Largest possible Germany

how big could germany become ? maybe it could expand even more in the east ?
would it be possible to make even the northern italian provinces of the HRE german speaking ?


Yes, if the WRE carries on a couple of centuries longer.

Another 200 or so years of border warfare leads to more territory being gradually depopulated and resettled by Barbarians. So the linguistic boundary between German and Italian could finish up at the Po (or even further south) instead of in the Alps. Similarly, the boundary between German and French/Occitanian could be quite a bit further west.
 
Accepting that new areas are incorperated more rapidly would probably be the best way to do it ... it could certainly grab Denmark (via the danish king's ownership of the Duchies of Holstein and Schleswig) and depending on your specifications (do it need to be germanic in culture?) also Habsburg lands
Are you talking about the 1864 suggestion by the Danish king to join the German Confederation here, or an earlier POD? Because in 1864 that plan would be shot down so fast by anyone but the king. Neither the French, the Russians nor the British will stand for it, and neither will the Danish people. Not to mention Bismarck thought it was a stupid idea as well.

An earlier POD, such as the Danish king being a bit braver and actually managing to gain a strong position in the north during the Thirty Year War could possibly, maybe, see a German state that includes Denmark. Considering how much influence German had, and how much more it would gain as Denmark expanded into Northern Germany, I don't expect the Germans to be particularly upset about this. Especially not when Copenhagen becomes more German than Danish, as Germans flock to the capital.

It would certainly be a different Germany if it's evolved out of such a state. The Danish naval focus, and the trading tradition of the North German cities mesh pretty well, which could mean colonial expansion beyond what Denmark managed in OTL. Perhaps the wealth from that could be leveraged in the Eastern Baltic, (re)conquering areas that had been a focus for both parties in the past. Those areas were not exactly densely populated, so a Germaniziation could happen. There's certainly the ingredients for a massive population boom if the Ruhr is gobbled up at some point, which has the most immediate outlet in the east.

Of course, you still need to actually unify Germany, but you'll at least have expanded into both Denmark and the Eastern Baltic. Oh yeah, Norway would come along in this deal, as would Iceland and Greenland. The former two seem likely to break away at some point though.
 
Yes, if the WRE carries on a couple of centuries longer.

Another 200 or so years of border warfare leads to more territory being gradually depopulated and resettled by Barbarians. So the linguistic boundary between German and Italian could finish up at the Po (or even further south) instead of in the Alps. Similarly, the boundary between German and French/Occitanian could be quite a bit further west.

If the WRE hold longer it means that either the germanics people to the north-east don't move from where they are (so no push from eastern people), or they get themselves killed trying to topple the roman empire. Also people were killed a lot in the Po valley (gothic war and justinian plague) at the end of the roman empire and the lombards still ended up talking Italian. You know why ? Because latin was more hype than germanic at this time.

Oh and if more people begin to talk a germanic language outside of germany by some event, i think that there would be far more different germanic languages and we wouldn't be able to recognize german.
 
If you could get the idea of pan-Germacism circulating it could turn interesting, although it will take time and unlikeness.
 
how big could germany become ? maybe it could expand even more in the east ?
would it be possible to make even the northern italian provinces of the HRE german speaking ?

Hardly gonna get much larger than OTL so there you go.

523px-Europe_under_Nazi_domination.png


Wait. Does it have to last? :p
 
If the WRE hold longer it means that either the germanics people to the north-east don't move from where they are (so no push from eastern people), or they get themselves killed trying to topple the roman empire.

No. Quite a few get killed raiding the RE but their tribes breed back to normal in a generation. As the Empire post-200 never makes any new conquests, it's a case of "What's mine is mine and what's yours is negotiable". A Roman victory just keeps things as they are, a Roman defeat means barbarian gains.

The Barbs were, for the most part, assimilated because they won too easily. Overruning all Gaul, Spain and Italy, they were thin on the ground most places and got absorbed by the people around them. Had the Roman resistance been stubborner, most of the fighting would have been in areas close to the Rhine and Danube, which areas would have been slowly depopulated by the endless warfare. To some extent this happened OTL, which is why the boundary of the German language is well within the former Roman limes. Prolong that process two more centuries and it will have crept even further frward.

The key to the survival of the Romance languages is the Western Empire's relatively easy defeat. The Eastern Empire put up a much harder fight, which is why Latin and Greek have been largely displaced in its former territories.
 
I think the largest sized Germany you can get would include:

1) The Kaiser's Germany of 1914
2) Austria
3) Czech Republic
4) Switzerland
5) The Netherlands
6) Luxembourg
7) Flanders
8) The Baltic States
9) Slovenia

All were either part of the Holy Roman Empire, areas of intense German colonization and German Crusader activity in the Middle Ages, or were dominated by speakers of some form of German.

If you start adding in areas of Italy, Hungary, France, or Poland, you can't actually Germanize those areas, and the likelihood of them leaving the country increases.
 
All were either part of the Holy Roman Empire, areas of intense German colonization and German Crusader activity in the Middle Ages, or were dominated by speakers of some form of German.

If you start adding in areas of Italy, Hungary, France, or Poland, you can't actually Germanize those areas, and the likelihood of them leaving the country increases.

I think you could add at least part of those with a POD in the early middle ages as I said earlier. With plague delayed or more/earlier eastern colonization areas settled by Germans would go farther East.

Additionally, there are secondary effects:
  • if there are more Germans, there's a larger pool from which to draw settlers. That would also help in later settlement schemes as the colonization efforts in Prussia or Hungary in the 18th century.
  • And there's the possibility of "circling in" other people. The Sorbs kept their ethnic identity, but are Germanized heavily. Assuming that the Czech were cirled in by German settlements, saw more "islands" of German settlement within their territory and have a far higher percentage of Germans in their cities, they wouldn't have a chance of breaking away from a Germany forming around them.
  • Like the Prussian and Austrian settlement schemes implemented later, there are other possibilities: Imagine the Hussites being crushed like the rebel peasants in Germany, with tens of thousands dead. Imagine reformation to spread into Slovenia or the Baltic states with German priests and church that is and will be German dominated for decades.
  • There might be later resettlement schemes. Say the Hapsburgs expand deeper into the Balkans, conquer the whole of Bosnia, Serbia and Albania and drive out all Muslims to be replaced (at least partially by Germans) and then they face a series of Serb uprisings as the Serbs oppose Austrian schemes to unite the Serb church with the Catholic church, leading to massive civilian death toll and a Serb exodus. What's left behind will be resettled to a significant part by Germans - as Hungary was. If other PODs guarantee that there are more Germans available...
Granted, all that adds up to a major wank and to everything working together neatly.
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I think the largest sized Germany you can get would include:

1) The Kaiser's Germany of 1914
2) Austria
3) Czech Republic
4) Switzerland
5) The Netherlands
6) Luxembourg
7) Flanders
8) The Baltic States
9) Slovenia

All were either part of the Holy Roman Empire, areas of intense German colonization and German Crusader activity in the Middle Ages, or were dominated by speakers of some form of German.

If you start adding in areas of Italy, Hungary, France, or Poland, you can't actually Germanize those areas, and the likelihood of them leaving the country increases.

This isn't true if you have an early POD. The map I posted earlier showed what is now Poland as being German. Stop the Slavic influx and you have that area too.
 
No. Quite a few get killed raiding the RE but their tribes breed back to normal in a generation. As the Empire post-200 never makes any new conquests, it's a case of "What's mine is mine and what's yours is negotiable". A Roman victory just keeps things as they are, a Roman defeat means barbarian gains.

Except the normal for Germany population is quite low until potato is discovered by Europe. And it was worse in the Antiquity. I think that just the Pô valley had more population than the entire Germany. And any germanic gain would lead to them speaking the language spoken by the people here.

The Barbs were, for the most part, assimilated because they won too easily. Overruning all Gaul, Spain and Italy, they were thin on the ground most places and got absorbed by the people around them. Had the Roman resistance been stubborner, most of the fighting would have been in areas close to the Rhine and Danube, which areas would have been slowly depopulated by the endless warfare. To some extent this happened OTL, which is why the boundary of the German language is well within the former Roman limes. Prolong that process two more centuries and it will have crept even further frward.

The Germans were assimilated because they were too few, in a land with a stronger culture ! And it wouldn't have crept further forward (except at the margin, because those areas that became germanic speaking were thinly populated to begin with compared to Gaul, Italia and Hispania and they didn't spoke Latin. Around Trier, people still spoke Gallic until the end of the 4th century. Combine that with an already existent Germanic population and you can see why those regions ended up speaking German (in fact the same thing happened in England).

The key to the survival of the Romance languages is the Western Empire's relatively easy defeat. The Eastern Empire put up a much harder fight, which is why Latin and Greek have been largely displaced in its former territories.

The key to survival of the Romance languages was that they were spoken by all the population, that this population outnumbered the barabarians that conquered them 50 to 1, and that those languages had far more prestige that any germanic dialect, including among the germanic people. And the church spoken latin which at the time wasn't so different than the language that the people in the streets spoke. Latin was never really spoken in the Eastern Empire (except in Romania, and oh, Romance languages survived here !), and the invasion that the Eastern Empire sustained were made by people far more numerous than the germanic people, and instead of all becoming just becoming a new "caste" atop the ancient society like in the Western Empire, a lot of invaders in anatolia for exemple became peasants after displacing previous ones. Also the Eastern empire saw it's religion replaced by another which was stronger at the time. Language in the territory of the old eastern empire is also deeply linked to the religion. Muslim now speak arabic or turkic. Orthodox christian mostly spoke greek. Copts Christian spoke coptic. The same had an influence on western europe, where Latin was the liturgical language and was spoken by the people on the streets and was know as the language of the former empire that the german barbarians admired. So they begin to spoke Latin.

Oh, and a lot people were speaking Greek all around the eastern mediterannean until the various ethnic epurations that the region saw in the two last centuries.
 
@ Imladik: yes, the Germanic tribes admired the Latin culture, but the status of their own Germanic languages is more complex. Especially the early generations valued their own language and habits a lot. Especially in areas near the Germanic-Romance 'language-border' Frankish nobles in the Romance Frankish area sent their Children to relatives in the Germanic Frankish area.
Even when the language of a part of the Franks was starting to shift or was shifting, they were proud to be Franks.

However the Franks and Anglo-Saxons were the two groups, which did manage to settle successfully. Although these provinces (Britannia (Anglo-Saxons); Belgica (well parts of Belgica), Germania Inferior and Germania Superior (Franks)) weren't the most densely populated of the Western Roman Empire and the provinces settled by the Franks already were in the border region between Celtic and Germanic tribes. Furthermore the Franks were much less successful in the rest of Gallia, where they 'performed' similar like most of the other Germanic tribes.
If one wants to change that, then I agree with Mikestone8, it would require a much slower settlement and conquest.
 
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