(iii) At first, from the tenth to the middle of the thirteenth century the tendencies to disruption were not so marked, and under stern Saxon and Hohenstaufen emperors the Empire was strong. One reason for this was the existence of another condition which at first made for unity, but which later aided these disruptive tendencies. This was the authority of the Pope and of the Church. We have seen that it was largely because of the recognition by the Pope of the Frankish kings as champions of Christendom that they became emperors. It was largely because the Pope continued to recognize the emperors that these emperors, Frankish, Saxon and Swabian, retained their power. Time and again, when the Saxon Henry and the Hohenstaufen Frederick dared to defy the Pope, their power fell from them because the people believed in the Pope, and he whom the Pope did not recognize could not have authority. Later, when the other forces making for disintegration had become stronger, the Reformation found the Empire rent in pieces. There was not, as there was in England and in France, an effective central authority which eventually determined the general result, and Germany was left partly Lutheran Protestant, partly Roman Catholic, in a condition which again strengthened the differences which already existed and the tendency to disruption.
(iv) A fourth cause of division resulted from the method under which the Empire took shape. Extensions of territory, made outside the Empire by individuals or by states, did not in general enlarge the borders of the Empire itself ; they belonged to those states or in dividuals who had made them their own. The knights of the Teutonic Order organized East Prussia, but East Prussia remained outside the Empire and was related only to Brandenburg to give additional importance to the Elector. Hungary was regained from the Turk by the Duke of Austria, who became its King, but as King of Hungary he owed no allegiance to the Emperor. Later, the Elector of Hanover became King of Britain, but Britain did not become part of the Empire. This acquisition of extra-imperial territory gave to those rulers power which was quite independent of the Em peror, and obviously tended at first to disruption; but herein lay, in fact, the seeds of such unity as Germany has hitherto attained.
On the other hand, though there was a certain loss of energy due to this lack of effective government, itself due to the geographical conditions, there was an advance in saving energy. From the time of the Franks, when the Teutonic lands were being civilized, the advance was evident; great territories were, to use a phrase used often before, brought within the circle of lands that mattered; the border lands or marks became states, and formed bases from which to energize other mark lands farther and farther east. Government by the Franks was comparatively easy as long as the Franks were evidently the superior people. The Saxons and Swabians were in a somewhat similar almost unchallenged position, but it was natural that the decentralizing tendency should grow greater when the mark lands became more and more able to stand alone, because they contained a greater population, because that population was not so scattered and isolated as it had been, and because they formed states that became the equals of their civilizers to the west. Thus even the increasing ten
dency to decentralization of government is in part a result of advance.
Further, there was a feeling of Unity which was in tensely real. This was due partly to the possession of a common language, partly to the persistence of the Imperial Idea, and partly in the earlier centuries, as we have seen, to the existence of a common Church. In so far as it was clue to the latter two causes, the feeling of unity spread beyond the boundary of empire, and permeated the whole of Christendom hemmed in between the Mohammedan and the heathen Norseman, whose attack, indeed, made it more intense. It found expression in the enthusiastic support given to the Crusades, and in the growth of, and friendly relations between, many universities. The more purely German sense of unity is shown in the rise and federation of trading cities. The divisions were governmental; territories were divided among the sons of a ruler; they were united by marriage with an heiress. There was waste, because of the lack of that security which a strong government enforces, but there was not anarchy ; men were gradually learning how to make the most of them selves, and energy was being accumulated. It is signi ficant of the disruptive tendencies that in the northern plain, far from the nominal centre of government, the Hansa towns should have become independent, like Brunswick and Magdeburg inland, like Hamburg, Lubeck and Stettin on the coast as ports, or even like Wisby and Bergen overseas as outpost factories ; but it is equally evident that the advantages of unity were recognized, for these towns formed a federation; while the fact that trade cannot be carried on at all without energy, without saved energy, and without saving energy, is evidence of advance.
Now let us consider how Germany has made a further advance, and saved more energy, by becoming effectively organized politically. Because of the way in which the Empire was governed, with no provision for an imperial force, it had little and ever-decreasing chance to ex pand its borders. New territories could not easily find a place in the state, but after the Empire had taken shape, Christianity continued to spread, south-eastwards among those who had come as heathen from the distant grasslands of Asia, and eastwards among the dwellers in the forest; but the lake-dotted moraine land made the southern shores of the Baltic more difficult of approach, and these were left heathen for centuries. Thus three quite distinct regions lay between the Roman and Roman Catholic Empire of the West and the Byzantine and Greek Church civilization of the East : Hungary, within the Carpathian highlands, peopled by the mixed race resulting from the union of all the steppeland peoples who had threatened Europe, yet christianized from Rome and bound to Western civilization by that fact ; Poland, centred in Warsaw but with no natural frontiers, peopled by Slavonic tribes within the forest, who united under the stimulus of attack from the west and of con version under the influence of missionaries from the Western Church ; and, lastly, Pomerania and Lithuania, lands of the heathen to the north and east.