Vietnam or Thailand ? Vote for the TOP Country of the Week !
Updated: June 1, 2025
Thus the Netherlands passed out of France into Germany, remaining, still, provinces of a loose, disjointed Empire. This is the epoch in which the various dukedoms, earldoms, and other petty sovereignties of the Netherlands became hereditary. It was in the year 922 that Charles the Simple presented to Count Dirk the territory of Holland, by letters patent.
While wave after wave of Germanic colonization poured over romanized Europe, breaking down old boundary-lines and working sudden and astonishing changes on the map, setting up in every quarter baronies, dukedoms, and kingdoms fermenting with vigorous political life; while for twenty generations this salutary but wild and dangerous work was going on, there was never a moment when the imperial sway of Rome was quite set aside and forgotten, there was never a time when union of some sort was not maintained through the dominion which the church had established over the European mind.
We believed and we believe that such a creative conception of a human commonweal can be fostered in exactly the same way that the idea of German unity was fostered behind the dukedoms, the free cities and kingdoms of Germany, a conception so creative that it can dissolve traditional hatreds, incorporate narrower loyalties and replace a thousand suspicions and hostilities by a common passion for collective achievement, so creative that at last the national boundaries of to-day may become obstacles as trivial to the amplifying good-will of men as the imaginary line that severs Normandy from Brittany, or Berwick from Northumberland.
For they were proud stout men, our Hapsburgers, though of taciturn unconciliatory ways; and Rudolf had so fitted them out with fruitful Austrian Dukedoms, which they much increased by marriages and otherwise, Styria, Carinthia, the Tyrol, by degrees, not to speak of their native HAPSBURG much enlarged, and claims on Switzerland all round it, they had excellent means of battling for their pretensions and disputable elections.
But it is remarkable that the same results took place in all the counties or dukedoms of the Lowlands precisely at the same period. In fact, if we start from the year 1200 on this interesting inquiry, we shall see the commons attacking, in the first place, the petty feudal lords, and next the counts and the dukes themselves, often as justice was denied them.
Many years ago there was trouble in Japan, and to help the Emperor, all the great dukes in the kingdom gave up their dukedoms. The Samurai also gave up their honorable positions in the service of these dukes, and became common citizens. "Then your Grandfather put away his sword. Years after, when he was old, he gave it to me.
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.
"But," he continued, "I do now remember that some of your ladyship's ancestors settled in Boston, for there is a monument to one of them in King's Chapel." James Otis inherited that sturdy New England pride which puts manhood above dukedoms and coronets. "A king may make a belted knight, A marquis, duke and a' that, But an honest man's aboon his might."
From small local beginnings the nations of western Europe emerged: Spain, Portugal, the Low Countries, France, Britain, Italy, Austria and eventually Russia. Each was a consolidation of local principalities, earldoms, dukedoms, kingdoms. Each was passing through the rural-urban transformation.
These were the years in which the power of Napoleon made the most astonishing strides; the years in which he remodelled the German Empire, placed on his head the iron crown of Lombardy, on his sister's that of Etruria, and on his brother's that of Holland; when the Consulate gave place to the Empire, and Dukedoms and Principalities were freely distributed among the marshals of the Grand Army.
Word Of The Day
Others Looking