Frederick the Great, discussion post 5: or: Yuletide requests are out!

[cahn]

All Yuletide requests are out!

Yuletide related:
-it is sad that I can't watch opera quickly enough these days to have offered any of them, these requests are delightful!

-That is... sure a lot of prompts for MCS/Jingyan. But happily some that are not :D (I like MCS/Jingyan! But there are So Many Other characters!)

Frederician-specific:
-I am so excited someone requested Fritz/Voltaire, please someone write it!!

-I also really want someone to write that request for Poniatowski, although that is... definitely a niche request, even for this niche fandom. But he has memoirs?? apparently they are translated from Polish into French

-But while we are waiting/writing/etc., check out this crack commentfic where Heinrich and Franz Stefan are drinking together while Maria Theresia and Frederick the Great have their secret summit, which turns into a plot to marry the future Emperor Joseph to Fritz...

Master link to Frederick the Great posts and associated online links

Comments

Re: Merrie Olde England

[selenak]

o you know if I was right about Matilda seeing her most important title as that of Empress of the Romans and the English not being too pleased about this, or if I was misremembering?

Honestly, I don't know, because I never read a non-fiction book about Matilda specifically (non-fiction biographies of her daughter-in-law didn't cover this), but the impression I did get from a variety of novels was that individual acts aside, what the English (or rather, the Norman barons having holdings in England - Matilda/Maude was the granddaughter of William the Conqueror, after all, and talking about "English" here is a bit misleading) were way more resentful about her second marriage than about her using the title from her first one. This was because Geoffrey d'Anjou, nicknamed "Plantagenet", wasn't Norman. He was Angevin. And of course being a man, her being Queen would mean that REALLY an Angevin would be ruling. Competition! Boo! Never mind that Geoffrey was years younger than Matilda, that her father had forced her to marry him and when she tried to leave him after a miserable first year had forced her to go back. (This was before she'd gotten pregnant with future Henry II.)

Now some of the novels also speculate that since Matilda had grown up and thus been schooled in the HRE (having been married with twelve), she might have been used to the type of deference an Emperor did get and thus was set on a confrontation course with her English (or "English", i.e. Norman) subjects to begin with. But to me that's massive projecting of the idea that anything British was automatically less authoritarian and more proto democratic. Her father, after all, was that charming gentlemen you described earlier who wasn't above blinding his grandkids to make a political point. His court was not one where you messed about with the King. What she probably did imprint on was that in her first marriage, her husband the Emperor despite or because of the age difference actually had included her a lot - German wiki says he had her with him on his various journeys, incuding to Italy when he was duking it out with the Pope in one of those power struggles a great many German Emperors had with a great many Popes, she got crowned as Empress as well, and at one point acted as regent for her husband in Italy when he was in the German speaking territories.