Page:The history of medieval Europe.djvu/582

CHAPTER XXVIII GERMANY IN THE LATER MIDDLE AGES German history in the later Middle Ages lacks unity com- pared to that of France or of England, and is more closely i . connected with lands to the east like Hungary, Germany in t , . . . the later Bohemia, and Poland, and with the countries Middle Ages about the Bahic Sea tQ the nQrt ^ than j t j g ^^ the states of western Europe. Italy is now seldom visited by the Holy Roman emperors and has its own separate history. Germany itself is nominally under the rule of one emperor, but really has become a shifting chaos of principalities and powers, great and small. Various local dynasties rise and fall, increase or diminish in territory, impinge upon or give way to one another. Among these some are worth noting as the later founders of modern states or as still reigning to-day. Important also are certain cooperative forms of government which develop in this period: the Hanseatic League of cities in the north, the military order of Teutonic Knights in the northeast, the Swiss Confederation in the southwest. In the later Middle Ages Germans, although divided politically, are still expanding territorially. Teu- tonic colonists throng into Bohemia, Poland, and Hungary; the Knights conquer and convert Poles and Letts; the Hanse towns acquire a commercial supremacy over Den- mark, Norway, and Sweden, — in fact, from the east coast of England to Novgorod they almost monopolize trade. German cities in general flourished in the later Middle Ages as never before: the great southern cities of Augsburg and Nurnberg reached the height of their prosperity about 1500. After the extinction of the Hohenstaufens the Holy Ro- man emperors had little authority. The right to elect the The seven emperor had by this time become limited to -electors seven of the leading lords of the land, three eccle- siastical, namely, the Archbishops of Cologne, of Mainz or Mayence, and of Trier or Treves, and four secular princes