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In the first place, the attempt of the medieval German emperors to gain control of Italy not only had signally failed but had left behind two contending factions throughout the whole country, one, the Ghibellines, supporting the doctrine of maintaining the traditional connection with the Germanies; the other, the Guelphs, rejecting that doctrine.
Prussia, that is, this patch of weeds, could not extend until the West weakened through schism. It had to wait till the battle of the Reformation died down. But it waited. And at last, when there was opportunity, it grew prodigiously. The weed patch over-ran first Poland and the Germanies, then half Europe.
The edict was to be executed by imperial commissioners, all of whom were Catholics, and so well did they do their work that, within three years of the promulgation of the edict, Roman Catholicism in the Germanies had recovered five bishoprics, thirty Hanse towns, and nearly a hundred monasteries, to say nothing of parish churches of which the number can hardly be estimated.
There were left to the Roman Catholic Church at the close of the sixteenth century the Italian states, Spain, Portugal, most of France, the southern Netherlands, the forest cantons of Switzerland, the southern Germanies, Austria, Poland, Ireland, large followings in Bohemia and Hungary, and a straggling unimportant following in other countries.
Blocked in the Germanies, the Austrian Habsburgs looked elsewhere to satisfy their aspirations. But almost equal difficulties confronted them. Extension to the southeast in the direction of the Balkan peninsula involved almost incessant warfare with the Turks. Increase of territory in Italy incited Spain, France, and Sardinia to armed resistance.
Longer accounts: Cambridge Modern History, Vol. V , ch. xii, xx, xxi, and Vol. VI , ch. vii- ix, xx; Histoire generale, Vol. V, ch. xix, Vol. VI, ch. xvi, and Vol. VII, ch. iv, v; Emile Bourgeois, Manuel historique de politique etrangere, 4th ed., Vol. I , ch. vi, xii, valuable for international relations of the Germanies; Bernhard Erdmannsdoerffer, Deutsche Geschichte, 1648-1740, 2 vols.
Then, too, the Emperor Charles V, who remained a loyal Catholic, was too immersed in the difficulties of foreign war and in the manifold administrative problems of his huge dominions to be able to devote much time to the extirpation of heresy in the Germanies.
Meanwhile, however, Great Britain had entered into a special agreement with Frederick with the object of guaranteeing the integrity of Hanover and the general peace of the Germanies. When, therefore, the colonial war between Great Britain and France was renewed in 1754, it was quite natural that the former should contract a definite alliance with Prussia.
Enough has now been said to give some idea of the distracted condition of the Germanies in the eighteenth century and to explain why the Holy Roman Empire was an unimportant bond of union. Austria, traditionally the chief of the Germanies, was increasingly absorbed in her non-German possessions in Hungary, Italy, and the Netherlands.
The local term, "Saxon," in the fifth and sixth century had nothing to do with the general term, "Saxon," applied to all northwest of the Germanies two hundred years and more afterwards. The chiefs very probably captured the Roman fiscal organization of the place, but seem rapidly to have degraded society by their barbaric incompetence.
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