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Or, it leads to further bloodshed as the Hedgemon seeks to actually recreate the Roman Empire and dominate all of its neighbors in brutal conflict. This leads to restive populations, and further brutal crackdowns as cultures, languages, or peoples seen as contrary to Imperial unity are wiped out or relocated.
Oh, please. This is not WWII, and it's half a millennium and more before the rise of European nationalism (which would likely lessened substantially by a successful HRE), so let's leave the proto-ethnic cleansing stuff in the ASB drawer where it belongs. Back in the High Middle Ages and Early Modern Areas, all that a monarchy needed to win the stable ownership of a region was to secure the loyalty of the local ruling classes. On a cultural-linguistic level, Europe at large was simultaneously much more fragmented and united than in the modern age. Educated ruling and middle classes shared a common Roman-Christian cultural heritage, and had a common Latin lingua franca. OTOH, European peasant masses typically spoke dialects that were substantially different 100 km in any direction. More or less all that a successful HRE needed to do to ensure the cultural-linguistic unity of the educated upper classes (all that really matters in a pre-modern empire) is to foster Latin as an imperial lingua franca even more than it was already used spontaneously as the language of the Church and culture. And Romance languages had already diverged far enough from Latin (ask Dante) that it would be a genuine imperial lingua franca and not cultural imposition of Italian section on German section (cultured Germans and German clergy used Latin like everyone else). In modern age, with a tradition of political unity lasting half a millennium and building up on the weighty Roman precedent, two things are quite plausible: either the HRE keeps using Latin as a lingua franca, and post-industrialization public-school mass education entrenches its use among the masses, or the HRE embraces German-Romance multilingualism, and it becomes a giant Switzerland.
As it concerns the bloodshed arising from a HRE success, certainly its unity would abolish all future conflicts within Central Europe. It is of course quite likely that it would attempt to expand at the expense of its neighbors. Where it is successful (and at least in some cases, it is bound to be to: e.g. a successful HRE almost surely leads to a rather more extensive expansion in and assimilation of Poland, Hungary, and Croatia, and at the very least, the border with France is likely to stay where it was in the 1400s), assimilation leads to less future nationalistic conflicts. When it is, then recurring wars with other European great powers are not likely going to be any worse than OTL.
But we aren't talking about Gallia, which was reached by sea, but Germany beyond the Rhine, which the Romans never controlled.
We are talking about the Alps (not) being a substantial barrier to the exercise of political control across them. Since neither the Romans in their control of northern Europe nor France or Austria in their control of (parts of) Italy did everything by sea, the point is quite relevant.
How do we know that. If its going to refraim itself as Roman, it probably lead to it being culturally dominant Italian as these pseudo romans reset Rome as the Imperial capital, and you have a german problem all over again.
Educated German upper classes and clergy used Latin and classical culture and venerated the Roman heritage like all the other counterparts of theirs in the rest of Europe. As I said, by the 13th century, Romance languages had already diverged substantially from Latin in wholly different languages, so using Latin and neo-Roman ideology to bind the empire together is not going to to lead to "Italian" dominance. As it concerns the capital, the Imperial court is likely going to move among various locations on a regular basis during the Middle Ages, and anyway the Middle Age monarchies did not pour big amounts of money in the capital. If and when the HRE does build its Versailles equivalent sometime in the Early Modern Age, by then the empire is going to be rather well entrenched.
But wherever the central government is, that is where the money will flow. That imperial capital will be site of grandoise building projects, and they'll use the church method to pilfer the middle class. Same situation, different recievers of the money is all.
Last time I checked, the building of Versailles did not lead to the fragmentation of France.
Who then, seeing itself threatened by that gigantic thing on their new french border, begin to conspire against them.
Quite possibly, but the plotting is then going to be reciprocal, and likely not that effective beyond a certain point.
It is more likely that a very strong amount of colonial competition unfolds between a successful HRE and a successful Angevin Empire. There would be great power competition, and recurrent wars, but not that different from OTL Anglo-French competition.
I think Europe would beg to differ.
OTL hubris.
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