to wash yourself because it was more important to have a clean soul than clean hands. The Romans built bridges, roads and statues, while christians were better at destroying statues and destroying Roman buildings like colloseum by plundering stones to build useless religious buildings like the St. Peter’s church. The christians behaved just like the talibans did when they destroyed the Buddha statues in Afghanistan or as ISIS did in Palmyra. That is what religion often brings. Charlemagne behaved in just the same way towards the Saxons when he destroyed their holy tree, and murdered people left and right in the name of christianity. "I am from East" Then you are suffering from the Stockholm syndrome. I mean your ancestors were murdered by German and Scandinavian crusaders because they wanted to push their holy book down the throat of slavic peoples. The Germans attacked Poland after Charlemagne had dealt with Saxony. And the Swedes attacked Russia. And German, Danish and Swedish crusaders came to the baltics and murdered anyone of different faith. You call that christianizing and civilizing. I call it barbarity and genocide.
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iLonghornful "What else should I call such neopagans who are nothing but white supremacist cults?" Over half of Icelands population believes that in pagan stuff like the existance of elves. And Iceland is probably the most democratic and peaceful country on the planet - while deeply christian countries like Mexico and the Phillipines are a little more to the opposite. "Do neopagans actually believe in their stupid gods" You look silly when you mock other religions but refuse to hold your own religion to the same standards. That make you look rude, hypocritical and stupid at the same time. Christians believe in talking animals and Bible stories about how Jesus told 2000 pigs to jump off a cliff and die. For me that is hard to comprehend.
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Germany and France was consisting of hundreds of independent cities and there was no strong king who held all the German speaking or French speaking peoples togheter. The church was what people had in common, and the different parts of todays Germany and France spoke very different dialects, and they had different economies and slightly different cultures and laws and such. Germany only got unified as late as 1871, while France was created many hundred years earlier. If you go long back in time you can see that the French people was Germans at first, but then those Germans started to eat frogs and speak in a different ways and become Frenchmen (if one should believe the historian Will Cuppy).
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evansdrad The celtic nationalist How do you know? Maybe did Charlemagne identify as a muslim congolese transgender, so who are we to judge? don't be a bigot
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How? He is not the founding father of my country.
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@greggor07 Well if Venice is south European and not western European because it is a part of Italy today, then by that logic should you also consider Spain and Portugal to also belong to southern Europe. They are all mediterranean latin language countries relying on tourism and eating the mediterranean diet. One thing is sure however, and that is that Venice does not belong to western Europe since it is clearly located at the centre at the European map than at the left part of it. One can even make a good case that it even belongs to eastern Europe considering the balkan provinces it had plus the islands of Cyprus and Crete.
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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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@perrotfrancois6683 That might be true. This club of countries tend to forget that there exist many European countries outside this club. And most of them does not share this history of Charlemagne. Navel gazing could be a proper word.
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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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German sausages is the wurst
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I rather be 5% ruled by USA, than 100% ruled by EU.
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iLonghornful https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Botulf_Botulfsson
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iLonghornful Europe before christianity was the Roman empire and the Greek civilization. Even the christians themselves admitted all the stagnation Europe had undergone since the fall of Rome when the Renaissance started.
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People are whatever they identify themselves as. Don't be racist.
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@liamkirwan6605 But what did he himself identify himself as? Maybe he thought of himself as something else.. maybe as a Belgian or a Brazilian. Who knows?
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Alsace Lorraine belongs to everyone
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Giving all the land to the oldest son made sense in the past, because if you divided it up into smaller and smaller units for every generation you would end up with a complicated unproductive agricultural system which gave very little food to the owners of the land, and the family would thus starve. So it therefore made sense to not cut up the land and let the oldest son get to keep it all. Today people just think this is unfair and discrimination against women and yadayada... but that is only because people today do not understand how the world in the past worked. And then of course was it kind of expected that family members helped and took care of each other, and that the oldest brother shared the food from his land with his family in times of food shortage, and that the rest of the family worked hard and was loyal to him in return. It was only after the introduction of the industrial revolution that this system began to change. Plots of land from multiple families were put togheter into one unit so it could be more easily handled. And large scale agriculture also made it more profitable to make technical changes and improvements and introducing new technics and tractos which could increase the food output from the land. And output grew, then would fewer people be needed as farmers and the younger sons could move to cities and work in the industry instead. So feudalism would live on up until the French revolution... if not until the late 1800s or early 1900s, when the nobility was abolished, democracy was born, new institutions came into being and industrial capitalists started to become more powerful than landowning aristocrats.
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