The music for the show is Flute Sonata in E-flat major, H. Homepage with maps, photos, transcripts and blog: www. Bluesky: hotgpod. Twitter: germanshistory. To make it easier for you to share the podcast, I have created separate playlists for some of the seasons that are set up as individual podcasts. The Ottonians. Salian Emperors and Investiture Controversy. Fredrick Barbarossa and Early Hohenstaufen. Frederick II Stupor Mundi.
Saxony and Eastward Expansion. The Hanseatic League. The Teutonic Knights. The Holy Roman Empire High praise indeed. In the late 15 th century when this was written there were nearly 3, cities in the wider empire north of the Alps, not all of them comparable to Florence, Milan or Rome. So, let us take a look at whether the future pope and creator of his own ideal city, the lovely Pienza in Tuscany was exaggerating, and if not, how Germania turned from a land of impassable forests into a a landscape dominated by cities, large and small.
Nobody would have suggested that German cities, even the largest ones, in and around the year could compete with a sophisticated and wealthy metropolis like Milan or Venice.
To understand why such comparison was at all conceivable, we have to go back to the fundamental changes in the economic landscape since then. One of the main axes of medieval German history had been the expansion eastwards we covered in Season 5. If you have not listened to it, the broad brush story is that from around onwards about , people moved from the densely populated regions of Flanders, Holland and the Rhineland into the lands east of the Elbe roughly equivalent to the area of the former east Germany.
In a second roughly equal sized wave that began around German speaking migrants moved further east, into Silesia, Poland, Prussia, the western part of Bohemia, Hungary, modern day Romania and many more places.
