Page:The history of medieval Europe.djvu/304

 260 THE HISTORY OF MEDIEVAL EUROPE they did have through feudal channels and ruling by feudal methods. We should further realize that the so-called feudal states of medieval Europe, instead of being perverse and regret- Feudal states taD * e obstacles to true geographical and racial and medi- a nd linguistic union, instead of being ugly, broken fragments of a once splendid empire of Charlemagne or of an ideal France or Germany or Italy, really often were the organic units of their age and repre- sented local life and vigor and enterprise and governable groups a great deal better than did the impossible empires aimed at by Charlemagne and Justinian and Otto the Great and Henry II. We should also realize that there was as yet no such thing as the France of to-day, nor even a French language and a French people, nor an Italian tongue and an Italian people. When the King of "France" forced his rule upon Toulouse, he was not uniting peoples already one in language, spirit, and customs, and everything else ex- cept government ; rather he was doing violence to national spirit and blotting out a beautiful language and terminat- ing a brilliant period of culture. The Prussian annexation of Alsace-Lorraine in 1870 was not a circumstance to the extermination of Toulouse in southern France by orthodox crusaders and by the Lord of Paris in the thirteenth century. In that century we find mentioned among the different nations at the University of Paris, not Frenchmen and Italians, but Lombards, Romans, and Sicilians, Flemings, Burgundians, Poitevins, Bretons, and Normans. The modern European states are simply historical growths and the outcome of a vast concourse of varied cir- Medieval cumstances, rather than the systematic working - m£fe 9 rn nd out_of _any fine principles of nationality. Ta- xational" day the peoples of those states have grown into homogeneous nations, distinct from one another. But in their origins those states consisted of elements by no means homogeneous. The advent of our modern state often meant an increase of centralization at the expense of local enterprise and prosperity. France of our day is dotted with