ABSTRACT
The idea of the nation as a medieval heritage is used to indicate a variety of historical elements, cultural and political, which combined over the medieval millennium to leave an imprint, albeit at times an unconscious one, on the collective mentality of the different western European peoples. The locution also assumes that this combination of elements crystallised into what we can call a nation, and that if the sentiment of nationhood may in future time have become dormant (because it was absorbed by an alien state), it could always be awakened in modern times by a variety of cultural and political means. The process by which the different Germanic peoples who settled in Western Europe from the third to the sixth centuries, converted to Christianity and identified to a certain extent with the Roman Empire, whilst progressively developing into unstable kingdoms and territorial principalities, is complex, often contradictory and indeterminate.
