Moderator: George Lepre
And of course do I recognize that France owns these territories now...likewise does Poland now owns german eastern territories.All nations in the world, including Germany now recognize that these regions belong to France... Except you?
Roman Empire
With the decline of the Roman Empire came the Alemans (or Alemanni), an agricultural people whose language forms the basis of the dialect of Alsace. In the Fifth century the Franks drove out the Alemans and Alsace became a part of the Eastern Kingdom of Austrasia.
Next came the Merovingian period, an intense period of evangelism. In 750, Pepin the Brief, father of Charlemagne divided the duchy of Alsace into two parts : the Nordgau and the Sundgau. The approximate equivalent of today’s two departements of Haut-Rhin and Bas-Rhin.
The Empire of Charlemagne
Under Charlemagne (742-814), the church’s power in Alsace increased still further, monasteries and convents flourished and the province prospered. Though the Emperor only visited Alsace twice, his inspectors came regularly.
The impressive list of provisions specified in advance of their visits shows that Alsace in the eight century was rich and prosperous.
After the death of this first Great European Emperor, his sons dismantled his large Empire : first it was Lothaire who inherited the region but Louis the German temporarily snatched Alsace away from his brother. Then in 842, Louis and their half-brother Charles the Bald ganged up on Lothaire, swearing the oath of Strasbourg just outside the city. In signing this document - historically important as the earliest in which both French and German almost modern languages were used - they pledged themselves to an alliance against Lothaire.
A year later the Empire of Charlemagne was formally divided and Alsace would eventually fall again in Louis arms. For the next eight centuries, Alsace’s destiny was intimately linked to the Holy Roman Empire. Louis the Pious is chiefly remembered for his fondness for hunting in the Vosges. He further distinguished himself by allowing all wine to travel duty-free, thus giving an early boost to Alsace wine exports.
The Hohenstaufen Emperors
The twelfth and thirteenth centuries were the golden age of Alsace under the Hohenstaufen Emperors, one of whom, Frederick the first (Barbarossa), claimed Alsace to be “the dearest of our family possessions”. It was a period of intense urbanization which saw the birth of a powerful merchant class with increasingly sophisticated tastes.
During the second half of this same century Alsace was embellished with many beautiful Romanesque churches. This artistic flowering took place at a time when Alsace could boast of a number of rapidly expanding towns and cities, each with a wealthy merchant class and powerful guilds and trade associations.
In the early years of the thirteen century Strasbourg won the privileged status of “free imperial city”. The city’s magnificent Gothic cathedral was built under the direction not of the bishop, but of a body controlled by the town council.
Other towns that grew in importance during this period were Sélestat and Colmar, Wissembourg, Obernai and Mulhouse. The Hundred Years’s war helped in some ways to increase Alsace’s prosperity, as it became a convenient depot and trading post for goods that could not easily be transported through war-torn France.
Then the picture changed dramatically. A succesion of bad winters followed hard on the heels of poor harvests and then the crowning disaster of bubonic plague. For this the Jews proved a convenient scapegoat, and they were viciously persecuted in the pogroms of 1336 and1349.
The Habsbourgs
By now the Habsbourgs were on the imperial throne. The Renaissance in the Rhine lands brought a welcome return to peace and prosperity. Excess and riotous living became the order of the day, a fact which drew the fire of both religious and secular writers and orators. The region became a major intellectual and artisitc centre.
The brilliant team of architects and stone masons working on strasbourg’s cathedral drew journeymen from far and wide. The Colmar painter and engraver Martin Schongauer influenced artists all over Europe. Strasbourg, the setting of Gutenberg’s invention of movable type thirty years earlier, now had many of the leading printing work-shops in the german-speaking world.
This new vehicle for the rapid dissemination of information helped to spread the ideas and ideals of the Humanists, who were well represented in Alsace : the magnificent library built up by the humanist scholar Beatus Rhenanus, friend and biographer of Erasmus, can still be visited in Sélestat.
The Reformation
In the early sixteenth century the Reformation had considerable impact in Alsace, which still has a fairly large Protestant community to this day. Several of Luther’s tracts were printed in Strasbourg and the great preacher for whom the city was famous included a number of his followers. Calvin, too, spend several years in Strasbourg, meeting Luther there.
The eight formative centuries of Germanic influence in Alsace were drawing to a close as the Holy Roman Empire disintegrated into the tragedy of the Thirty Years war (1618-1648).
And what is so funny?He is a Frank... and as all people know Franks were Germans... lol. This is why Germans call France... Frankreich... LOL LOL.
I should learn from the past?Hugueso wrote:...
You know what MH.... you should learn from the past, or simply you should go to the toilets and take some rest, you're getting red....
Instead of loling around you really should read some history books!Hugueso wrote:You idiot.
You're know saying that France started WWI?
LOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOL
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