That extraordinary extent of frontier which had hitherto been characteristic of Prussia was not wholly taken away by the new annexations, but it was greatly lessened. The kingdom, as a kingdom, is made far more compact, and the two great detached masses in which it formerly lay are now joined together. Moreover, the geographical character of Prussia becomes of much less political importance, now that her frontier marches to so great an extent on the smaller members of the League of which she is herself President. ♦War with France, 1870-1871.
The German Empire.
Incorporation of the Southern states.♦ Next came the war with France, the first effect of which was the incorporation of the southern states of Germany with the new League, which presently took the name of an Empire, with the Prussian King as hereditary Emperor. ♦Recovery of Elsass-Lothringen, 1871.♦ Then by the peace with France, nearly the whole of Elsass and part of Lotharingia, including the cities of Strassburg and Metz, were restored to Germany. They have, under the name of Elsass-Lothringen, become an Imperial territory, forming part of the Empire and owning the sovereignty of the Emperor, but not becoming part of the kingdom of Prussia or of any other German state. ♦The Imperial title.♦ The assumption of the Imperial title could hardly be avoided in a confederation whose constitution was monarchic, and which numbered kings among its members. No title but Emperor could have been found to express the relation between the presiding chief and the lesser sovereigns.
♦The new Empire a revival of the German Kingdom, but not of the Roman Empire.
Comparison of the old Kingdom and the new Empire.♦
Still it must be borne in mind that the new German Empire is in no sense a continuation or restoration of the Holy Roman Empire which fell sixty-four years before its creation. But it may be fairly looked on as a restoration of the old German Kingdom, the Kingdom of the East-Franks. Still, as far as geography is concerned, no change can be stranger than the change in the boundaries of Germany between the ninth century and the nineteenth. The new Empire, cut short to the north-west, south-west, and south-east, has grown somewhat to the north, and it has grown prodigiously to the north-east. ♦Name of Prussia.♦ Its ruling state, a state which contains such illustrious cities as Köln, Trier, and Frankfurt, is content to call itself after an extinct heathen people whose name had most likely never reached the ears of Charles the Great. ♦Position of Berlin.♦ The capital of the new Empire, placed far away from any of the antient seats of German kingship, stands in what in his day, and long after, was a Slavonic land. ♦Formation of the new Empire.♦ Germany, with its chief state bearing the name of Prussia, with the place of its national assemblies transferred from Frankfurt to Berlin, presents one of the strangest changes that historical geography can show us. But, strange as is the geographical change, it has come about gradually, by the natural working of historical causes. The Slavonic and Prussian lands have been Germanized, while the western parts of the old kingdom which have fallen away have mostly lost their German character. Those German lands which have formed the kernel of the Swiss Confederation have risen to a higher political state than that of any kingdom or Empire. But the German lands which still remain so strangely united to the lands of the Magyar and the southern Slave await, at however distant a time, their natural and inevitable reunion. So does a Danish population in the extreme north await, with less hope, its no less natural separation from the German body. Posen, still mainly Slavonic, remains unnaturally united to a Teutonic body, but it is not likely to gain by a transfer to any other ruler. The reconstruction of the German realm in its present shape, a shape so novel to the eye, but preserving so much of ancient life and ancient history, has been the greatest historical and geographical change of our times.
§ 3. The Kingdom of Italy.
♦Small geographical importance of the kingdom as such.♦
We parted from the Italian kingdom at the moment of its separation from the Eastern and Western kingdoms of the Franks. Its history, as a kingdom, consists in little more than its reunion with the East-Frankish crown, and in the way in which the royal power gradually died out within its limits. There is but little to say as to any changes of frontier of the kingdom as such. As long as Germany, Italy, and Burgundy acknowledged a single king, any shiftings of the frontiers of his three kingdoms were of secondary importance. When the power of the Emperors in Italy had died out, the land became a system of independent commonwealths and principalities, which had hardly that degree of unity which could enable us to say that a certain territory was added to Italy or taken from it. Even if a certain territory passed from an Italian to a German or Burgundian lord, the change was rather a change in the frontier of this or that Italian state than in the frontier of Italy itself. ♦Changes on the Alpine frontier.♦ The shiftings of frontier along the whole Alpine border have been considerable; but it is only in our own day that we can say that Italy as such has become capable of extending or lessening her borders. ♦Case of Verona.♦ When, in 1866, Venice and Verona were added to the Italian kingdom, that was a distinct change in the frontier of Italy. We can hardly give that name to endless earlier changes on the same marchland. ♦Case of Trieste, 1380.♦ In the fourteenth century, for instance, the town of Trieste, disputed between the patriarchs of Aquileia and the commonwealth of Venice, was acknowledged as an independent state, and it presently gave up its independence by commendation to the Duke of Austria. It is not likely that the question entered into any man’s mind whether the frontiers of the German and Italian kingdoms were affected by such a change. Whether as a free city or as an Austrian lordship, Trieste remained under the superiority, formally undoubted but practically nominal, of the common sovereign of Germany and Italy, the Roman Emperor or King. Whether the nominal allegiance of the city was due to him in his German or in his Italian character most likely no one stopped to think. ♦No eastern or western frontiers.♦ East and west, the Italian kingdom had no frontiers; the only question which could arise was as to the relation of the islands of Corsica and Sardinia to the kingdom itself or to any of the states which arose within it. To the south lay the independent Lombard duchies, and the possessions which still remained to the Eastern Empire. ♦The Norman kingdom of Sicily not an Imperial fief.♦ These changed in time into the Norman duchy of Apulia and kingdom of Sicily; but that kingdom, held as it was as a fief of the see of Rome, was never incorporated with the Italian kingdom of the Emperors, nor did its kings ever become the men of the Emperor. Particular Emperors in the thirteenth century, in the sixteenth, and in the eighteenth, were also kings of one or both the Sicilian kingdoms; but at no time before our own day were Sicily and southern Italy ever incorporated with a Kingdom of Italy. When we remember that it was to the southern part of the peninsula that the name of Italy was first given, we see here a curiosity of nomenclature as remarkable as the shiftings of meaning in the names of Saxony and Burgundy.
Naples and Sicily then, the Two Sicilies of later political nomenclature, lie outside our present subject. ♦Venice no part of Italy.♦ So does the commonwealth of Venice, except so far as Venice afterwards won a large subject territory on the Italian mainland. ♦Her Italian dominions.♦ Both these states have to do with Italy as a geographical expression, but neither the Venetian commonwealth nor the Sicilian kingdom is Italian within the meaning of the present section. They formed no part of the Carolingian dominion. ♦Venice and the Sicilies part of the Eastern Empire.♦ They were parts of the Eastern Empire, not of the Western. They remained attached to the New Rome after an Imperial throne had again been set up in the Old. They gradually fell away from their allegiance to the Eastern Empire, but they were never incorporated with the Empire of the West. I shall deal with them here only in their relations to the Imperial Kingdom of Italy, and treat of their special history elsewhere among the states which arose out of the break-up of the Eastern Empire. Again, on the north-western march of Italy a power gradually arose, partly Italian, but for a long time mainly Burgundian, which has in the end, by a strange fate, grown into a new Italian Kingdom. ♦The House of Savoy.♦ This is the House of Savoy. The growth of the dominions of that house, the process by which it gradually lost territory in Burgundy and gained it in Italy, form another distinct subject. ♦Its special history.♦ It will be dealt with here only in its relations to the kingdom of Italy.
♦The Kingdom of Italy continues the Lombard kingdom.♦
The Italian Kingdom of the Karlings, the kingdom which was reunited to Germany under Otto the Great, was, as has been already said, a continuation of the old Lombard kingdom. It consisted of that kingdom, enlarged by the Italian lands which fell off from the Eastern Empire in the eighth century; that is by the Exarchate and the adjoining Pentapolis, and the immediate territory of Rome itself. ♦Austria and Neustria.♦ The Lombard kingdom, in the strictest sense, took in the two provinces north of the Po, in which we again find, as in other lands, an Austria to the east and a Neustria to the west. ♦Æmilia.
Tuscany.♦ It took in Æmilia south of the Po—the district of Piacenza, Parma, Reggio, and Modena—also Tuscany, a name, which, as it no longer reaches to the Tiber, answers pretty nearly to its modern use. ♦Romagna.♦ The Tuscan name has lived on; the Exarchate and Pentapolis, as having been the chief seat of the later Imperial power in Italy, got the name of Romania, Romandiola, or Romagna. This name also lives on; but the Lombard Neustria and Austria soon vanish from the map. Their disappearance was perhaps lucky, as one knows not what arguments might otherwise have been built on the presence of an Austria south of the Alps. ♦Lombardy proper.
Venetia.♦ The Lombard Neustria together with Æmilia got the special name of Lombardy, while the Lombard Austria, after various shiftings of names taken from the principalities which rose and fell within it, came back in the end to its oldest name, that of Venetia. ♦Mark of Ivrea.
Duchy of Friuli.♦ In the north-west corner Iporedia or Ivrea appears as a distinct march; but the Venetian march at the other corner, known at this stage as the duchy of Friuli, is of more importance. It takes in the county of Trent, the special march of Friuli, and the march of Istria. ♦Fluctuation of boundary at the north-west corner.♦ This is the corner in which the German and Italian frontier has so often fluctuated. We have seen that, after the union of the Italian and German crowns, even Verona itself was sometimes counted as German ground.
♦Comparison of Italy and Germany.♦