Birthday Greetings # 86

 So what do you do if you wind up as the ruler of a nation so small that you could cast a handkerchief across it?  Such was the dilemma that faced Bernard VII the Bellicose when he inherited the lordship of Lippe at the age of nearly one.  To be fair he probably didn't start considering the issue until a few years latter.  The epithet he was awarded gives you some indication of how he solved his problem.  Lippe was one of those tiny little statelets of the Holy Roman Empire that had been carved out of a larger entity whose ruler had got on the wrong side of the emperor.  Over the years the territory of Lippe was divided between various sub branches of the family, reunited when certain branches undertook a little constructive incest or did the decent thing and died out entirely and were divided once again when a new bunch of descendants were produced who all needed titles and approximately fifteen square feet of territory to rule.  It was this peculiarity of inheritance that made the Holy Roman Empire not so much a nation as a geo-political kaleidescope.

At its largest point Lippe was about 50km east to west and roughly the same north/south.  So Lippe was obviously a genuine economic and military powerhouse able to raise whole dozens of soldiers to serve in its wars.  They certainly got their share of experience under Bernard VII's rule.  While rumours that he punched the Price Bishop of Liege in the face when asked what he was going to do when he grew up are probably unfounded it cannot be denied that from the moment he took control of his handful of square kilometres of dirt farmers he got into feud after feud.  "Feuds" incidentally was what wars were called when the participants were too small and insignificant to have their squabbles dignified with the term "war".  Kings and princes had wars; counts, knights and local bishops had feuds.  Peasants died whatever the terminology.

Over the course of an eighty year reign Bernard managed to ally with the Landgrave of Lower Hesse against that worthy's brother and then allied with his own brother against the Landgrave of Lower Hesse.  On one occasion one of these feuds got seriously out of control and some of his enemies called in a Bohemian army (Bohemia then being a significant territory and a serious player in imperial politics).  The Bohemians then ravaged Lippe (which must have taken all of twenty five minutes) and levelled the town of Blomberg.  Bernard apparently wasn't present at the time.

Eventually most of these feuds got patched up.  At some point somebody would complain to the emperor and he would tell everybody to calm down.  They almost never did but resorted to the courts instead.  Warfare was never absent from the Holy Roman Empire but neither was lawfare and most rulers considered themselves unqualified if they couldn't conduct both simultaneously.  In between fighting with virtually everyone he ever met our birthday boy somehow found the time to get married and have seven children.  Strangely there were some bits of Lippe left for them to inherit once Bernard went off to quarrel with God (to take an extremely optimistic view on where he wound up in the afterlife).