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Updated: June 1, 2025
If thou makest first a trial of the successfulness of thy endeavors upon things far lower, more base, but much more easy to obtain, as crowns, kingdoms, earldoms, dukedoms, gold, silver, or the like, how vain are these attempts of thine, and yet thou thinkest to possess thy soul of heaven.
On the northern frontier the same Burgundian house was massing together into a single state nearly all the crowd of counties, marquisates, and dukedoms which now make up Holland and Belgium. Nobles hardly less powerful or more dependent on the Crown held the central provinces of the kingdom when Lewis the Eleventh mounted its throne but a few months after Edward's accession.
Not able to hold out, however, against so potent an adversary, he resigned his estate to the Emperor Rudolph II., and received in exchange the dukedoms of Oppelon and Ratibor in Silesia, with an annual pension of fifty thousand joachims.
Good policy, perhaps; but it is better to corrupt than to decapitate. James I. was of this opinion. He restored dukedoms. He made a duke of his favourite Villiers, who had made him a pig; a transformation from the duke feudal to the duke courtier.
Most of the new Norman countships and dukedoms thus created in Italy had declared themselves fiefs of the Church; and the successor of the Apostle might well hope, by aid of the Norman priest-knights, to extend his sovereignty over Italy, and then dictate to the kings beyond the Alps. The aid of Hildebrand in behalf of William's claims was obtained at once by Lanfranc.
But where was he, the chieftain of that gallant host, the claimant of dukedoms and principalities, the victor for whose brows a splendid wreath of laurel had been so nobly gained by the blood of the brave? Will blushing glory hide the tale of shame?
But let us trust rather that Anne and Molly received him into their arms, and soon made him forget all about castles and chapels and dukedoms and ungrateful princes, in the everlasting youth of the heavenly kingdom, whose life is the presence of the Father, whose air to breathe is love, and whose corn and wine are truth and graciousness.
These princedoms and dukedoms were accompanied with grants of extensive estates in the countries which the French arms had conquered; and the great feudatories of the new empire accordingly bore titles not domestic, but foreign. In everything it was the plan of Napoleon to sink the memory of the Bourbon Monarchy, and revive the image of Charlemagne, Emperor of the West.
Charles the Second of Spain, the last descendant in the male line of the Emperor Charles the Fifth, would soon die without posterity. Who would then be the heir to his many kingdoms, dukedoms, counties, lordships, acquired in different ways, held by different titles and subject to different laws?
Rome now held temporal sway only over the States of the Church, which were weak in armed force, even when compared with the small republics, dukedoms, and principalities which lay north and south.
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