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For seventy-five years more a series of wars was to be waged in which the religious element was distinctly to enter. In fact these wars have often been called the Religious Wars the ones connected with the career of Philip II of Spain as well as the subsequent dismal civil war in the Germanies but in each one the political and economic factors predominated.
It was in the Germanies, in fact, that Napoleon's achievements were particularly striking. Before his magic touch many of the antique political and social institutions of that country crumbled away. As early as 1801 the diminution of the number of German states had begun.
He put into Edward's hands a rod of gold and a charter of investiture, by which symbols he appointed him as "Vicar-general of the Empire in all the Germanies and in all the Almaines". Next day the allies heard a mass celebrated by the Archbishop of Cologne in the church of St. Castor.
There began a sort of popular grumbling against the Reformers, who were now already schismatic: their rich patrons fell under the same suspicion. In the outer Germanies it was not a defence of Christendom at all, but a brutish cry for more food. But everywhere the populace stirred.
When Richelieu became the chief minister of Louis XIII , he found the Habsburgs in serious trouble and he resolved to take advantage of the situation to enhance the prestige of the Bourbons. The Austrian Habsburgs were facing a vast civil and religious war in the Germanies, and the Spanish Habsburgs were dispatching aid to their hard-pressed kinsmen.
It was the defection of the English Crown, the immense booty rapidly obtained by a few adventurers, like the Cecils and Russells, and a still smaller number of old families, like the Howards, which put England, with all its profound traditions and with all its organic inheritance of the great European thing, upon the side of the Northern Germanies.
We have now reviewed the states that were to be the main factors in the historical events of the sixteenth century the national monarchies of England, France, Portugal, and Spain; the Holy Roman Empire of the Germanies; and the city-states of Italy and the Netherlands.
But he could not live in the peace of his own land, and he turned again and rode through kingdoms and through baronies, seeking adventure. From the Lyonesse to the Lowlands, from the Lowlands on to the Germanies; through the Germanies and into Spain. And many lords he served, and many deeds did, but for two years no news came to him out of Cornwall, nor friend, nor messenger.
No Charlemagne with his Gallic armies forced it tardily to accept baptism. It was not savage like the Germanies; it was therefore under no necessity to go to school. It was not a morass of shifting tribes; it was a nation.
His sister Elise was princess of the diminutive state of Lucca. The kings of Spain and Denmark were his admirers and the tsar of Russia now called him friend and brother. A restored Poland was a recruiting station for his army. Prussia and Austria had become second- or third-rate powers, and French influence once more predominated in the Germanies.
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