Towns.] The towns, whose separate organisation was, in some parts of Europe at least, as much the result of military, as of economic necessities, became the centres of expanding trade and increasing wealth. Within their strong walls they were able to hold their own, and claim for themselves a part in the social system as well as baron or bishop. But feudalism had at last met its master. With its decline before the national spirit, we are on the threshold of modern times. [Sidenote: The growth of national monarchies.] The division of the Empire into local kingdoms, begun at the treaty of Verdun, paved the way for the modern idea of a national state. The Empire stifled the early possibilities of a German nation, and Empire and Papacy combined to make impossible an Italian nation. But in France other prospects arose. Through its virtual exclusion from the Empire, France had been delivered from some very real dangers. The early Capetians were shadows round which a mighty system revolved; but they had a lofty theory and a noble tradition at their back, and the time at last came when they could convert their theory into practice. Philip Augustus made France a great state and nation. [Sidenote: Power passes from Germany to France.] Under St. Louis the leadership of Europe passed definitely from the Germans to the French—from the people ruled by the visionary world-Empire to the people ruled by a popular and effective national monarchy. The alliance between France and the Church, the preponderance of French effort in the Crusades, the spread of the French tongue and literature as the common expression of European chivalry, had made the French nation famous, long before a large proportion of the French nation had been organised into a French state. The Spanish peoples acquired strong local attachments; the English became conscious of their national life. Alfonso the Wise of Castile and Edward I. of England rank with St. Louis and Philip the Fair. Even Frederick II. owed his strength to his national position in Germany and Naples, rather than to his imperial aspirations. Before our period ends, the national principle had clearly asserted itself. Trade, art, literature, religion began to desert cosmopolitan for national channels, and the beginnings of the system of estates and representative institutions show that the great organised classes of mediæval society aspired to share with their kings the direction of the national destinies. The Empire had fallen; the Papacy was soon to be overthrown; feudalism was decayed; the cosmopolitan culture of the universities had seen its best days. It is in the juxtaposition of what was best in the old, and what was most fertile in the new, that gives its unique charm to the thirteenth century. The transition from the Dark Ages to the Middle Ages had been worked out. There were signs that the transition was beginning that culminates in the Renascence and the Reformation.