Fragmentation: The Holy Roman Empire

"[T]he Empire was not theoretically a national Germany state, but an international state of which the vicissitudes of fortune had left only the German-speaking fragment."1 If it the vicissitudes had truly been random, we might expect a geographic or haphazard loss of territory. Instead the grinding down of the lands of the Empire occured, over hundreds of years, with a linguistic millstone.

At its height, near its birth, the Holy Roman Empire covered modern France, Germany, Northern Italy, Switzerland, Austria, the Czech Republic, Belgium, the Netherlands, Luxemburg, and parts of Denmark, Poland, (Lithuania?), Slovenia, and Slovakia, but by 1618, the year the Thirty Years War began,