But it may be objected that the evidence of a sectarian historian is not admissible on any question of fact. Take, then, what a sober correspondent writes from the scene of the Thirty Years' War in 1639, not of dogs, but of men: "It is an ordinary thing in Brandenburg country to eat man's flesh,"[144] and he goes on to tell how a judge has just met his death that way. Again, De Thou, approaching Mérindol, finds not a soul to be seen; all had retired to caves at the sight of armed men. Elsewhere he saw all the peasants at work armed, and of one town nothing remained intact but a fountain and one street; the work of a commander, in the king's name, for the gratification of his private revenge. The state produced is well described by Sir Thomas Overbury in 1609 as one in which there was "no man but had an enemy within three miles, and so the country became frontier all over." What "frontier" meant is well defined by an Italian of this time as country to which a few could do no harm and in which many could not live. The prosperity of the Empire while this was the state of France has been already outlined; what it became, as a result of the civil war, while France was becoming the best organised and most civilised country in Europe, may be guessed from Reresby's description of the district which in 1600 had been the most comfortable in Christendom, that between Augsburg and Frankfurt; villages and towns uninhabited, much ground untilled, no meat to be had, no sheets, sometimes no beds; for drink, milk and water, little wine and that sour and very dear; people so boorish as to resemble beasts. Significant, too, is it that while Sir Philip Sidney, defining the qualities of the dominions of Europe for his brother, writes, "Germany doth excel in good laws and well administering of justice," and while all subsequent travellers for forty years confirm this, a German, Zeiler, compiled his guide to Spain shortly before the date when the correspondent just quoted wrote his letter, and in this guide, in maintaining the claims of Spain on the attention of the student, puts among the characteristics in which Spain excels the rest of Europe, the inflexibility of justice there.