r/HolyRomanEmperors • u/Cultural_Act_8513 Louis II • 6d ago
Ranking Every Holy Roman Emperor Day 29: William
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u/Worldwar2Historian Frederick Barbarossa 6d ago
bad also do charlemagne
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u/SeBoss2106 5d ago
Bad to mediocre.
Historically the position of counter king is though. He sent his opponent, Konrad IV. scurry to Sicily and broke up his dynastic seat in Swabia.
He didn't succeed in securing much support in Germany and then promptly died in Frisia, leaving little to no Legacy.
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u/rapidla01 6d ago
How do you rank no-shows? Bad?
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u/Cultural_Act_8513 Louis II 6d ago
?
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u/rapidla01 6d ago
Doesn’t really do anything apart from dying young, but that’s hardly his fault, though.
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u/Cultural_Act_8513 Louis II 6d ago
Oh I thought you were saying something off topic but I didn't really understand.
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u/sketchbookamy 6d ago
I’d say Bad, maybe higher if you want to judge his character and ability as Count of Holland too but as King of the Romans there’s not much going for him; I think the best part of his reign was that it ended before anything could really happen. And this is solely due to the reason he even became King in the first place, because if he’d lived longer he probably would have been remembered a lot like his successor (Richard), that is not at all. An intentionally weak ruler who would stick to his home territory and let the rest of the nobility hold all the real power.
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u/Objective-Golf-7616 Frederick II 6d ago edited 6d ago
Bad to very bad—and probably the latter. Frankly, any other take just doesn’t live in the real world. He was an illegitimate King of the Romans in any case, and the princes recognized this even after the loss of Conrad IV and the Staufen flame. Really… it was his ‘reign’ after the implosion of the Staufen heirs and the total illegitimacy and uproar that it caused which signaled the destruction of the Reichsgut from which the German crown never really recovered.
Frederick II was the last Roman Caesar and the culmination of Antiquity. William of Holland was the first petty, stripling ‘king’. The twin pillars of Romanity in the medieval world, the empire and the church, had destroyed each other—and it was entirely the church’s fault, who now had a hungry Capetian monarchy sniffing at hegemony and quasi-imperial pretensions.
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u/Herald_of_Clio 6d ago edited 6d ago
As a Dutchman, I can say that Count William II of Holland has become sort of (in)famous among local Medievalists as the only King of the Romans from our soil. As Count of Holland, he was fairly competent and energetic, but before he could do much of anything as Rex Romanorum, he got himself killed during a winter campaign against the West Frisians in 1256. The West Frisians, shocked that it was William they had killed in battle, then hid his body under a fireplace in a farmhouse until his son Count Floris V finally recovered his father's bones 26 years later.
I think generally I would rank William as bad. He just wasn't able to do a whole lot in the time given to him, and he never controlled much more of the HRE than his home territories in Holland and a bit of the Rhineland. He wasn't wholly incompetent, though, and he did somehow manage to get himself elected as King of the Romans from out of nowhere.