gave her special countenance proved the least successful. It was not in
the Eastern Mediterranean but in Spain, in Lower Italy, and in Central
Europe, that the frontiers of Western Christendom were permanently
advanced. For the historian, however, the failures have an interest not
inferior to that of the more productive enterprises.

The age of border wars and border colonies begins long before the
appearance of a true crusading spirit. In German history the movement of
expansion dates from Henry the Fowler; when he captured Brandeburg (928)
and annexed the heathen tribes between the Elbe and Oder, he inaugurated
a policy of settlement and colonisation which the German Margraves of
those regions were to pursue, slowly and methodically for more than two
hundred years. In its later stages the policy was sometimes assisted by
Crusaders; from the first it made many converts to Christianity, and was
furthered by the foundation of frontier sees and churches subject to the
German archbishops of Hamburg and Magdeburg. But the men who directed
the policy were purely secular and selfish. The greatest of them, Henry
the Lion, Duke of Saxony from 1142 to 1180, and Albert the Bear,
Margrave of Brandenburg from 1134 to 1170, concentrated their energies
upon the development and extension of their principalities, exploited
the Slavs, plotted against one another and their Christian neighbours,
neglected national interests, and frankly made the Church the instrument
of their ambitions. Yet in the craft of state-building they showed
exceptional sagacity, enlisting as their allies the traders of the
Baltic, the peasants of North Germany and the Low Countries. Under their
rule and that of their most successful imitators, the Teutonic Knights
in Prussia, cities such as Lubeck (founded 1143) and Dantsic (colonised
1308) became centres of German trade and culture; while the open country
in the basins of the Elbe and Oder was covered with newly settled
villages of German immigrants. The effects of this colonisation have