Part 2 — Chapter IV.—Of Provincial and Communal Institutions. (continued 3)

GERMANY:A. D. 1162-1177. The Emperor and the Pope.

See (in this Supplement) PAPACY: A. D. 1162-1177.

GERMANY:12th-17th Centuries. Causes of the Disintegration of the Empire.

"The whole difference between French and German constitutional history can be summed up in a word: to the ducal power, after its fall, the crown fell heir in France; the lesser powers, which had been its own allies, in Germany. The event was the same, the results were different: in France centralization, in Germany disintegration. The fall of the power of the stem-duchies is usually traced to the subjugation of the mightiest of the dukes, Henry the Lion, who refused military service to the Emperor Frederick Barbarossa just when the latter most needed him in the struggle against the Lombards.

See SAXONY: A. D. 1178-1183 (page 2813).

… The emperor not only banned the duke, he not only took away his duchy to bestow it elsewhere, but he entirely did away with this whole form of rule. The western part, Westphalia, went to the archbishops of Cologne; in the East the different margraves were completely freed from the last remnants of dependence that might have continued to exist. In the intervening space the little ecclesiastical and secular lords came to be directly under the emperor without a trace of an intermediate power and with the title of bishop or abbot, imperial count, or prince. If one of these lords, Bernard of Ascanium, received the title of Saxon duke, that title no longer betokened the head of a stem or nation but simply an honorary distinction above other counts and lords. What happened here had already begun to take place in the other duchy of the Guelphs, in Bavaria, through the detachment from it of Austria; sooner or later the same process came about in all parts of the empire. With the fall of the old stem-duchies those lesser powers which had been under their shadow or subject to them gained every where an increase of power: partly by this acquiring the ducal title as an honorary distinction by the ruler of a smaller district, partly by joining rights of the intermediate powers that had just been removed to their own jurisdictions and thus coming into direct dependence on the empire. … Such was the origin of the idea of territorial supremacy. The 'dominus terrae' comes to feel himself no longer as a person commissioned by the emperor but as lord in his own land. … As to the cities, behind their walls remnants of old Germanic liberty had been preserved. Especially in the residences of the bishops had artisans and merchants thriven and these classes had gradually thrown off their bondage, forming, both together, the new civic community. … The burghers could find no better way to show their independence of the princes than that the community itself should exercise the rights of a territorial lord over its members. Thus did the cities as well as the principalities come to form separate territories, only that the latter had a monarchical, the former a republican form of government. … It is a natural question to ask, on the whole, when this new formation of territories was completed. … The question ought really only to be put in a general way: at what period in German history is it an established fact that there are in the empire and under the empire separate territorial powers (principalities and cities)? As such a period we can designate approximately the end of the 12th and beginning of the 13th centuries. From that time on the double nature of imperial power and of territorial power is an established fact and the mutual relations of these two make up the whole internal history of later times. … The last ruler who had spread abroad the glory of the imperial name had been Frederick II. For a long time after him no one had worn the imperial crown at all, and of those kings who reigned during a whole quarter of a century not one succeeded in making himself generally recognized. There came a time when the duties of the state, if they were fulfilled at all, were fulfilled by the territorial powers. {3762} Those are the years which pass by the name of the interregnum. … Rudolph of Hapsburgh and his successors, chosen from the most different houses and pursuing the most different policies, have quite the same position in two regards: on the one hand the crown, in the weak state in which it had emerged from the interregnum, saw itself compelled to make permanent concessions to the territorial powers in order to maintain itself from one moment to another; on the other hand it finds no refuge for itself but in the constant striving to found its own power on just such privileged territories. When the kings strive to make the princes and cities more powerful by giving them numerous privileges, and at the same time by bringing together a dynastic appanage to gain for themselves an influential position: this is no policy that wavers between conceding and maintaining. … The crown can only keep its place above the territories by first recognizing the territorial powers and then, through just such a recognized territorial power by creating for itself the means of upholding its rights. … The next great step in the onward progress of the territorial power was the codification of the privileges which the chief princes had obtained. Of the law called the 'Golden Bull' only the one provision is generally known, that the seven electors shall choose the emperor; yet so completely does the document in question draw the affairs of the whole empire into the range of its provisions that for centuries it could pass for that empire's fundamental law. It is true that, for the most part it did not create a new system of legislation but only sanctioned what already existed. But for the position of all the princes it was significant enough that the seven most considerable among them were granted an independence which comprised sovereign rights, and this not by way of a privilege but as a part of the law of the land. A sharply defined goal, and herein lies the deepest significance, was thus set up at which the lesser territories could aim and which, after three centuries, they were to attain. … This movement was greatly furthered when on the threshold of modern times the burning question of church reform, after waiting in vain to be taken up by the emperor, was taken up by the lower classes, but with revolutionary excesses. … The mightiest intellectual movement of German history found at last its only political mainstay in the territories. … This whole development, finally, found its political and legal completion through the Thirty Years War and the treaty of peace which concluded it. The new law which the Peace of Westphalia now gave to the empire proclaimed expressly that all territories should retain their rights, especially the right of making alliances among themselves and with foreigners so long as it could be done without violating the oath of allegiance to the emperor and the empire. Herewith the territories were proclaimed to be what they had really been for a long time—states under the empire."

I. Jastrow, Geschichte der deutschen Einheitstraum und seiner Erfüllung (translated from the German). pages 30-37.

GERMANY: 13th-15th Centuries. The rise of the Free Cities and their Leagues.

"Under cities we are to understand fortified places in the enjoyment of market-jurisdiction (marktrecht), immunity and corporate self-government. The German as well as the French cities are a creation of the Middle Ages. They were unknown to the Frankish as well as to the old Germanic public law; there was no organic connection with the Roman town-system. … All cities were in the first place markets; only in market-jurisdiction are we to seek the starting point for civic jurisdiction. The market-cross, the same emblem which already in the Frankish period signified the market-peace imposed under penalty of the king's ban, became in the Middle Ages the emblem of the cities. … After the 12th century we find it to be the custom in most German and many French cities to erect a monumental town-cross in the market-place or at different points on the city boundary. Since the 14th century the place of this was often taken in North-German cities by the so-called Roland-images. … All those market-places gradually became cities in which, in addition to yearly markets, weekly markets and finally daily markets were held. Here there was need of coins and of scales, of permanent fortifications for the protection of the market-peace and the objects of value which were collected together; here merchants settled permanently in growing numbers, the Jews among them especially forming an important element. Corporative associations of the merchants resulted, and especially were civic and market tribunals established. … From the beginning such a thing as free cities, which were entirely their own masters, had not existed. Each city had its lord; who he was depended on to whom the land belonged on which they stood. If it belonged to the empire or was under the administration (vogtei) of the empire the city was a royal or imperial one. The oldest of these were the Pfalz-cities (Pfalzstädte) which had developed from the king's places of residence (Königspfälze). … Beginning with the 12th century and in course of the 13th century all cities came to have such an organ [i. e. a body of representatives] called the Stadtrath (consilium, consules) with one or more burgomasters (magistri civium) at their head. Herewith did the city first become a public corporation, a city in the legal sense. … Of the royal cities many since the time of Frederick II had lost their direct dependence on the empire (Reichsunmittelbarkeit) and had become territorial or provincial cities, through having been sold or pledged by the imperial government. As soon as the view had gained ground that the king had no right to make such dispositions and thus to disregard the privileges that had been granted to the cities, people spoke no longer of royal cities but of cities of the empire. These had, all of them, in course of time, even where the chief jurisdiction remained in the hand of an imperial official, attained a degree of independence approximating to the territorial supremacy of the princes. They had their special courts as corporations before the king. Since the second half of the 13th century they rejoiced in an autonomy modified only by the laws of the realm; they had the disposal of their own armed contingents and the sole right of placing garrisons in their fortresses. They had accordingly also the right of making leagues and carrying on feuds, the right to lordless lands (Heimfallsrecht) … and other prerogatives. The cities of the empire often ruled at the same time over extensive territories. … {3763} Among the cities of the empire were comprised after the 14th century also various cities of bishoprics which had been able to protect themselves from subjection to the territorial power of the bishop, and which only stood to it in a more or less loose degree of subordination. … For the majority of the cities of bishoprics which later became cities of the empire the denomination 'Free Cities' came up in the 14th century (not till later 'Free Cities of the Empire'). … Among the leagues of cities, which especially contributed to raise their prestige and paved the way to their becoming Estates of the Empire or of the principalities, the great Rhenish civic confederation (1254-1256) lasted too short a time to have an enduring effect. The Swabian civic league was for purely political purposes—the maintenance of the direct dependence on the empire (Reichsunmittelbarkeit) against the claims of territorial sovereignty of the princes, and its unfortunate ending served rather to deteriorate than to improve the condition of the cities. It was different with the Hansa. This name, which signified nothing else than gild or brotherhood, was first applied to the gild of the German merchants in the 'stahlhof' in London. This gild, having originated from the amalgamation of various national Houses of German merchants in England, had finally, under the name of 'Hansa of Germany' or 'Gildhall of the Germans in England,' come to comprise all Germans who carried on trade with England. Similar associations of the German merchants were the 'German House' in Venice, the 'German Counting-house' in Bruges and the German Hansas in Wisby on Gotland, in Schonen, Bergen, Riga and Novgorod. The chief purpose of these Hansas was the procuring of a 'House' as a shelter for persons and for wares, the maintaining of peace among, the Hansa brothers, legal protection, the acquisition of commercial privileges, etc. The Hansas were gilds with several elected aldermen at their heads who represented them in external matters and who administered the property. … Quarrels among the brothers might not, under penalty, be brought before external tribunals; they were to be brought before the Hansa committee as a gild-tribunal. This committee had also an extended penal jurisdiction over the members; under certain circumstances they had even the power of life and death in their hands. An especially effective punishment was the Hansa Bann, which occasioned, besides expulsion from the Hansa, a complete boycott on the part of the Hansa brothers. … The community of interests thus founded among these cities led repeatedly, already as early as the second half of the 13th century, to common steps on their part; so that in Hansa affairs a tacit league existed, even although it had not been expressly sanctioned. After this had become more clearly apparent in the troubles with Flanders (1356-1358) the name Hansa was also applied to this league-relationship, so that henceforward besides the Hansa of the German merchants there existed a Hansa of the German cities. The Hanseatic League received a firm organization through the Greifswald and Cologne confederations of 1361 and 1367, both of which were at first only entered into for a single warlike undertaking (against Waldemar of Denmark), but which were then repeatedly renewed and finally looked upon as a permanent league. The Hanseatic League … came forward in external matters, even in international relationships, as an independent legal entity. It carried on war and entered into treaties with foreign nations; it had a league army at its disposal and a league fleet; it acquired whole territorial districts and saw to the building of fortresses. In itself it was not a defensive and offensive league; it did not concern itself with the feuds of single cities with outsiders. The sphere of activity of the league was essentially confined to the province of commerce: protection of commerce, … the closing of commercial treaties, etc. … The head of the League was and continued to be Lubeck. Its kernel, as it were, was formed by the Wendish (i. e. Mecklenburg and Pomeranian) cities which were united under Lubeck. Originally any city of Lower Germany which asked to be taken in was received into the League. … Hansa cities which did not fulfil their federal obligations came under the penalty of the Hansa bann and the general commercial ostracism consequent upon it. … The federal power was exercised by civic diets, which were assemblies of delegates from the members of the council [Rath] of the individual cities. The summons was sent by Lubeck. The decrees were passed in the form of 'recesses.' … Within the League again were narrower leagues with their own common affairs and their own civic diets. After numerous changes the four 'quarters' were recognized as such: the Wendish under Lubeck as its head, the Saxon under Brunswick, the Cologne under Cologne, the Prussian-Livonian under Danzig.

R. Schröder, Lehrbuch der deutschen Rechtsgeschichte (translated from the German), pages 588-609.

See, also, HANSA TOWNS (page 1624), and CITIES, IMPERIAL AND FREE (page 473).

GERMANY: 15th-17th Centuries. The decay of the Hansa.

"The complete ruin of the empire in the course of the 15th century necessarily entailed at last the ruin also of its members. Nowhere did this elementary truth make itself felt in a more terrible manner than in northeastern Germany, in those colonial districts which in consequence of the extraordinary development of the Hansa had risen in importance to the extent of having an influence on the whole east and northeast of Europe. Here the year 1370 had denoted for the Hansa a climax without a parallel. After a glorious war it had closed with the Danish king, Waldemar Atterdag, a peace which seemed about to keep the northern kingdoms, for a long time to come, under the power of its will. But, soon after, the Lubeck-Hanseatic policy began to degenerate. … The Hansa had looked on without interfering at the struggle which began between the Teutonic Order and Poland. This freed it from the threatening maritime supremacy of the Order; besides this it had just become involved, itself, in conflicts in the North. … A long and tedious war ensued … which ended to the disadvantage of the Hansa. … Within the Hansa, during the struggle, the divergency of interests between the Wendish, Prussian and Livonian cities had for the first time become so pronounced as to amount to complete disunion, and already in 1431 in Hanseatic circles the fear could be expressed … 'that the noble confederation of our Hansa will be dissolved and destroyed.' Such being the case it soon became evident that the struggle with King Erich had actually cost the Hansa the 'Dominium maris Baltici.' {3764} For one thing the English and the Dutch, more and more unopposed, began to carry on in the East a commerce which was hostile to the Hansa. … While the Western enemies of the Hansa thus appeared in districts on the Baltic, which had hitherto been reserved for the Hanseatic merchant, the influence on the North Sea of the Baltic Hansa cities diminished also more and more. It was possible indeed, for some time to come, still to hold on to Norway. But further to the southwest the Hansa ships, in the war which England in union with Burgundy had been waging with France since the year 1415, saw themselves attacked on all sides in spite of the neutral flag. It was well-known that the empire would not protect the German flag. It was worse still that in England a more and more violent opposition arose against the Hanseatic privileges, for the progress of this movement laid bare once and for all the fundamental contrast between the commercial interests in England of the Rhenish Hansa cities and those of the 'Osterlings' [Eastern cities]. If the English were prepared perhaps to further extend the rights of the Hansa in their land in return for the simultaneous free entry of their flag in the Baltic, that was a condition which pleased the German western cities as much as it seemed unacceptable to the Osterlings, Lubeck at their head. The English had succeeded in carrying discord into the enemy's camp. Affairs in Flanders were on a footing equally dangerous to the continued existence of the Hansa as a whole. … Lubeck, in a diet of the year 1466, recommended the members of the Hansa to consider the merchants of Cologne as not belonging to the Hansa when in the lands of the Duke of Burgundy. A complete breach could not now fail to come. It occurred, very unfortunately for Cologne and the western cities, on English territory. In 1468 English ships were plundered in the 'Sund,' at the bidding, as was claimed, of the Hansa. The result was that King Edward IV took prisoner all German merchants who happened to be in England and forbade commercial intercourse with Germany. From this restriction, however, the Cologners were able to free themselves through separate negotiations with the king. It was an inconsiderate step thus to separate themselves from the rest of the Hansa, and that, too, in such a question as this. Cologne stood there fully isolated now even from the western cities. Lubeck at once profited by the occasion to have Cologne placed under the Hansa bann and soon after the Hansa, almost entirely united now except for Cologne, began the war against England. In the year 1472 a great fleet sailed out against the island-kingdom; it had complete success. The peace of Utrecht of February 18th 1474 restored once more the old Hanseatic privileges in England and opened up the prospect of damages amounting to £10,000. Cologne had to submit; in 1478 it returned to the Hansa. But all the same there was no complete restoration of the old unity. The mercantile differences between the west and the east cities not only continued but increased, and a dominion over the Baltic, not to mention the North Sea, was, in spite of the momentary success in England, no longer to be thought of. … After about 1490 the interests also of the Wendish cities including, say, Bremen, Hamburg and Lüneburg, became divided. … Thus towards the end of the 15th century the Hansa bore the stamp of decline in all directions, … the political-mercantile preponderance on land, as well as the 'Dominium maris Baltici,' was broken and the league itself was torn by internal dissensions. In the years from 1476 to 1494 only one common Hansa diet was held; complete ruin was now only a question of time. The 16th century and a part still of the 17th century comprise the period of the slow wasting away of the Hansa. While at the beginning of this period the South German merchant-princes developed a German world-commerce, the satiated mercantile houses of the North showed themselves incapable of progressing even on purely commercial paths. They remained in the ruts of old-fashioned commerce." In England "less and less regard was paid to the warnings and plaints of this antiquated piece of retrogression, until Queen Elisabeth made use of the incautious promulgation of an imperial edict forbidding English merchants to settle in the Hansa cities to simply abrogate the Hanseatic privileges in England. It was the key-stone on the tomb of the Hanseatic relations with England, once so close and full of import."

K. Lamprecht, Deutsche Geschichte (translated from the German), volume 4, pages 468-484.

"The unmerciful fate which had overtaken the German nation [the 30 years war], like a storm wind descending upon the land, gave also the death-blow to that proud communal system which when in its prime showed better than any other institution the greatness of the German power in the Middle Ages. He who does not know the history of the Hansa does not know how to estimate the true significance of our people. He does not know that no goal was too distant for it, no task too great; that at the same time it could belong to the first commercial nations of the world and intellectually absorb and work over the idea of humanism, could offer defiance to the kings of the Danes and challenge the pope for usurping the rule of the world. How did things still look on the Thames when in Dantzig, day after day, four or five hundred ships were running in and out, when the merchants of Soest, Dortmund and Osnabrück were opening their counting-houses in the Warangian city of Novgorod? It is in truth nothing new if the German nation today again begins to reckon itself among the naval powers. … In those days it was also the baneful religious schism which hindered the great commercial centres on the German northern coast from making use of the favoring constellations which presented themselves. The evangelical burghers of Lubeck and Rostock could not make up their minds for the sake of advantageous trade connections with Spain to become bailiffs of their brothers of the faith in Holland; they could put no trust in the brilliant promises with which the emperor's Jesuits tried to turn them away from the cause of Denmark and Sweden, and herewith probably the last opportunity was missed of breathing new life in the already aging commercial league. The attempt made in 1641 to renew the league by ten cities remained ineffectual. Lubeck which already in 1629 had lost 96 ships could no longer keep itself from ruin; its great commercial houses became bankrupt and drew down the smaller ones with them in their fall; Dantzig, which still in 1619 had been able to show an export of grain to the amount of 102,981 tons, exported in 1655 only 11,361, and in 1659 not more than 542 tons."

Zwideneck-Sü-denhorst, Deutsche Geschichte, 1648-1740 (translated from the German), volume 1, page 50.

{3765}

GERMANY: 16th Century. At the beginning of the Reformation Movement.

"An increase in pilgrimages first begins to mark a new phase of religious life which was encouraged by the admonitions of preachers of repentance like Capistrano. Like an avalanche did the numbers grow of the pilgrims who streamed together from all parts of Upper and Central Germany, from the foot of the Alps to the Harz Mountains. Thirty, even seventy thousand might have been counted of those who assembled at Niklashausen to hear the words of the prophet (Boeheim) who was already reverenced as a saint. … This 'saint' was burned with an Ave Maria upon his lips. … It might have been supposed that the sad outcome of these movements would have frightened men away, but no; one can boldly maintain on the contrary that never, save during the crusades, were so many pilgrimages made as in the last 60 or 70 years before the reformation. … If that way of striving after righteousness before God, vain and mistaken as it seems to us, may be looked upon as religion, then the last fifty or sixty years before the reformation show an exceptionally high degree of religious feeling, or at least of religions need; a feeling ever increasing through lack of means to satisfy it. With regard to the clergy, indeed, things looked dark enough, especially in North and Central Germany. One does not know which was greater, their lack of knowledge or their lack of morality. … The most incredible facts were brought to light by the later visitations. … The result might have been a complete return to heathenism had such a clergy, which could show, especially in the larger South German cities, but few redeeming exceptions, had the whole spiritual guidance of the people in its hands. But it did not; and the doings of the secular clergy by no means affected the religious life of the community as they would have done to-day. The exponents and fosterers of this religious life at that time in Germany were the mendicant friars: Franciscans, Dominicans, Augustinian friars. … Many things in the outer world, especially at the end of the century, came to aid the church's efforts: the needs of an age in which so much was unstable; the anger of Heaven which, as the monks so drastically preached and the multitude piously believed, so evidently threatened to vent itself. That period of history, indeed, might be called a prosperous one by anyone regarding merely superficially the condition of social and political affairs. It is well known how German commerce prospered at that time, extending to all parts of the world and ever having new paths opened up for it by the new discoveries. Frenchmen and Italians, astounded at the riches and princely splendor which the commercial magnates in the South German trade-centres were able to display, sang the praises of the prosperity and culture of the land. Industry and commerce were on the increase and art, realizing its highest aims, found an abiding-place and self-sacrificing patrons in the houses of the citizens. With every year the number of high and low-grade schools on the Rhine and in South Germany increased in number, and were still scarcely able to do justice to the pressing educational needs. An undercurrent of fresh and joyous creative impulse, full of promise for the future, can be traced among the burghers. But if one regards the age as a whole one sees everywhere not only a threatening, but actually a present decline. The abundant popular literature, more even than the writings of scholars, gives a clear insight into these matters. … Since the days of antiquity, on the eve of the French Revolution alone do we find the opposing principles so sharply contrasted with each other as they were at the end of the Middle Ages. In the rich commercial cities themselves there was already an immense proletariat as opposed to the excessive wealth; and there is reason to believe that never, even counting the present day, have there been so many beggars as in those decades. It must be borne in mind that, both practically and theoretically, beggary was furthered by the church. Much from her rich table fell into the lap of the poor man, and actually not only was it no shame to beg but beggary was a vocation like any other. The man who ate the bread of beggary stood morally higher than he who toiled to gain a living. … Men did, on the other hand, have the consciousness that the great accumulation of capital in the hands of individuals furthered poverty as it always does. The complaints are general against 'selfishness'; the pauper, the town artisan, the noble and the scholar are remarkably in accord on this one point, that deception, usury and cheating are the only explanation of the prosperity of the merchant. When the knight attacked the goods-waggons of the traders he believed that he was only taking what rightfully belonged to himself. The merchants and the rich prelates were responsible to his mind for the deterioration of his own class or estate which can no longer hold its own against the rich civilians. All the more does he oppress his own serfs. Only seldom among the higher classes do we hear a word of pity for the poor man, a word of blame against the fleecing and harrassing of the peasants; much oftener bitter scorn and mockery, which nevertheless is founded on fear; for men know well enough in their inmost souls that the peasant is only waiting for a suitable moment in which to strike out and take bloody vengeance, and anxiously do they await the future. Even among the citizens themselves those who were without possessions were filled with hatred against the rich and against those of high degree. The introduction of Roman law, unintelligible to the burgher and peasant, made the feeling of being without law a common one. The more firmly did men pin their faith on that future in which the Last Judgment of God was to come and annihilate priests and lords. Such impressions, which were kept vivid by an ever spreading popular literature, by word of mouth and by pictorial representations, could only be heightened by the state of political affairs in the last decades of the 15th century and the first years of the 16th. Well known are the many struggles for the firmer organization of the empire, for the carrying through of the reform-plans of a Berthold of Mainz. The publicists of the time, and to no small degree the Emperor Maximilian himself, who, if he wanted to carry through any measure addressed himself directly to the people, cast broadside among the populace numerous pamphlets containing the most unintelligible ideas and promises. {3766} And what a host of plans and ideas did this much loved, knightly emperor not have! How beautifully could he talk of old German might and glory and draw pictures of a rosy future. With intense interest did men follow the transactions of the diets which promised to better affairs. One plan of taxation followed on the heels of another. What project was left undiscussed for the better carrying out of the Peace of the Land! In the end everything remained as it had been save the want and general discomfort which increased from year to year. Bad harvests and consequent rise in prices, famine, severe sicknesses and plagues are once more the stock chapters in the chronicles. Frightful indeed were the ravages caused by the first, almost epidemic, appearance of the Syphilis; with regard to which, during the whole period of the reformation, the moral judgment wavered. … It is a wondrous, gloomy time, torn by contradictions, a time in which all is in a ferment, everything seems to totter. Everything but one institution, the firmly welded edifice of the Roman church. To Germany also came the news of the horrible vices with which the popes just at this time disgraced the Holy See: people knew that no deed was too black for them when it was a question of satisfying their greed of power and their lust. But nevertheless they remained the successors of Peter and the representatives of Christ, and so little can one speak of a process of dissolution in the church, that the latter appears on the contrary the only stable power and the religious-ecclesiastical idea is rather the one that rules all things. Although men to a great extent scorn and mock her servants and long often with burning hatred for their annihilation, yet it continues always to be the church that holds the keys of the Kingdom of Heaven and that can avert the wrath of God; the church, to which the anxious soul turns as the last anchor of hope and tries to outdo itself in her service. It is not indeed pious reverence for a God who is holy and yet gracious that draws the sinners to their knees, but the dread of the tortures of purgatory and of the wrath of Him who sits above the world to judge it. This causes the soul, restless, dissatisfied, to be ceaseless in its endeavors to conciliate the Angry One through sacrificial service—the whole religious activity being one half-despairing 'Miserere' called forth by fear. Such was the spirit of the age in which Martin Luther was born and in which he passed his youth."

Kolde, Martin Luther (translated from the German), volume 1, pages 5-27.

See, also, PAPACY: A. D. 1471-1513, to 1517-1521 (pages 2441-2450).

GERMANY: 16th Century. The Catholic Reaction.

"Altogether about the year 1570 the spread of protestantism in Germany and the lands under its influence had reached its zenith. It had been accepted by the great majority of the nation—already in 1558 about seven tenths; the gaining over of the rest also seemed only a question of the near future. Yet beyond a doubt its lasting success was only legally assured in places where it had won over the governing power and could stand on the generally recognized basis of the religious peace. This was the case in the secular principalities of the protestant dynasties, but not in the Wittelsbach and Hapsburgh lands, where its lawful existence depended only on the personal concessions of the existing ruler, and still less in the ecclesiastical territories. … To give it here the secure legal basis which it lacked was the most important problem, as regarded internal German affairs, of the protestant policy. … The only way to attain this was to secure the recognition on the part of the empire of the free right of choosing a confession in the bishoprics; in other words the renunciation of the 'Ecclesiastical reservation.' … This goal could only be attained if the protestants advanced in a solid phalanx. This is, however, just what they could not do. For they themselves were torn by bitter contentions with regard to the faith. … From this point of view it was no boon that Calvinism, the specifically French form of protestantism, found entrance also into Germany. … Under its influence, to begin with, the Saxon-Thuringian church became divided in its interpretation of the teachings concerning justification and the Lord's Supper. … The complications were still further increased when Frederick III of the Palatinate, elector since 1559, disgusted at the quarrelsomeness of the Lutheran theologians, dismissed the zealot Tilemann in August 1560, and in 1563 gave over the recognized church of the Palatinate to Calvinism. Herewith he completely estranged the Lutherans who did not regard the Calvinists as holding the same faith. … Germany could no longer count itself among the great powers and at home the discord was ever increasing. The motion of the Palatinate in the electoral diet of October 1575 to incorporate in the religious peace the so-called 'Declaration of King Ferdinand' with regard to it, and thus to secure the local option with regard to a creed in the bishoprics, was opposed not only by the ecclesiastical members of the electoral college but also by the electorate of Saxony. In consequence of the same party strife a similar motion of the Palatinate, made in the diet of Regensburg, was lost. … On the one hand hostilities grew more bitter among the German protestants, on the other the Roman church, supported by the power of the Spanish world-monarchy, advanced everywhere, within and without the German empire, to a well-planned attack. … She had won her first victory in the empire with the refusal in 1576 to grant the local option of creed, for this was almost equivalent to a recognition on the protestant side of the 'Ecclesiastical Reservation.' The more eagerly did Rome, by demanding the oath drawn up in the council of Trent, strive to chain fast her bishops to her, to remove those who made opposition even if it had to happen by disregarding the law of the land and the religious treaties, to bring zealous catholic men into the episcopal sees—everywhere to set the reaction in motion. The manner of proceeding was always the same: the protestant pastors and teachers were banished; the catholic liturgy, in which the utmost splendor was unfolded, was reintroduced into the churches, and competent catholic clergy were put in office. The members of the community, left without a leader, had now only the choice allowed to them of joining the catholic church or of emigrating; the protestant officials were replaced by catholic ones; new institutions of learning, conducted by Jesuits, were founded for the purpose of winning the rising generation, inwardly also, for Catholicism. {3767} Beyond a doubt this whole work of restoration put an end in many cases to a confused and untenable state of affairs, but at least as often it crushed down by force a healthy, natural development and wrought havoc in the moral life of the people. Thus did the reaction gain the ascendancy in most of the ecclesiastical principalities of the South; in the North the scale still hung in the balance. … And in this condition of affairs the discord among the protestants grew worse year by year! 'Their war is our peace' was the exultant cry of the Catholics when they looked upon this schism. In order to preserve pure Lutheranism from any deviation, the electoral court of Saxony caused the 'Formula of Concord' to be drawn up by three prominent theologians in the monastery of Bergen near Madgeburg (20 May 1577), and compelled all pastors and teachers of the land to accept them under pain of dismissal from office. As this necessarily accentuated the differences with the Calvinists, John Casimir of the Palatinate endeavored, in the Convention of Frankfort on the Main in 1577, to unite the protestants of all denominations and all lands … in a common effort at defence; but his appeal and the embassy which he sent to the evangelical princes met with no very favorable reception. On the contrary in course of time 86 estates of the empire accepted the Formula of Concord which was now published in Dresden, together with the names of those who had signed it, on the 25th of June 1580, the 50th anniversary of handing in the Augsburg Confession. What a pass had matters come to since that great epoch! … At any rate the unity of the German protestants was completely at an end, and especially any joint action between Saxony and the Palatinate had been rendered impossible. … In 1582 the Roman party opened a well-planned campaign for the purpose of putting itself in full possession of the power in the empire. The emperor belonged as it was to their confession, so all depended on the manner in which the diet should be made up; and this again depended on who should be members of the college of princes: for in the college of electors the votes of the protestants and catholics were equal inasmuch as the Bohemian vote was 'dormant,' and of the imperial cities only a few were still catholic. In the electoral college, then, the protestants possessed the majority so long as the 'administrators' [of the bishoprics] maintained as hitherto their seat and their vote. In the first place the catholics succeeded in the diet of 1582 in persuading Magdeburg for the nonce to renounce in favor of Salzburg its presidency in the assembly of the princes; herewith, however, a precedent was given, not only for this ecclesiastical foundation but for all the evangelical administrators, that permitted of the most fateful conclusions being drawn to the disadvantage of the protestants. Scarcely had this happened when the Roman party gave a decisive turn to affairs on the Lower Rhine. Archbishop Gebhard of Cologne prepared to follow the example of his predecessor Hermann of Wied, chiefly induced, it must be said, by the wish to gain the hand of the fair countess Agnes of Mansfeld. Relying on the Cologne protestants and the Counts of the Wetterau and reckoning on help from the Netherlands he formally went over to the protestant church on the 19th of December 1582, proclaimed the local option of a creed for his diocese on the 16th of January 1583, and married the Countess Agnes a few weeks later in Bonn. While on the one hand, now, the diet of the duchy of Westphalia declared for him and the local option was here put through, the Cologne diet, on the other, called together by the cathedral chapter, declared against him, under pressure as it was from both Spain and Rome. Pope Gregory XIII deposed him … and on the 23rd of May the pupil of the Jesuits, Ernest of Bavaria, who already since 1566 had been bishop of Freisingen, since 1573 of Hildesheim, since 1581 also of Liege, was placed in the see of Cologne. The war began. On the one side Spanish and Bavarian troops marched into the land, on the other forces from the Netherlands and the Palatinate, led by John Casimir in person under the approval of Louis VI. … The fortunes of war soon turned completely against him [Gebhard], … he himself was beaten and compelled to flee to the Netherlands, and Westphalia was then conquered. This victory was decisive not only for Northern Germany, but for the fate of the bishoprics altogether—indeed for the whole form which the administration of the empire was to take. Had Gebhard held his own, the majority in the electoral college would have become protestant; the bishoprics in the northwest which had not yet taken a decisive stand, and probably others also, would have followed the example of Cologne and would never have allowed their seats in the assembly of princes to be taken from them; the Lower Rhenish-Westphalian provinces would then have been gained for protestantism. The opposite of all this now happened. In the first place Archbishop Ernest restored the Roman church by the most oppressive means in Westphalia; he called the Jesuits to Bonn, Neuss, Emmerich and Hildesheim. His election as bishop of Munster (May 1585) decided the victory in that bishopric also. … The Roman party succeeded now, actually, in driving the administrators from the diet. In order not to cause the violent dissolution of the diet which met in April 1594 for the purpose of granting a tax which was pressingly needed for the Turkish war, Magdeburg renounced once more Its presidency in the college of princes; and when, in December 1597, the diet was again called for the same purpose, the catholic estates, in spite of all protests to the contrary, regarded the matter as having been settled by the precedents of the last two diets. Herewith the administrators lost their seats in the diet, and in the college of princes the majority was in the hands of the catholics. Inasmuch also as the evangelical members of the college of electors did not hold together, the total majority of the diet was at the disposal of the catholics. … On the 27th of April 1608 the Palatinate, together with Brandenburg and nine lesser protestant estates, but without the electorate of Saxony [Luther's state!], declared to Duke Ferdinand of Styria, the emperor's representative, that they would leave the diet but would maintain the possession of the ecclesiastical estates by force if necessary. The schism with the church had already paralyzed the judicial system of the empire; it now paralyzed also its highest political corporation."

Käemmel, Deutsche Geschichte (translated from the German), pages 701-715.

See, also, PAPACY: A. D. 1537-1563 (page 2458).

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GERMANY: A. D. 1615. First newspaper publications.

See PRINTING AND PRESS: A. D. 1612-1650 (page 2592).

GERMANY: A. D. 1618-1700. The rise of Prussia.

"King Frederick [the Great] has good reason for it when he says in his memoirs: 'Just as a river first becomes valuable when it gets to be navigable, so the history of Brandenburg first gains more serious importance towards the beginning of the 17th century.' It was under the elector John Sigismund that three decisive occurrences took place which opened up a great future for the Marks—a totally different development from the growth of the other lands of the empire. These were the joining to Brandenburg of the secularized provinces of the Teutonic Order, the going over of the ruling house itself to the reformed church, finally the acquisition of the Lower Rhenish border lands. Other princes of the empire also, catholics as well as protestants, had enlarged their power by means of the lands of the old church. But in the matter of the territory of the Order the policy of the German protestants ventured its boldest move; by Luther's advice the Hohenzollern Albrecht snatched away from the Roman church the largest of all its clerical belongings. The whole territory of the new duchy of Prussia was alienated ecclesiastical land; the pope's anathema and the emperor's ban fell on the head of the renegade prince. Never was the Roman See willing to recognize such robbery. In uniting the ducal crown of their Prussian cousins with their own electoral hat the Hohenzollerns of the Mark broke forever with the Roman church. Their state stood and fell henceforward with the fortunes of Protestantism. At the same time John Sigismund adopted the reformed creed. … At the same time of thus gaining a firm footing on the Baltic John Sigismund acquired the duchy of Cleve together with the counties of Mark and Ravensberg,—a territory narrow in circumference but highly important for the internal development as well as for the European policy of the state. They were lands which were strongholds of old and proven peasant and civic freedom, richer and of higher capacities for culture than the needy colonies of the East, outposts of incalculable value on Germany's weakest frontier. In Vienna and Madrid it was felt as a severe defeat that a new evangelical power should establish itself there on the Lower Rhine where Spaniards and Netherlanders were struggling for the existence or non-existence of protestantism—right before the gates of Cologne which was the citadel of Romanism in the empire. … A power so situated could no longer have its horizon bounded by the narrow circle of purely territorial policy; it was a necessity for it to seek to round off its widely scattered provinces into a consistent whole; it was compelled to act for the empire and to strike for it, for every attack of strangers on German ground cut into its own flesh. … For the House of Brandenburg, too, tempting calls often sounded from afar, … but a blessed providence, which earnest thinkers should not regard as a mere chance, compelled the Hohenzollerns to remain in Germany. They did not need the foreign crowns, for they owed their independent position among other states to the possession of Prussia, a land that was German to the core, a land the very being of which was rooted in the mother-country, and yet at the same time one that did not belong to the political organization of the empire. Thus with one foot in the empire, the other planted outside of it, the Prussian state won for itself the right to carry on a European policy which could strive for none but German ends. It was able to care for Germany without troubling itself about the empire and its superannuated forms. … The state of the Hohenzollerns plunged once again headlong from the position of power which it had so recently attained; it was on the sure road to ruin so long as John Sigismund's successor looked sleepily into the world out of his languid eyes. This new attempt, too, at forming a German state seemed again about to end in the misery of petty-stateism as had been the case formerly with the political constellations of the Guelphs, the Wettiners, the Counts Palatine, which had arisen under immeasurably more favorable auspices. It was at this juncture that the elector Frederick William, the greatest German man of his day, entered the chaos of German life as a prince without land, armed only with club and sling, and put a new soul into the slumbering forces of his state by the power of his will. From that time on the impulse of the royal will, conscious of its goal, was never lost to the growing chief state of the Germans. One can imagine English history without William III, the history of France without Richelieu; the Prussian state is the work of its princes. … Already in the first years of the rule of the Great Elector the peculiar character of the new political creation shows out sharply and clearly. The nephew of Gustavus Adolphus who leads his army to battle with the old protestant cry of 'with God' resumes the church policy of his uncle. He it is who first among the strife of churches cries out the saving word and demands general and unconditional amnesty for all three creeds. This was the program of the Westphalian peace. And far beyond the provisions of this treaty of peace went the tolerance which the Hohenzollerns allowed to be exercised within their lands. … While Austria drives out its best Germans by force, the confines of Brandenburg are thrown open with unequalled hospitality to sufferers of every creed. How many thousand times has the song of praise of the Bohemian exiles sounded forth in the Marks! … When Louis XIV revokes the Edict of Nantes the little Brandenburg lord steps forth boldly against him as the spokesman of the protestant world, and offers through his Potsdam Edict shelter and protection to the sons of the martyred church. … Thus year after year an abundance of young life streamed over into the depopulated East Marks; the German blood that the Hapsburghs thrust from them fructified the land of their rivals, and at the death of Frederick II about a third of the inhabitants of the state consisted of the descendants of immigrants who had come there since the days of the Great Elector. … The particularism of all estates and of all territorial districts heard with horror how the Great Elector forced his subjects to live as 'members under one head,' how he subjected the multiplicity of rule in the diets to the commands of his own territorial jurisdiction and supported his throne on the two columns of monarchical absolutism: the miles perpetuus and permanent taxation. {3769} In the minds of the people troops and taxes still passed for an extraordinary state burden to be borne in days of need. But Frederick William raised the army into a permanent institution and weakened the power of the territorial estates by introducing two general taxes in all his provinces. On the country at large he imposed the general hide-tax (general-hufenschoss), on the cities the accise, which was a multiform system of low direct and indirect imposts calculated with full regard for the impoverished condition of agriculture and yet attacking the taxable resources at as many points as possible. In the empire there was but one voice of execration against these first beginnings of the modern army and finance system. Prussia remained from the beginning of its history the most hated of the German states; those imperial lands that fell to this princely dynasty entered, almost all of them, with loud complaints and violent opposition into this new political combination. All of them soon afterwards blessed their fate. … Frederick William's successor by acquiring the royal crown gained for his house a worthy place in the society of the European powers and for his people the common name of Prussians. Only dire need, only the hope of Prussia's military aid, induced the imperial court to grant its rival the new dignity. A spasm of terror went through the theocratic world: the electorate of Mainz entered a protest; the Teutonic Order demanded back again its old possession, which now gave the name to the heretical monarchy while the papal calendar of states, for nearly a hundred years to come, was to know only a 'margrave of Brandenburg.'"

H. von Treitschke, Deutsche Geschichte im 19ten Jahrhundert (translated from the German), volume 1, pages 26-36.

See, also, GERMANY: A. D. 1608-1618 (page 1466), and PRUSSIA: A. D. 1700 (page 2613).

GERMANY: A. D. 1648. The effects of the Thirty Years War.

"The national recollection holds fast to the great German war as a thirty years continuance of universal warlike ravagings. As a matter of fact, however, the separate parts of the empire were directly affected by it in very different degrees; some parts only seldom and to a small extent, many at frequent intervals or through long-enduring periods: no part however to such an extent that during the whole three decades it stood always under the immediate pressure of military events and of military burdens. Devastation and exhaustion worked their immediate results in all directions, but we must not leave out of consideration that the local differences were naturally very great. An incalculable number of details concerning the horrors of the war and concerning its destructive effects lies before us. … So undoubtedly well-founded as on the whole the majority of these details may be said to be, impressively as they are apt to be brought forward, they are none the less not such as to suffice to enable us to gain from them an exhaustive representation of the condition of things. We have hundreds who give testimony to all the ravagings and the misery of the time, and the voices of such witnesses are almost the only ones that are heard. It is natural that there are no equally eloquent reports concerning those periods of time and those places in which people found themselves in medium and comparatively bearable circumstances. For the most part only what was exceptional—although, indeed, that happened only too often—is depicted in the complaining reports. … It cannot be denied too that amid the fearful needs of that time the German language succumbed to a certain propensity for what is monstrous. In all the writings which speak of war and the ravages of war one sees an exuberance, which comes to be a fixed mannerism, of almost whiny tones of complaint. … The superlative of horror predominates almost exclusively; and with an exceedingly fertile faculty of invention men surpass themselves in ever new, ever more blood-curdling variations of the one theme of blood and arson, of wretchedness and famine. … The most severe of all evils, indeed, as a matter of fact, were those to which the peasant element was subjected. … The profits of all agricultural labor were most perceptibly diminished on account of the extraordinary highness of wages, which, a natural result of the lack of workmen, formed the subject for the chief complaints after the war, especially of those classes which possessed land. Everywhere we meet with the fact that those entirely without property, such as serving men and maids are really better off than the peasant who has land. They draw the highest wages in money and in natural products, they must be treated with the greatest consideration by their employers to prevent them from quitting their service, for everywhere they are sought after and easily do they find work. … If the evils hitherto touched upon concerned chiefly the peasant holdings, there was another and no less important one which concerned all property holders and especially the nobles, whether feudatory or directly under the empire. This was the general burden of debt on landed property. … The noble as well as the peasant had, from of old, mortgages resting upon his property; those who made the loans were chiefly the large and the small capitalists in the cities. … As a matter of fact, already during the war itself in large parts of the empire the landed property had been in a condition of insolvency."

B. Erdmannsdörffer, Deutsche Geschichte, 1648-1740 (translated from the German), volume 1, pages 100-109.

"How bitterly the decrease of population was felt in many regions is proved by a decree of the local diet [kreistag] in Franconia, transmitted to us by Hormayr, according to which any man might take two wives, priests (catholic) might marry and no man under 60 years of age might enter a monastery. Quite incalculable was the loss of domestic animals; we have but very incomplete statistics on the subject, but according to these few the assertion is not unjustifiable that at most one fifth of the number existing before the war remained. The lack of working people being so great it was therefore inevitable that famine should break out in very many regions. The memoranda in chronicles and diaries contain truly horrible, heart-breaking representations on the subject. J. J. Rayser's 'Historischer Schauplatz der Stadt Heidelberg' reports from the Palatinate: … 'Many rejoiced if they could only get oxhides, cowhides, the skins of horses, sheep and other animals, and eat them. Indeed cruel hunger drove them to other things too, towards which human nature is apt to feel horror and disgust. They ate dogs, cats, rats, mice, frogs and other animals in order to appease their bitter hunger. {3770} Nor did they refrain from such animals as had already lain for several weeks on the roads, or in pools and streams and which gave forth a horrible odor. … The starving people even killed each other and ate up the corpses; they ransacked the cemeteries, broke open graves, climbed up on the gallows and on the wheel and took the dead away to eat them.' … The reports of single cases of cannibalism from neighborhoods where otherwise the most friendly and contented people lived, are too disgusting to allow us to quote any further examples. … There is no other example of a destruction of civilization such as the Thirty Years War in Germany produced. There is no other case where a whole people in all parts of the land was uniformly exposed to such severe losses, so that in numbers it was reduced to one half; where, from riches, luxury and abundance such as had undoubtedly prevailed at the beginning of the century men had come to poverty and to the want of even the necessaries of life. … The dissolution of the numerous military organizations and the dismissal of the regiments had created an enormous number of tramps of the most dangerous sort and still continued to do much towards increasing vagabondage. The grade of intelligence among the people of the lowlands had decreased most alarmingly; while superstition was continually on the increase. Witch-trials flourished both in the city and in the country. Beggary had long ceased to be a cause for shame; the war, which had brought down to it in a short time even those who had been formerly the richest, caused even the most dishonorable trade to be held in honor. Whoever by daily labor could earn his daily bread might think himself fortunate. In the place of the horses which war had carried away, human beings took to dragging carts in the street. … With the ruin of the trade and of the art industry of Germany, which in the 16th century would for so many objects have probably needed to fear no rivalry and which was only surpassed by that of Italy, went hand in hand the rise and increase of French industry. This was due in no small part to the fact that an extensive market was opened up for it in Germany. From the great and small courts of the secular and ecclesiastical princes, from the estates of the nobles, where the plunder of the generals and colonels of all nations and confessions had at last indeed been unloaded, the money contributed by the subjects flowed into the strong-boxes of the Paris manufactories, which dictated the fashions for the whole continent. Thus did the industrial triumph of France supplement its political supremacy; thus did Germany's misfortune become the cause of enriching her western neighbor, France having known how to secure its existence as a state by itself three centuries earlier than the Germans had done."

H. von Zwiedineck-Südenhorst, Deutsche Geschichte, 1648-1740 (translated from the German), volume 1, pages 45-49.

"Through the complete destruction of its old civilization, through an unexampled devastation of its prosperity and ruin of its moral life the fatherland of the Reformation had saved for that part of the world the freedom of faith. Strangers played with the strongest people of Europe. That language which in Luther's and Hutten's time had gloried at once in the purity of its origin and in the terse power of its national plainness had become Gallicized and full of flourishes, a disgusting mixture of flatness and bombast, of artificiality and coarseness, so servile, so incapable of expressing in simple grandeur what was high and noble that in answer to the question what German writings of those times can we read to-day the honest reply must be, with the exception of some poems by Simon Dach, Logau and Paul Gerhard, solely the droll adventures of Simplicissimus and the merry sermons of Father Abraham a Santa Clara. The terror and need of the time, the rule of brute force and the intrusion of foreign customs, had jarred and disturbed the inner life of the nation to its very depths. Truth and fidelity had vanished, as well as the proud frankness and bright enjoyment of life of the older generation. A hideous greed of gold had taken hold of high and low; the boastful pride of luxurious extravagance continued in the midst of the general poverty."

Essay by Heinrich von Treitschke, quoted by Zwiedineck, page 52.

See, also, GERMANY: A. D. 1648, to 1648-1780 (pages 1484-1489).

GERMANY: A. D. 1648-1715. Relations of Austria, Germany and France after the Thirty Years War.

"After 1648 it was the natural policy of the Hapsburgh emperors to maintain the status quo of the Westphalian treaties. … After the emperor had once lost the prospect of gaining for himself the undivided rule over Germany, all his endeavors were needed at least to hinder it from passing to another. The efforts of the separate territorial sovereigns to enlarge and round off their lands, their attempts to extend their power externally and at the same time to tighten their hold on their own subjects found henceforward a counterpoise in Austria."

L. Häusser, Deutsche Geschichte (translated from the German), volume 1, page 21.

"The whole shamefulness of this disintegration of Germany, showed itself in the defenceless state of the empire. … Right under the greedy hands of France lay the weakest, the most unguarded members of the empire. All along that priest-avenue the Rhine, from Munster and Osnabrück up to Constance, stretched a confused mass of tiny states, incapable of in any way seriously arming themselves, compelled to betray their country through the feeling of their own utter weakness. Almost all the Rhenish courts held pensions from Versailles. … Fully one-third of Germany served in the wars of the empire as a dead burden. … The weakness of Germany was to blame for the new growth of power in Austria and France; … the foreigners laughed at the 'querelles allemandes' and the 'misère allemande'; the Frenchman Bonhours mockingly asked the question if it was possible that a German could have intellect. … As the born antagonist of the old order of things in Europe the basis of which was Germany's weakness, Prussia stood in a world of enemies whose mutual jealousies formed her only safeguard. She was without any natural ally, for the German nation had not yet come to understand this budding power. … Just as the House of Savoy was able to tread its way through the superiority of the Hapsburghs on the one hand and of the Bourbons on the other, so did Prussia, although immeasurably harder pressed, have to find a path for herself between Austria and France, between Sweden and Poland, between the maritime powers and the inert mass of the German empire. {3771} She had to use every means of remorseless egoism, always ready to change front, always with two strings to her bow. The electorate of Brandenburg felt to the very marrow of its being how deeply foreign ideas had eaten into Germany. All the disorganized forces … which opposed the strong lead of the new monarchy placed their faith in foreign help. Dutch garrisons were stationed on the Lower Rhine and favored the struggle of the Cleve estates against their German lords. The diets of Magdeburg and of the electoral Mark counted on Austria. … Frederick William breaks down the barriers of the Netherlanders in the German Northwest; he drives their troops from Cleve and from East Friesland. … Then he calls out to the deaf nation his warning words, 'Remember that you are Germans,' and seeks to drive the Swedes from the soil of the empire. Twice did the ill-will of France and Austria succeed in robbing the Brandenburg prince of the reward of his victories, of the rule in Pomerania: the fame of the day at Fehrbellin they could not take from him.

See BRANDENBURG: A. D. 1640-1688 (page 310).

… When the republic of the Netherlands threatened to fall before the attack of Louis XIV Brandenburg caught the raised arm of the conqueror.

See NETHERLANDS: A. D. 1674-1678 (page 2289).

Frederick William carried on the only serious war that the empire ventured on for the recovery of Alsace.

See AUSTRIA: A. D. 1672-1714 (page 209)].

… With the rise of Prussia began the long bloody work of freeing Germany from foreign rule. … In this one state there awoke again, still half unconscious as if drunken with long sleep, the old hearty pride in the fatherland. … The House of Hapsburgh recognized earlier than the Hohenzollerns did themselves how hostile this modern North German state was to the old constitution of the Holy Empire. In Silesia, in Pomerania, in the Jülich-Cleve war of succession—everywhere Austria stood and looked with distrust on its dangerous rival. … Equally dangerous to Hapsburgh and to the German empire were the French and the Turks; how natural was it for Hapsburgh to seek support from Germany, to involve the empire in its wars, to use it as a bulwark towards the west or for diversions against France in case the Turks threatened the walls of Vienna. … Only it cannot be denied that in this common action the Austrian policy, under a more centralized guidance and backed by a firmer tradition, looked out for its own advantage better than did the German empire—loose, heavy, and without consistent leadership. When the might of Louis XIV began to oppress Germany the policy of the Hapsburghs was to remain for a long time luke-warm and inactive. This policy led Austria indeed even to make a league with France and, when she did at last decide to help the great elector of Brandenburg against the enemy of the empire, this happened so charily and equivocally as to give rise to the doubt whether the Austrian army was not placed there to keep watch over the Brandenburg forces or even to positively hinder their advance. An Austrian writer himself assures us that Montecuculi was in secret commanded only to make a show of using his weapons against the French. For a long time Austria stood by inactive while the Reannexations were going on.

See FRANCE: A. D. 1679-1691 (page 1236).

… The whole war as conducted by Austria on the Rhine and in the West was languid and sleepy;

See AUSTRIA: A. D. 1672-1714 (page 209);

the empire and individual warlike princes were left to protect themselves. What an entirely different display of power did Austria make when it was a question of fighting for its own dynastic interests!"

H. von Treitschke, Deutsche Geschichte im 19ten Jahrhundert (translated from the German), volume 1, pages 21-33.

"As in the wars so in the diplomatic negotiations the separation of the Austrian dynastic interests from the advantage and needs of the German empire often enough came to light. It is only necessary to revert to the attitude which the emperor's diplomacy took at Nimeguen and Ryswick.

See NIMEGUEN (page 2362); and FRANCE: A. D. 1697 (page 1243)].

… When in the conferences at Gertruidenburg (1710) Louis XIV was reduced to being willing not only to give up the 'Reannexations' and Strassburg but even to restore Alsace and the fortress of Valenciennes, it was also not the interests of the empire but solely those of the House of Hapsburgh which led to the rejection of these offers and to the continuance of a war by which, as it turned out eventually, not one of these demands was gained. No wonder that in Germany, restricted though the imperial authority already was, men still did not feel secure so long as the emperor continued to have even the power of making peace independently of the empire."

L. Häusser, Deutsche Geschichte (translated from the German). volume 1, page 23.

"Louis XIV regarded himself not exactly as enemy of the German empire and of the imperial power of the House of Hapsburgh, but rather as a pretendant to the throne. As he explains it in the political directions meant for his son the empire of the West, the heritage of Charles the Great, belongs not of right to the Germans but to the kings who are crowned at Rheims. … The Germans have ruined the empire, only a ruler with the power of the French king can bring it again to honor. … If Louis XIV by means of the Rhine Confederation of 1658 saw himself bound in a close communion with German princes and electors, if his troops rushed in at the decisive moment before Erfurt and at Saint Gothard, if his omnipresent diplomacy sought to find starting-points everywhere, even in the Hofburg at Vienna: all this seemed to him activity in a field which he really felt belonged to himself. The rendering of the German princes dependent on the French court, the loosening of the bonds which held the empire together, the isolation of the Hapsburghs from the rest of the empire: these were tasks which presented themselves as a matter of course if taken in connection with those views of the right of the French to the empire. … Already in Richelieu's time the king's councillor, Jacques de Cassan, had brought forward the proof, in a writing dedicated to the cardinal, that the greater part of the existing European states, including Germany, were lands which had unjustly been estranged from the French crown. … This idea d'Auberry now carried further: as a matter of fact Germans and French were to be considered one people as they had been under the Merovingians and Carolingians; … the true ruler, in the sense of the original world-organization was not the emperor but the French king."

B. Erdmannsdörffer, Deutsche Geschichte (1648-1740) (translated from the German), volume 1, page 509.

{3772}

GERMANY: A. D. 1789-1792. Germany and the French Revolution.

"What enthusiasm prevailed when France proclaimed the equality of everything that bears human form, when the prophecies of Rousseau, who spoke as no other Frenchman could, to the hearts, to the courage, to the ideals of the German youth, seemed about to be realized! All the cravings of the time, the noble eagerness to recognize the dignity of man and the heaven-storming defiance of the sovereign ego, found themselves satisfied by the bold sophism of the Genevan philosopher who declared that, in a condition of absolute equality, everyone should obey himself only. The sins of the Revolution appeared to the harmless German spectators as hardly less seductive than its great deeds. The taste which had been educated on Plutarch's lives of heroes grew loyally excited over the broad Catonism of the new apostles of freedom: the unhistorical abstractions of their political creed were in keeping with the philosophical self-satisfaction of the age. The over-zealous youths in whose ears still sounded the stirring words of the robber Moor felt themselves drawn along by the rhetorical pathos of the French and unsuspectingly admired the republican virtue of the Girondists at the very time when this party with unhallowed frivolity was instigating a war against Germany. … In Hamburg and several other cities the festival of confraternity was celebrated and the liberty pole erected on the anniversary of the storming of the Bastille. … Even in Berlin women of rank were seen adorned with the tricolored ribbon and the rector of the Joachimsthal gymnasium, in a solemn official address held on the occasion of the king's birthday, praised the glorious Revolution to the lively applause of Minister Hertzberg. … But this enthusiasm of the German cultivated world for revolutionary France was and remained purely theoretical; … the German admirers of the Revolution never once laid before themselves the question how their feelings on the subject should take on flesh and blood. The wise man of Konigsberg [Kant] unconditionally and harshly rejected all right of resistance. Even Fichte, the most radical of his disciples, who even in the days of Robespierre still dared to defend French liberty, warned emphatically against the carrying out of his own ideas. He saw no bridge between the 'level high road of natural law' and the 'dark defile of a half-barbaric policy,' and he closed with the renunciatory declaration: 'Worthiness to attain liberty can only come upwards from below; freedom itself, if there is to be no disturbance, can only descend from above.' … When the struggle of parties continued to rage ever more fiercely and with more cruelty, when the fanatic zeal for equality took upon itself to annihilate even the last aristocracy of all, that of life itself, then the faithful and unchanging mind of the German found it impossible any longer to follow the unaccountable contortions of French passion. The German enthusiast turned weeping away from the barbarian who had defiled his sanctuary. … Only in the minor states, which lacked the sense of justice of a monarchy, did the sins of the old French regime find an echo. There in the Germany of the religious foundations (the Rhine bishoprics) there still flourished the catholic unity of faith and the pride of cathedral chapters which were recruited from nobles. In the cities of the empire the haughtiness and corruption of old civilian confraternity held sway, in the territories of the princes, counts and imperial knights, the arrogance of little corner tyrants. The whole existence of these ruined and ossified forms of government cried shame on the ideas of the century. Almost solely in these tiniest provinces did a slight popular ferment show itself when the glad news of the great peasant emancipation came from France. It chanced that the abbess of Frauenalbe was hunted from her lands by her subjects, that the oath of allegiance was refused to her sister-abbess in Elten. Small peasant revolts broke out here and there. … All this betokened little; in reality nowhere was the political slumber of the empire deeper than in these regions. … The weak and weaponless small states were entirely without power of resistance against foreign violence. … Neither was the emperor nor were the Prussian statesmen blind to the immeasurable dangers of a war in the condition in which things were. Leopold's cold-blooded, calculating nature remained long unmoved by the appeals for help written by his unhappy sister Marie Antoinette, who allowed herself to be carried to the very verge of betraying her country by her woman's passion and her princely pride. The Prussian cabinet was at first very well pleased with the steps taken by the constitutional parties; its envoy, von der Goltz, made no secret of acknowledging the righteousness of the cause of the revolution and showed that he had kept his eyes open to the accumulated acts of folly of the blinded court. The mad doings of the emigres were condemned with equal severity in Vienna and in Berlin. Not until the spring of 1791, not until King Louis had had to atone for his unsuccessful flight by unheard of personal humiliations, did the two courts begin to think seriously of protecting themselves against acts of revolutionary violence. … Frederick William's chivalrous soul was aglow with the thought of avenging with his sword the offended majesty of France. Single clever heads among the émigrés succeeded after all in gaining secret influence at court. … In his circular from Padua Leopold invited the European powers to enter the lists for his ill-used brother-in-law, to avenge by forcible means every insult to the dignity of the king, to recognize no constitution of France of which the crown should not voluntarily approve. Bischoffswerder, of his own accord and contrary to his instructions, then signed the Vienna treaty of the 25th of July by which both parties (Prussia and Austria) mutually guaranteed each other's possessions and promised each other help in case of internal disturbances. … Public opinion in Prussia greeted the Austrian alliance with deep mistrust, … but King Frederick William approved the arbitrary steps of his friend (Bischoffswerder). He met Leopold soon after in Pillnitz … and rejoiced in the thought that the league of the two chief powers in Germany would last eternally, to the weal of coming generations. In all of these mistaken acts there was no immediate threat against France. In Pillnitz those émigrés who urged war were sternly thrust aside and all that was obtained was the empty declaration of August 27; the two powers announced that they considered King Louis's cause a matter common to all sovereigns; in case all European powers should agree, there should be interference in France's internal affairs. {3773} This meant nothing whatever, for everyone knew that England would have nothing to do with armed intervention. And even these obscure conditions were abandoned in Vienna when King Louis, in the autumn, was reinstated in his dignities and voluntarily accepted the new constitution. The Revolution seemed to have come to a standstill, the emperor was completely pacified. … It was France and France alone that, in the face of this peaceable attitude of the German powers, forced the war upon them. … The antipathy of a great majority of the nation [France] to the republic was to be overcome by the glamor of military successes, by the old darling dream-project of natural boundaries. The financial needs of the state were to be remedied by a mighty plundering expedition. … While the war-like mood in the legislative assembly increased from day to day, in the negotiations with the emperor paltry disdain was shown; not even was a definite indemnity offered to the estates of the empire in Alsace. It was then that the House, carried away by the stirring speeches of the Gironde, demanded a solemn declaration from the emperor that he would give up the plan of a European league and would show his readiness to support France according to the old treaties of alliance with the Bourbons. The penalty of refusal was to be immediate war. Upon Leopold giving a dignified and temperate reply war was declared against Austria on April 20th 1792. … A doctrinary speech of Condorcet's announced to the world that the principles of republican liberty had risen up against despotism. The glove was thus thrown down to the whole of ancient Europe: for Prussia, moreover, the Vienna Treaty now became binding, having meanwhile been supplemented by a formal defensive league."

H. von Treitschke, Deutsche Geschichte im 19ten Jahrhundert (translated from the German), volume 1, page 114-124.

See, also, FRANCE: A. D. 1791 (pages 1271-1275).

GERMANY: A. D. 1796-1807. Germany and Napoleon.

"With the Italian campaign of 1796 began the second epoch of the revolutionary era, the more fruitful one for the world at large. The propaganda of the revolution now first began to take actual effect and in Central Europe a new order of things superseded the old division of lands, the traditional forma of state and society. It was through Bonaparte's victories that the weapons of France first acquired an indisputable ascendancy. … As was the case with her manner of making war, so did France's European policy take on a new character in the hands of the victor of Montenotte and Rivoli. … In the head of the great man without a home, to whom the soul-life of nations, the ideal world, ever remained an unknown quantity, the horrible conception of a new world-monarchy had already found a place. The images of the Cæsars and the Carolingians stood in dazzling splendor before his mind. The rich history of a thousand years was to be annihilated by a single grand adventure; the multiform culture of the West was to yield to the sway of one gigantic man. This new and altogether un-French policy of conquest rushed to its goals with a wonderful assurance and want of conscience. Bonaparte's perspicuity recognized at once by what means Austria, victorious in Germany but worsted in Italy, could be forced into a temporary peace: … he offered the imperial court the possession of Venice in return for Milan, Belgium and the left bank of the Rhine. … Under such conditions the Peace of Campo Formio was entered into on October 17th 1797. Once more the Holy Empire was to pay the penalty for Austria's defeats, and once more, with greater hypocrisy than ever before, there rang out in the diet those unctuous, imperially-paternal phrases with which the un-German imperial power was wont to bemantle its dynastic policy. Whereas among the conditions of the secret articles of Campo Formio were the mutilation of the German western boundary, the secularization of ecclesiastical territory, the compensation of foreign princes at the cost of the empire: the published version of the treaty spoke only of the unviolated integrity of the empire. … At last, however, the unhallowed secret had to come out. At Christmas-tide 1797 Mainz was vacated by the imperial troops. There came to light the whole hopelessly confused relationships of the two similarly-fortuned nations of central Europe when, at the same time, the French occupied the unconquered bulwark of the Rhine provinces and the conquered Austrians marched into the city of St. Mark. Soon afterwards the envoys of France at Rastadt openly came forward with the demand for the left bank of the Rhine. It was the first official forewarning of the annihilation of the Holy Empire. … So deep was the empire sunken when the dreaded 'Italicus,' on the occasion of a flying visit to Rastadt first cast a glance into German life. On the shallow intrigues of this fruitless congress did Bonaparte base his judgment of our fatherland. He saw through the absolute nullity of the imperial constitution and complacently came to the opinion that if such a constitution had not existed it would have been necessary to invent it in the interests of France. … It seemed to him high time to win the petty dynasts entirely for France by gratifying their greed of land, and thus to rob sundered Germany of its nationality (dépayser l'Allemagne). … On February 9th, 1801, the Peace of Luneville proclaimed openly and unequivocally that which the treaty of Campo Formio had only secretly and obscurely provided: that the Rhine was henceforward to be Germany's boundary. A district of nearly 1,150 square miles and containing nearly four million inhabitants was thus lost to Germany. … With uncanny cold-bloodedness the German nation accepted the fearful blow. Scarcely a sound of patriotic wrath was heard when Mainz and Cologne, Aachen and Treves, the broad, beautiful lands that had been the scene of our earliest history, passed into the hands of the stranger. How many bitter tears had the decrepit generation of the Thirty Years War once poured forth for the sake of Strassburg alone! … The first consul resumed the plan which Sièyes as ambassador in Berlin had sketched already ill 1798. He prepared a threefold division of Germany and, in order to bring the defenceless minor states wholly in his power, sought first to thrust back the two chief German powers as far as possible towards the east. … The great man-scorner now invented an infallible means of gaining sway over these south and west German provinces. {3774} Not in vain had he probed the German higher nobility at Rastadt into the inmost recesses of their hearts. He created our new intermediate states for the purpose, through them, of securing forever Germany's disintegration. The host of petty princes, counts and imperial knights, were burdensome to him because they belonged mostly to the Austrian party and were of no use in war. Among the electors and dukes, on the contrary, there was useful material enough for the formation of a crowd of French vassals; … they had almost all, during the recent wars, made separate treaties with the enemies of the empire. As rebels against that empire and its emperor they had abandoned the ground of legality and broken their bridges behind them. If the man who was omnipotent now took under his protection these political hermaphrodites who were fit neither to live nor die; if he satisfied their greed by throwing them some crumbs from the belongings of their lesser co-estates and tickled their vanity by means of pretentious titles and a show of independence; if he rolled together the hundreds of tiny territories into some dozens of new accidental states with a history of yesterday and entirely without a legal title, living solely from the favor of France; if he then led his satraps to audacious wars against their fatherland and hurried them on from one felony to another, rewarding new lackey-services by new booty—where was the wonder? They had sold their souls to him and he was able to reckon on it that they would rather kiss the boots of the stranger than ever submit to subordinate themselves to a German commonwealth. … Bonaparte, meanwhile, had long made up his mind to resume the war with his unassailable enemy [England]. Already in March 1803, long before the breach occurred between the two western powers, he sent his confidant Duroc to Berlin with the notice that he saw himself compelled to seize Hanover. … Therewith the last and sole pride of the Prussian policy, the neutrality of North Germany, was threatened with its death-blow. … And meanwhile the Holy Empire was made to drink the cup of shame to the very dregs. When Bonaparte caused the Duke of Enghien, seized within the limits of Baden, to be led to execution, only foreign powers like Russia, Sweden and England dared in Regensburg to demand satisfaction for the scandalous breach of the peace of the empire. Baden on the contrary, by Napoleon's command, begged most earnestly that the painful matter might not be followed up any further; while the rest of the plenipotentiaries took their holiday before the time and thus by their flight cut off all further negotiations. In May 1804 the Napoleonic empire was founded. … A hard, distrustful foreign rule weighed upon Germany even before its princes had formally made their submission to the emperor. … Thus prepared, Napoleon proceeded to realize in his own way the idea of a German triad with which Hardenberg had just been amusing himself. Not in bond with Austria and Prussia but independently and in opposition to them was France's old protegée, 'la troisième Allemagne,' to take political form and shape. … In the spring of 1806 the rumor spread at the German courts that a new and extensive mediatization was to take place. Once more, as had happened four years previously, the envoys of our high nobility hastened to Paris on behalf of their lords, to secure by flattery and bribery their share of the booty. … The Rhine confederation of Louis XIV was resuscitated in an incomparably more pronounced form. Sixteen German princes renounced the empire, declared that they themselves were sovereigns and that every law of the venerable old national commonwealth was null and void. They recognized Napoleon as their protector and placed at his disposal an army of 63,000 men to be used in any continental war in which France should engage. … German particularism entered into the bloom-time of its sins. … The anarchy of a new interregnum broke in upon Germany. Faustrecht held sway, exercised no longer by bandit nobles but by princely courts. Napoleon regarded with mistrust any and every expression of national feeling in the enslaved land. The interest of France, he wrote to his Talleyrand, demands that opinion in Germany remain divided. A certain Yelin of Ansbach published an anonymous pamphlet, 'Germany at its lowest Depth,' a well-meant writing, full of feeling, and one which, in an age of iron, had only the peaceful advice to give: 'Weep aloud, oh noble, honest German!' But even this pious ejaculation of a harmless petty citizen seemed to the emperor a matter for alarm and he caused the book-seller Palm, who is said to have aided in spreading the book, to be court-marshalled and shot. It was the first judicial murder of Napoleonism on German ground, and the clever people in Bavaria began to doubt whether the Rhine Confederation had, after all, really brought about the victory of freedom and enlightenment. … A new act of treason on the part of Napoleon led at last to the out-break of the inevitable war. Often and solemnly had Napoleon assured to his Prussian ally the possession of Hanover. It was now suddenly reported in Berlin that the emperor, who all through the summer had been carrying on peace-negotiations with England and Russia, had not scrupled to offer to deliver back to the Guelphs their hereditary lands. When this news reached him Frederick William at once (August 9) wrote to the Czar: 'If Napoleon treats with England concerning Hanover he will ruin me.' The king foresaw that in a short time the miserable condition in which things had been in February would recur again and that Prussia had only the choice left of once more in silence suffering herself to be shamefully plundered or of opposing by arms the ingress of the grand army. That was why the Prussian army was placed on a war-footing and made to assemble in Magdeburg's territory. With this step of justifiable self-defence the war was decided. … Nothing could have been more honest than the unsparingly upright defiance of the king to Napoleon; nothing more righteous than the three demands of the Prussian ultimatum of October: withdrawal of the French from Germany, recognition of the North German Confederation, a peaceful agreement as to the remaining questions at issue between the two powers. Even from the verbose, clumsy war-manifesto there breaks forth occasionally a tone of dignified national pride: the king takes up arms 'to free unhappy Germany from the yoke under which it is being crushed. Nations have certain rights independent of an treaties!' … Already on the 15th of October (1806) Napoleon laid a contribution on all the Prussian provinces this side the Weichsel of 159 million francs, declaring that the result of the battle of the former day (Jena) had been the conquest of all these lands. {3775} Never had the man of fortune boasted so outrageously, and yet, through a strange turn of fortune, the most unhallowed of his lies was to become literally true. Immediately after the defeat the court of Saxony carried out its long-planned desertion and went over to Napoleon. A week after the battle the Prussian territory to the left of the Elbe, and the possessions of the House of Orange and of the electors of Hesse, were provisionally incorporated in the French empire. … On July 7-9, 1807, the Peace of Tilsit was signed, the most cruel of all French treaties of peace, unprecedented in form as well as in contents. It ran, not that the lawful king of Prussia ceded certain lands to the victor, but that the conqueror, out of regard for the emperor of all the Russias, granted back to its sovereign the smaller half of the Prussian state. And this scandalous phrase, which contemporaries only looked upon as a freak of Napoleonic arrogance, expressed simply the naked truth. … Alexander did not wish the last narrow dam which separated the Russian empire from the lands of the vassals of France, to be torn away. … Prussia retained, outside of the 5,700 square miles which the state, exclusive of Hanover, had owned before the war, only about 2,800, … of 9¾ million inhabitants only 4½ million. The work of Frederick the Great seemed undone."

H. von Treitschke, Deutsche Geschichte im 19 Jahrhundert (translated from the German), volume 1, pages 164-265.

See FRANCE: A. D. 1796 (APRIL-OCTOBER), and after (pages 1314-1349.)

GERMANY: A. D. 1815-1848. After the struggle. The Zollverein.

"In Austria, in the decades succeeding the wars of liberation, their reigned the most immovable quiet. The much-praised system of government consisted in unthinking inactivity. The Emperor Francis, a man with the nature of a subaltern official, hated anything that approached to a constitution and a saying of his was often quoted: 'Totus mundus stultizat et vult habere constitutiones novas.' Metternich's power rested on the 'dead motionlessness' of affairs. As far as his German policy was concerned his aim was to hold fast to the preponderating influence of Austria over the German states, but not to undertake any responsibilities towards them. … As for Prussia, in spite of the great sacrifices which she had made, she emerged from the diplomatic negotiations and intrigues of the Vienna Congress with the most unfavorable disposition of territory imaginable. To the five million inhabitants that had remained to her five and a half millions were added in districts that had belonged to more than a hundred different territories and had stood under the most varied laws. There began now for this state a time well filled with quiet work, the aim and object being to create a whole out of the various parts. … The founding of the Burschenschaft [student league] in Jena, the antagonistic attitude of the Weimar press, the Wartburg festival with its extemporized conflagration scene, excited scruples and fears in the ruling circles. The murder of Kotzebue and the attempt on Ibell's life showed the growing fanaticism and called forth stronger measures from the governments. … Metternich recognizes their usefulness for the carrying through of his reactionary measures. … At a meeting in Teplitz he succeeds in winning Frederick William III for his plans. In Carlsbad, over the heads of the members of the federal diet, the most decisive regulations were adopted which culminated in the appointment of the Mainz Central-Investigation-Committee … and confirmed Metternich's unhallowed rule in Germany as well as the reign of that most miserable reaction which called forth a burst of indignation even from the most moderate-minded patriots, and which laid the land open to the scorn of the foreigner."