[Sidenote:  911-1024.]

The establishment of schools, and the protection given to the arts and sciences, invited the whole body of the nation to the acquisition of useful and ornamental knowledge; but the invitation was not even generally accepted.  There was much superstition in every order of the laity.  An opinion prevailed among them, that the world was to end, and the day of judgment arrive, in the year 1000.  An universal panic spread itself over Europe.  Strange to relate, the people sought to avoid the catastrophe, by hiding themselves in caverns and tombs.

The existence of this ignorance cannot be denied:  but, to the ecclesiastics, who strove against it, who erected and fostered so many schools to dispel it, and who exerted themselves in the manner we have mentioned, to establish another and a better order of things, a great share of praise and gratitude should never be denied.

The mines of Hartz were discovered in the time of Otho I. and diffused so much wealth over Saxony, and afterwards over all Germany, as gave the reign of that emperor the appellation of “the age of gold.”  Before this time, Nicephorus Phocas had called Saxony, from the dress, or rather the coverings of its inhabitants, “the land of skins.”  But all the wealth of the country still continued to be concentrated among the great landowners.

III. 1.

Boundaries and State of Germany during the Franconian Dynasty.

1024-1138.

Under Henry III. the second prince of this line, the German empire had its greatest extent.  It comprised Germany, Italy, Burgundy and Lorraine.  Poland, and other parts of the Sclavonian territories, were subject to it.  Denmark and Hungary acknowledged themselves its vassals.

The emperors affected to consider all kingdoms as forming a royal republic, of which the emperor was chief.  For their right to this splendid prerogative, they always found advocates in their own dominions:  they reckon, among these, the illustrious Leibniz.  Out of Germany, nothing of the claim, beyond precedence in rank, has ever been allowed.  This, no sovereign in Europe has contested with the emperors:  it is observable, that, as the French monarchs insisted on the Carlovingian extraction of Hugh Capet, they affected to consider Henry the Fowler the first prince of the Saxon dynasty, and all his successors in the empire as usurpers.  Lewis XIV. expresses himself in this manner in some memoirs recently attributed to him.

III. 2.

State of German Literature during the Franconian Dynasty.

[Sidenote:  1024-1138.]