By 1400 a new Europe had been made: a loose confederacy of Christian states, with a common high culture, broadly similar social and political institutions, and a developed inter-regional economy.

the rise of Germany must be a principal explanation for the war. The modern country that the great Prussian chancellor Otto von Bismarck created in the second half of the nineteenth century out of what had been literally hundreds of states and principalities became strong and ambitious, inclined to risk and aggression in the less judicious hands of