Page:Marquis de Sade - Adelaide of Brunswick.djvu/19



A little after the middle of the eleventh century, the period of the story we are going to tell, Germany offered to the universe the picture of a stormy sea, the waves of which threatened to engulf the rest of Europe. There was weakness on the throne of the German Empire, and there was rivalry in Rome. Any decree by one of these powers was immediately opposed by the other.

Living was difficult in those times either through the struggle of the people for existence, or through the disorders of the nobles who left in peace neither the travelers, who were attacked with impunity on the highways, nor those who cultivated the land bordering these dangerous highways. There were battles, armed robbery, unfair taxation, revolting customs, unjust laws; commerce, which would have promoted the general welfare, was paralyzed; and public safety, which is necessary for the happiness and advancement of man, was destroyed.

Emperor Henry IV (1050-1106) still in his adolescence, had just enough military strength to keep himself on his tottering throne; but the opposition which armed force subjugated on one side was revived by political parties on the other.

One of the thorns in the side of Henry IV was a people called Brunswickians who were courageous and unconquerable. They had defeated the Roman general Varus some ten centuries before, and at one time their possessions extended from the banks of the Weser and Elbe to Moravia and from the Rhine to the Baltic Sea. They still burned with the audacious zeal with which they had been inspired by Wittekind, under