- Germany from 1250 to 1493
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After the diet of 1530, Charles left Germany for more than a decade, occupied with troubles in the Mediterranean, the Netherlands, and, once again, France. In 1535 he campaigned against Tunis to subdue the Barbary pirates who, as a naval arm of the Ottomans and as corsairs and privateers, had been making navigation unsafe. Renewed war with France was temporarily halted in 1538 by a treaty meant to last 10 years, but in 1542 France struck again, along with several European allies, including the duke of Gelderland and Cleves (or Kleve), whose lands were claimed by Charles as part of his Burgundian inheritance. The emperor’s conquest of this duchy in 1543, which considerably broadened his power base, and the peace he concluded with France in 1544 (the Peace of Crépy), followed by an armistice in 1545 with the Ottoman Empire, left him free at last to deal decisively with the German Protestants.
The emperor’s policy toward religious deviants was guided by his concept of empire. The universal realm over which he hoped to reign faced external and internal threats; its desired unity and order were assaulted by infidels from without and by national rivalries and heresy from within. He had dealt with the first and second threats; now he turned his attention to the third. Protestantism had spread rapidly in Germany. More than a religion, it was, by the 1540s, a full-fledged political movement with a growing military capacity. The number of Protestant territories had recently grown to include, among others, Brandenburg, the Palatinate, Albertine Saxony, and the bishoprics of Cologne, Münster, Osnabrück, Naumburg, and Merseburg. In Philip of Hesse the Lutherans had an able political strategist. At least provisionally, pending the settlement of all religious issues by a general council, the Protestants had won grudging recognition of their right to exist. Such a council was actually summoned by Pope Paul III—though only upon repeated prodding by the emperor—but there were few signs that the Protestant states would submit. In 1545, therefore, Charles decided on war. He found a pretext in the capture, by Lutheran princes, of the duke of Braunschweig-Wolfenbüttel, a Catholic who had tried to reconquer the lands from which he had been expelled by his Lutheran subjects. Claiming that this capture violated imperial law, Charles opened the conflict in 1546, in which he was joined by Maurice, duke of Saxony, an ambitious Lutheran prince to whom Charles had secretly promised the Saxon electorship. The ensuing war fell into two phases, the first of which saw the emperor victorious at the Battle of Mühlberg, in 1547. Capitalizing on this strong position, Charles in 1548 forced the estates to accept an Interim, a temporary religious settlement on the emperor’s terms. It was the political concessions Charles demanded from the estates, however—concessions that would have permanently limited their autonomy—that led to a resumption of war. Among the Protestants the lead was now taken by Maurice of Saxony, who had abandoned the emperor and had obtained material support from the new French king, Henry II, for fighting on the Protestant side. The resulting “Princes’ War” was brief (1552–53) and inconclusive, and in 1555 a peace was signed at an imperial diet held, again, in Augsburg.
The Peace of Augsburg closed one epoch of German history and opened another. It decided the religious issue but did so in a way bound to occasion future problems. It reinforced the princes’ authority over their territories but failed to settle their relations with the emperor. Most important, it legalized Lutheranism, laying down the rule, later epitomized in the phrase cuius regio, eius religio (“he who governs the territory decides its religion”), that each ruler in the empire—i.e., each prince or city government—could opt for either the Roman Catholic or the Lutheran religion (jus reformandi) and that this choice was binding on everyone under that ruler’s jurisdiction. Only one faith could legitimately exist in a given state, and that faith had to be the ruler’s and could be only Catholicism or Lutheranism; Calvinism, Zwinglianism, and Anabaptism were excluded. A subject unwilling to live by this choice was free to emigrate and take his belongings with him (a provision considered liberal at the time). Confiscated church properties could be kept by the governments that had taken them. An Ecclesiastical Reservation prevented ruling prelates from converting their lands along with them. These terms make it clear that the real winners of the war, and of the entire Reformation period, were the territorial princes, whose authority and power, which now encompassed the church, were greatly increased. As for the emperor, he abdicated in frustration and retired to a monastery in Spain, leaving his Spanish and Burgundian crowns to his son Philip and the empire and the Habsburg lands in central Europe to his brother Ferdinand. These two men, as Philip II and Ferdinand I, strong-minded Catholics both, were to play prominent roles in the period of Counter-Reformation and confessionalism that dominated Europe after 1555.
The confessional age, 1555–1648
German society in the later 1500s
The changes that resulted from state building and the Reformation yielded little real benefit for ordinary people. Historians agree that the later 16th century was, for many, a time of economic hardship and social stress. Rapid increase in population (the European population rose by more than half between 1500 and 1700) and, secondarily, the influx of precious metals from the New World were the main causes of an inflationary trend that spanned the entire century and reached painful stages in Germany in the 1590s and early 1600s. Grain prices were especially affected, with the result that an ever smaller share of the ordinary person’s budget was available for the purchase of other products. This had several effects, which, at least in outline, are well documented. The quality of nutrition for all but the wealthiest became much worse than it had been in the late Middle Ages, when meat consumption was at an all-time high. Illness and epidemic disease were frequent as the nutritional deficiency was aggravated by a series of bad harvests, perhaps caused by unusually severe winters in the decades after 1560.
Cities and towns suffered loss of income as the market for their manufactured wares declined. In consequence, municipal guilds lost ground, not only economically but also politically, as their participation in urban policy making was curtailed. There were exceptions to this trend. Craftsmen specializing in the manufacture of luxury cloths and arms found lucrative markets at princely courts; but overall the position of artisans declined. Journeymen could no longer anticipate becoming masters. Artisans employed in traditional handiwork felt the pressure of the putting-out system favoured by merchant capitalists, whereby much production was moved from the town, where artisanal guilds protected their members, to the countryside, where merchants could hire cheaper labor. Division of labor increased, gradually transforming self-employed craftsmen into dependent workers.
In the agricultural sector, high grain prices and rising land values improved the lot of peasant proprietors, but the greatest beneficiaries were landowning nobles and urban patricians with investments in agriculture. Society was polarized by these developments. A minority of rich peasants lived amid struggling smallholders hard-pressed by feudal lords who maximized their profits by increasing labor and tax burdens (the period has been called a “second serfdom”), and in the cities an upper crust of wealthy merchants and landed aristocrats faced a proletariat, whole sections of which were pauperized by the end of the century. The populous cities, once the glory of Germany, began to play a smaller role, as economic troubles and the centralizing policies of territorial princes decreased their prosperity and sapped their political strength.
The highly visible contrast between rich and poor and the animosity of the weak against the powerful created tensions among groups and classes. Political and economic power was more concentrated than ever before. Its new centers in Germany were the splendid courts of secular and ecclesiastical princes, whence it was distributed to favoured groups: the nobility, rising in importance again but finding its function limited to the service of rulers, and the upper bourgeoisie, shifting its loyalty from guild hall to palace. For ordinary people, administrative centralization and politically sanctioned Reformation had the effect of imposing more rigid control over their lives. A host of mandates flowed from centers of government, seeking to promote an ethic of order, productivity, and morality by shaping working and domestic activities as well as private habits and attitudes. These inroads caused resentment, and there is evidence of widespread resistance, most of it passive. Under these circumstances, the Evangelical Reformation seems to have made but slight impact on the populace at large, whose effective religion continued to be a mixture of traditional Christianity and folk magic.
Most people were worse off near the end of the 16th century than at its beginning. The lot of women, in particular, had deteriorated. About 1500 many German women had been at work in numerous urban occupations. But a century later they had been crowded out of all but the most demeaning trades as economic pressures, reinforcing ancient prejudices, eliminated them wherever they offered competition to male craftsmen. In this light, it is not surprising that the period from the 1580s to the 1620s also witnessed a surge of persecutions for witchcraft in Germany (mainly in the southwest and Bavaria). As elsewhere, the witch craze in the empire seems to have been a reaction to the strains of a time of troubles, the actual causes of which, fairly clear now to historians, were hidden from contemporaries.
