Wikipedia: Bohemia/Talk

To J Hofmann Kemp Please take a look at Gdingen and Gdynia and see how Larry Sanger handled the two name situation. I agree with that completely.

The history of most of the places I am referring to , started with the current names in 1945 and some in 1919/1920 -Period.

What you are doing is whiping out a 1000 year of history by taking away the proper names and replacing it with the 1920/1945 and thereafter communist military take-over names. Not only the land is stolen , but that amounts to stealing the history too. And please do not tell me again that it is ok for the land to be stolen , because it is ok to militarily occupy, it is illegal to oust the inhabitants, replace them with others and keep the land.- Period. H. Jonat

: H.J., "Bohemia" has been used as the name of this place in writing longer than Boehmen for the simple fact that it IS the Latin name. The Czechs were there by 600. The Boii (whoever they were, Celt or German) were gone. The name stuck to the place, not to a group of people who have lived there continuously. Oh, and I think that Larry was wrong. He's not always right. We should have entries under the modern name of a place with a section labelled "history of {whatever}" to cover the previous history.--MichaelTinkler

I had put all the earlier ways of writing the name/s in my early Boii=Boier, Baier, Bajuvaren = modern Bayern and Boii= Boemi=Boehmen entrances. People keep taking it out. But Bohemia = Boemi as it was written on old maps. (That is why I love to look at old maps). H. Jonat H. Jonat

HJ, we keep taking it out because the majority of scholars in the 20th century, and almost ALL scholars in the late 20th century, agree that the Bajuvaren are not ETYMOLOGICALLY the same as the Boii. Let me give you another examples - the entry at Huns says that they are the same as the 'Hiung-nu' in the Chinese sources. The majority of scholars in the late 20th century disagree, including the great Otto Maenchen-Helfen, whose book on the Huns I'm plowing through right now in order to straighten out that entry. He was one of the few scholars with the linguistic expertise in Chinese, Mongolian, Turkish and Turkic dialects, etc., etc., etc. (he was a GREAT linguist) to sort it out, and he says 'most likely not.' JHK, in fact, is probably among the 10 or 15 best informed Americans on the subject of the origins of the Bavarii, given her graduate training and what she wrote her dissertation about. There really are only 2 or 3 people in America I know personally and about 10 others who I don't know personally but whose work I respect who I would defer to more than to her on this topic. The study of names in the 19th century depended on an early state of philology; the linguistic research has changed a LOT in the last 100 years, and relying on comparison of sounds as spelled by Romans or Greeks is not taken very seriously any more.

now on to another topic about which you certainly know more than I - is there any reason to suspect one of Mieszko's wives than the others as the parent of Boleslav I? And is the woman you put in as 'Oda, princess of Ostmark' the daughter of Thietrich (Theoderic)? If so, I wonder about the title 'princess.' What were the March-lords' wives and daughters called?

: Thanks, Michael -- Personally, I'd like to know a bit more about this, too. Princess is definitely anachronistic if this was before about the 11th c. (I haven't seen the quote, so I'm not sure what date was given). As for the other titles and names, I'm a bit confused. There seem to be a lot of them -- especially known last names. At the time in question, there were still an awful lot of people out there who didn't have more than one name, or went by x, son (or daughter) of x. One of the toughest things about studying the period is the absence of any clear indication of kinship for many of the people we sudy. This is compounded by reiteration of leading names, i.e., names that re-occur in one family and, in some cases, pretty much "belong" to a family if it's an important one. Also, there is a HUGE difference between title and office. One could be a dux (translated into modern duke, but not really the same) and lose the title and office (and the lands associated therewith) to someone else after a few years. Relationships certainly were more regular and titles more heritable by the end of the 10th c, but the rules described above are little more than a wish-list based on the few consistencies historians have found. Please see the wiki article on feudalism to better understand why we cannot and should not make such assumptions.

As for the "how Larry handled it" matter, please note my response. If we were to create a new article every time a war cased political boundaries to change, whether right or wrong, we would have 5 or 6 entries for many cities. Think of Strasbourg, or any of the cities that changed hands after the 30 years war, and with the Spanish Succession, Austrian Succession, 7 Years' war, Napoleonic Wars, and WWI. doubtful that any one city suffered all those changes, but dead stupid to have separate articles for each era -- the people living there didn't change entirely. I can perhaps see valid reasons for three entires for Constantinople, Byzantium, and Istanbul, but only because the cultures were so different. And even then, I would argue that it be one article under Istanbul, with redirected pages for Constantinople and Byzantium.JHK

To MichaelTinkler and JHK About the titles, I found : Otto I the Great king, emperor , he became emperor after he was born. Otto II emperor ,Otto III emperor, They were born as a son of an emperor. They were emperor from the day of their birth. Otto III , born 980,was already crowned emperor by his father. Otto II died in 983. Otto III was emperor.But since he did not have the age (with Frankish it was 14), his mother Theophanu (Byzantium) reigned for him. When she died, the grandmother Adelheid (Adelaide) (St) of Italy reigned for Otto III. When a person was born a son of a duke, the baby was born :duke so-and-so. These titles meant, that they were the son of a ..whatever and they had the lawful right to become the same title so-and-so. These royal titles with European (perhaps international)registries of titles and positions are kept up. The person later on in live was not always able to actually keep the position ,after the fathers death, because other inheriters also attempted to get the same position.

Now back to the other matter, people in the 20th/21st century cannot possibly have all the information that earlier people had. For example in Germany, there were many destructions.Take Hamburg. In circa 845 AD 600 Viking ships came sailing on the Elbe river and destroyed Hamburg. Hamburg at that time had 500 inhabitants. It was the reason that archbishopric Hamburg and Bremen were then combined. The 30 years war slashed and burned a very large part. There were many destructions over and over again. Even without wars there were many fires, that destroyed towns, cities, many times over. There was not even an English translation of Ptolemy's Geography until 1932. The first bible in America was not in English language. These are just a few examples .Therefore I believe that people today can only judge by what is left and what is available to them now. They cannot get a true picture today as the people of that time did. H. Jonat

: Helga. NO. To start with, one word: ARCHAEOLOGY. Archaeology has proven many things right and many things wrong. If you go on reading old history books you might beleive that Homer was a myth and that the Trojan war never happened. Schliemann in the 19th century began changing our attitudes toward that. Modern archaeology has taught us a LOT about the ancient Germans that Tacitus and Ptolemy never knew. Let me tell you something about Ptolemy, too. The reason no one had translated Ptolemy's Geography into English until 1932 is that anyone who wanted to read it before the 17th century was already a person who could read Greek and Latin. By the 17th century, by which point the translations into the vernacular languages became popular, no one believed that the ancient Greeks knew more about the geography of the world than modern explorers. And they didn't. Ptolemy had odd ideas about a lot of geography - look at what he thought about the location of Ireland relative to England! And given that he was wrong about a lot of things, why should his THIRD hand reports of what tribe lived where and what ethnicity THEY were be accepted today? He was not an anthropologist or a linguist, so he didn't have any reliable way to tell a Celt from a German except by believing what someone else told him. Since the 17th century the only people who read Ptolemy were also usually able to read Latin and Greek, and didn't need an english translation very much! Gosh! The 30 years war didn't destroy knowledge - it destroyed books and people. Lots and lots of books survived - cetainly enough to cast doubt on the IDENTITY of the Boii and the Bavarii. --MichaelTinkler

: I must also dispute what who think you know about the passage of titles, Helga. Your example is very specific and not representative. It also doesn't prove your point. After all, Otto did not become Emperor by inheriting the title -- His father wasn't emperor. Henry the Fowler was elected king after the Carolingian house had pretty much died out in the east. His election was according to normal Frankish custom -- if a ruler cold not rule, the leading men (not nobles, that doesn't really fit the time period, although it is more true in the 10thc than the 8th) had the right to choose another leader. This was not based of any type of vassalage (vassals don't get to overthrow a king), but on the principle that the king was the best leader in war and would provide them with the most plunder. Otto was succeeded by his son and grandson, but only because he was a good enough leader to keep build loyalty to his family. NONE of these people were Emperor from the day of their birth -- that's just silly. That's like saying that Prince Charles has been King of England from the day of his birth. Otto may have had them crowned co-emperor as teenagers (I haven't re-read anything specific on the Ottonians in a while, so I couldn't say when tthey received the imperium)-- the Carolingians certainly did this, as a way to ensure succession and consolidate power.

: Your other example of dukes being born dukes, etc, just doesn't fly. Whether or not you like to hear it, modern scholarship (and here I mean Scholars like Prinz, Störmer, Schwind, Riché Wallace-Hadrill, and Semmler -- mostly Germans) does not support that theory. I've spent a lot of time working with the land transaction records from Fulda and Lorsch. Titles are not used, except for royalty, and in the cases of a very few well-known leading men. We can corroborate some of these titles by reading some of the Annals for the time -- Annales fuldensis, Annales vedastini, Annales Laureshaimensis and Annales bertiniani are some I've used. They are interesting because they tell us that so-and-so was dux or comes of the Ostmark, or somewhere else. They also tell us when these guys were transferred or demoted -- which means those offices were not inheritable. That said, they were often held by members of one family. Now, if you are reading edited versions of these documents, there is often commentary that names the people as Duke of such and such, or Count of X -- but these are later additions by (usually) 19th c. historians. For the Ottonian period, more titles were "set" but there was still a lot of fluidity that must be taken into account. JHK

First, I think we should all agree to call Vaclav Wencelas (or Wenceslaus) -- that's his most common name in English, and if someone wants to know who "Good King Wenceslas" was, they should be able to find him.

Re-wrote for accuracy -- removed anachronisms, removed statement about Charlemagne and the four gaues because I've read almost every primary source on the Carolingian East and a fairly large number of the secondary sources, and I can't recall ever seeing this mentioned. If someone can show me a valid, non-web source for this, I'll be happy to see it returned. JHK

To JHK Do you want to call him: Saint Wenceslas , Chech Vaclav -? that seems alright to me H. Jonat

: let me suggest: "Wenceslas (Czech, Vaclav, later canonized)" By the way, Vaclav is my fault - Collins seems to be Frankophobic, in his Hispanophilia, and so he's very sympathetic to Slavic names in reaction, I guess. --MichaelTinkler.