1378 to 1493
Internal strife among cities and princes
The electors had voted for Wenceslas reluctantly during Charles IV’s reign, fearful that the monarchy might become a perquisite of the house of Luxembourg. Most of the other princes shared their concern over the continued ascendancy of the dynasty.
Wenceslas
Wenceslas (ruled 1378–1400) inherited a variety of problems, which grew after his father’s statesmanlike hand had been removed. Wenceslas’s habitual indolence and drunkenness, which increased as he grew older, excited the indignation of his critics. His prolonged periods of residence in Bohemia betrayed his lack of interest in German affairs and allowed the continuous friction between princes, cities, and nobility to develop into open warfare.
The collision of princes and cities was prompted by vital issues of long standing. The flight of the rural population from servile tenures on the land to the free air of the cities aggravated the population losses from the Black Death and further reduced the labour force and the revenues of territorial lords. Others who stayed on the land accepted the protection and jurisdiction of the neighbouring city as “external” citizens (Ausbürger, or Pfahlbürger) and thus withdrew themselves and their land from seignorial control. Only the most powerful cities (e.g., Nürnberg, Rothenburg) were able to extend their extramural territory to a substantial degree by force, but all strove to expand the area of their jurisdiction at the expense of local lords, partly to prevent village industries from competing with the city guilds.
A second major issue was the insistence of territorial lords on imposing tolls on city merchandise in transit through their possessions. In theory, tolls on road and river traffic were exacted in return for the protection of merchants and their goods, but the multiplication of toll stations hampered trade and provoked innumerable disputes, which often culminated in the seizure of merchants and merchandise by exigent lords.
The third and immediate cause of the crisis lay in the financial policy of Wenceslas himself. His Bohemian revenues, though large, were strained by the great sums payable to the electors in return for his elevation to the kingship. Hence he attempted to tap the resources of the imperial cities by demanding heavy taxes, and he threatened to mortgage recalcitrant cities to the neighbouring princes, their chief enemies.
On July 4, 1376, an alliance of 14 imperial cities of Swabia was formed under the leadership of Ulm and Constance for mutual protection against unjust taxes and seizure from the empire. The Swabian League counted 40 members by 1385 and was linked with similar coalitions in Alsace, the Rhineland, and Saxony. Wenceslas’s initial hostility to the league faded as its membership increased, and in 1387 he gave it his verbal and unofficial recognition. He feared offending the territorial princes by extending full recognition; further, a clause of the Golden Bull had declared all city leagues to be illegal. Thus he temporized and awaited the outcome of the approaching trial of strength between cities and princes. On August 28, 1388, the princes of Swabia and Franconia routed the largely mercenary forces of the Swabian League at Döffingen, near Stuttgart. The stipendiaries of the Rhenish League were put to flight by the count palatine Rupert II near Worms on November 6.
The cities triumphantly withstood the ensuing siege operations, but their economy was injured by the forays, ambuscades, and blockades instituted by the princes. The protracted campaigns also exhausted the financial resources of the princes. When Wenceslas intervened in 1389, both parties were ready for peace. At the Diet of Eger (May 2) he ordered them to desist and declared the city leagues to be dissolved. The contestants complied. The princes were satisfied with the prospective disbandment of the cities, and the cities feared the consequences of further resistance, but neither side relished Wenceslas’s opportunism. The princes disliked his political flirtation with the cities, and the cities resented his final championship of the cause of the princes.
Wenceslas’s early gestures of support for the cities rankled the electors, who in 1384 and 1387 discussed the advisability of replacing him with an imperial vicar or regent. Wenceslas, however, learned of the plan and conveyed his opposition, while the electors were unable to unite on their choice of a regent. Some electors turned to a more drastic solution—Wenceslas’s deposition. In 1394 Rupert II and Archbishop Frederick of Cologne considered the election of Richard II of England but failed to win the support of their electoral colleagues. In the following year, however, Wenceslas’s elevation of Gian Galeazzo Visconti, imperial vicar of Milan, to the status of duke was assailed as a dismemberment of the empire and enabled the electors to act as the indignant defenders of the integrity of the Reich against a wasteful and profligate king. Wenceslas attempted to conciliate the princes by appointing his younger brother Sigismund as German regent in 1396. But the Milanese issue enabled Rupert and Frederick to enlist the support of the archbishops of Mainz and Trier for their proposed deposition of Wenceslas. The death of Rupert in 1398 occasioned some delay, but at length the electors compiled a lengthy series of charges against the king, and in September 1399 they openly proclaimed their intention of deposing him.
At this critical stage further proceedings were temporarily checked by serious differences concerning the choice of Wenceslas’s successor. The favoured candidate of the Rhenish electors was the count palatine, Rupert III, who was himself an elector. However, another elector, Duke Rudolf of Saxony, and a powerful group of northern German princes contended that the electors could not raise one of their own members to the kingship. The Golden Bull had declared otherwise, but Rudolf held his ground and declined to participate in the subsequent proceedings. On June 4, 1400, the four Rhenish electors invited Wenceslas to Oberlahnstein to consider measures for the reform of the empire and threatened to release themselves from their oath of allegiance if he failed to appear. The king’s efforts to rally support for his cause were utterly fruitless, and he decided to stay in Bohemia. On August 20 Archbishop John of Mainz, on behalf of the four electors, publicly proclaimed the deposition of Wenceslas as an unfit and useless king and freed his German subjects from their allegiance to him. On the following day the three archbishops elected Rupert in Wenceslas’s stead. Rupert’s consent to his election was presumed to furnish the necessary majority required by the Golden Bull.
Rupert
Rupert (ruled 1400–10) lacked the skill and resources necessary to revive the drooping power of the German monarchy. His title was not beyond dispute while Wenceslas lived, and the territorial princes and cities were therefore slow to acknowledge him. Pope Boniface IX, maintaining that only a pope might legally depose a German monarch, withheld his approbation of Rupert. An expedition against Wenceslas in 1401 failed before the walls of Prague. Rupert then embarked upon an Italian expedition (1401–02), hoping to obtain the imperial crown from the pope and thus dispel the cloud of uncertainty that hung over his title. The enterprise was crippled by lack of financial means, Boniface’s conditions were exorbitant, and Rupert returned to Germany without the coveted imperial coronation. Fortunately, he had little to fear from Wenceslas, who was fully occupied in protecting his Bohemian throne from the machinations of his ambitious younger brother Sigismund. Far more dangerous was the degeneration of Rupert’s relations with the Rhenish electors. In 1405 he offended Archbishop John of Mainz by refusing him military aid in his war against Hesse and Brunswick. Consequently the archbishop united all the enemies of Hesse and Brunswick in the League of Marbach, which included 18 imperial cities. Rupert contended that coalitions of cities were prohibited by the Golden Bull, and he denounced the league as illegal. The dispute was arrested by the mediation of the archbishop of Cologne, but the memory rankled. Rupert’s prospects darkened still further in 1408, when he lent his support to Pope Gregory XII against the cardinals who wished to summon a general council to end the Great Schism in the church. The archbishops of Mainz and Cologne and the vast majority of the German prelates favoured the conciliar solution and strongly approved the policy of the cardinals. Wenceslas shrewdly followed suit and in return received assurances from the cardinals that the future general council would recognize him as German king. The powerful proconciliar party in the German church proceeded to agitate openly for the restoration of Wenceslas to the throne. The threat of civil war, however, was averted by Rupert’s death on May 18, 1410.
Sigismund
On the death of Rupert, the movement for the reinstatement of Wenceslas immediately lost headway. The Rhenish electors, having deposed Wenceslas 10 years previously on ground of his unfitness, could not reelect him without admitting their inconsistency. Nonetheless, the house of Luxembourg was powerful and would assuredly throw its full weight against any non-Luxembourg candidate to the German throne. The four electors agreed on the expediency of selecting Rupert’s successor from the Luxembourg dynasty but disagreed on the choice of candidate. The count palatine and the archbishop of Trier elected Wenceslas’s brilliant but unreliable brother, Sigismund, at Frankfurt on September 20, 1410. Eleven days later, the archbishops of Cologne and Mainz elected Wenceslas’s turbulent and treacherous cousin, Jobst of Moravia. Jobst died in the next year, and Wenceslas agreed to accept Sigismund on condition that he himself retained the title of German king. But Sigismund ignored the reservation and assumed the disputed title. Wenceslas’s protests were greeted with indifference in Germany and quickly died away. A second election of Sigismund at Frankfurt (July 21, 1411) gave him an ample majority and removed all doubt concerning the validity of the previous election.
Sigismund was energetic, versatile, and intelligent; but long experience never blunted his rashness in rushing into new projects, and his financial incapacity never ceased to astonish his contemporaries. His pursuit of personal power and dynastic possessions was unceasing and unscrupulous. His kingdom of Hungary and his later acquisition, Bohemia, were his primary concerns, and the interests in Germany were constantly set aside in their favour. The disastrous reigns of his predecessors, Wenceslas and Rupert, had emphasized Germany’s basic problems: the weakness of the monarchy, the friction between princes and cities, and the unchecked growth of lawlessness and disorder. During his long reign (1410–37) Sigismund appeared less and less frequently in Germany and did little to correct these evils.
The Hussite controversy
Sigismund’s prolonged absences were caused in great part by the explosive Hussite controversy in Bohemia. The Czech church in Bohemia had long retained a marked individuality and much autonomy in its liturgy. This independent temper in ecclesiastical affairs was being slowly fused in the late 14th century with a rising sentiment of nationality among the Czechs. The upsurge of feeling took the negative form of a growing resentment of the German minority, which dominated the towns by virtue of its economic power and cultural influence. The luxury and immorality of the Bohemian clergy were castigated by a series of religious reformers such as Conrad of Waldhauser, Thomas of Štítný, John Milíč of Kroměříž (Kremsier), and Matthew of Janov. The teachings of Conrad and Milíč had a strongly puritanical tinge; in opposition to the wealthy sacramental church with its external means of grace, they held up the ideal of the primitive church in a condition of apostolic poverty and the exclusive authority of the Bible as the foundation stone of faith and belief. These movements met and intermingled in the person of Jan Hus.
Jan Hus
A graduate in divinity of the University of Prague, Hus was appointed incumbent of the Bethlehem Chapel in Prague in 1402 and immediately attracted wide attention with his sermons, which were delivered in Czech in accordance with the foundation charter of the chapel. In 1403 he strongly defended a number of extracts from the religious writings of the Englishman John Wycliffe calling for church reform. Czech opinion in the university solidly supported Hus, but the more numerous German masters carried the day, and the teaching of the controversial extracts was forbidden. Similarly, when Pope Gregory XII’s cardinals rebelled against the pope and demanded a general council to terminate the schism in the papacy in 1408, the Czech members of the university aligned themselves with the cardinals, while the Germans stood with the pope. On matters of general policy, the masters of the university voted by “nations,” of which there were four: Bohemian, Bavarian, Saxon, and Polish, the last consisting in fact largely of Germans. Thus the Germans controlled three votes, the Czechs only one. When King Wenceslas reversed the proportion by decree, the German masters and students seceded to found their own university at Leipzig, and the mutual enmity deepened.
In 1410 Hus was excommunicated by Archbishop Zbyněk of Prague but refused to appear at the papal court for judgment and continued to preach. Two years later he protested against the sale of indulgences and was placed under papal sentence of excommunication. The city of Prague was subjected to a papal interdict. Hus left the capital at Wenceslas’s request but preached throughout the land and vastly enlarged his following. From the lower Czech clergy who popularized Hus’s doctrines, the masses learned that the German minority were intruders and foes of Bohemia and of the true religion. Lesser nobles who had lost their lands by mortgage or purchase to the prosperous German burghers of the cities were readily converted. The more self-interested members of the upper nobility were attracted by Hus’s proposed reduction of the Czech church to apostolic poverty, which would bring the rich territorial possessions of the higher clergy within their grasp.
The rising ferment in Bohemia disquieted the heir apparent, Sigismund, and he intervened with the suggestion that Hus should expound and justify his opinions to the Council of Constance (1414–18), recently convened to heal the schism in the papacy. Hus accepted, and Sigismund furnished him with a comprehensive safe-conduct. The conciliar commission that examined Hus focused the debate on two issues: the unauthorized Bohemian practice of extending communion in both kinds (bread and wine) to the laity and the points of agreement between Wycliffe and Hus. Hus declined to retract his Wycliffite opinions until they were refuted by Holy Writ, and thus he defied the authority of the council in matters of doctrine. He was arrested on November 28, 1414, and died at the stake on July 6, 1415. Sigismund’s protests against the breach of his safe-conduct were silenced by the argument that excommunicates automatically lost imperial protection.
The Hussite wars
The death of Hus enshrined him at once as a martyr and a national hero in the memory of his followers among the Czechs. They raised a storm of denunciation against Sigismund and expressed their resentment by widespread attacks on orthodox priests and churches. The Catholics retaliated in kind, and Bohemia was in a state of civil war when the death of Wenceslas (August 16, 1419) brought Sigismund to the tottering throne. The new king’s talent for conciliation and compromise was useless in the heated religious atmosphere. Pope Martin V urged him on against the Hussites and promised him imperial coronation as his reward. At his prompting, Sigismund raised a motley host in Germany and launched it into Bohemia under the banner of a papal Crusade (March 1, 1420). But the invaders were thrown back from the walls of Prague, and on July 7, 1421, Sigismund was declared deposed by the Bohemian assembly of estates. The shock of defeat forced Sigismund to attempt a fuller mobilization of German resources. Under the traditional system, princes and cities had been allowed to fix at their own discretion the quota of men provided by each when a royal campaign was in prospect. Naturally, both estates used their discretionary power to reduce contributions to a minimum. In 1422, however, Sigismund himself fixed the strength of the contingents demanded from the individual princes and cities throughout Germany. The response was disappointing. In 1426 the king raised his requirements, but to no effect. Hence the yearly campaigns against the Hussites were waged largely by mercenary armies. To meet the rising costs, the Diet of Frankfurt was persuaded in 1427 to vote a general tax, the so-called Common Penny. But there was little enthusiasm in Germany for the Crusade; massive evasions of payment occurred, and the strength of local feeling hampered the coercion of defaulters.
In 1429–30 the irrepressible Hussites swept through Saxony, Thuringia, and Franconia in a destructive foray. Sigismund, exploiting the general alarm, reverted to the older system and demanded contingents from each prince and city. The response improved, and a large army invaded Bohemia, only to meet complete disaster in 1431 at Taus (now Domažlice, in the Czech Republic). It was evident that the veteran Hussites could not be crushed by force. Sigismund therefore welcomed the opportunity to transfer the problem of reconciling the Hussites with the church to the Council of Basel (1431–49). The Hussite extremists, the Taborites, were inflexible. They condemned the hierarchical system of church government and affirmed the priesthood of all true believers. Hence the council conducted its long and arduous negotiations with the majority party among the Hussites—the Calixtines, or Utraquists, who were prepared to accept the grant of communion in both kinds as a basis of settlement. The Utraquist nobles annihilated the protesting Taborites at the Battle of Lipany (May 30, 1434) and made peace with the council by the Compact of Iglau (July 5, 1436), which conceded them communion in both kinds and reunited them with the Roman Catholic church. The Utraquist nobles extracted far better terms from Sigismund as the price of their recognition. He agreed to accept the guidance of Czech councillors in governmental affairs, to admit only Czechs to public office, to grant an amnesty for all offenses committed since the death of Wenceslas, and to allow the Czechs a large measure of autonomy in their civil and religious life. It is unlikely that the slippery Sigismund intended to honour these pledges, but they cleared the way for his triumphant return to Prague in August 1436.
In Germany the Hussite threat had clearly revealed the inadequacies of the existing financial and military systems, but the incentive to press Sigismund’s reforms to a successful conclusion faded when the Hussite peril was scotched by negotiation. The general apathy was demonstrated in 1434, when Sigismund proposed to the princes a land peace embracing the whole of Germany. The abolition of private wars and feuds by such a peace was undeniably a paramount necessity. The princes themselves, however, were among the chief offenders against law and order, and their nominal approval of the plan deceived no one. Sigismund himself, increasingly absorbed in crucial negotiations with the Hussites, did not persevere, and the project gathered dust in the imperial archives. The impulse he gave to the cause of reform did not, however, fade entirely, though Sigismund did not live to see the sequel. His death on December 9, 1437, terminated the tenure of the German throne by the house of Luxembourg and opened the door of opportunity to the Habsburg dynasty.
The Habsburgs and the imperial office
Albert II
In the absence of a male heir, Sigismund had named his son-in-law Albert of Habsburg, duke of Austria, as his successor. Albert was able and vigorous, and the union of the territories of the two dynasties enabled him to exert considerable leverage in German politics. Albert declared his neutrality in the current dispute between Pope Eugenius IV and the Council of Basel on the subject of conciliar sovereignty and thereby evaded an issue on which the electors were strongly divided; thus, on March 18, 1438, he was unanimously elected at Frankfurt. The electors attempted to elicit from the new king an understanding that he would grant privileges to his subjects only with their advice and consent. They also submitted a project for the division of Germany into four new administrative units (Kreise) in which the enforcement of the land peace would be entrusted to captains of princely rank. Albert judged that the princes were seeking to enlarge their power and influence under the guise of introducing reforms for the common good. The German cities also doubted the impartiality of the princes as custodians of law and order. Both proposals were therefore stillborn. The king hastened from Frankfurt to defend his kingdom of Hungary, endangered by Turkish raids on Siebenbürgen (part of Transylvania, now in Romania). The campaign was brought to a premature close by the death of the king on October 27, 1439.
Frederick III
Albert II had left only an infant son, and the leadership of the house of Habsburg passed to his cousin Frederick, duke of Styria. Inside the electoral college the duke was vigorously supported by his brother-in-law Frederick of Saxony and was elected unanimously on February 2, 1440. The choice of Frederick tightened the hold of the Habsburgs on the German kingship. It also brought to the throne a ruler who, absorbed in dynastic concerns and in astrology, had no more than a passing interest in Germany. Under the absentee government of Frederick III, the feuds among the princes and the collisions between the princes and the cities developed into savage wars accompanied by widespread ravaging and pillage. All paid lip service to the need for peace; but who was to enforce it? Was it to be enforced by the monarchy, which lacked power and executive machinery? Was it to be enforced in the courts of the princes, whose judicial impartiality was suspect? Were complaints against the princes to be heard and decided in the king’s court (Hofgericht)? Or must they be adjudicated by the council (Hofrat) of the prince concerned? The right to enforce peace effectively was a major source of power to the holder; hence the struggle between Frederick and the princes was long, bitter, and inconclusive.
These issues were brought to a head by the rapid westward progress of the Ottoman Turks after their victory at Varna on the Black Sea in 1444 and their definitive conquest of Serbia in 1459. The Habsburg kingdom of Hungary and Frederick III’s own duchy of Styria lay in the path of the invaders. In 1453 the fall of Constantinople extinguished the Eastern Empire and aroused fears in Germany that the Western (i.e., Holy Roman) Empire would meet the same fate. The king used the opportunity to demand financial aid against the Turks from the diet, the German assembly of estates. Under the leadership of the princes, the diet reminded him that Germany’s capacity for defense was weakened by the current internal anarchy. In 1455 six electors proposed to the king the establishment of an imperial court of justice in which all three estates (electors, princes, and cities) should be represented. Frederick dismissed the scheme as an attempted invasion of his authority and stubbornly maintained his disapproval in a series of stormy interviews.
In time an increasing number of princes became convinced that reform would make no significant progress until Frederick was removed. As early as 1460 the Wittelsbach princes urged his deposition in favour of George of Poděbrady, the able and resourceful king of Bohemia. To check the danger, Frederick began to dole out reforms with a sparing hand. In 1464 he consented to make the court of the treasury (Kammergericht) independent of his person, to staff it with representatives of the three estates, and to extend its jurisdiction into fields other than financial. It was the acquisition of Austria in 1463 on the death of his brother Albert that finally proved his undoing. The unruly Austrian nobility early took the measure of Frederick and thereafter disregarded his authority. On the east and south the duchy was imminently threatened by the expanding kingdom of Hungary under its land-hungry ruler Matthias Corvinus. The southern borders of the Habsburg lands were also ravaged by the Turks. Frederick’s continuing irresolution and passivity encouraged Matthias Corvinus, who had already seized a portion of Bohemia, to launch a campaign against Austria. The Austrian nobility made no move against him, and Vienna fell to him in 1485. Frederick fled to Germany and made pitiful appeals for help to the princes. His misfortune provided the party of reform with a long-awaited opportunity. Led by Berthold von Henneberg, the able and resolute archbishop of Mainz, they pressed the aging and afflicted Frederick to relinquish the kingship in favour of his son Maximilian. Solaced somewhat by the assurance of a Habsburg succession, he gave a reluctant acquiescence, and Maximilian was elected on February 16, 1486. Frederick retained the title of emperor, held since his imperial coronation at Rome in 1452—the last imperial coronation held in the Holy See. But he played no part in the government of Germany, and his death on August 19, 1493, passed almost unnoticed.
Developments in the individual states to about 1500
The princes and the Landstände
In the various principalities the outcome of the struggle between the territorial princes and the assemblies of estates (Landstände) was not fully decided by 1500. The vigour of the conflict arose partly out of the contrasting conceptions of government held by the protagonists. The secular princes looked upon their lands as private possessions that could be divided by agreement among their sons and drew little distinction between their private and their public revenues. The three estates regarded themselves as the corporate representatives of the whole territorial community and maintained that actions by a prince affecting their interests and privileges should be subject to their consent. They therefore opposed the partition of the territory by family pact among the princes’ sons. The inadvisability of breaking up the principalities into petty territorial lordships was at length conceded by the more prudent princes. By 1500 the rulers of Bavaria, Brandenburg, Saxony, and Württemberg had accepted the principles of territorial indivisibility and primogeniture.
In financial matters the imposition of extraordinary taxes (Notbeden) remained the crucial issue between the princes and the estates. The mounting cost of war and administration outstripped the ordinary revenues of the ruler, plunged him deeply into debt, and compelled him to seek financial aid from the estates with increasing frequency. In the absence of a clear distinction between public and private revenue, the estates often contended that the deficit was a private debt of the prince and disclaimed responsibility. Needy princes were thus forced to buy temporary solvency by concessions that later shackled them in their dealings with the estates. The estates regarded the Notbede strictly as an occasional emergency tax and insisted that it should be reasonable in amount. Indeed, the estates of Bavaria and Brunswick extracted from their respective princes in the course of the 14th century a formal recognition of their right of armed resistance to extortionate taxation. Similarly, any prince who broke his agreements with the estates was subject to the right of resistance. Thus the aims of these territorial assemblies were mixed. They sought to preserve the privileges of the three orders, to restrain the power of the prince, and to limit taxation. They were, however, also actively interested in good government, and the more enlightened rulers usually issued their ordinances only after consultation with the estates.
The princes proceeded against these powerful and often turbulent bodies with great caution. They persistently demanded that territorial assemblies convene only at the summons of the prince. They discountenanced the widespread conviction that absentees from the assembly were not bound to pay the taxes that it voted. In consequence, the peasants, who were not represented except in the Swiss cantons, Baden, Friesland, and Tirol, remained in the grasp of the princes’ tax collectors. In these directions the princes had generally made notable advances by 1500, but in the vital matter of the Notbede they were still obliged to bargain with the estates as equals. They had nowhere attained their ultimate objective: to transform the tax into a regular imposition voted automatically by the estates on demand.
Beyond the confines of the assemblies of estates, the attempts of the princes to curb their overmighty subjects aroused vigorous resistance. The noble vassals, proud and unruly, readily combined against any prince who sought to tamper with their liberties. Wise rulers deflected the nobles’ energies into useful channels by employing them as stipendiaries. Hence even the most powerful princes—the Habsburgs in Austria and the Hohenzollerns in Brandenburg—proceeded circumspectly, and the difficult task of bringing the nobility to heel was far from completed in 1500. The cities of the princely territories defended their independence no less stubbornly. The princes revoked their charters, influenced municipal elections, and forbade the cities to associate in self-defense. The struggle was most intense in the north and east, where the Hohenzollern dynasty of Brandenburg emerged as the chief foe of municipal freedom. In 1442 the elector Frederick II (“Iron Tooth”) crushed a federation of Brandenburg cities and deprived its leader, Berlin, of its most valued privileges. In the Franconian possessions of the dynasty, Albert Achilles of Hohenzollern waged a destructive war (1449–50) against a city league headed by Nürnberg. He suffered a resounding defeat in a pitched battle near Pillenreuth in 1450. The elector John Cicero took up the battle 38 years later, when the cities of the Altmark in west Brandenburg refused to pay an excise tax on beer voted by the assembly of estates. He discomfited the cities in the ensuing “Beer War” and radically revised their constitutions to his own advantage. On the other hand, the great cities of southern Germany, enriched by the Italian trade, were more than a match for the local princes: the Wittelsbach dukes of Bavaria were decisively worsted by Regensburg in 1488.
The growth of central governments
Between 1300 and 1500 the organs of central government in the territorial states became more specialized and diversified. The parent body was the advisory council (Hofrat) of high nobles and ecclesiastics, whom the prince consulted at his discretion. Its business was not differentiated, and there was no division of labour among the councillors. It met at the summons of the prince and did not convene at regular intervals. Its membership was not fixed, and some advisers did not attend except at special invitation. Others were regional councillors who attended the prince only when he appeared in their locality. A body so unspecialized and fluctuating was ill-adapted to cope with the increasingly complex problems of central government. Hence in the 14th and 15th centuries a professional element of “daily” or permanent councillors was introduced. They were usually legists, trained in Italy or in the newly founded universities of Prague (1364), Vienna (1365), Heidelberg (1386), Rostock (1419), and Tübingen (1477). They were well versed in Roman law, which, with its centralizing and authoritative precepts, provided a congenial climate for the growth of the powers of the territorial princes everywhere save in Saxony, Schleswig, and Holstein, where the ancient customary codes were deeply rooted. Financial administration, which required specialized skills, was placed under the direction of a separate department of government, the treasury (Hofkammer). An inner ring of favoured advisers, the privy council (Geheimrat), was also instituted to counsel the prince on affairs of state. The besetting weakness of the new administrative structure was financial. Few princes followed the example of the Hohenzollern dynasty in drawing up an annual budget and requiring financial officials to submit regular accounts to the government. On the positive side, chanceries gradually created a common German language, which Luther later used to spread his message.
German society, economy, and culture in the 14th and 15th centuries
Transformation of rural life
Despite the impressive advance of trade and industry in the later Middle Ages, German society was still sustained chiefly by agriculture. Of an estimated population of 12 million in 1500, only 1.5 million resided in cities and towns. Agriculture exhibited strong regional differences in organization. The more recently settled areas of the north and east were characterized by great farms and extensive estates that produced a surplus of grain for export through the Baltic ports. The south and west was a region of denser population, thickly sown with small villages and the “dwarf” estates of the lesser nobility. In the northeast the great landlords, headed by the Knights of the Teutonic Order, tightened their control over the originally free tenants, denied them freedom of movement, and ultimately bound them to the soil as serfs. In the south the heavy urban demand for grain chiefly benefited the larger peasant proprietors, who sold their surplus production in the nearest town and used their gains to acquire more land. The lesser peasantry, with their smaller holdings, practiced chiefly subsistence farming, produced no surplus, and therefore failed to benefit from the buoyant urban demand. The frequent division of the patrimony among heirs often reduced it to uneconomically small fragments and encouraged an exodus to the cities. On the other hand, landless day labourers who survived the Black Death in the mid-14th century were able to command higher wages for their services.
In southern Germany the strain of transition in rural society was heightened by the policies of the landlords, both lay and ecclesiastical. Confronted by labour shortages and rising costs, many landlords attempted to recoup their losses at the expense of their tenants. By means of ordinances passed in the manorial courts, they denied to the peasantry their traditional right of access to commons, woods, and streams. Further, they revived their demands for the performance of obsolete labour services and enforced the collection of the extraordinary taxes on behalf of the prince. The peasants protested and appealed to custom, but their sole legal recourse was to the manorial court, where their objections were silenced or ignored. Ecclesiastical landlords were especially efficient, and peasant discontent assumed a strong anticlerical tinge and gave rise to the localized disturbances in Gotha (1391), Bregenz (1407), Rottweil (1420), and Worms (1421). Disturbances recurred with increasing frequency in the course of the 15th century on the upper Rhine, in Alsace, and in the Black Forest. In 1458 a cattle tax imposed by the archbishop of Salzburg kindled a peasant insurrection, which spread to Styria, Carinthia, and Carniola. In Alsace the malcontents adopted as the symbol of revolt the Bundschuh, the wooden shoe usually worn by the peasants. They also formulated a series of specific demands, which included the abolition of the hated manorial courts and the reduction of feudal dues and public taxes to a trifling annual amount. On these fundamental points there was little room for compromise, and the outbreaks were stifled by the heavy hand of established authority. But the rigours of repression added fuel to peasant discontent, which finally burst forth in the great uprising of 1524–25 (see below The revolution of 1525).
The nobility
The lesser nobility included two distinct elements. The imperial knights (Reichsritter) held their estates as tenants in chief of the crown. The provincial nobility (Landesadel) had lost direct contact with the crown and were being compelled by degrees to acknowledge the suzerainty of the local prince. The imperial knights had been extensively employed by the Hohenstaufen emperors in military and administrative capacities and were chiefly concentrated in the former Hohenstaufen possessions in Swabia, Franconia, Alsace, and the Rhineland. With the extinction of the Hohenstaufen dynasty, they lost their function and rewards as a nobility of service. The revenues from their small estates sank in purchasing power as prices rose. Caste prejudice prevented them from seeking an alternative role in trade or industry. Resentful of the decline in their fortunes and fiercely independent, they clung grimly to their remaining privileges: exemption from imperial taxes and the right to indulge in private war. They stubbornly resisted the persistent attempts of the princes to reduce them to subject status, and in Trier and Württemberg especially they were given valuable aid by the provincial nobles. For purposes of defense or aggression, the imperial and provincial knights combined freely in powerful regional leagues, usually directed against the local princes or cities. In the course of their chronic feuds with the cities, many knights became mere highwaymen. Many others, who had been forced to sell their estates or who were encumbered with debts, took service in Germany or Italy as mercenaries (Soldritter). In eastern Germany the knights, though equally unruly, were far more affluent. The knightly estate (Rittergut) was larger and produced a profitable surplus for export. The provincial knights sat in the assembly of estates, and taxation by the prince required their consent. They were therefore well-entrenched against the encroachments of princely power.
Urban life
Urban society in 15th-century Germany was concentrated in some 3,000 cities and towns. About 2,800 of the total were extremely small, with populations varying from 100 to 1,000. Of the remainder, no more than 15 cities contained more than 10,000 inhabitants. In this restricted group three were preeminent. Cologne reached its peak in the 13th century with a population of 60,000 but sank to 40,000 by 1500 following epidemics, internal disputes, and expulsions. In 1500 Augsburg was the most populous German city, with a resident population of 50,000. Third place was held by fast-growing Nürnberg, which counted 30,000 souls. The social unity of the citizen body had been most marked in the 13th century, when the guilds joined the dominant patrician families (Geschlechter) in wresting the right to form independent city councils (Stadtrat) from the lords of the cities. In the 14th century the guild masters, methodically excluded from the councils by the patrician oligarchy, broke into open revolt in Speyer (1327), Strassburg (now Strasbourg; 1332), Nürnberg (1348), and elsewhere. In its economic aspect the ensuing conflict embodied an attempt by the guildsmen as industrial producers to free urban industry from the tight control exercised by the merchant patriciate. By 1500 the guilds almost everywhere had gained varying degrees of representation in the city council.
In the meantime the guilds themselves had become increasingly oligarchic and exclusive as the established masters restricted the entry of new members in order to reduce competition. The ascent of journeymen and apprentices to the rank of master was obstructed by the imposition of excessive fees, and in many guilds membership became virtually hereditary. In consequence, the journeymen began to associate in fraternities of their own to press their demands for higher wages and a shorter working day. The masters denounced the fraternities as illegal, compiled blacklists of leading agitators, and formed intercity associations to enforce low wage rates. The day labourers and casual workers outside the guild structure had no protective organization and suffered heavily in periods of economic depression. The surviving tax records of the German cities, though not wholly reliable guides, nevertheless suggest wide extremes of wealth and poverty. In late 15th-century Augsburg 2,985 of a total of 4,485 households (66 percent) were recorded on the tax rolls as exempt from taxation on the ground of insufficient means. At the other extreme stood the enterprising and prosperous business dynasties of the Fuggers and the Welsers. Not all wealthy citizens lacked public spirit, however, and hospitals, almshouses, and charitable foundations multiplied within the city walls. The spreading problem of mendicancy was combated by stringent legislation against able-bodied beggars in Esslingen (1384), Brunswick (1400), Vienna (1442), Cologne (1446), and Nürnberg (1447).
The decline of the church
The vigour and assertiveness of secular society in Germany was exercised increasingly at the expense of the clergy and the church. Among the upper clergy more than 100 archbishops, bishops, and abbots were temporal rulers. The prelates were usually sons of the nobility and did not allow election to church office to interfere with their aristocratic ardour for war and territorial acquisition. They were expert in the accumulation of benefices and were notoriously lax in the performance of their spiritual duties. Their influence was freely used to advance their kinsmen and partisans among the greater and lesser nobles, who dominated the cathedral chapters and ruled the abbeys. The monasteries were filled with monks and nuns who were distinguishable from the lay aristocracy only by a nominal celibacy. Among the secular princes, the rulers of Austria, Brandenburg, and Saxony wrested a right of appointment to a fixed number of bishoprics and lesser church offices from the papacy, which had been gravely weakened by the schism and the conciliar movement of the 15th century. All lay and ecclesiastical princes imposed heavy extraordinary taxes on the clergy. The steady invasion of the church by secular interests was also exemplified by the moral and material condition of the lower clergy. The Black Death of 1348–50 had decimated the ranks of the more dedicated priests, who ministered to their plague-stricken flocks instead of seeking safety by flight. The new recruits who rushed into holy orders were often self-seeking and spiritually unqualified. As the inflow continued, the problem of clerical unemployment and inadequate stipends attained greater proportions. Many were compelled by need to accept ill-paid livings. Others obtained no benefice at all and lived precariously as chantry priests or as itinerant chaplains. Their moral and intellectual defects were bitterly assailed by church reformers and by an increasingly well-informed laity. Many pious Christians, especially in the cities, began to turn away from the priesthood in their search for spiritual comfort and to seek relief in mysticism or in lay associations practicing a simple, undogmatic form of Christianity.
Trade and industry
The most impressive achievements of the German economy between 1200 and 1500 lay in trade and industry. German trade benefited from the Hundred Years’ War between France and England, which diverted northbound Mediterranean merchandise from the customary Rhône valley route to the eastern Alpine passes; from the fierce internal warfare between the Italian city-states, which weakened their supremacy in long-distance trade; and from the rapid economic development of “colonial” eastern Europe between the Baltic and the Danube. The northern German trade was chiefly based on staple commodities such as grain, fish, salt, and metals; but the southern German merchants, in their capacity as middlemen between Italy and the rest of Europe, had taken the lead by 1500. They combined trade and industry in the great Ravensburg Trading Company (1380–1530), which produced and exported Swabian linen and laid the foundation of the fortunes of the Höchstetter, Herwart, Adler, Tucher, and Imhof families. The most important independent concern was that of the Fuggers, whose founder, Hans Fugger, began his career as a linen weaver in Augsburg. The Fuggers’ accumulated profits provided capital for moneylending and banking, which they conducted with the aid of business techniques borrowed from the more advanced Italians. The wealth and prosperity of Germany, which Machiavelli remarked on in 1512, stood in sharp contrast to its political and military weakness, a disparity that contributed significantly to a profound sense of malaise and discontent on the eve of the Reformation.
Cultural life
In the absence of a strong centralized monarchy to act as a focus, German culture continued to be regional in character and widely diffused. The mysticism of Meister Eckhart, Johann Tauler, and Heinrich Suso, which commanded all men to look for the kingdom of God within themselves, flourished chiefly in the cities of the Rhineland, where lack of diligent pastoral care forced Christians to call upon their own inner resources. In the same region social and moral satire attained an urgent and vivid realism. Sebastian Brant (1458–1521), born at Strassburg, spared no class in his epic on human stupidity, the Narrenschiff (Ship of Fools). But it was in the thriving cities of southern Germany, as yet little affected by Italian humanism, that late Gothic culture reached magnificent heights in art, architecture, and sculpture. Albrecht Dürer, born in Nürnberg in 1471, challenged his generation with his evocative engraving “Melancolia I,” in which a brooding figure with closed wings sits idly amid a chaos of scientific instruments and meditates on the futility of human endeavour. In architecture the hierarchical elaboration of the late Gothic style maintained its ascendancy and even made a notable conquest in Italy with the construction of the great cathedral of Milan, begun in 1387. The sculptured carvings of Tilman Riemenschneider (c. 1460–1531) in the chapels and cathedrals of Würzburg and other Franconian cities revealed the anxiety, the deep piety, and the religious sensibility of Christian men engaged upon a spiritual pilgrimage that was to continue through the Reformation and beyond. His work was the pinnacle of a great flowering of sculpture, one of the greatest in German history.