Introduction

It is likely that most of the composers and courts considered in this book would have thought of themselves as being German, even if they were nominal citizens and members of the Holy Roman Empire. For the purposes of this study, we can describe the German lands in a geographical sense as stretching from the Baltic and North Sea coasts in the north to the Bavarian lands of the ruling Wittelsbach family in the south, and from the borders of the Spanish Netherlands in the west to Austria and the Kingdom of Bohemia in the east. ¹