re: #231 aagcobb

Good point. One wonders if at some point they would have recognized the sense of unity and unified, as Germany and Italy did in the 19th Century. That’s all just grist for alternative history novels now, though.

It might have taken as long as it did for Germany and Italy, and they discovered their unity only after centuries of pain caused by their disunity. People think WWII did hideous damage to Germany, but it was nothing compared to the Thirty Years War. Half the population of Germany died in that conflict.

It still took them another two centuries to discover, “We must hang together or we shall surely hang separately.”