Just curious as Brit who has only learnt about Charles V, Philip II and the Holy Roman Empire briefly in Religious Studies and when learning about the Tudors/Stuarts.

Reddit keeps on deleting everyone’s answers! What is going on?!

44 comments

  1. Well in Germany obviously yes. It was the key institution in the central European area for almost 1000 years

  2. A little, mostly Charles the Vth because he is the big rival of François 1er durind the renaissance, and then pretty much nothing, a mention for Louis the XIVth reigns and then Franz Ferdinand in 1914*.

  5. Of course. It had major influence in the area. Not to mention HR Emperors who were also Kings of Bohemia.

  6. As I can remember we learnt about it more or less just briefly in connection with world war 1 and Europe around the 19th century.

    Norway in the Middle Ages and after Napoleon on the other hand…

  9. Yes. Medieval Italy was shaped by the HRE and its conflict with the papacy and Italian cities. The Habsburgs, both the Austrian and Spanish branch, not to mention Italian branches, ruled large swaths of Italy until 1918, so we definitely learn about them.

  10. We learned about the Roman Empire, but we never learnt about the Habsburgs and their influence over Europe, even tough we had a 80 year war against them. We just called them the ‘Spanish’.

  11. We absolutely did, I’d say quite a lot, but I don’t remember much since history is not my favourite.

  13. We were a part of the HRE and the Habsburg/Spanish/Austrian Netherlands for centuries, so yes, we learned quite a bit about it.

  14. Roman Empire – yes

    The Habsburgs – not specifically, but many of them are of course included and the dynasty is mentioned etc.

  16. About the Holy Roman empire yes. Not so much about the Habsburgs, or at least I don’t recall.

  18. We study historical events in chronological order, and there are two different subjects: history of Ukraine and history of the rest of the world. From what I can remember, we mainly focused on Carolingians and the development of Prussia, and the Habsburgs were mentioned in the topic of enlightened absolutism and how they gave political rights to Ukrainians. Nowadays the studying system probably have changed, but that’s what I can remember

  19. I forgot to mention also we learned about Archduke Franz Ferdinand and how that initiated WW1 by eurpting tensions between Austria and Serbia, which then involved pretty much everyone else in Europe due to defensive treaties. Fortunately, it is nowhere near this easy now to create a world war and frankly if it was, Ukraine and all other ex-Soviet countries would have been completely blown up by now due to Putin and the world would end up being faced with nuclear extinction.

  20. Regarding the HRE, it is mentioned, but we don’t learn much about it.

    We learn that it existed, that Austria/ the Hapsburgs had a lot of power in it, that a lot of the members of the Hanseatic League were part of it and that it ended because of the Napoleonic Wars, but that’s basically it.

    I’m willing to bet that some portuguese learn even less about it. It’s just not that relevant to our history.

    Regarding the Hapsburgs, we learna bit more. We focus mainly on the period from Phillip II to Phillip IV since they ruled in Portugal at that time.

  21. From the 1526 Battle of Mohacs to the 1683 Siege of Vienna, we fought a lot against Habsburgs. We learn about the Holy Roman Empire in that context, as a regional rival.

    Apart from it, we learn about the Habsburgs and Austria-Hungary in a WWI context. Both of us were major players in the Central Powers with historically significant outcomes. But, unlike our WWI allies, we had minimal involvement in WWII.

    Note: During the 16th century, Golden Age of the Ottoman Empire, our main rival was Spain. Interestingly, we don’t learn anything about Spain despite learning about Charles V (or Carlos I of Spain).

  22. Holy Roman Empire in general – yes. Habsburgs in particular – not as far as I remember. Loads of stuff about the nazis though, because Germany. Which is fair enough and understandable, but I think my knowledge of world history is too limited because it feels like 50% of history lessons were about the nazis.

  23. Absolutely and extensively! We did Czech history but ways in context of the neighbouring history. Also very extensively general European history, we did a lot of British history especially the War of Roses, Queen Elizabeth, Stuarts, Cromwell and such. Then a lot of French, especially all of the stuff leading up to Napoleon and the French revolutions. We did German history and Russian history too. USA history mostly about Washington and then involvement in WWII. We did general world history as in old China and Egypt, but we’ve dropped that early.

  27. Very, very little really. Unless you did history as a serious subject for the Senior Cycle of secondary school, it wasn’t all that detailed.

    I’ll save the verbose explanation and just let you read the syllabi. These are just broad overviews, and are very easy to flip though:

    The Irish Junior Cert history syllabus:

    https://www.curriculumonline.ie/getmedia/ec03a6f7-5fb3-4bcb-b8bb-5bf3d9f8855b/JCSEC13_History_Syllabus.pdf

    The Leaving Cert (Senior Cycle) history programme is optional, so you’d only study it if you wanted to learn history. I did Economics and Economic History as a separate subject, but it’s been abandoned as a subject since 2004.

    https://www.curriculumonline.ie/getmedia/da556505-f5fb-4921-869f-e0983fd80e50/SCSEC20_History_syllabus_eng.pdf

  28. Yes but I forgot most if not all of the details (even though I fucking loved history classes) 😭

    I was just thinking of buying myself some historybooks cause I’m starting to realize there’s a whole bunch of stuff I forgot or don’t even know.

  29. No.
    We had basically two subjects all throughout history in school: the migration to the Americas and WW2 with specific focus on the occupation (Denmark)

  30. A little, yes, as my country was part of Sweden when the 30 years’ war happened. Also many historians here roughly date archeological findings by Frankish dynasties, with terms like “Merovingian/Carolingian era”, and the Carolingians were obviously the ones who founded the HRE. Most of the more detailed stuff about them I’ve had to learn on my own though.

  31. The Habsburgs yes, but the Netherlands also got its independence from Spain which was part of the Habsburg empire so thats no surprise. The HRE was usually revered to as Germany with the teachers just saying it was very decentralised. I dont think many of my classmates are aware that the Netherlands as a region was also once part of it.

  32. No. It just doesn’t have anything noteable to do with Icelandic history and unless one studies history specifically they’re unlikely to know much about Germany except WW2.

  33. No not at all really. When it came to history here, it was basically “Jesus did a bunch of stuff during Roman times”, then it skipped to the viking/medieval ages from a Swedish perspective, then it quickly glanced over the Black Plague, the Renaissance and skipped right ahead to the industrial revolution and stopped around the end of WWII.

  34. We learned nothing about the Habsburgs. I still don’t really know who/what they were. I only know them because of the inbreeding memes.

    As for the HRE, I only remember it being mentioned when we were going over WW1 and that the Roman empire split into east (Byzantium) and west (HRE). That’s pretty much it.

  35. Very little sadly, and mostly in the periphery of other topics.

    We learnt a little bit about the HRE when studying the Middle Ages, but only very superficially. We actually focused more on the Hanseatic League, since that was very important to Scandinavia. Then the HRE of course also came up when talking about Martin Luther and the Protestant Reformation, as well as the Thirty Years War, where Sweden with Gustavus Adolphus Played an important role.

    The Habsburgs were then briefly mentioned in connection with talking about the French Revolution, Marie Antoinette and the Napoleonic Wars. And of course, Austria-Hungary when talking about the assassination of Franz Ferdinand and the First World War. But that is basically all. Actually way too little considering how important the HRE and the Habsburgs have been in shaping European history.

  36. Not at all. The only Habsburg we learned about was Franz Ferdinand, and even then we never learned the wider context so I only recently realised he was a Habsburg.

    I learned more about the Holy Roman Empire when I did a module on Prussia in my history degree, but honestly I found it extremely confusing and not particularly interesting.

  37. Of course – that’s part of our history.
    The Roman Empire was a very important time for Austria, especially for Carinthia – and you can find things of this period nearly everywhere.

    The time under the Habsburgs was a very big part of historic education in my youth, we had to learn a lot of names and dates. In the years it got less and less – my son didn’t get so much information about this time.

  38. Of course. Holy Roman Empire influenced Italy very much, especially the northern area.

    I just had a lesson with my students about Frederick II and I’m going to talk about him again during literature lesson. 🙂

  39. Sure we learned extensively about the HRE, we were the de facto capital of it for some time.

    The Habsburger were shortly mentioned, but we spent much more time on the Ottonian dynasty, given that Otto I is buried here.

  40. I didn’t attend any optional history classes. There was very little about European history in the 2nd through 18th centuries. You go from Rome collapsing straight to Napoleon, Germany and the Grand Duchy of Finland. There’s a plague and some other shit in between.

    A lot of stuff missing.

  41. It’s one part that I am disappointed we didn’t really touch upon in school.

    I knew of the existence of a ‘Holy Roman Empire’, but I thought it that was the new name for the Eastern Roman Empire. I also had heard of a ‘Byzantine Empire’, but knew little else.

    These mistakes were fixed heavily when I started playing CKII about 10 years ago, so when I was like 18. I’ve since gone into a lot more detail learning about their history online. Obviously not optimal, but I am much more comfortable when it comes to big European nations like those two and the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth.

  42. We learnt a bit about the HRE during the medieval period, and then it came in a lot more when we learning about the reformation, Martin Luther’s proclamation and the Diet of Worms.

    The Hapsburgs weren’t really mentioned much, until they came into the picture as part of the lead up to the First World War.

  43. Only a little bit, and in upper secondary school.

    Basically just mentioned as one of the first things to unify central Europe and as a spritual successor to the Roman Empire (only kinda lol). Also that the first emperor didn’t know how to read but knew that citizens should be taught to read

  44. We learn about it to the extent of “this was Germany before”

    When we studied the age of exploration we would look at a map of Europe and someone would ask “What’s the Holy Roman Empire” and the teacher would respond “Oh that’s just Germany.”

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