Page:History of the Thirty Years' War - Gindely - Volume 1.djvu/53

 tory at all, is the difficulty of mastering the geography of the countries concerned in it. Without its geography the history of a country is but as a rumor from some imaginary land. Who does not recollect, for instance, his utter mental confusion on meeting the name Burgundy in his reading as the designation of a country? At one time this land seemed to be here, and again there, and then somewhere else, and it would not be strange if many a mind well-informed in history were never relieved from this confusion. All historical reading and study have suffered from this same difficulty, which we have now the means of removing, or at least of relieving. Of these the reader is invited to avail himself, so as to thoroughly understand the map of Europe, and especially that of the German Empire as it existed in the year 1618, at the beginning of the Thirty Years’ War, and then he will be able to appreciate its condition when the war closed in the peace of Westphalia, in 1648.