A Short History of Germany Part 3

The other event was of deeper import than this. The burgs, or cities, which were created as a defense against the Hungarians, had become busy centers of manufacture and trade, and to some extent of learning. Many of them had been made free cities. That is, they were under the direct control of the Emperors instead of the hereditary n.o.bles as at first.

These cities enjoyed especial privileges and immunities which drew to them population and prosperity. The true policy for German Emperors, hara.s.sed by Italian intrigues and at war with their own archbishops and disaffected n.o.bles, would have been to form close alliance with these free cities, and make friends of their burghers and guilds.

When there was no king, no ruler in the land, when robbery ran riot so that traveling was impossible, two cities, Hamburg and Lubeck, agreed together to keep order in their neighborhood. Then Brunswick and Bremen joined; and at last over a hundred towns had combined together in what was called the "Hanseatic League."

This Confederacy became the mightiest power in the North of Europe; and at one time even threatened the overthrow of feudalism, and to convert West Germany into a federation of free munic.i.p.alities.

When trades increased in the cities, each trade managed its own affairs by an organization called a _guild_. The guilds in the course of time obtained a share in the government of the towns; and it was the regenerating power of these guilds which brought about this great movement. With their simple ideals of truth, sincerity, and justice, they were the storehouses of that power which is the real life of a nation. As well expect a tree to flourish when its sap is not permitted to rise, or a man to be well when the blood is obstructed in his veins, as to look for healthful growth and expansion in a nation from which the life of its common people is excluded!

Among these early guilds, that of the Meistersingers, which was chartered in 1340, was of vast importance in the development of the German people.

It was composed of artisans and governed by the strict, pedantic rules then existing in the arts of musical and literary composition.

The prizes did not confer as great an honor as those bestowed at Olympia two thousand years before, but they were sought with an intense enthusiasm.

The soul of the Teuton was by nature set to music. For him that art was not a luxury reserved for the rich and cultured, but the daily food which nourished the life of the most untutored. Within this musical and literary guild the two arts of music and poetry for centuries existed in their most elementary form, and were the soil out of which later came such marvelous blossom and fruit.

CHAPTER VII.

Germany, which had always been a loosely compacted ma.s.s, was at the close of the Hohenstaufen dynasty composed of 60 independent cities, 116 priestly rulers, and 100 reigning dukes, princes, counts, and barons, always rivals and usually at war with each other, in perpetually changing combinations for attack or defense.

Lying beneath this body of small and struggling sovereigns was a people in whom was the first dawning consciousness of human rights; which consciousness was gradually extending to that helpless ma.s.s underlying the whole--the peasantry.

In 1273 the German princes succeeded in electing an Emperor; and the Great Interregnum was over.

It is a curious fact that the two names _Hapsburg_ and _Hohenzollern_ should have appeared simultaneously in German history. Rudolf, Count of Hapsburg, through the influence of his brother-in-law Frederick of Hohenzollern, Count of Nuremburg, was chosen to fill the vacant throne.

It was during the reign of Albert, son of this first Hapsburg, that the Swiss first revolted against imperial authority.

Gessler, who had been sent by Albert to subdue the refractory Alpine shepherds, so exasperated them by his atrocities that he was shot by William Tell. It was a long way from Tell to Swiss freedom and independence. But the people from that hour never wavered in their determination not to be serfs to the house of Hapsburg.

The Hanseatic League in North Germany, and the invincibly free spirit in Switzerland, were the two things of deepest significance at this time of political chaos.

Side by side with this a.s.sertion of political rights, there had commenced a general intellectual awakening. The Bishop of Ratisbon, Albertus Magnus, was so learned in mathematics and in science that people believed he was a sorcerer.[1] G.o.dfrey of Strasburg had written an epic poem about King Arthur and his Knights of the Round Table.

Wolfram of Eschenbach had told of the Holy Grail in his Parsifal; and a learned history of Denmark had been written, without which our own literature would have suffered immeasurable loss, for in it Shakspeare found the story of Hamlet!

It was at this time (1356) that the famous "Golden Bull" was issued, a new electoral system, which reduced the number of electors to seven.

The idea was that as the sun and the seven planets illumined our heavens, so that great luminary, the German Emperor, should be the center of a political system composed of seven Electors.

These earthly luminaries, whose duty it was to elect a new Emperor, were the Archbishops of Mainz, Cologne, and Treves, and the temporal princes of Bohemia, Brandenburg, Saxony, and the Palatine of the Rhine.

The very first act of these seven wise men was to place upon the throne Wenceslas, a brutal madman, who might better have been confined as a maniac.

It was during the reign of his brother and successor Sigismund that the burning of John Huss lighted the conflagration in Bohemia known as the Hussite War.

John Huss, a professor of the University of Prague, had dared to raise his voice against the temporal enrichment of a church whose Founder had not where to lay his head, and who had put behind him the kingdoms of this earth, when offered to him by Satan!

Huss, for this offense, came under the displeasure of the bishops.

Charges were brought against him that he had maintained the existence of four G.o.ds, and he was condemned and burnt (1415).

The Hussite war had none of the reforming purpose which led to the martyrdom they wished to avenge. It was a mad strife, beginning over some detail of the Communion Service, and ending in a war between Bohemian and German, in which for nearly twenty years the country ran with blood.

At this period an event occurred of trifling significance then, but of profound importance to future Germany.

In 1411 the Emperor borrowed one hundred thousand florins of Frederick of Hohenzollern, the Burgrave, or "Count of the Castle," of Nuremburg, direct descendant from that first Hohenzollern who helped to found the Hapsburg dynasty. For this loan Sigismund gave his creditor a mortgage on the territory of Brandenburg. Frederick at once took up his residence there, and subsequently made an offer of three hundred thousand gold florins more to purchase the territory. The Emperor accepted the terms, so the then small state was thereafter the home of the Hohenzollerns, and was on its way to become Prussia.

Sigismund and his brother Wenceslas belonged to another dynasty, that of Luxemburg. But after the death of the former, in 1440, the Hapsburgs succeeded again to the crown, which they wore until it was taken off at the bidding of Napoleon in 1806.

Just before the issuance of the Golden Bull, there had occurred that most revolutionary event, the discovery of gunpowder. When a man in leathern jacket could do more than a knight in armor, when safety depended upon quickness and lightness, and ponderous iron and steel were fatal--then a momentous change in conditions was at hand! The destruction of feudalism was involved in this discovery of 1344.

Under Frederick III., that Hapsburg who came to the throne in 1440, the Empire seemed to have reached a climax of disorder. Old things were pa.s.sing away, and the new had not yet come to take their place.

On the eastern sh.o.r.e of the Baltic the march of German civilization had received an almost fatal check. The "German Order," an organization of knights intended to keep back the Slavonic tide, had failed to do so.

Holland was becoming estranged from the German Empire. France had obtained possession of Flanders. Luxemburg, Lorraine, and Burgundy were becoming practically independent; while it began to seem as if Switzerland were forever lost to Germany.

And now the Hungarians were setting up their new king, the valiant Hunyadi; and the Bohemians theirs, George of Podjebrod. Not only were these kingdoms and princ.i.p.alities slipping away, but the peasants in the cantons of the Alps, and elsewhere in revolt, were some of them led by great n.o.bles.

Still another, and perhaps the gravest of all these dangers, was one which yet darkens our horizon in this closing nineteenth century!

In the year 1250 the Turks had commenced their existence in Asia Minor, with one little clan, led by one obscure chieftain. This clan had grown as if by miracle into a great empire in the East, rivaling in power that of the Saracens, whose successors they were as the head of the Mahomedan Empire. The Turks had been steadily encroaching upon Germany; had made havoc in Hungary; had devastated Austria, and were now insolently pressing on toward their goal, the Imperial palace at Vienna.

While the incompetent and drowsy Emperor Frederick III. was helplessly viewing these stupendous overturnings, there occurred that other event, as important in the empire of thought as the invention of gunpowder had been in that of political inst.i.tutions.

The invention of printing (1450),--that art preservative of all arts,--was the greatest step yet taken in the emanc.i.p.ation of the human mind.

The poor inventor was, after the manner of inventors, badly treated.

John Fust, on account of Gutenberg's inability to pay back the money he had loaned him for his experiment, seized the printing press, and himself proceeded to finish printing the Bible.

The rapidity with which the copies were produced, and their precise resemblance to each other, created such astonishment that a report spread that Fust had sold himself to the devil, with whom he was in league.

This, together with the ident.i.ty of names, led Victor Hugo, Klinger, and other writers to confuse John Fust, the practicer of the Black Art in mediaeval times, with John Fust the printer. And as the original Fust had come to stand for the emanc.i.p.ation of the human intellect through free learning, and as printing was above all else the means for such emanc.i.p.ation, the coincidence, if such it be, was, to say the least, remarkable!

When we approach the time of Isabella of Castile and of Columbus, and when we are confronted with that familiar specter, the Turk, in Southeastern Europe, we feel that we are in sight of the lights on familiar headlands, and are not far from port. We are not very near to that haven, but we are pa.s.sing the line which divides the old from the new.

[1] See chart of Civilization in Six Centuries, "Who, When, and What."

CHAPTER VIII.

It was not alone in Germany that the old was vanis.h.i.+ng. The movement in that country was part of a general condition prevailing in England, France, and Spain; all with the same tendency--the pa.s.sing of the power from many small despotisms to one greater one. It was an advance, although a slow one, in the path of progress. Feudalism--that newfangled system which had so tried the soul of Duke Welf in the ninth century--was dissolving.

In England the war with France, and the War of the Roses, by impoveris.h.i.+ng the n.o.bles had broken their remaining authority, and that system which had been gradually peris.h.i.+ng since the Conquest was virtually dead.