It took me weeks to learn how to tie my shoelaces.  I remember my twin sitting in front of me, showing me how to loop the lace over and over again and I just couldn’t get it.  Dancing was out of the question.  I remember she demonstrated the process.  She moved from side to side with a step and slide so effortlessly and I felt like a big flopping blob of jello spilling over and stuck in the mold of a robot boy.  She counted one and two and three and four, one and two and three and four.  I tried to clap while I tried to lift my two non-descript feet stuck in a block of concrete up and over and count in my head.  It was a mess!  Let’s not even broach the topic of neckties.  I had a brown, skinny clip on tie for years and I prayed no one would notice it when I went to the Kingdom Hall.

It wasn’t dyspraxia.  It was awkward teenagia.  People with dyspraxia have problems with movement and coordination.  It doesn’t impact intelligence, but it can affect some cognitive skills.  According to researchers 4 out of 5 children with this condition manifested are boys and experts say 10 percent of people have a degree of dyspraxia.  In simple terms The National Institute of Neurological Disorders and Stroke describes people with dyspraxia as being “out of sync” with their environment.  I never felt in sync, but not necessarily out of sync.  Take a deep research dive on dyspraxia, especially if you are in the childcare or education system.

What’s with the great idea of a tie?

STORYTIME

PLACE: Holy Roman Empire

TIME:  16th / 17th Century

WHO:  Habsburg vs Luxembourg

SUBJECT: CUIUS REGIO, EIUS RELIGIO (whose realm, his religion)

Europe is under a slow boil. There are witch hunts, black plagues, defenestration, protestant reformation, everyone’s a nation.  The Holy Roman empire is a fragmented collection of mostly independent nation states.  Some of the regions are the Kingdom of Hungary, Bohemia.  The House of Habsburg ruled over Austria, another part of the family ruled over Spain and its empire including most of the Americas.  The HRE ruled over Saxony, Brandenburg, Bavaria, Palatinate.  However, the position of Holy roman emperor was mainly in title only.

After the 95 Theses nailed to the wall, take one down and Gutenberg passes it around, these independent states became divided between Catholic and Protestant rulership.  The Peace of Augsburg in 1555, signed by the Holy Roman Emperor of that time, Charles V, ended the war between the German Lutherans and the Catholics, and this established the principle mentioned in Latin…”Whose Realm, His Religion.”  This made the decision of the religion of the domain up to the state princes, confirming again the intendance they had over their states.  The subjects, citizens, or residents or denizens were given a grace period in which they were free to emigrate to different regions in where their desired religion was the religion of the land.  The challenge was that the Peace of Augsburg was between the Lutherans and the Catholics.  What would happen when another major religion in Protestantism which was not party to the party, Calvinism arose?  This treaty temporarily stalled war; however, hostilities still bubbled in the cauldron underneath.

We can almost write the script.  Some lands wanted religious conformity; other lands permitted religious diversity.   Some religious leaders didn’t want to give up their power and position and some wanted to restore the old order.  Some areas were dominated by one religion, others were dominated by another.  Minorities of each group were sprinkled all over.  Some rulers allowed the spread of creed without coercion, others wanted uniformity.

Religious tensions remained strong throughout the second half of the 16th century. The Peace of Augsburg began to unravel—some converted bishops refused to give up their bishoprics while certain Habsburg and other Catholic rulers of the Holy Roman Empire and Spain sought to restore the power of Catholicism in the region. This was evident from the Cologne War (1583–1588), a conflict which ensued when the prince-archbishop of the city, Gebhard Truchsess von Waldburg, converted to Calvinism. As he was an imperial elector, this could have produced a Protestant majority in the college that elected the Holy Roman Emperor, a position that Catholics had always held.

At the beginning of the 17th century, the Rhine lands and those south to the Danube were largely Catholic, while the north was dominated by Lutherans, and certain other areas, such as west-central Germany, Switzerland, and the Netherlands, were dominated by Calvins.  However, minorities of each creed existed almost everywhere.  In some lordships and cities, the numbers of Calvinists, Catholics, and Lutherans were approximately equal.

Much to the consternation of their Spanish ruling cousins, the Habsburg emperors who followed Charles V (especially Ferdinand I and Maximilian II, but also Rudolf II and his successor, Matthias) were content to allow the princes of the empire to choose their own religious policies. These rulers avoided religious wars within the empire by allowing the different Christian faiths to spread without coercion. This angered those who sought religious uniformity. Meanwhile, Sweden and Denmark, both Lutheran kingdoms, sought to assist the Protestant cause in the Empire and wanted to gain political and economic influence there as well.

One day, the Hapsburg, Emperor Rudolf II, a devoted Catholic moved the imperial capital from Vienna back to Prague in 1583.  He was an outsider and needed to ensure the support of the Bohemian protest nobles by securing their right to practice Protestantism and establish state-sponsored Protestant Churches through the 1609 Letter of Majesty.  Rudolf's younger brother, Matthias, thought this was too muuuuuccch, and, after Rudolph's death in 1617, Matthias attempted to reverse the Letter of Majesty.  Two anti-reformation officials were sent to Hradcany Castle in Prague to reinstate Catholic control over the Bohemian nobles. In 1618, a Protestant assembly stormed the castle and threw the two officials and their secretary out the window.  This is what is called the Defenestration of Prague.  Fortunately, no one was hurt.  The Catholics believed that these men were saved by an angel, while Protestants claim the three were spared by landing in a dung heap that cushioned their fall.  This act is considered to be one of the signals for the start of a Bohemian revolt that marked one of the beginning triggers to the Thirty Years’ War.  Country after country along religious lines fell into the war, Bohemia, Austria, Germany, Russia, Sweden, Denmark, Poland, Catholic Spain, Protestant England, France, and the list goes on.

PARIS, 1630

The word on the street was that in the heat of the war, King Louis XIII hired Croatian mercenaries and, at a lineup of the military might under French service, these warriors were presented in all their glory to the King.  These mercenaries were known for their long cloaks, fur hats, and to top it off a fashionable, picturesque cloth ranging from the coarse of the soldier to the linen of the fine and silk for the officer, distinctly knotted at the Croats’ neck. 

The Croat or Hravat, in Serbian, was repurposed by the French and the King made it a cravat, a mandatory accessory for the elite, the royalty and their gatherings.

The word on the streets of Croatia was that the wives of the soldiers would have to identify their husband, but an ancient battlefield would be a disastrous mess, making it difficult to identify your man as you watched him go into battle.  The Croat men began wearing a colorful piece of cloth so their loved ones could identify them in battle. 

The Thirty Year War according to historians, fought primarily in central Europe was religious based and remains one of the longest and most brutal wars in human history. There were more than 8 million casualties due to the war itself and the subsequent chasers, famine and disease.  The war lasted from 1618 to 1648, beginning as a battle among the Catholic and Protestant states that formed the Holy Roman Empire.  However, as the Thirty Years’ War evolved, it became less about religion and more about power and governance over Europe and who would have that privilege.  In the end, this deadly conflict changed the geopolitical face of Europe and is part of the reason for the national borders and sovereignty we see today in Europe, sculpted by the role of religion and nation-states in society and also gave us the cravat or the necktie.

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