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Counts of Provence ARE German Nobility...Technically

Greetings Surtsicna, I just wanted to let you know that technically speaking, the Counts of Provence were indisputably lords of the Holy Roman Empire (as subjects of the sub-kingdom of Arles) from 1032 and were, therefore, German nobility. As such, they fit under the "de" category of that title in Template:s-reg, which includes both modern German titles and Imperial titles. It only became a part of France in 1484. Other titles that fit in this category are Count of Savoy, Count Palatine of Burgundy, and Dauphin of Viennois, all of which eventually became a part of France, but not during this time.

I know you don't personally like succession boxes and whatnot, but please stop reverting/undoing perfectly valid edits. Dukes and counts within France are not "regnal titles", they are titles of "French nobility". "King of Naples" in the context of most of the Valois-Angevin kings are "Titles in pretence", not "Regnal titles". The header categories are to make things more clear, even if they take up more space. There are no limits to the size that a succession box can be, so you're dislike of large succession boxes has no merit. I will look into adding a category to s-reg for Holy Roman Empire or Arles titles to fix some of the ambiguity here, but in the meantime, I am reverting the three s-boxes you made "compact", although I have removed the reference to Aragon in the one. That reference was directly drawn from the article itself, but I agree the evidence in the article is weak. If I find more about the pretension, I will try and expand the article (I have an Angevin history book on my desk right now). Thank you for your understanding. – Whaleyland (Talk • Contributions) 21:03, 26 November 2015 (UTC)

Update: A request to add Arleat nobility using the parameter "arl" to Template:s-reg has been filed, pending input by an administrator. Once this is approved, the issue over using "German nobility" to refer to the above-mentioned territories will be resolved. I agree that the use, while technically correct, feels strange, so this fixes it through a mode that is also historically accurate. – Whaleyland (Talk • Contributions) 21:20, 26 November 2015 (UTC)

"The German nobility (German: deutscher Adel) was a class of persons who, until 1919, enjoyed certain privileges relative to other people under the laws and customs of various parts of what is now Germany." Your interpretation collides with our article on German nobility, to which the box header links. That just should not happen. One could argue that, technically, titles of all vassals of the "Emperor of the Holy Roman Empire of the German Nation" were titles of German nobility. Thus, the Count of Holland, the King of Bohemia and the Doge of Genoa were all technically German nobility. But why should we claim that? What do we gain by pushing such a view on Wikipedia?

Please, do not claim to know anything personal about me. We have barely interacted on Wikipedia, let alone personally. I do like succession boxes and tend to edit them a lot. For example, I was the last to edit the Angevin boxes. I believe common sense dictates the size limit of the succession boxes. I don't think we should make them gigantic and redundant to each other merely for the sake of fancy headers. It makes them less useful, since their purpose is to give a quick summary. Creating a box for every little thing also makes the boxes as a whole less useful; it would be ridiculous to have a box describing Mary I of England as Countess of Charolais. And how do you define regnal titles? The medieval Count of Anjou was in every way (but especially in terms of authority) more similar to the King of France than to the modern Duke of Valentinois, so we definitely cannot jam them all under "French nobility". And if we define a title as being -Titular- (-Titular- King of Naples), why do we need a header that says the same thing? All other parameters (predecessor, successor, years, etc) are the same, so it turs out we have a separate box merely to use a redundant header. I thought we had agreed on that when discussing the Henry VI of England boxes. Surtsicna (talk) 22:07, 26 November 2015 (UTC)

My apologies for assuming your opinion—you are current that I do not know you or your thoughts. However, through our interactions over the past few months I do know that you prefer simple succession boxes to larger ones, something we have fought over on numerous occasions. For titles of nobility and regnal titles, I see the primary purpose of the category headers as a means of displaying feudal/structural authority. In your examples above, you are actually incorrect about Bohemia (it legally sat outside the Empire as an observer and tie-breaker in the Electoral College) and Genoa (which was a part of the kingdom of Arles, like Provence). Holland, however, was legally a part of the Empire and the count owed the emperor homage for his lands, which he did on many occasions. It is not "pushing a view on Wikipedia", it is historical fact supported by contemporary evidence. Lords owed homage for their land to higher lords and, eventually, kings and emperors. While the modern English title of "duke of Cambridge" may mean virtually nothing, technically it sits in the same place within the British (or English) peerage as Richard of Conisburgh, 3rd Earl of Cambridge in the fifteenth century. It is not a regnal title, it is a title of English/British nobility. Your example of Mary Tudor being Countess of Charolais is not the same and falls into a different category, that of "Honorary Titles", for she held that in right of her husband. It falls into the same place as "Queen consort" or "First lady". It doesn't mean anything and in most cases it is not included in succession boxes.

For me, common sense is not very common, especially on Wikipedia. Most people today would think that the County of Provence was a part of France. Why wouldn't they? It's in France today. Same with the counties of Burgundy, Savoy, Flanders, Viennois, and many others. This misconception can be corrected so easily by adding a simple title header to the succession boxes. Their purpose is not only to quickly summarise the titles, but to place those titles in a place and time, hence the inclusion of the dates, the successors, and predecessors. But we leave out a vital clue to how that person's world functioned. If we list only the titles, we ignore the fact that some of those titles were not held in the land one thinks they may be in and that the person's world was actually quite a bit more complicated than one may otherwise perceive.

Lastly, about the "Pretenders" title above the "titular" box, that was actually a compromise made a while back. What we ended up doing with Henry VI was create an entirely new type of box, the "disputed" box, which I think is probably a good solution for a lot of pretenders since many pretenders until recently actually did have some authority somewhere within their claimed lands. Disputed titles should definitely go under the title header of that title rather than a pretender header. In contrast, the "pretender" header was a formatting coup. We were having issues converting "s-ttl" to have italics and a vaguer look about it when referring to pretenders so we created a new box with the "– Titular –" header above it. The title headers came afterwards and "Titles held in pretence" just joined the rest of them. There is technically a difference between titular and pretender, although I don't think it's ever been agreed upon. Titular rulers usually are undisputed but just lack the land. The first exiled kings of Jerusalem, for example. Nobody replaced them, they just lost their land. They kept using the title but it no longer meant anything. Pretenders, meanwhile, are often rivals against a legitimate ruler or are claiming a title that they legitimately lost, either through a coup or something else. The fact that we don't differentiate between these is probably one reason why the "Titles held in pretence" header still survives, but I'd be willing to try to find a new way to document pretenders and titular rulers in s-boxes. I've never been satisfied with what we have. – Whaleyland (Talk • Contributions) 22:36, 26 November 2015 (UTC)

I am afraid you are again endorsing a fringe theory or creating your own; very simply put, both the Kingdom of Bohemia and the Republic of Genoa are always found on the map of the Holy Roman Empire. In other words, they were part of the Empire. If both Provence and Genoa were part of the Kingdom of Burgundy (Arles), which was itself part of the Holy Roman Empire, what makes the Count of Provence but not the Doge of Genoa part of German nobility? Anyway, you cannot possibly argue that the Earl of Cambridge had as much authority over Cambridge as Louis III of Anjou had over Anjou. The British system of peerage, both present and historical, is incomparable to the virtually autonomous vassals of the Kingdom of France. As for Countess Bloody Mary of Charolais, I am afraid there are users who insist on such frivolous boxes.

Yes, the headers might correct some misconceptions. But succession boxes are not supposed to that. Succession boxes (like infoboxes) are not meant to present the reader with new information; they are meant to recapitulate information already present in the article. Firstly and foremostly, they are supposed to illustrate successions, such as when multiple titles (even if, and especially if, held in vassalage to different lords) converge to the same successor. We lose that if we separate those titles into individual boxes, each with its own predecessor and successor though identical to other predecessor and successor fields.

And that brings me to a possibly eureka idea, tied to the last part of your comment. Is it possible to reform the box headers completely, so that they function more like the -Titular- header? They would then not require separate predecessor and successor fields. The boxes would be as detailed as you'd like them and as concise/illustrative as I'd like them to be. Surtsicna (talk) 23:47, 26 November 2015 (UTC)

It's actually funny that you propose that because I was just thinking the same thing. I actually tested the code briefly to see how easily it could be done. No luck so far, but it is possible. What I imagine is to pretty much make it so the header could be nestled above any or all of a row without breaking any shared succession. I'll try to test the concept this weekend. I'd have to make sure not to break the code, though, which should be easy right now since all the relevant templates are protected. It's a good idea that I think would satisfy both of us. I agree wholeheartedly that I want to see succession boxes that show shared predecessors and successors—it is definitely one of the visual benefits of the system. However showing the title categories can be helpful as well in many cases. I'll see what I can do. Hopefully some solution can be found. It may be as easy as turning the colspan from an automatic parameter to an adjustable one using an If/Then formula, that way I could keep the default to colspan=3 but have the option for it to span fewer columns to allow for merged successions. Unfortunately there is no way at this point to nestle the title code directly into Template:s-ttl because of all the different type of title header parameters and templates, but that probably is what we should have done years ago. I can test that concept, too, although I doubt it would be adopted immediately.

Just to reply to a couple of your other points, there are many reasons to consider Bohemia a full part of the Holy Roman Empire: 1) it was essential created by the emperor and the pope (although the duchy had been outside the Empire before then); 2) it was held in personal union with the Emperor almost continuously from the 1500s onward; 3) the king became an elector in 1356, albeit one with restricted powers; and 4) most people writing this history of the Empire in English since the 1800s don't differentiate it from the rest of the kingdom. Wikipedia's own article attests to that. However, until its personal union with the Habsburgs, it was an outlier client kingdom, attached to the Empire but apart from it, its people not German much like the Hungarians and Poles. I am not currently working on Bohemian history but if I run across references to the status of Bohemia in the Empire, I'll work on cleaning up the article a bit to better represent its relationship. The Wiki article on the kingdom is very poorly cited and could definitely use improvement.

Regarding the "authority" nobility in France had versus English nobility had, I am not arguing that it was comparable, because in many cases it was not. However authority does not play a role in feudal hierarchies. While we both can agree that the Duke of Cambridge held much less power (though more than is generally acknowledged) in England than the Duke of Anjou held in France, we can also both agree that the former was a member of the English nobility just as the latter was a member of the French nobility. Indeed, marsher lords on the Scottish and Welsh borders and in Ireland held about the same amount of power as many of the counts in France, who were either vassals of dukes or directly of the king. Just because the large apanages such as Anjou and Burgundy were in many ways autonomous does not mean that other lands like Orléans, Normandy, or Toulouse were too. Essentially the more powerful French lords were powerful because they held mostly interconnected territory, which the lords in England generally did not have. Thus in England lords had to contend with rivals as neighbours and had to travel long distances to visit all their lands while major French lords could sit in Angers or Dijon and rule more centrally (especially under the rule of John II's sons and descendants).

Right. At least we seem to be in agreement on some of the major points. On the other issues, we are not the first or the last to debate and discuss them, and I feel that is perfectly acceptable in the quasi-academic setting of Wikipedia. I will get to work this weekend on testing a new header style that we can hopefully use to replace the current style (although it will take a while). I also have made my request at Template:s-reg to add the Arleat nobility to the list, since it is really something that should have been there from the beginning. While technically all German and Arleat (and most Italian) nobility to 1806 was "German nobility", it makes much more sense to set the nobility within the context of its immediate kingdom-level superior, I think. I'd prefer to replace the title with "Holy Roman Empire nobility", but since so many Imperial titles continued in German after 1806, this just won't work. Fortunately, in Italy and Arles, the French Revolution and Napoleon pretty much destroyed the old hierarchical system allowing for a clean break between titles. – Whaleyland (Talk • Contributions) 00:56, 27 November 2015 (UTC)

Updated: Okay, I've been trying out a few things and wanted to run them by you to see if either comes close to what you are thinking about. Check out User:Whaleyland/Sandbox2. The two templates are based of a simple recoding of Template:s-reg that makes the colspan parameter adjustable, allowing the header to span from 1-3 columns rather than the current default of 3. It's not perfect, but test sample 1 does imbed the header more fully in the title, which sounds like the idea you were looking for. I'll wait for your comments and suggestions before working on this further. Cheers! – Whaleyland (Talk • Contributions) 03:56, 28 November 2015 (UTC)

That's exactly what I had in mind! There might be a better solution, of course, but I cannot think of it.

Another thing I've been considering is possibly scrapping the national headers completely and replacing them with headers such as "Vassal titles", "Sovereign titles", "Titles by marriage", or something like that. The last one would be especially useful, since it would allow us to use simple and accurate "Queen of Spain" rather than clumsy and somewhat made-up term "Queen consort of Spain". Surtsicna (talk) 12:59, 28 November 2015 (UTC)

Succession box for Earl of Wessex and Duke of York.

I have started a discussion on the topic here.--Editor FIN (talk) 13:44, 30 November 2015 (UTC)

Ingelgerians

I bow to your expertise. Why not start an article on the subject, or translate the French one? Isananni (talk) 18:50, 4 December 2015 (UTC)

Rise, Sir Isananni! We do have an article, House of Ingelger. For some reason, however, Ingelgerians did not redirect there. Surtsicna (talk) 19:23, 4 December 2015 (UTC)