ABSTRACT
The difficulty of dealing with the history of Germany in the early modern period begins with even the coarsest facts. The boundaries of Germany are a case in point. Because most modern maps of Europe in this period conveniently outline the borders of the Holy Roman Empire with a heavy line and because the Empire embraced most territories which were unarguably German, it is always tempting to equate the borders of Germany with those of the Empire. In fact, however, even contemporaries did not do that. While most educated Germans in 1600 still cherished images of the vaster medieval Empire and its ‘universal mission’ which were powerful enough to engender a sense of pride in this sprawling political corpus and in its German leadership, they were aware that it was a body which, though German in its core, was multinational at almost every point on its periphery. Partly under the influence of ethnic and linguistic criteria popularized by Italian humanism, Germans (and other Europeans, too) had by well before 1600 learned to speak of a Germany distinct from the Empire.
