The Prussian, or rather the Prussian aristocracy, which, by achieving the leadership of Germany, has flung so heavy a mass at Europe, originated in the rough admixture of certain West German and Christian knights with the vague pagan population of the Eastern Baltic plain, which, until almost the close of the Middle Ages, was still a field for missionary effort and for crusade. It was the business of the Teutonic knights to tame this march of Christendom. They accomplished their work almost out of sight of the governing empire, the Papacy, and Christendom in general, with what infamies history records. The district thus occupied was not within the belt of that high Polish culture which is one of the glories of Europe. Nations may not inexactly be divided into those who seek and those who avoid the sea. The Poles are of the latter type. This belt, therefore, of _Borussia_ (whence our word Prussia is derived)--roughly from the Vistula up on to the Bight of Libau--was held by the Teutonic knights in a sort of savage independence. The Christian faith, which it had been their pretext and at first their motive to spread, took little root; but they did open those avenues whereby the civilization which Germany itself had absorbed from the south and west could filter in; and the northern part of the district, that along the sea (which is the least marshy, and, as that poor country goes, the least barren), was from the close of the Middle Ages German-owned, though for some generations nominally adherent to the Polish crown. The Polish race extended no farther northward in the present province than the lake country of its southern half, and even there suffered an admixture of Lithuanian and German blood.