The most important area of Germanized people in the Slavonic belt is what is now known as East Prussia, the disconnected province of the German Republic (1919). This is the zone of gradation from the broad-headed people of Central Europe to the long-headed Baltic folk speaking old languages, of which the now extinct Prussian was one, related to Lithuanian. Christianity had spread down the Vistula before the Germanizing process had {44} got far across the Oder, so that agricultural organization, fixing the popular language, made the lower Vistula mainly Slavonic on its western side. The next stage of progress of the Roman tradition had now to be across the Vistula into East Prussia, and it took place at the suggestion of the ruler of Danzig and the monks of Oliva near by. It was carried out by the Teutonic Knights, and involved Germanization at least of the formerly Prussian-speaking people near the coast. The Masurians farther inland among their marshes were, and remained, more Slavonic, but felt the Germanizing influence sufficiently to secede, along with their northern Germanized neighbours, from the Roman Church in the sixteenth century. The result is a curious one: the modern East Prussians are mainly Polish-speaking, but largely Protestant, among the Masurian Lakes, and German-speaking, and, for Germans, rather unusually long-headed on the coastal plain. In the recent plebiscite even the Masurian Poles showed marked aversion to incorporation in the re-created and intensely Roman Catholic republic of Poland, and it seems probable that, when treaty allocations are finally made, the Masurians as well as the coastal peoples will remain under Germany. East Prussia is a rural region with large estates, and this fact, added to that of its position as a sort of German frontier outpost, has made it intensely patriotic and very conservatively minded. The East Prussian population becomes mixed with people of Lithuanian speech across the Niemen, but Memel, as a town, is naturally largely German. Its fate is (April 1922) not yet settled. The other groups of German speech and associations in Eastern Europe beyond the Vistula and Austria are in no case sufficiently large to be described as _peoples_, though they form important communities, and it may be useful to give a short list here. In Hungary they occur in numbers in the Pécs district (south-west), around Budapest, north-west of the Bakony Wald, &c. {45} In Yugoslavia there are groups in the Backa, between the lower Theiss and the Danube, and in the Banat. The enlarged Rumania has a number of German groups in the metalliferous district east of the Banat, between the upper Maros and the upper Alt, especially near Sibiu (formerly Hermannstadt), around Cluj (formerly Kolozsvar) and Bistrita (Bistritz), in Bukovina, and also in southern Bessarabia.