conqueror of England, saw his ambitious edifice crumble to pieces while
it was still in the making; even the Union of Kalmar (1397), by which
the crowns of Norway and Sweden and Denmark were vested in a single
dynasty, could not save the rich prize of the Baltic trade from falling
into German hands. Germany, even when ill-governed and a prey to the
ambitions of provincial dynasties, was still _grande chose et
terrible_, as more than one political adventurer learned to his cost.
The energy, the intelligence and the national spirit of a great people
made good all the errors of statesmen and all the defects of
institutions.

[Illustration: Holy Roman Empire under Frederick Barbarossa]

Late in the fifteenth century the Germans were mortified to discover
that, although a nation, they had not become a state. They found that
the centre of political power had shifted westward, that the destinies
of Europe were now controlled by the French, the English and the
Spaniards. These nations had perfected a new form of autocracy, more
vigorous, more workmanlike in structure, than any medieval form of
government. Germany in the meanwhile had clung to all that was worst and
feeblest in the old order; her monarchy, and the institutions connected
with it, had been reduced to impotence. The same process of decay had
operated in the minor states of the eastern group. In Scandinavia, in
Hungary, in the Slavonic lands, the tree of royal power was enveloped
and strangled by the undergrowth of a bastard feudalism, by the
territorial power of aristocracies which, under cover of administrative
titles, converted whole provinces into family estates and claimed over
their tenants the divine right of unlimited and irresponsible
sovereignty. To investigate all the reasons for the political
backwardness of these eastern peoples would carry us far afield. But one