and prosperity. One view of kingship had been decisively challenged, but the materials with which another might be constructed were already to hand. Despite these immense changes France did not seem closer to political unity nor Germany to political disintegration at the close of the twelfth century. The ground was prepared for a series of huge upheavals, but when they came they took men by surprise. Neither Henry the Lion nor Frederick Barbarossa were anachronisms; each acted with the confidence of many precedents and parallels, reaching back for centuries. In the end it was this very confidence, even blindness to change, which was to give it the shattering, unexpected, impact which was to burst upon Europe in the thirteenth century.
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