Portugal and Holland were major players in exploring the world

>How the Polish saved civilization, by Grzegorz Brzeczyszcykiewiz

read the title

Ulysses

>Holland was a major player in exploring the world

Uh sweetie, you mean Portugal and Spain which at some point shared the entire globe.
Holland was just a minor player which preyed on other's colonies.

>Spain
You mean Italians.

Holland was still very important so his pointing still stands

*point

>includes Belgium in Western Europe
>complains about Irish irrelevance

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Beckett, Joyce, Yeats, actually tons of writers.

Diaspora in the American Northeast

Loads of scientists.

A substantial number of "English" thinkers are Irish our Scottish too.

Given it only had 5-6 million people it hasn't done bad at all, a veritable powerhouse, but the UK claimed it all.

Ireland could have been the european japan if the famine never happened

>And you regions of Europe are shit.
That's how they are seen here. Pole user here btw.

You may be western Slavs but you’re still east of Germany,

pfffft hahahaha, holy shit that many?
that is some paraguay shit right there senpai

kek

Iceland, Finland and ~ lSwitzerland are also pretty irrelevant tbf

It currently is the European Japan

a common problem in many smaller countries that were once parts of bigger empires,
people seem to think that 'if its not on the map it doen't exist and its people simply vanished one day' even if said country is oldest in the empire,
also when they name famous people by empire name - american style, my personal favourite was when i saw a nationality of austro-hungarian attributed to some scientist,
proportionally, of course there can't be as many famous people in small countries, but you have to give credit where credit is due

Should have fished

Even before Western civilisation was born in France, the first signs of it could be seen in dark age Ireland.

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wtf romania is not southern european

we have much more in common with the west then balkan nations

Romania is pure Balkan, like Greece.

Wouldn't have happened if they didn't multiply like germs.
Also that's not entirely death, a huge amount of that drop is from emigration.
Would really like to see a 30 years war before and after graph of the population of Germany.

Goes both ways. I’m tired of people born in Ireland/Scotland under British rule being used as national heroes and against the idea of the empire when they were just as loyal citizens as any other.

lmao nice skateboard park kid

Because it's always been a small area with a small population that has, historically, just been a small part of Britain. It's like asking why a particular province of France never did anything major. There have been Irish artists, soldiers, et cetera. Ireland gets to claim a small bit of Britain's glory. Except for the craziest anti-English Irishmen.

it is in the Balkans but nobody in their right mind would consider Romania a Slavic country

True, it is a gipsy country.

True, it's a Balkan country.

>It's like asking why a particular province of France never did anything major.
Name one

France is so relevant that even any random French province is more relevant than most countries desu senpai.

>Ireland
>A county
Okay OP, I'll fucking bite despite the fact that if you aren't baiting you are an infinite retard.
Let's not forget that prior to England doing everything they can through sheer incompetence to fuck Ireland and the Irish in the ass, Ireland-while divided politically to a meme level of infighting-was united island over by ancient Brehon Law; a code of laws which unified all people on the island and which was remarkably effective and weirdly ahead of its time.
They had their laws, language, culture and beliefs until England arrived. Simply put, "Ireland" as a nation never got a chance to exist. But if you're going to say "Britain" you may as well say "Scotland and England and Wales and Ireland" seeing as it was the combined efforts of GB/the UK which lead to its prosperity.
England was not always a powerhouse and was several times only very nearly prevented from being anything but a stain on France's history.

I'm not sure why you picked "Ireland" as a "country" as something that "didn't do anything" instead of one of the countless meme European states which contributed fat fuck all other than individuals born there when said state was part of something larger.

Come to think of it, England wasn't really all that hot until it was invaded (again) by Frenchmen who sent all the anglo-saxon men into the arms of the Scots and would then for centuries make England subject to disputes between groups of French Nobles.

We'll pretend you didn't just run here from brit/pol/ on another desperate attempt to discredit the potato chugging commie suckling bog niggers next door to you, but for the love of christ at least put a bit of effort into your shitposting you LARPing French-Norse-Arab mogrel

That being said, Medievil Ireland is one of the wackiest and most interesting parts of history for me and I enjoy reading about it despite how bewildering those people are to me.

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Lindisfarne is off the coast of Northern England.
But i do agree that while Europe fell to the Germanic barbarians, Ireland preserved Roman Christian high culture and wrote many great works of literature that we see in folklore today. Furthermore tgey helped convert Britain to Christianity after the Saxon invasions

Brittany between 1500 and 1950.

But yeah, I see your point. No wonder the frogs are salty that they’re completely irrelevant nowadays.

England were so bad at running things in Ireland that almost all Irish rebellions were for increased autonomy or in response to some stupid shit the English pulled. Barely any were for actual independence.

That said, pic related happened 2 days ago in 1921 and honestly the War of Independence and the hilarity of what England now has to put up with in regards to Ireland almost makes up for it desu

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Well ok yeah but Brittany is special that way.

I’m sad Henry was such an autist. A catholic England would mean “”Irish people”” have literally no identity and cease to exist.

By that metric any country today that isn't America is completely irrelevant.

WEZ BE ROMANS N SHIET

>Come to think of it, England wasn't really all that hot until it was invaded (again) by Frenchmen who sent all the anglo-saxon men into the arms of the Scots and would then for centuries make England subject to disputes between groups of French Nobles.
Post Christian Anglo-Saxon England was the cultural centre of Europe with Anglo-Saxon art and poetry being highly credited. Furthermore England was one of the first unified kingdoms in western Europe with a universal law code and robust coinage system.
Also i do get a little ticked off when people assume the norman nobles were wholly insensitive to Anglo-Saxon customs. This is simply not true, most nobles adapted pretty quickly to the point that most 1st gen English born nobles spoke English and adopted English customs
Only the monarchs and powerful earls retained their original identity so thoroughly for centuries (although i suppose only the powerful ones had these disputes so i guess you're right)

What is the Greatest Irish invention ever? Every literate person in the western world and beyond uses it every day! In fact you are using this invention to read this piece now? What is it? It is the space between words! That's right, ancient texts were written without spaces. However, Ireland was never part of the Roman empire and the Latin language was foreign. Accordingly when Latin texts arrived with Christianity, words needed to be separated to allow for their translation into Irish and empower the native speakers to learn the Latin language. Scriptio continua (continuous text) as it is known was written as an aide-memoire therefore the writers did not need word separators as these writings contained information that was already known to them.

The earliest Greek inscriptions used interpuncts (dots between words) which was common in the writing systems that preceded it. The practice waned however and scriptio continua became common place.

References

Knight, Stan (1996). "The Roman Alphabet". In Daniels, Peter T.; Bright, William. The World's Writing Systems. Oxford University Press.

Saenger, Paul (2000). Space Between Words: The Origins of Silent Reading. Stanford University Press.

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Hardly, a catholic England united with a Catholic Ireland (or honestly whatever with both nations being united in faith) and with the infinite amount of autism England had over centuries of utterly inept rule in Ireland could have lead to some pretty neat stuff. Many Irish were perfectly happy to be under English or "British" Yoke, in all honesty the issues just arose when England simply refused to improve their treatment of the people there. Even the protestants they started shipping over eventually got sick of their shit. There is no word nor term to accurately describe the level of sheer ineptitude of England's rule over Ireland. Literally not a single point in history exists when they effectively, peacefully and fairly managed or ruled Ireland. The entire history of Anglo-Irish relations has been one of England awkwardly fumbling invasions, dealing with rebellions and eventually saying "fuck it."

Divisions according to CIA

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>most 1st gen English born nobles spoke English and adopted English customs

That's just a blatant lie, the entire English aristocracy spoke French well into the 15th century.

>A catholic England would mean “”Irish people”” have literally no identity and cease to exist.
That's not really true. An Irish identity existed before then. The various political entities in Ireland recognised each other as being the same people and people from outside the island as beings foreigners.

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Yes, but only the court nobles spoke it as their main language.
Think logically. When the population all speak English and you need to deal and trade with them, you don't speak French
Also i think knights counted as nobles

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Why would a noble need to deal and trade with Anglo peasants?

It was the traders and such who had to learn French if they wanted to be able to converse with the nobility. That's exactly how modern English was born.

>irish identity being just muh catholics
Not really. In fact it was England who first begged the pope to invade Ireland and make them "more catholic"

>Why would a noble need to be able to converse with his subjects

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Yes that's what I asked. You think they went to a lot of the same dinner parties?

Who did they talk to then?
Also why do you assume that medieval English were either a fucking earl or a smelly serf?
Also read the wikipedia screenshot

To each other obviously, or to the bourgeois upstarts who were educated enough to speak French and thus interact with nobility. And the guy in that screenshot was not even a knight himself but the son of a knight, there is no reason to believe he was nobility or even owned any land. And even he spoke French.

Basically the English class system went like this:

- upper class: speaks French
- middle class: speaks French and English
- lower class: speaks English

Furthermore the Normans intermarried with the Anglo-Saxons extensively so they would assimilate genetically, linguistically and culturally. Only the king and his buddies would be quite French, although even this distinction faded with Henry III and subsequent kings who lost all their French lands

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>Within 50 years of the invasion, most of the Normans outside the royal court switched to English

Your pic literally says the complete opposite of what you posted lmao.

But that's wrong you revisionist fuck.

Not all Normans were nobles, but all nobles were French. And no, nobles didn't intermarry with peasants, that's kind of the entire point of a class system.

In fact it's often (and I suppose understandably) overlooked by British historians that the English class system, which still permeates every facet of English culture today, is the expression of a class of foreigners ruling over the country without ever having been overthrown.

In other words, the reason British society is so rigidly divided into classes is that the French rulers wanted to preserve their existence as a separate caste, and not mix with the conquered people.

No one cares Polack.

>reads only half of it
Great job
Not an argument

Who said they married with peasants?
They married with the displaced Anglo-Saxon nobility

Except they don't see themselves as foreigners, they don't speak like foreigners and they live in England

Funny that 19th and 20th century racialists made that argument about the Indian caste system where the evidence is far more sketchy, but never about England, probably because it didn't fit their narrative.

>Ireland thread gets hijacked by a couple of British autists having a pointless back and forth

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You think upper class English people see themselves as in any way related to the lower classes?

>they don't speak like foreigners
Haha what? English accents differ so rigidly along class lines that they might as well be different languages.

And shit I don't even have to use the past tense, all this shaped English society so profoundly that it's still true to this day, despite over a century of social deconstruction.

OP was saying that without the religious differences, Ireland would just be in a similar situation to Wales in the modern age instead of breaking off and distancing themselves from the British and union identity.

I hope you're not serious
You think the nobility see themselves as not English?
Of course they don't see themselves as related to peasants but no nobility does. It's nothing to do with "they wuz french n shieeet"

Haha no, no other Western country has a cultural class divide anywhere close to England's.

And obviously it's not that they don't see themselves as "English" since they're the ones who created the idea of "Englishness" and assimilated the lower classes into it. If anything it's the lower classes that aren't properly English in the way the upper classes are. England was so profoundly shaped by its French rulers that its native inhabitants are more like guests in their own country, much like American natives.

Truly the predations of the *nglo know no bounds.

>If anything it's the lower classes that aren't properly English
What are you trying to get at? Is this an attempt to make all of English history seem like it's actually French history?

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The upper class of England accomplished a truly impressive feat I must say. It goes far beyond simply conquering and ruling England. They actually managed to rob the native English of any ethnic or class consciousness and convince them to identify with their conquerors. And they held their power incredibly well. In France for example the upper class was violently overthrown despite being ethnically no different from the rest of the people, yet the native English have let themselves be ruled for a thousand years by a class of foreigners without ever questioning their rule. Because they're so indoctrinated as to not even aware of being ruled by foreigners. It's brilliant.

It goes to such extremes that for example most English people still today hate France. All because they were told to hate France by their upper class for political reasons between the 15th and 19th centuries. And so they obediently hate France, oblivious to the irony that they do so in service to their French overlords.

>Post Christian Anglo-Saxon England was the cultural centre of Europe
It was universally regarded as a backwater and had more cultural links to scandanavia than europe due to danish kings
>Anglo-Saxon art and poetry being highly credited
I don't know what this means
>most 1st gen English born nobles spoke English and adopted English customs
Absolute bollocks, define 'english customs' because they sure as shit weren't emulating peasants, Richard the Lionheart famously didn't know english and never set foot in england

It was Anglo-Saxons that united Europe under Catholicism with St. Boniface and other Anglo-Saxon missions.
English customs lile hairstyles

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But hang on, they originated in Africa. Don't you mean African nobility?

I have no agenda, just historical clarity. Popular perception of history, especially English history, is severely muddled by the way it was written by the agents of the English upper class.

No.

It was Clovis and Charlemagne that imposed Catholicism on Western Europe.

To be honest I'm not racist and have nothing against a nobility with different background, they don't seem so different to me anyway (except wealth of course).

Fake news
>English people still today hate France
Extreme fake news

Charlemagne's big guy for the job were mostly Anglo-Saxons like Alcuin and Boniface.

You're not fooling anyone Pierre and/or Nigel

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Charlemagne converted the Saxons by genociding the fuck out of them, not by sending some missionaries.

Ebic post xD

It's thanks to Boniface that the carolingians had relations with the pope
Also Boniface is the patron saint of Germany
Also the carolingian renaissance was thanks to Anglo-Saxons

>Commanders and leaders: Arthur Percival

no surprise then

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lmao

Didn't like half of Ireland migrate to the states?

>We wuz central europeans n shiet
You are basically russkies

lol wut

France had relations with the Pope since Clovis saved Catholicism by converting to it, not to mention when Pepin, Charlemagne's father, fucking created the Papal States.

Beelgium served as a shield of france against germany and fought the Romans fiercely

>Beelgium served as a shield of france
more like a speedbump desu