The idea of expansion towards the East runs through the whole history of Germany like a scarlet thread, and often lends its successive phases a similarity of design and a certain consistency. The history of this expansion is one of the most fascinating epics in European history and it is the Germans themselves who started calling it Drang nach Osten, ranking the results of this drive among the greatest achievements of Germany's national past. Truth to tell, there is an audacity about this Drang, a fierce and ominous dynamism that cannot be denied, for it created a new Germany from the Elbe to the Oder and beyond, deep into the Vistula region. No other Western European nation can boast such a feat, though in the East the Russians accomplished something similar, only on a vaster scale, when they spread out the old Russia from Kiev, Novgorod and Moscow towards the Volga, the Urals and the Siberian steppes as far as Vladivostok. It is, indeed, a dramatic and tragic turning-point in modern European history when these two nations, which developed their grandiose eastward expansion in their own independent spheres, come to a head-on crash in the present bloody and merciless struggle.

Students of history are well aware of the ambiguity of the term medieval. Although it may be true that for some thousand years, between c. 500 and c. 1500 A.D., the social, economic, political and religious life of Western Europe had characteristics easily distinguishable on a broad view from the ancient Greco-Roman civilization that preceded, and from what we call the modern world of nation-states that followed, yet within that millennium the developments are so great, and the changes and declines so numerous, that the careful historian distrusts anything approaching to a general judgment which might confuse century with century, and region with region. Yet in spite of this, many, whose knowledge of the social or artistic life of past ages is very wide, forget such distinctions, and speak readily of the medieval papacy, the medieval village, the medieval craftsman or medieval philosophy, as if each of these expressions denoted a single clear-cut system or institution.

The purpose of this essay is not so much to answer questions as to raise them; not to present conclusions, but to prospect a territory which remains to a remarkable extent unmapped, and to suggest lines of future exploration which few of us, in present circumstances, have either the leisure or the opportunity to pursue.