ABSTRACT
When first a German king succeeded in gaining the mastery over the whole country, with the support of the church, the power which he held in his hands was, for those days, enormous. In the west Germany had at her first beginning in 911 an apparently admirable frontier: it reached to the Rhine and the Vosges. German colonization of the southern portion of the Eastern Marches was pushed as far as the Leitha, and beyond it: German Austria was born. The German people seemed to have choice before it, if it desired to grow and spread through conquest, of taking either the westward or the eastward direction or both at once. In Lombardy as in Germany the main support of the German rule came from the church. By the middle of the eleventh century the majority of the bishops in the eastern half of Upper Italy were Germans, installed by the king in order to advance German interests in Italy.
