Thoughts on the Holy Roman Empire?

[Pedophobe]

Yeah but if it was a de jure empire with an actual flesh and blood emperor why is it never drawn that way on the map? I want to see what a map drawn by the people who lived there would have looked like.

Even if the Emperor was piss weak administratively to the point of being useless, it was still the First Riech, it had some formal unified identity as a state.

 

[William Murderface]

Yeah but if it was a de jure empire with an actual flesh and blood emperor why is it never drawn that way on the map? I want to see what a map drawn by the people who lived there would have looked like.

Even if the Emperor was piss weak administratively to the point of being useless, it was still the First Riech, it had some formal unified identity as a state.

If I had to venture a guess it's because A) the people of the time didn't really conceive of the nation-state as we do today until after the Treaty of Westphalia in 1648. You might be English, or French, or German in some vague ethnic way, but most people never went more than 30 miles from the place of their birth. You were from Yorkshire, or Normandy, or Prussia. You didn't really care who was on the throne and what games the nobility were playing because you were far more concerned with your day-to-day life and what they did in London, or Paris, or Berlin had almost no real change in that. B) The people who made maps of the HRE were also doing it for their own internal reasons. The emperor had an ever changing list of kings and princes and counts under him and needed to know at a glance who was ruling Bavaria this week or which territory Count Whatever was in charge of and looking at a map is a very easy way to do that in what is essentially real time. C) The powers and authority of the HR Emperor were very limited. It wasn't like the French king who had effectively unlimited powers. There was no real unity in the HRE because of all the shifting alliances and marriages and, after the Protestant Reformation, multiple religions, so why should there be a single unified blob on a map to reflect that there is a single HRE?

 

[Fougaro]

The literal Thousand-Year Reich. Virgin Nazi Germany vs Chad Holy Roman Empire.

 

[NvII iS 8ulLt f0R 88C]

Yeah but if it was a de jure empire with an actual flesh and blood emperor why is it never drawn that way on the map? I want to see what a map drawn by the people who lived there would have looked like.

Even if the Emperor was piss weak administratively to the point of being useless, it was still the First Riech, it had some formal unified identity as a state.

Vassals and de-jure states (like the Khedivate of Egypt) are usually drawn separately to indicate the lack of control from the mainland. Most maps still include similar colors,notes to indicate the relationship (which is also the case for the HRE most of the time). Unified states like England and France don't have massive wars between their heads of nobility like the HRE did. Electors like Saxony and Brandenburg openly disobeyed the Emperor's imperial edicts and even went to war with them and retained their self control. Your argument just boils down to "I want to see groBgermaniums in my map" at this point.

 

[SIMIΔN]

Lazy German historians must have cribbed off Warhammer.

 

[you22]

But at a particular time, the territory of the Holy Roman Empire surpassed that of the Roman Empire