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Updated: June 6, 2025
And this same year, 1806, witnessed, as we have seen, not only the humiliation of Austria but the deepest degradation of Prussia. By 1808 all the Germanies were at the mercy of Napoleon. Prussia was shorn of half her possessions and forced to obey the behests of her conqueror. The Confederation of the Rhine was enlarged and solidified.
The Baltic Plain, sundry units of the outer Germanies and Scandinavia, probably Hungary, possibly Bohemia, certain mountain valleys in Switzerland and Savoy and France and the Pyrenees, which had suffered from lack of instruction and could easily be recovered these would be affected. The outer parts, which had never been within the pale of the Roman Empire might go.
Mohammedanism spread rapidly: within a hundred years of its founder's death it had conquered western Asia and northern Africa and had gained a temporary foothold in Spain; thenceforth it stretched eastward across Persia and Turkestan into India and southward into central Africa; and in the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries, as we have seen, it possessed itself of Constantinople, the Balkans, Greece, and part of Hungary, and threatened Christendom in the Germanies and in the Mediterranean.
It was an experiment, this creation of the Germanies by Western culture, this spiritual colonization of a March beyond the limits of the Empire. It did not completely succeed, as the Reformation proves; but it had at least the strength in the century after Charlemagne, its founder, to withstand the Eastern attack upon Christendom. The attack was not racial.
No Rex ever called himself a local Imperator or dreamed of calling himself so; and that is the most significant thing in all the transition between the full civilization of the old Empire and the Dark Ages. The original Roman armies invading Gaul, Spain, the western Germanies and Hungary, fought to conquer, to absorb, to be masters of and makers of the land they seized.
For political events in the Germanies in the sixteenth century: E. F. Henderson, A Short History of Germany, 2 vols. in 1 ; Sidney Whitman, Austria ; Gustav Welf, Deutsche Geschichte im Zeitalter der Gegenreformation , an elaborate study; Franz Krones, Handbuch der Geschichte Oesterreichs von der aeltesten Zeit, Vol. I, ch. iii-v; G. W. Kitchin, A History of France, 4th ed.
Another aspect of international relations was emphasized in the first half of the seventeenth century. It was the Thirty Years' War, with its revolting cruelty, which brought out the contrast between the more humane practice of war as an art in Italy and the savagery which disgraced the Germanies.
Until the generations before the year 800 there was no civilization beyond the Rhine save the upper Danube partially reclaimed, and a very scanty single extension up the valley of the Lower Main. But Charlemagne, with vast Gallic armies, broke into the barbaric Germanies right up to the Elbe. He compelled them by arms to accept religion, letters and arts.
These insurrections became almost regular in the southwestern Germanies, and were called Bundschuhe, a shoe fastened upon the end of a pole serving as a standard of revolt.
Charles the Bold, who died in 1477, was prevented from constructing a great central kingdom between France and the Germanies only by the shrewdness of his implacable foe, King Louis XI of France.
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