Monday 3 August 2020

borussia

With a national hymn dedicated to the King of Prussia, Friedrich Wilhelm III (Fridericus Rex Borussiae) on the occasion of his fiftieth birthday, composer Gaspare Spontini brought the New Latin coinage (see also) into common-parlance on this day in 1820, first suggested as the name for an ancient tribe in the region in an early sixteenth century treatise by Erasmus Stella—now regarded as fictitious and bad scholarship.
From the anthem also came the sense of Borussia as the female personification of the old kingdom (previously) and is one aspect of the golden figure portrayed atop the Victory Column (Siegessรคule) in Berlin, the Prussian capital, commemorating their win against Denmark in 1852—otherwise identified as Nike, the Greek goddess, and her Roman equivalent, the sculptor, Friedrich Drake, styling her features off of the-then crown-princess of Prussia, future Queen Victoria. Because of the kingdom’s unifying and modernising drives through the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, it became the namesake of many football clubs, preserved there more than its association with the old empire.