You can't ignore it as a special case!
You can't ignore it but it doesn't lend itself to the cursory level of depth that most BM players want in their medieval history. An HRE Duke was very different than a French Duke or an English Duke. He was quite possibly a Prince-Bishop instead of a Duke (something you didn't see in England and France very much at all) and he was probably a heck of a lot more independent than an English Duke while also having less freedom than you'd imagine for a semi-independent lord of that rank: the HRE for much of the middle ages was kind of like BM is in that the minute anybody rocked the boat too much, the whole Empire would come crashing down on them. You got left alone a lot of the time to do what you wanted so long as what you wanted didn't piss off too many people.
The easiest way I can think of to illustrate this is that your average person who knows just a few things about the middle ages has probably heard of Richard the Lionhearted, Henry V, a Louis or two, and maybe one or more Dukes out of Shakespeare. You know why Shakespeare didn't write about German politics? Because they were so busy carefully needling one another over electoral politics that you didn't have huge changes in large swaths of land like the Hundred Years War, or if you did, it was in places like Bohemia where you had the larger entity (HRE) absorbing a smaller one rather than two countries of relatively similar size and power going at it. How many HRE Emperors can you name after 1066? You know why? It's not because you don't know more than most people about medieval stuff just by virtue of having this conversation. It's because they just don't have as many far-reaching stories as the French, English, and even Spanish magnates do. There are some major exceptions, like Frederick the Great, and this picture got completely changed around in the 17th-19th centuries..it's not a reflection of German culture as boring. it's a reflection of the fact that 100 lesser lords with the Pope breathing down their necks, even if they had big fancy titles, were all so constrained in what they could hope to accomplish that a guy like Richard the Lionhearted would've pissed off so many people in such a short time that he never would've been allowed to amount to anything. Who knows, maybe that means it's a better system!
OT: do you know if it's possible to get such a list? I'd be interested to see that.
http://www.gamersgate.com/DD-CK2/crusader-kings-iiThey are pretty close, and if you check out some of the mods you can get very close, at least for Western Europe. I have no idea if, like, the Timurids or the Russians are correct, because I don't know jack about them.
It's not entirely unhistorical to redraw a Duchy's borders. The Duchy of Burgundy is historically centered on Dijon, and when the Dukes of Burgundy came in possession of what is now Belgium that did not mean the culture of Flanders was unified with that of Dijon, but the whole area was certainly refered to as "Burgundy", and the local barons in Flanders owed allegiance to the Duke of Burgundy.
You are actually talking about the Kingdom of Burgundy, not the Duchy of Burgundy. Burgundy is also a bit unique in that it had once covered a much larger area than just the Duchy centered on Dijon. It was a major piece of the Frankish Empire during the Dark Ages, so they had cultural influence on that whole region -- but not enough to persist as an entity for more than 60 years or so. When Flanders came under Burgundian rule it was still very much culturally Flemish (or Dutch, depending on whose toes you want to step on) and the borders of "Flanders" did not change during this period even though it was nominally part of Burgundy. This ties in to your earlier distinction: it's more like the same dude was Duke of Burgundy and Count of Flanders and less like Flanders suddenly joined the Duchy of Burgundy. The truly "Burgundian" entity around Dijon did not change much and is also still pretty Burgundian to this day. Also, the Flemish Counts of Flanders were descended directly from Charlemagne through Judith Martel (whose English King husband Æthelwulf died without having an heir via Judith, whose subsequent marriage to his son Æthelbald was annulled by the Pope for being creepy, and who eloped with a woodsman in Flanders that became Count Baldwin Ironarm who is actually the model for Cathay) - so both Burgundy and Flanders were part of the same Dark Ages Kingdom even though there wasn't a heck of a lot in the way of culture or civilization during that time.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kingdom_of_BurgundyReally, you could consider nearly everything in Europe a special case
They had different implementations of the same basic medieval parts. You could re-create those parts (as CK2 does a pretty decent job of doing) but it would be too complex for your average BM player, plus you'd really need succession since that was a big driver of politics. When we talk about medieval history as it has any relevance to BM, I try to use boundaries that exclude implementations that were too unique to generalize about for BM. BM is centered around the landed noble with some religious influence (but nothing like the Pope). That makes France and England the most obvious candidates: land changed hands a lot, the church was a factor but nowhere near as big a factor as it was in the HRE, you didn't have Moors conquering the place to make it entirely about religious war. But even when you had different "cultures" (like Burgundian and Flemish, for example) you had a lot of overlap. The Bretons and the Cornish, for example, were much closer than the Bretons and the Occitans in Toulouse. Burgundian and Flemish could both be traced back to the Franks and so even if they thought Normans talked funny, they weren't going to be at each other's throats in the same way that Saxons and Normans were.
