ABSTRACT
Germany scarcely attained a literary awareness of cultural let alone political unity until the very end of the fifteenth century, and then mainly as a negative impulse, in resistance to the claims of Italians to the intellectual mastery of the west. In Italy the number of significant political units had diminished during the later Middle Ages; in Germany it was on the contrary increasing at the time and it is a temptation to which most historians of the country succumb to write the later medieval history of Germany in terms mainly of the emperor. The kingdom of Germany formed part of the territories of the Holy Roman Emperor, but it was not coincident with them since, as Italians repeatedly pointed out, the Alps formed a political as well as a cultural and to some extent a linguistic frontier. The Empire which thus determined the area of the German kingdom had once been the most powerful monarchy in Europe.
