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In answer to his entreaties, civil war ensued, but the Catholic mountaineers won a great victory that very year and the reformer himself was killed. A truce was then arranged, the provisions of which foreshadowed the religious settlement in the Germanies each canton was to be free to determine its own religion. Switzerland has remained to this day part Catholic and part Protestant.
Thus the number of the Germanies was suddenly reduced from more than three hundred to less than one hundred, and the German states which mainly benefited, along with Prussia, were the southern states of Bavaria, Wuerttemberg, and Baden, which Napoleon desired to use as an equipoise against both Austria and Prussia.
But these two Germanies are not the great Germany, that of the artists, the poets, the thinkers, that of Bach, Mozart, Beethoven, Goethe, Schiller, Heine, Leibnitz, Kant, Hegel, Liebig. This latter Germany is good, generous, humane, pacific; it finds expression in the touching phrase of Goethe, who when asked to write against us replied that he could not find it in his heart to hate the French.
Is it common sense to think the population of a few thousands can hunt out a fur empire here the size of two Germanies? Remember it was not the hunter who exterminated the buffalo and the beaver and the seal and the otter! The poacher destroyed one group of sea furs; the railway and the farm supplanted the other.
There might possibly, even at that distance from the frontiers, be rumors of some little incursion or other of barbarians; perhaps a few hundred fighting men, come from the outer Germanies, had taken refuge with a Roman garrison after suffering defeat at the hands of neighboring barbarians; or perhaps they were attempting to live by pillage in the neighborhood of the garrison and the soldiers had been called out against them.
Within the next few years the Lutheran teachings carried everything before them throughout the northern and central Germanies. Nor are the reasons for Luther's success in defying pope and emperor and for the rapid acceptance of his new theology hard to understand. The movement was essentially popular and national.
These efforts at reform, like many before and after, were largely unfruitful, and, despite occasional protests, practical disunion prevailed in the Germanies of the sixteenth century, albeit under the high-sounding title of "Holy Roman Empire."
Although Italy, the Netherlands, and the Germanies were not yet developed as strong united monarchies, many of their patriotic leaders longed for such a development, worked for it, and believed that the principal obstacle to it was the great Christian Church with the pope at its head.
In all there were over three hundred states which collectively were called "the Germanies" and which were united only by the slender imperial thread. The idea of empire had not only been narrowed to one nation; it also, in its failure to overcome feudalism, had prevented the growth of a real national monarchy. What was the nature of this slight tie that nominally held the Germanies together?
The family subsequently became related by marriage to reigning families in Hungary and in Italy as well as in Bohemia and other states of the empire. The fortunes of the Habsburgs were decidedly auspicious. Of course, signs were not wanting of some national life in the Germanies.
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