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"In mid-2006 the website for the London publication (www.almanachdegotha.com) ceased to function."
However, the site
www.almanachdegotha.org is functional. --
megA (
talk)
18:52, 29 November 2009 (UTC)
is not listed in any reference works like Alamanch de Gotha or Genealogisches Handbuch des Adels. Like L.Smithfield says he has certainly has a real talent for these websites. And too much time on his hands.... - dwc lr ( talk) 22:21, 8 December 2009 (UTC)
(I forget why :P), and this isn't the first time the subject of Prinz Karl Friedrich von Deutschland has been raised. As someone who doesn't know a great deal about how this nobility stuff works, I'd be interested to know (from both sides) about his title and its legal standing in Germany and elsewhere, as well as if he is who he says he is, and/or who the person he says he is actually is? If there is any doubt about the reliability of this person, then we should be making doubly sure before including any links etc... Miremare 14:16, 9 December 2009 (UTC)
someone who thinks that this Prinz Karl Friedrich von Deutschland is for real should start a biographical article on him right here on Wikipedia. Let a greater audience evaluate the claim of this so-called prince of Germany. I know that this person is a fake through and through so any article that I would write on this person would say so right up front. This person is totally fake and everyone in the real world knows it. Pretending that this person is for real is like pretending that Mickey Mouse is the recently lost king of Germany. Everyone knows the history of both Germany and the Holy Roman Empire and this fake person is simply not a part of it! But maybe someone who does think that this person is for real should write a Wiki article on him. Then a larger audience can all have a good laugh at this fraud character rather than just the few of us who are writing on this talk-page. -- L.Smithfield ( talk) 16:07, 9 December 2009 (UTC)
I did not mean to suggest that this Prinz Karl Friedrich von Deutschland is impersonating someone else, as if someone by that name already existed. Rather I did mean to state that this person is pretending to be something that he is not. Whoever this person is, he is not a real lost prince of either Germany or the HRE. He just made up a completely fake name for himself. He has no past. He has no imperial, royal, or even noble parents. He has no biography anywhere on the web. This person is simply a complete fake. He is pretending to be something that he is not. He pretends to be the heir to the imperial throne of the HRE. This pretension on his part is just pure fantasy. Anyone can just make up a name and pretend to be the heir to some former kingdom, but that doesn't mean that the person is actually what he claims. He is just pretending to be the heir to the former imperial throne of the HRE. This person exists nowhere on the web except for within his own fantasy web sites. Making up some fake fantasy web sites is not enough to establish that a person is the heir to a former throne of Europe. Show me a real biography of this fake person (other than from one of his own fake web sites) and then I will acknowledge that this fake person exists. -- L.Smithfield ( talk) 21:40, 9 December 2009 (UTC)
He is not notable or interesting. Nobody takes care about him.-- Yopie ( talk) 23:27, 9 December 2009 (UTC)
"Prinz von Deutschland" is a fantasy title; you might try to call yourself "Prince of Switzerland", "Prince of Hamburg" or "Prince of the USA" as well. If you do a google search with "Prinz von Deutschland", you get eight (!) results, none of them indicating an actually existing person. (but one of them a Polish impostor, who, some years ago, crossing the border to Germany, claimed to be on his way to Buckingham palace, and that he needed an appropriate General's uniform from the next barracks...) -- megA ( talk) 13:16, 10 December 2009 (UTC)
[1][ http://www.independent.co.uk/news/people/profiles/the-holy-roman-emperor-is-alive-and-well-and-living-in-teddington-743014.html]. The “Emperor’s” mother says they are “completely sane”, well if you say so do dear!!. - dwc lr ( talk) 14:30, 11 December 2009 (UTC)
just blame our two inexpert friends, for your stated disappointment, who first started this quite ridiculous discussion board, being MegA and mr smithfield, who both seem to have a real problem with this character karl, mr smithfeild in particular who has put more of the aforementioned links on Wikipedia in the discussion pages than anyone else it seems, hardly the why you would ignore a so called lunatic, (sorry borrowed your word yopie).
Final question: Should we not better move this whole crap about “Prinz Karl Friedrich von Deutschland” (in this and the previous sections) to the archive so that no readers get confused by this nonsense anymore? -- Equord ( talk) 22:03, 5 January 2023 (UTC)
Here's something I've been wondering for a while: this page seems to contain more criticism towards mediatized German houses than actually explain what the Gotha was all about. There is not even a mention of the statistic part of the Almanach (more than half of its pages and ever increasing), which worked as a sort of "International Blue Book", was widely used and generally respected for its accuracy and wealth of information. While criticism should have its place on this page, one gets almost the impression that Justus Perthes cooked up a German conspiracy to promote families to higher status, rather than, say, the Congress of Vienna and the Federal Diet.
Also there seems to be a number of errors and/or misleading statements. For example: "The Gotha's condescending attitude towards Eastern European nobility and royalty, and towards Iberian, Spanish, British, Italian, and Scandinavian highest nobility, led to the proliferation of German mediatized princesses in the royal houses of Europe, as their value in the marriage market had been artificially enhanced by this work's rankings. Another consequence was the yet ongoing Romanov succession dispute, as Maria Vladimirovna of Russia, a claimant to the headship of the Russian Imperial Family,[6] has a Romanov father and Bagrationi mother, a morganaut according to the Gotha standards; the entire Russian male dynastic descent went extinct when applying its standards."
1) Before WWI, none too many marriages between mediatized houses and royal families seem to have occurred; none in Britain, none in France (although a Princesse d'Orléans married a Prince Czartoryski of the family long in Gotha); one in the Netherlands (Princess Marie married the Prince of Wied); none in Belgium (unless we deem the Princes of Hohenzollern being mediatized after they ceded their sovereignty to Prussia in 1849). Perhaps the writer confuses the sovereign German houses (Saxe-Coburg and Gotha, Waldeck and Pyrmont, Anhalt, Schwarzburg-Rudolstadt etc.) with mediatized? The sovereign families married to the royal families of many greater powers, but sovereignty is equal to countries both great and small. Indeed, such families as Schaumburg-Lippe, Reuss, Liechtenstein and Hohenzollern-Sigmaringen appear to have found much finer spouses after 1815 than they did in the two centuries before, while the Thurn und Taxis and Isenburg families seem to have lost some of their earlier allure. -- But I find no evidence of "proliferation" of mediatized houses.
2) Norfolk (mentioned in the article) entered the Gotha in 1876, the same year the comital houses were upgraded; thus -- "For over a century, the second section consisted of non-sovereign princely houses from all over Europe (save many easternmost areas). Rohans, Leiningens, Ruspolis, Windisch-Graetzes, Norfolks, Lobkowiczes, Thurn and Taxises and Czartoryskis appeared together." -- is misguiding. The Thurn und Taxis was included in the Gotha from the start (before there were any section II), so were the Lobkowicz, the Leiningen entered in the 1790s, the Czartoryski during the first decade of the 1800s, the Windisch-Graetz and the Rohan in the 1810s, the Ruspoli in late 1820s. The second section was introduced in the early years of the 19th century, and families outside the traditional HRE started entering the Gotha only in the 1870s, when a preface stated that the Almanach strove to be more intenational in its scope. After that time the number of Spanish, British, French and Italian houses increased steadily (as long as they sent in the information). -- The sad fact that Scandinavian monarchs seem to have created few to none princely, let alone ducal houses is hardly condescension towards Swedish or Danish nobility (counts at best).
3) I don't think the editors of Gotha set the standards on the Russian succession dispute; surely that is a matter of the Romanov house law. The Almanachs from the 1920s and 1930s seem to contain a hint of desperation with the Russians when trying to get all the titles correctly, but I doubt whether they (the editors) decided who were morganauts and who weren't. As to the house of Bagrationi, no one questions its high status and antiquity, but a few points should be made here: whether Transcaucasian states are in Europe or not, is a matter of some dispute; secondly, while Gotha listed in section one those houses who had lost their thrones after the beginning of the 19th century, they must have meant "after the Congress of Vienna," because, if the thought is followed to its logical conclusion, most of the mediatized princely houses of Germany would have entered section I (indeed, the principalities of Isenburg and Leyen were mediatized as late as 1815); thirdly, after the annexation of Georgia the Russian Emperors treated the Bagrationi as Russian princes and not as sovereigns. Moreover, the Bagrationi never sent their information to the Gotha.
Quote: "This division was considered of great social significance in the Holy Roman Empire and its successor states; nobles from the second section were considered legally equal to German royals appearing in the first section (at least with those royals whose houses actually were ducal or less before the Napoleonic period; of the truly older kingdoms, Prussia declined to recognize a countess Harrach, mediatized, from section two, to marry its king in better than morganatic terms)"
4) Only Prussia and Austria were higher than ducal before Napoleonic times. The Electors were of course of a royal rank, but their family members were usually dukes (or counts palatine).
5) King Friedrich Wilhelm III of Prussia was very rash in marrying Countess Auguste of Harrach before her family was included in the Gotha! (The first mediatized counts were included 1824, but not Harrach.) I'm joking, but once again, the Gotha didn't invent mediatization, which was a complicated affair anyway and should perhaps be linked as "See also:" The main reason for the second upgrade of the counts was probably due to the fact that few were remaining, as many of them had been promoted to princely rank before 1890, and the editors also liked to show the family connections of the different branches (such as the Leiningen, the Fugger and the Solms, having both princely and comital mediatized branches).
To sum up, these particular criticisms aside, I'd like this article to be more descriptive of the Gotha (including the Annuaire diplomatique-statistique) and less of a condemnation of mediatization and ultimately, of Gotha being a book made by Germans in Germany -- there seems to be an underlying anti-Teutonic tone in the article (oh, I'm not German).
And as an aside to the raging discussion, I'm surprised that no one's noted that this so-called "Prinz Karl Friedrich von Deutschland" has pinched the contents of his genealogical pages from Paul Theroff's Online Gotha (a very good source for presents goings-on in princely houses, mediatized or not). —Preceding unsigned comment added by 89.166.7.128 ( talk) 21:54, 6 January 2010 (UTC)
About the Almanach de Gotha on the linked site (see Article) http://www.boydellandbrewer.com/store/viewitem.asp?idproduct=13798 I read these words: "the only publication to list all the members of ALL the imperial, royal, princely and ducal houses and the counts of the Holy Roman Empire" (!!!): but isn't true because the Almanach is NOT complete: there aren't a lot (around 300+, or more) of royal, imperial, princely, or ducal families, still living, in the peerages of Russia, Italy, U.A.E., India, Thailand, Japan, China, Nigeria, ........... that aren't listed on this publications ! Please remember that this info on the Boydell and Brewer's site about Almanach de Gotha isn't correct (and very far complete) -- A curious reader ( talk) 12:39, 1 April 2011 (UTC).
After God knows how many years , I have given up editing the above page and taken it off my watchlist. It is impossible to keep it NPOV, non-advertising and accurate because it's repeatedly edited by warring single purpose accounts. Giano 08:40, 27 September 2013 (UTC)
I do agree with the points made by HofKal2 in their edit summary and don’t see that there edits are unreasonable, this article should state “is” and imo it gives a fair overview of the history of the title, yes up to the present. Lots of things change hands over the years, the rights to the Burke’s Peerage titles for example have also changed hands various times it’s not been the same publisher/publishing company who has produced this series of books from day 1, it’s legally a continuation under a new publisher, this article clearly distinguishes the change of ownership. I don’t see what the problem is. - dwc lr ( talk) 08:30, 1 March 2019 (UTC)
HofKal2 ( talk) 11:35, 3 March 2019 (UTC)
This is the
talk page for discussing improvements to the
Almanach de Gotha article. This is not a forum for general discussion of the article's subject. |
Article policies
|
Find sources: Google ( books · news · scholar · free images · WP refs) · FENS · JSTOR · TWL |
Archives: Index, 1 |
![]() | A fact from Almanach de Gotha appeared on Wikipedia's
Main Page in the
Did you know column on 25 June 2004. The text of the entry was as follows:
| ![]() |
![]() | This article is rated Start-class on Wikipedia's
content assessment scale. It is of interest to the following WikiProjects: | |||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
|
![]() | This page is not a forum for general discussion about Almanach de Gotha. Any such comments may be removed or refactored. Please limit discussion to improvement of this article. You may wish to ask factual questions about Almanach de Gotha at the Reference desk. |
"In mid-2006 the website for the London publication (www.almanachdegotha.com) ceased to function."
However, the site
www.almanachdegotha.org is functional. --
megA (
talk)
18:52, 29 November 2009 (UTC)
is not listed in any reference works like Alamanch de Gotha or Genealogisches Handbuch des Adels. Like L.Smithfield says he has certainly has a real talent for these websites. And too much time on his hands.... - dwc lr ( talk) 22:21, 8 December 2009 (UTC)
(I forget why :P), and this isn't the first time the subject of Prinz Karl Friedrich von Deutschland has been raised. As someone who doesn't know a great deal about how this nobility stuff works, I'd be interested to know (from both sides) about his title and its legal standing in Germany and elsewhere, as well as if he is who he says he is, and/or who the person he says he is actually is? If there is any doubt about the reliability of this person, then we should be making doubly sure before including any links etc... Miremare 14:16, 9 December 2009 (UTC)
someone who thinks that this Prinz Karl Friedrich von Deutschland is for real should start a biographical article on him right here on Wikipedia. Let a greater audience evaluate the claim of this so-called prince of Germany. I know that this person is a fake through and through so any article that I would write on this person would say so right up front. This person is totally fake and everyone in the real world knows it. Pretending that this person is for real is like pretending that Mickey Mouse is the recently lost king of Germany. Everyone knows the history of both Germany and the Holy Roman Empire and this fake person is simply not a part of it! But maybe someone who does think that this person is for real should write a Wiki article on him. Then a larger audience can all have a good laugh at this fraud character rather than just the few of us who are writing on this talk-page. -- L.Smithfield ( talk) 16:07, 9 December 2009 (UTC)
I did not mean to suggest that this Prinz Karl Friedrich von Deutschland is impersonating someone else, as if someone by that name already existed. Rather I did mean to state that this person is pretending to be something that he is not. Whoever this person is, he is not a real lost prince of either Germany or the HRE. He just made up a completely fake name for himself. He has no past. He has no imperial, royal, or even noble parents. He has no biography anywhere on the web. This person is simply a complete fake. He is pretending to be something that he is not. He pretends to be the heir to the imperial throne of the HRE. This pretension on his part is just pure fantasy. Anyone can just make up a name and pretend to be the heir to some former kingdom, but that doesn't mean that the person is actually what he claims. He is just pretending to be the heir to the former imperial throne of the HRE. This person exists nowhere on the web except for within his own fantasy web sites. Making up some fake fantasy web sites is not enough to establish that a person is the heir to a former throne of Europe. Show me a real biography of this fake person (other than from one of his own fake web sites) and then I will acknowledge that this fake person exists. -- L.Smithfield ( talk) 21:40, 9 December 2009 (UTC)
He is not notable or interesting. Nobody takes care about him.-- Yopie ( talk) 23:27, 9 December 2009 (UTC)
"Prinz von Deutschland" is a fantasy title; you might try to call yourself "Prince of Switzerland", "Prince of Hamburg" or "Prince of the USA" as well. If you do a google search with "Prinz von Deutschland", you get eight (!) results, none of them indicating an actually existing person. (but one of them a Polish impostor, who, some years ago, crossing the border to Germany, claimed to be on his way to Buckingham palace, and that he needed an appropriate General's uniform from the next barracks...) -- megA ( talk) 13:16, 10 December 2009 (UTC)
[1][ http://www.independent.co.uk/news/people/profiles/the-holy-roman-emperor-is-alive-and-well-and-living-in-teddington-743014.html]. The “Emperor’s” mother says they are “completely sane”, well if you say so do dear!!. - dwc lr ( talk) 14:30, 11 December 2009 (UTC)
just blame our two inexpert friends, for your stated disappointment, who first started this quite ridiculous discussion board, being MegA and mr smithfield, who both seem to have a real problem with this character karl, mr smithfeild in particular who has put more of the aforementioned links on Wikipedia in the discussion pages than anyone else it seems, hardly the why you would ignore a so called lunatic, (sorry borrowed your word yopie).
Final question: Should we not better move this whole crap about “Prinz Karl Friedrich von Deutschland” (in this and the previous sections) to the archive so that no readers get confused by this nonsense anymore? -- Equord ( talk) 22:03, 5 January 2023 (UTC)
Here's something I've been wondering for a while: this page seems to contain more criticism towards mediatized German houses than actually explain what the Gotha was all about. There is not even a mention of the statistic part of the Almanach (more than half of its pages and ever increasing), which worked as a sort of "International Blue Book", was widely used and generally respected for its accuracy and wealth of information. While criticism should have its place on this page, one gets almost the impression that Justus Perthes cooked up a German conspiracy to promote families to higher status, rather than, say, the Congress of Vienna and the Federal Diet.
Also there seems to be a number of errors and/or misleading statements. For example: "The Gotha's condescending attitude towards Eastern European nobility and royalty, and towards Iberian, Spanish, British, Italian, and Scandinavian highest nobility, led to the proliferation of German mediatized princesses in the royal houses of Europe, as their value in the marriage market had been artificially enhanced by this work's rankings. Another consequence was the yet ongoing Romanov succession dispute, as Maria Vladimirovna of Russia, a claimant to the headship of the Russian Imperial Family,[6] has a Romanov father and Bagrationi mother, a morganaut according to the Gotha standards; the entire Russian male dynastic descent went extinct when applying its standards."
1) Before WWI, none too many marriages between mediatized houses and royal families seem to have occurred; none in Britain, none in France (although a Princesse d'Orléans married a Prince Czartoryski of the family long in Gotha); one in the Netherlands (Princess Marie married the Prince of Wied); none in Belgium (unless we deem the Princes of Hohenzollern being mediatized after they ceded their sovereignty to Prussia in 1849). Perhaps the writer confuses the sovereign German houses (Saxe-Coburg and Gotha, Waldeck and Pyrmont, Anhalt, Schwarzburg-Rudolstadt etc.) with mediatized? The sovereign families married to the royal families of many greater powers, but sovereignty is equal to countries both great and small. Indeed, such families as Schaumburg-Lippe, Reuss, Liechtenstein and Hohenzollern-Sigmaringen appear to have found much finer spouses after 1815 than they did in the two centuries before, while the Thurn und Taxis and Isenburg families seem to have lost some of their earlier allure. -- But I find no evidence of "proliferation" of mediatized houses.
2) Norfolk (mentioned in the article) entered the Gotha in 1876, the same year the comital houses were upgraded; thus -- "For over a century, the second section consisted of non-sovereign princely houses from all over Europe (save many easternmost areas). Rohans, Leiningens, Ruspolis, Windisch-Graetzes, Norfolks, Lobkowiczes, Thurn and Taxises and Czartoryskis appeared together." -- is misguiding. The Thurn und Taxis was included in the Gotha from the start (before there were any section II), so were the Lobkowicz, the Leiningen entered in the 1790s, the Czartoryski during the first decade of the 1800s, the Windisch-Graetz and the Rohan in the 1810s, the Ruspoli in late 1820s. The second section was introduced in the early years of the 19th century, and families outside the traditional HRE started entering the Gotha only in the 1870s, when a preface stated that the Almanach strove to be more intenational in its scope. After that time the number of Spanish, British, French and Italian houses increased steadily (as long as they sent in the information). -- The sad fact that Scandinavian monarchs seem to have created few to none princely, let alone ducal houses is hardly condescension towards Swedish or Danish nobility (counts at best).
3) I don't think the editors of Gotha set the standards on the Russian succession dispute; surely that is a matter of the Romanov house law. The Almanachs from the 1920s and 1930s seem to contain a hint of desperation with the Russians when trying to get all the titles correctly, but I doubt whether they (the editors) decided who were morganauts and who weren't. As to the house of Bagrationi, no one questions its high status and antiquity, but a few points should be made here: whether Transcaucasian states are in Europe or not, is a matter of some dispute; secondly, while Gotha listed in section one those houses who had lost their thrones after the beginning of the 19th century, they must have meant "after the Congress of Vienna," because, if the thought is followed to its logical conclusion, most of the mediatized princely houses of Germany would have entered section I (indeed, the principalities of Isenburg and Leyen were mediatized as late as 1815); thirdly, after the annexation of Georgia the Russian Emperors treated the Bagrationi as Russian princes and not as sovereigns. Moreover, the Bagrationi never sent their information to the Gotha.
Quote: "This division was considered of great social significance in the Holy Roman Empire and its successor states; nobles from the second section were considered legally equal to German royals appearing in the first section (at least with those royals whose houses actually were ducal or less before the Napoleonic period; of the truly older kingdoms, Prussia declined to recognize a countess Harrach, mediatized, from section two, to marry its king in better than morganatic terms)"
4) Only Prussia and Austria were higher than ducal before Napoleonic times. The Electors were of course of a royal rank, but their family members were usually dukes (or counts palatine).
5) King Friedrich Wilhelm III of Prussia was very rash in marrying Countess Auguste of Harrach before her family was included in the Gotha! (The first mediatized counts were included 1824, but not Harrach.) I'm joking, but once again, the Gotha didn't invent mediatization, which was a complicated affair anyway and should perhaps be linked as "See also:" The main reason for the second upgrade of the counts was probably due to the fact that few were remaining, as many of them had been promoted to princely rank before 1890, and the editors also liked to show the family connections of the different branches (such as the Leiningen, the Fugger and the Solms, having both princely and comital mediatized branches).
To sum up, these particular criticisms aside, I'd like this article to be more descriptive of the Gotha (including the Annuaire diplomatique-statistique) and less of a condemnation of mediatization and ultimately, of Gotha being a book made by Germans in Germany -- there seems to be an underlying anti-Teutonic tone in the article (oh, I'm not German).
And as an aside to the raging discussion, I'm surprised that no one's noted that this so-called "Prinz Karl Friedrich von Deutschland" has pinched the contents of his genealogical pages from Paul Theroff's Online Gotha (a very good source for presents goings-on in princely houses, mediatized or not). —Preceding unsigned comment added by 89.166.7.128 ( talk) 21:54, 6 January 2010 (UTC)
About the Almanach de Gotha on the linked site (see Article) http://www.boydellandbrewer.com/store/viewitem.asp?idproduct=13798 I read these words: "the only publication to list all the members of ALL the imperial, royal, princely and ducal houses and the counts of the Holy Roman Empire" (!!!): but isn't true because the Almanach is NOT complete: there aren't a lot (around 300+, or more) of royal, imperial, princely, or ducal families, still living, in the peerages of Russia, Italy, U.A.E., India, Thailand, Japan, China, Nigeria, ........... that aren't listed on this publications ! Please remember that this info on the Boydell and Brewer's site about Almanach de Gotha isn't correct (and very far complete) -- A curious reader ( talk) 12:39, 1 April 2011 (UTC).
After God knows how many years , I have given up editing the above page and taken it off my watchlist. It is impossible to keep it NPOV, non-advertising and accurate because it's repeatedly edited by warring single purpose accounts. Giano 08:40, 27 September 2013 (UTC)
I do agree with the points made by HofKal2 in their edit summary and don’t see that there edits are unreasonable, this article should state “is” and imo it gives a fair overview of the history of the title, yes up to the present. Lots of things change hands over the years, the rights to the Burke’s Peerage titles for example have also changed hands various times it’s not been the same publisher/publishing company who has produced this series of books from day 1, it’s legally a continuation under a new publisher, this article clearly distinguishes the change of ownership. I don’t see what the problem is. - dwc lr ( talk) 08:30, 1 March 2019 (UTC)
HofKal2 ( talk) 11:35, 3 March 2019 (UTC)