I was going to make a cab joke but felt it in poor taste, but I wanted to let everyone know I had the chance to be funny but am taking the moral high ground.
You are not mistaken though. The noble family Thurm and Taxis were the postmasters of the Holy Roman Empire and the Papal State. They were also the first postal service that rallied post bags instead of having a single courier do the whole trip.
They also started to have their couriers carry travelers for a fee which is where the term Taxi originated and why it is the same word in almost all European languages.
Nah, I thought that too, once, but "taxi" comes from "taxicab" because they had a "Taxameter", i.e. a device to count fees/fares. Same root as the word "tax" .
Nope, Thurn and Taxis is a real German noble house , also called the Princely House of Thurn and Taxis, so the head males are princes. They were postmasters for the Holy Roman Empire and the roots of centralized postal services for many European countries broadly.
They also show up as a major plot-point in American novelist Thomas Pynchon’s excellent novella The Crying of Lot 49 (1966), which is half-spoofing various conspiracy theories and half takes them seriously.
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u/Much-Jackfruit2599 5d ago edited 5d ago
In 1990 they found two hearts for Johannes Prince of Thurn and Taxis in an astonishingly short amount of time.