CHAPTER VII

. TEUTONIC EUROPE

179 : 10. Mikklegard. “The Great City.” This was the name given to Byzantium by the Goths.

180 : 2–11. Procopius, _Vandalic War_; Gibbon, chaps. XXXI-XXXVIII; Freeman, _Historical Geography of Europe_.

181 : 14. Gibbon, chaps. XXXVII and XXXVIII.

182 : 1. Eginhard, _The Life of Charlemagne_.

183 : 24. _The Political History of England_, vol. V, by H. A. L. Fisher, p. 205: “While the sovereigns of Europe were collecting tithes from their clergy for the Holy War, and papal collectors were selling indulgences to the scandal of some scrupulous minds, the empire became vacant by the death of Maximilian on January 19, 1519. For a few months diplomacy was busy with the choice of a successor. The king of France (Francis I) poured money into Germany, and was supported in his candidature by the pope; the king of England (Henry VIII) sent Pace to counteract French designs with the electors; but the issue was never really in doubt. Germany would not tolerate a French ruler; and on June 28, 1519, Charles of Spain was elected king of the Romans.”

184 : 8. Depopulation. (Thirty Years’ War.) _Cambridge Modern History_, vol. IV, p. 418, says that Germany was particularly afflicted. The data are unreliable, but the population of the empire was probably reduced by two-thirds, or from 16,000,000 to less than 6,000,000. Bavaria, Franconia and Swabia suffered most. W. Menzel says: “Germany is reckoned by some to have lost one-half, by others, two-thirds, of her entire population during the Thirty Years’ War. In Saxony 900,000 men had fallen within ten years; in Bohemia the number of inhabitants at the demise of Frederick II, before the last deplorable inroads made by Barier and Torstenson, had sunk to one-fourth. Augsburg, instead of 80,000 had 18,000 inhabitants. Every province, every town throughout the Empire had suffered at an equal ratio, with the exception of Tyrol.... The working class had almost totally disappeared. In Franconia the misery and depopulation had reached such an extent that the Franconian estates, with the assent of the ecclesiastical princes, abolished in 1650 the celibacy of the Catholic clergy and permitted each man to have two wives.... The nobility were compelled by necessity to enter the services of the princes, the citizens were impoverished and powerless, the peasantry had been utterly demoralized by military rule and reduced to servitude.” It has been said that the city of Berlin contained but 300 citizens; the Palatinate of the Rhine but 200 farmers. In character, intelligence and in morality, the German people were set back two hundred years. There are, in addition to the authorities quoted here, numerous others who make the same observations, in fact, this depopulation is one of the outstanding results of the Thirty Years’ War.

See also Anton Gindely, _History of the Thirty Years’ War_, p. 398.

184 : 22 _seq._ The _British Medical Journal_ for April 8, 1916; and Parsons, _Anthropological Observations on German Prisoners of War_.

185 : 6. See the note to p. 196 : 27.

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