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From: gd8f@kelvin.seas.Virginia.EDU (Gregory  Dandulakis)
Subject: Re: XX cty glagolitic
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Date: Mon, 24 Apr 1995 14:17:21 GMT
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In article <3na22l$5oe@ixnews2.ix.netcom.com>,
Marek Konski <marek1@ix.netcom.com> wrote:
>
>This kind of mistakes (ie., adding German to the Holy Roman Empire) is
>made by people who like to make some political claims based on words.
>They bring up entities as "the Holy German Roman Empire" or "the Slavic
>Empire" and confuse them with Germany or, alternately, with Russia. In
>their next step those people claim that all former territories of the
>Empire or all Slavic countries should be ruled by Germany or Russia,
>respectively.


Quite correct.


>The Holy Roman Empire was a loose confederation of states everyone of 
>which pursued its own policy. For a long time its leading political
>power was the Kingdom of Bohemia. At that time many territories of the
>Empire actually belonged to this Kingdom, from Carniola (Slovenia) to
>Brandenburg.   


Quite correct, except in the beginning.


>It is well known that the vehicle of the Latin script was the Roman
>Catholic Church and no "Holy Roman German Empire" should be credited
>for its work.


I totally disagree. The Church in Rome was only an integral part of the
power games, a pawn in the hands of the Germanic (also called Frankish)
kings who destroyed the Western part of the Roman Empire (later with the
Crusades they destroyed also the Eastern part) and then appropriated the
Roman Empire's cultural and symbolic deeds (including the name). Exactly
the same thing that the invading Turkic tribes did to the Islamic Cali-
phate in Baghdad a little later. The funny thing is that a little later,
the Germanics and the Turkics were fighting over Islam versus Christian,
despite the fact that both had destroyed the initial creators of the cor-
responding religions/bureaucracies/empires. And "Latin Christiendom"
in the Middle Ages, fundamentally meant "Frankish Christiendom", with
an admixure of some non-Germanic dominant groups a little later (the
products of sphere of influence of the Germanics).

Anyway, names, languages, religions, etc, have different meaning at
different times, even if they have superficially the same name/cultural-
tag.


Gregory
