Before we can safely proceed with the story of European development during the past four hundred years, it is necessary to know what were the chief countries that existed at the beginning of our period and what were the distinctive political institutions of each. A glance at the map of Europe in 1500 will show numerous unfamiliar divisions and names, especially in the central and eastern portions. Only in the extreme west, along the Atlantic seaboard, will the eye detect geographical boundaries which resemble those of the present day. There, England, France, Spain, and Portugal have already taken form. In each one of these countries is a real nation, with a single monarch, and with a distinctive literary language. These four states are the _national_ states of the sixteenth century. They attract our immediate attention. ENGLAND [Sidenote: The English Monarchy] In the year 1500 the English monarchy embraced little more than what on the map is now called "England." It is true that to the west the principality of Wales had been incorporated two hundred years earlier, but the clannish mountaineers and hardy lowlanders of the northern part of the island of Great Britain still preserved the independence of the kingdom of Scotland, while Irish princes and chieftains rendered English occupation of their island extremely precarious beyond the so- called Pale of Dublin which an English king had conquered in the twelfth century. Across the English Channel, on the Continent, the English monarchy retained after 1453, the date of the conclusion of the Hundred Years' War, only the town of Calais out of the many rich French provinces which ever since the time of William the Conqueror (1066- 1087) had been a bone of contention between French and English rulers. While the English monarchy was assuming its geographical form, peculiar national institutions were taking root in the country, and the English language, as a combination of earlier Anglo-Saxon and Norman-French, was being evolved. The Hundred Years' War with France, or rather its outcome, served to exalt the sense of English nationality and English patriotism, and to enable the king to devote his whole attention to the consolidation of his power in the British islands. For several years after the conclusion of peace on the Continent, England was harassed by bloody and confused struggles, known as the Wars of the Roses, between rival claimants to the throne, but at length, in 1485, Henry VII, the first of the Tudor dynasty, secured the crown and ushered in a new era of English history. [Sidenote: Increase of Royal Power in England under Henry VII]