CHAPTER I
HISTORICAL LIENS
Sorrow at our political and religious disruption is our first feeling, when we begin to take stock of our national resources. Of the territory which five hundred years ago was the German empire and was inhabited by the German people united, at least in thought, into one political organism, the Germany of today lacks at least one-third, comprising the German sections of Austria, the Netherlands, Belgium and Switzerland. If you add the Livonian provinces from the Memel to the F inni sh Bay, where the peasants were largely not German, but the knights and the burghers were German, then the shrinkage amounts to practically one-half of what was Germany at the end of the Middle Ages. In this calculation we do not even consider those territories which, toward the end of the fourteenth century and at the beginning of the fifteenth century, were only loosely connected with the empire, and belonged, nationally at least, to France or Italy, as for instance Burgundy, the two Savoies, Milan, Mantua, Verona and other provinces. We confine ourselves, in the first place, to the countries long inhabited by German races, and secondly to the
IO