text:  The forces of that monarchy at all times formidable to its neighbours from the warlike spirit of its inhabitants and their rapacious disposition conspicuous alike in the earliest and the latest times;[4] its central situation forming as it were the salient angle of a bastion projecting into the centre of Germany; and its numerous population--were then in a peculiar manner to be dreaded from their concentration in the hands of an able and ambitious monarch who had succeeded for the first time for two hundred years in healing the divisions and stilling the feuds of its nobles and turned their buoyant energy into the channel of foreign conquest