Perhaps this isn’t so surprising. Germany, after all, is a nation steeped in tradition. But Spenkuch, while playing around with those maps, found something that did surprise him. The religious patchwork of modern Germany also overlapped with an interesting economic patchwork: the people living in Protestant areas earned more money than those in Catholic areas. Not a great deal more—about 1 percent—but the difference was clear. If the prince in your area had sided with the Catholics, you were likely to be poorer today than if he had followed Martin Luther.
