The population became by the time the war had ended a mere fraction of what it was at the opening of the seventeenth century. Some idea of the state of things may be gathered from the instance of Augsburg, which during its siege by the Imperialists was reduced from 70,000 to 10,000 inhabitants. What happened to the great commercial city of the Fuggers was taking place on a scale greater or less, according to the district, all over German territory. We read of towns and villages that were pillaged more than a dozen times in a year. This terrific depopulation of the country, the reader may well understand, had vast results on its civilization. The whole great structure of Mediaeval and Renaissance Germany--its literature, art, and social life--was in ruins. At the close of the seventeenth century the old German culture had gone and the new had not yet arisen. But of this we shall have more to say in the next chapter. For the present we are chiefly concerned to give a brief sketch of the second great epoch-making event, or rather train of events, which conditioned the foundation and development of modern Germany. We refer, of course, to the rise of the Prussian monarchy. We should premise that the Prussians are the least German of all the populations of what constitutes modern Germany. They are more than half Slavs. In the early Middle Ages the Mark of Brandenburg, the centre and chief province of the modern Prussian State, was an outlying offshoot of the mediaeval Holy Roman Empire of the German nation, surrounded by barbaric tribes, Slav and Teuton. The chief Slav people were the Borussians, from which the name "Prussian" was a corruption. The first outstanding historic fact concerning these Baltic lands is that a certain Adalbert, Bishop of Prague, at the end of the tenth century went north on a mission of enterprise for converting the Prussian heathen. The neighbouring Christian prince, the Duke of Poland, who had presumably suffered much from incursions of these pagan Slavs, offered him every encouragement. The adventure ended, however, before long in the death of Adalbert at the hands of these same pagan Slavs.