Timeline for Why do central European nations use the color black as their national colors?
Current License: CC BY-SA 3.0
11 events
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| Apr 8, 2018 at 2:24 | comment | added | MAGolding | @Allinone - there is basically no red in the coat of arms of the Holy Roman Empire. The background or field is gold, the eagle feathers are black, and the eagle's eyes, if depicted, are usually black and white. The Eagle's tongues, beaks, legs, and talons are usually the same color. They are often depicted as a shade of yellow, orange, or red, sometimes outlined in black, and are sometimes black like the rest of the eagle. In heraldry the color of minor body parts was sometimes specified in the blazon, but never in the blazon of the Imperial arms, thus leaving it up to the artist. | |
| Oct 19, 2016 at 11:42 | comment | added | Shautieh | Let us continue this discussion in chat. | |
| Oct 19, 2016 at 9:19 | comment | added | Relaxed | With that kind of reasoning, you can justify just about anything, which is not very useful. Meanwhile, this answer simply does not accurately reflect its own source, which seems bad regardless. | |
| Oct 19, 2016 at 9:18 | comment | added | Relaxed | Also, your theory seems so vague to the point of being meaningless: If I understand you correctly, you're telling us new flags tend to reuse older flags and the choice is rationalized afterwards. So far so good. But it's also supposed to support the theory that the French flag did not reuse the colours of earlier flags/arms widely known in France at the time, instead turning to another source (the American flag). Similarly, it's supposed to undermine the idea that the German flag reused the colours of the Lützow Free Corps in favour of some poorly supported link to much older colours. | |
| Oct 19, 2016 at 9:12 | comment | added | Relaxed | @Shautieh Who says it's random? Did you even read my answer? It's a bit rich to invoke Occam's razor when you are trying to push some over-arching theory based on exactly nothing. In the case of France, AFAIK, what research says is that multiple flags with similar colours were used at the time, with American colours being just one source of influence. | |
| Oct 19, 2016 at 8:14 | comment | added | Shautieh | @Relaxed Occam's razor would say that it's more probable that people based their new flags based on previous ones than take random colours by chance and get the exact same. I'm not saying this is always the case of course, and it is possible that this explanation was an after thought. About my examples though, there is no doubt about the colours of the Brazilian flag, and historical research actually states that the French flag colours come from the American ones (which come from the British) and that the common explanation about Paris and king colours was the after thought. | |
| Oct 19, 2016 at 5:50 | comment | added | Relaxed | @Shautieh That's not much of an evidence of anything and it's too easy to think that things can't be coincidences or to speculate on what-if scenarios. Besides, you can easily turn the explanation around: The black-red-gold was used from 1815, the “reason“ (link with the Holy Roman Empire) was invented later. Ditto for the French flag: The three colours actually had various use in the kingdom of France dating back at least from the 17th century and earlier, the American flag is just one factor, it's not as simple as that. Historical research ought to be based on sources, not neat hypotheses. | |
| Oct 19, 2016 at 1:57 | comment | added | Shautieh | ... Second example is France, whose colours officially come from the combination of the colours of Paris (blue and red) and the colour of the King (white). The blue/white/red colours really come from the American flag, as French revolutionaries got inspired by it. It's as simple as that, and if the colours of Paris had been blue and green, they would just have invented another reason for the French flag to become blue/white/red! That's why I doubt that the holy roman empire and German flag colours could be a mere coincidence. | |
| Oct 19, 2016 at 1:50 | comment | added | Shautieh |
@Relaxed It might be a coincidence, but quite often country flags retain their colours from previous states even though the official reason for each colour is reinvented! I have two examples : Brazil will say its flag is green because of the Amazonian forest, yellow because of the riches found inside its mines, etc. while it can clearly be said that these colours all come from the Royal Standard of Brazil last emperor Pedro I, with green itself coming from his Braganza dynasty and yellow from his wife Habsburg dynasty, ... continued
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| Oct 18, 2016 at 9:07 | comment | added | Relaxed | Actually, your source does not support your assertion: The section is called “Supposed pre-modern origins” and starts with “The choice of black red and gold as national colours was retrospectively motivated […]”. | |
| Oct 17, 2016 at 22:00 | history | answered | AllInOne | CC BY-SA 3.0 |