Page:Macfadden's Fasting, Hydropathy and Exercise.djvu/159

Rh rustics. Frederic Barbarossa's armies had been recruited among the bare-fisted peasantry of the South-German highlands but on the battlefield of Legano were crushingly defeated by the train-bands of some fourteen Italian cities. Roman legionaries held their own against the giants of the Teutonic forests, and the levies of the Hanseatic League prevailed against the federation of the iron-clad cavaliers that had for centuries treated them as an inferior species of bipeds. Lionheart Richard came to grief in a siege, and his German peer, Eberhart Longbeard of Wirtemberg was terribly beaten by the home-guards of a little manufacturing town.

—and all that in spite of the fact that the artisans of the Middle Ages were physically handicapped by the unsanitary condition of their streets and dwellings.