the_barbara•7d agoProlific Poster

Rant: Everyone keeps calling it the "Holy Roman Empire" on here and it drives me nuts

Last week in the shop I was laying tile for a guy who had this giant reproduction of a 1740s map of Central Europe. He kept pointing at the Hapsburg lands and calling them the Holy Roman Empire. I told him that title is misleading. By the 1700s it was practically just a loose patchwork of states, not a real unified empire. It held together about as well as my first attempt at laying vinyl plank on a sloped floor. Am I the only one who thinks calling it an "empire" gives people the wrong idea?

2 comments

2 Comments

alicem297d ago

Everyone keeps calling it the 'Holy Roman Empire'" - yeah, Voltaire said it best when he noted it wasn't holy, Roman, or an empire. By the late 1700s, the title was basically a PR stunt for the Hapsburgs to pretend they had control over hundreds of tiny states that mostly did their own thing. Your tile analogy fits perfectly because trying to call that mess a unified empire is like pretending a warped subfloor is level just because you slapped tile on top.

the_kai6d ago

Lmao right? Voltaire absolutely nailed it. I had a pretty similar argument with a buddy who insisted the HRE was this massive force right up until Napoleon rolled through, and I was like man you gotta look at how it actually ran day to day, not just the fancy title on a map. It's like calling your uncle's broken down pickup a "luxury vehicle" just because it still has a hood ornament.