Page:American Journal of Sociology Volume 11.djvu/695

 INTRODUCTION TO SOCIOLOGY 679

abbe, he of St. Denis. All these territories included only parts of the basins of the Loire and of the Seine or their tributaries.

Let the theorists who proclaim that nationalities are consti- tuted by river basins, or marked off by water-courses or moun- tains, try to apply their systems to the feudal regime! Is it not evident that the whole external organization of states during this important period, including the organization of their frontiers, was related to the internal organization of their society, and that their political frontiers, like all their other boundaries, were only their social frontiers ?

And this applies not only to feudal France. In Germany and in Italy we see that the Teutonic kingdom which resulted at the commencement of the tenth century from the fusion of the king- dom of the eastern Franks with Bavaria, Saxony, and Alemania, did not have precise boundaries, and did not correspond to any geographical reality. On the east the regnum Teutonicum bor- dered upon the Slavs and the Hungarians; but it no more had natural frontiers than it had as yet, differing from France, a center of gravity. Four great groups alone were to be distin- guished: Saxony, extending from the Elbe to near the Rhine; the Frisians, along the North Sea, and the peoples of Thuringia remained in part independent; the Franconians were upon both banks of the Maine and in the lower valley of the Neckar; Bavaria, victorious over the Hungarians, had extended her dom- ination over Carinthia and the eastern part of Franconia. Car- inthia, however, was to detach itself and form a new duchy. Alemania or Swabia, separated from Bavaria by the Lech, reclined on the south upon the Alps, and on the west upon the Vosges, from the time of the annexation of Alsace in 911. In short, the territories occupied by the Franconians and Swabians did not possess physical boundaries; they were to be constantly parti- tioned; they were to hold to particularism, both on account of their geographical complication and by reason of social causes. Saxony and Bavaria represented rather natural regions. The first occupied the Germanic portion of the depressed lands lying along the interior seas which separate central from northern Europe, yet it had no natural frontier toward the east, where it