Germany from 1250 to 1493
1250 to 1378
The extinction of the Hohenstaufen dynasty
The death of Frederick II in 1250 and of his son Conrad IV in 1254 heralded the irreversible decline of Hohenstaufen power in Germany and in the conjoint kingdoms of Naples and Sicily. Conrad’s infant son Conradin, heir to Naples and Sicily, remained in Germany under the guardianship of his Bavarian mother. His uncle Manfred seized the reins of government in both Italian kingdoms and in 1258 formally supplanted Conradin by engineering his own coronation in Palermo. Manfred’s defiance of papal claims to suzerainty over the kingdoms impelled the French-born Pope Urban IV to grant them to Charles of Anjou, brother of Louis IX of France. Papal taxation of the French clergy and loans from Florentine bankers enabled Charles to raise a large mercenary army for an expedition to Italy. Manfred, deserted by his barons, was defeated and slain near Benevento in 1266. Conradin then rallied his German supporters and led them across the Alps. But Conradin’s financial resources were inadequate; unpaid troops deserted, and his depleted following was routed by Charles near Tagliacozzo (1268). Conradin was captured as he fled toward Rome, convicted of lèse-majesté (a form of treason), and beheaded in the public square at Naples.
The Great Interregnum
In Germany the death of Frederick II ushered in the Great Interregnum (1250–73), a period of internal confusion and political disorder. The anti-kings Henry Raspe (landgrave of Thuringia, 1246–47) and William of Holland (ruled 1247–56) were elected by the leading ecclesiastical princes at the behest of the papacy. William’s title was recognized initially only in the lower Rhineland, but his marriage to Elizabeth of Brunswick in 1252 ensured his acceptance by the interrelated princely dynasties of northern Germany. The death of the Hohenstaufen Conrad IV left William without a rival in Germany. His growing strength and independence enabled him to escape from the tutelage of his ecclesiastical electors and to devote himself to purely dynastic policies. He pursued his feud with Margaret, countess of Flanders, over their conflicting territorial claims in Zeeland at the mouth of the Rhine. He renewed the attempts of his dynasty to obtain complete mastery of the Zuider Zee by thrusting eastward into Friesland; he died at the hands of the Frisians in 1256.
Pope Alexander IV forbade the election of a Hohenstaufen but interfered no further with the succession. Hence the initiative was taken by a small group of influential German princes, lay and ecclesiastical, acting out of self-interest. None desired the election of a ruler powerful enough to threaten their growing independence as territorial princes; nor did they single out a German candidate, who might prove to be as uncontrollable as William. Archbishop Conrad of Cologne approached Richard, earl of Cornwall, brother of Henry III of England. Richard’s gifts and assurances of future favor bought him the votes of the archbishops of Cologne and Mainz, the count palatine of the Rhine, and Otakar II of Bohemia. He was formally elected in 1257 and crowned king at Aachen (Aix-la-Chapelle). Three months after Richard’s election, Alfonso X of Castile, who aspired to the empire in order to strengthen his foothold in Italy, was chosen in similar fashion by the archbishop of Trier, the duke of Saxony, the margrave of Brandenburg, and the duplicitous Otakar.
The candidates were distracted by the turbulence of the aristocracy in their countries—Richard paid four fleeting visits to Germany; Alfonso failed to appear at all. Each appealed to the papacy for confirmation of his election. Their claims were summarized in Urban IV’s bull Qui coelum (1263), which assumed that the exclusive right of election lay with the seven leading princes involved in the double election of 1257.
The rise of the Habsburgs and Luxembourgs
Rudolf of Habsburg
When Richard died in 1272, the electoral princes were spurred into action by Pope Gregory X, who desired the election of a German monarch sympathetic toward a Crusade for the recovery of the Holy Land. The princes, dreading an overly powerful king, rejected the advances of Philip III of France and Otakar. In 1273 they chose instead Rudolf of Habsburg, a minor count of Swabia who lacked the strength to regain the crown domains the electors had usurped during the Great Interregnum. Papal diplomacy persuaded Alfonso X to abandon his pretensions to the throne, but Otakar denounced the election on the ground that the duke of Bavaria had voted as lay elector in his stead. Rudolf I allied himself with the Wittelsbach family of Bavaria and with other envious neighbors of Otakar, who was defeated and slain in 1278. The duchies of Austria and Styria, overrun by Otakar during the Interregnum, were declared vacant and conferred jointly on Rudolf’s sons Albert and Rudolf in 1282. These acquisitions placed the Habsburgs in the first rank of the German territorial princes and lent impetus to a gradual shift in the political center of gravity from the Rhineland to eastern and southern Germany. The growing Habsburg power, however, disquieted the electoral princes, who frustrated the king’s attempts to secure the election of his elder son, Albert, in 1287 and of his younger son, Rudolf, in 1290.
Adolf of Nassau
On the death of Rudolf I in 1291, the electors averted the danger of a hereditary Habsburg monarchy by choosing Count Adolf of Nassau as his successor. Adolf, possessing only a small patrimony to the south of the river Lahn, strengthened himself financially by promising military aid to, and receiving subsidies from, both sides in the then current Anglo-French war. He took possession of Meissen when the cadet branch of the Wettin dynasty died out, and he used his foreign subsidies to purchase Thuringia in 1295. He was thus able to adopt a more independent attitude toward his electors. On June 23, 1298, five of the electors pronounced Adolf unfit to rule and deposed him; on the following day they elected Albert of Austria in his stead. Albert marched westward from Austria at the head of a large army, and, in a battle at Göllheim, Adolf was slain and his supporters fled.
Albert I of Habsburg
By raising the Habsburg Albert I (ruled 1298–1308) to the kingship, the electors placed themselves in jeopardy. The new ruler, backed by the ample resources of his Austrian dominions, was more powerful and unscrupulous than his predecessor. The electors regarded his treaty of friendship with Philip IV of France (1299) as a move to enlist French support for the election of his son Rudolf as his successor in Germany. In 1300 his attempt to seize Holland and Zeeland as a vacant fief of the empire was rightly interpreted by the electors as an effort to establish Habsburg influence on the lower Rhine. The four prince-electors of the Rhineland (the archbishops of Mainz, Trier, and Cologne and the count palatine) conspired to depose Albert. But Albert wrecked the design by decisive military action in 1301–02, and he sealed his victory over the electors by obtaining confirmation in 1303 of his election from Pope Boniface VIII in return for an unprecedented oath of fealty and obedience to the papacy. Albert subsequently renewed Adolf’s claims to Meissen and Thuringia, but his authority there was still disputed when he was assassinated in 1308. Albert had temporarily tamed the electoral princes, placated the papacy, and renounced intervention in Italy; but this policy foundered at his death, and the electors were given a fresh opportunity to reassert their influence over the German monarchy.
Henry VII of Luxembourg
The princes, released from Albert’s heavy hand, sought a servant, not a master. Archbishop Baldwin of Trier sponsored the candidacy of his brother, Count Henry of Luxembourg, who was elected at Frankfurt am Main in 1308 as Henry VII. The house of Luxembourg (Luxemburg) was not a major territorial power, and Henry lost no time in exploiting his new status to extend its possessions. Under his direction the Diet of Frankfurt (1310) closed the long-disputed question of the Bohemian succession by awarding the kingdom, with the consent of the Bohemian estates, to Henry’s son John. Thus, in common with the Habsburgs, the main weight of Luxembourg interests gravitated eastward. But Henry, unlike his Habsburg predecessors, dreamed of a restoration of the ancient authority of the empire in Italy. His Italian expedition (1310–13) opened brilliantly, and in 1312 he was crowned Holy Roman emperor at Rome. The old fear of German domination, however, stiffened the resistance of the Italian states. Pope Clement V was alarmed by Henry’s preparations to invade the kingdom of Naples, a papal fief, and threatened excommunication. A renewed collision of empire and papacy seemed imminent when Henry died in 1313.
The growth of territorialism under the princes
The decline of Hohenstaufen influence in Germany, the Great Interregnum, and the rapid alternation of dynasties on the German throne created favorable conditions for the territorial princes, lay and spiritual, to gain power. Frederick II had purchased the support of the princes with lavish grants of crown lands, chiefly in the Rhineland and Thuringia. In 1220 he procured the cooperation of the ecclesiastical princes in the election of his son Henry as king and eventual heir to the empire by renouncing his regalian rights of building castles, issuing coinage, and imposing tolls on merchandise in their territories. Henry himself had extended similar concessions to the lay princes in 1231.
Thereafter the direct action of royal authority was virtually precluded in the princely domains. The princes were at liberty to multiply castles and toll stations, establish mints, exploit mineral deposits, and settle all judicial cases except those transferred on appeal to the court of the emperor. The machinery of administration under the prince and his council (Hofrat) was, nevertheless, still rudimentary. Public taxation was intermittent and restricted to emergency occasions, and it was subject to the consent of the three estates of the principality (clergy, nobles, townspeople), which were consulted separately by the prince. The estates grasped the opportunity to ventilate their grievances and to press their advice upon the prince. The emerging territorial state was thus under the dual government of the prince and the estates, and its development was to be heavily influenced by a shifting balance of power between them.
Constitutional conflicts in the 14th century
The death of Henry VII led to a disputed election and a civil war in Germany. The electors’ impulse to choose another lesser count as king was checked by the houses of Habsburg and Luxembourg, which pressured the prince-electors to choose between their candidates. The pro-Habsburg majority elected Frederick the Handsome, duke of Austria. The minority withdrew their support from Henry VII’s son John and transferred it to a more formidable candidate, the Bavarian duke Louis of Wittelsbach, who had recently broken an Austrian invasion of his duchy.
Electoral custom did not yet acknowledge the majority principle. The papacy, which had claimed the right to adjudicate disputed elections since 1201, was vacant. Hence the two claimants settled their differences by the sword. In 1322 Louis defeated and captured his rival at Mühldorf, but his triumph in Germany merely raised the curtain on a long and bitter dispute with the papacy.
Pope John XXII, guided by canon law and precedent, affirmed that Louis might not legally rule until confirmed by the papacy. Thus the disputed election of 1314 and the absence of papal approbation invalidated Louis’s royal title and his right to govern. Louis contended, however, that election by a majority conferred a legitimate title and administrative power and did not require papal confirmation. His defiance of the pope exposed him to excommunication in 1324 and to the procedures of canon law, whereby he was required to submit entirely to the papal terms before absolution could be granted. Louis warned the electors that their rights were endangered by the subjection of the elections to papal confirmation. Six electors responded in the Declaration of Rhens (1338), proclaiming as an ancient custom of the empire that election by a majority was valid and that the king-elect assumed his administrative power immediately, without the intervention of papal approbation. Under Louis’s direction the declaration was repeated at the subsequent Diet of Frankfurt as an imperial law, and offenders against it were declared guilty of lèse-majesté.
John XXII and his successors were unyielding. In 1343 Pope Clement VI made diplomatic overtures to Charles of Luxembourg, heir to the Bohemian throne, with the object of procuring his election to the German kingship in Louis’s stead. The electors, led by Baldwin of Luxembourg, the archbishop of Trier, began to desert Louis one by one. The pope thereupon urged a new election. Charles assured the pope secretly that he would await papal confirmation of his forthcoming election before exercising governmental power in the Italian possessions of the empire, but, despite intense pressure by Clement, he would accept no such restriction with regard to Germany. In 1346 only two electors remained faithful to Louis: his son Louis of Brandenburg and his kinsman Rudolf, count palatine of the Rhine. The other five assembled at Rhens on July 11 and elected Charles under the title of Charles IV. The new king was spared a lengthy conflict with his rival, who died of a stroke in 1347. Shortly after his accession to the throne, however, the kingdom faced one of the greatest epidemics of all time, the Black Death (caused by bubonic and pneumonic plague), which killed perhaps one-third of the population, caused a labor shortage, and left the survivors shaken.
Charles IV and the Golden Bull
Charles IV (ruled 1346–78) readily perceived that disputed elections exploding into civil war had been a standing malady of the German body politic since 1198 and that the stability of the German monarchy depended largely upon the degree of cooperation achieved with the territorial princes, more especially with the prince-electors. In 1355, on his return from his imperial coronation as Holy Roman emperor, he promulgated, with the consent of the German assembly of estates, or diet (1356), a basic constitutional document, known as the Golden Bull from its pendant gold seal (bulla). Charles’s double objective was to minimize areas of dispute in future elections and to strengthen his ties with the electors. Unanimity among the electoral princes had always been difficult to attain; hence the validity of election by majority vote, a principle already set forth in the Declaration of Rhens, was reaffirmed. The territories of the lay electors were declared indivisible and heritable only by the eldest son. Thus, partitions of land by family agreement and consequent uncertainty concerning the holder of the electoral vote were eliminated. In conformity with ancient custom, the archbishop of Mainz was to convene the electors and to request them to name their favored candidate. He was to announce his own choice after the other electors had given their vote verbally so that he could cast the deciding vote in the event of a tie. The election was to be held in Frankfurt am Main, the royal coronation in Aachen.
The membership of the electoral body was fixed at the traditional number of seven: the archbishops of Mainz, Cologne, and Trier, the count palatine of the Rhine, the king of Bohemia, the margrave of Brandenburg, and the duke of Saxony. When the throne was vacant, the count palatine would be regent in southern Germany and the duke of Saxony in the north; thus the long-standing papal claim to govern the empire during a vacancy was tacitly rejected. The question of papal confirmation of elections was ignored; neither Charles nor his electors were prepared to yield, but an open affirmation of their position would have been ill received by the papacy, which had played a leading role in Charles’s election.
The Golden Bull consolidated and extended the territorial power of the electors. Their right to construct castles, issue coinage, and impose tolls was confirmed. They could judge without appeal. Conspiracy or rebellion against them was deemed high treason. They were to meet the ruler once yearly as supreme advisory council on affairs of state. The formation of city leagues against them was specifically prohibited. On the basis of these enactments, the Golden Bull has been called the Magna Carta of German particularism. The electors in their capacity as territorial lords were its chief beneficiaries; the rest of the princes were envious and strove thenceforth to acquire an equally large measure of territorial sovereignty.
Rudolf IV of Austria ordered his chancery to fabricate a series of imperial charters, including two from Julius Caesar and Nero, as evidence of his virtual independence of the empire. Charles IV submitted them for examination to the Italian humanist Petrarch, who declared the charters spurious. Rudolf took up arms and was bought off by the recognition of his claim to Tirol in 1364.
The election of Charles’s son Wenceslas (Wenzel) as king in 1376 (two years before Charles’s death) was a striking example of the emperor’s skill in securing the cooperation of the electors for his dynastic purposes. The election of an emperor’s son as king of the Romans during the father’s lifetime had not occurred since 1237; the prince-electors, in their anxiety to prevent any single dynasty from strengthening its grip on the succession, had checked all subsequent attempts. But unprecedented gifts, concessions, and a renewed prohibition of city leagues by Charles overcame the opposition of the electors. Pope Gregory XI had previously announced that the election would be invalid without papal confirmation. Charles, in concert with the electors, speeded the election and subsequent coronation of his son and then submitted an antedated request for confirmation to the pope, who countered these devious tactics by delaying confirmation; it was still under consideration at Gregory’s death in 1378. The decline of the papacy during the Great Schism (Western Schism; 1378–1417) precluded the vigorous assertion of its right of confirmation, which became a mere formality and was subsequently tacitly abandoned.
Decline of the German monarchy
Charles IV’s power was based primarily upon the territorial possessions of the house of Luxembourg, which he greatly extended by the purchase of the electorate of Brandenburg (1373). The German monarchy was a source of dignity and influence, but, in terms of land and revenue, it was outweighed by Charles’s hereditary domains in the east and northeast. The Golden Bull, replete with privileges to the electors, attacked none of the fundamental problems of the monarchy: dwindling crown lands, slender revenues, and the lack of an army and of an expert bureaucracy.
The financial problem was acute and long-standing. The succession of disputed elections between 1198 and 1257 had compelled the various claimants to purchase support by grants of royal land and revenues. The attempt by Rudolf of Habsburg to recover possession of crown lands alienated since 1245 had been opposed by his electors, who were unwilling to set an example by surrendering their own considerable acquisitions. At every election the votes of the princes had been secured by the grant or pledge of royal rights and property; thus, every king began his reign with a financial millstone round his neck and could attain freedom of action only by the possession or acquisition of extensive dynastic territories. The system of pledging crown lands led to the permanent loss of this land and its revenues and to the enrichment of the princes at the expense of the emperor. The imperial cities (Reichsstädte) had been heavily taxed by Rudolf, and, before his acquisition of Austria, they had furnished the bulk of his revenue. His less provident successors had pledged them in a few cases to the local territorial princes and had thus lost the right of taxation. Charles IV carefully cultivated his dynastic revenues from Bohemia, but he lavishly expended crown assets in Germany to expand his family possessions. His financial exploitation of the cities for purely dynastic purposes naturally stiffened their resistance to taxation. By 1400 the annual revenues from all the German crown possessions had averaged only 30,000 florins.
The enforcement of the public peace, a taproot of royal power in other countries, had long since slipped from the hands of the German monarchs. The German monarchy possessed no executive officials comparable to the English sheriff or justice of the peace, and it was diverted from its guardianship of law and order by recurrent conflicts with the papacy and by its absorption in purely dynastic matters. Consequently, the proclamation and enforcement of the peace fell into the hands of regional associations of cities and of the individual territorial princes. Thus, the monarchy was prevented from using its function as defender of the public peace as an entering wedge to invade the jurisdiction of the municipalities and the territorial lords.
In sum, the German rulers were being gradually deprived of their triple role as feudal suzerain, defender of the church, and keeper of the peace. The sweeping privileges granted to the princes in 1220 and 1231 had undermined the monarch’s position as feudal suzerain. The rulers’ bitter struggles with the papacy cast doubt on their credibility as protectors of the church. They allowed their powers as guardians of the public peace to slip into the hands of others.
The continued ascendancy of the princes
By Charles IV’s death in 1378, the division of Germany into numerous loosely defined territorial principalities had reached an advanced stage.
Southern Germany
In southern Germany the dissolution of the Hohenstaufen duchy of Swabia gave territorial predominance to the Habsburgs, whose original possessions were scattered across Alsace, Breisgau, the Vorarlberg, and Tirol. Rudolf’s acquisition of the provinces of Austria and Styria in 1282 had more than doubled the Habsburg patrimony and established its center of gravity in southeastern Germany. The Habsburg’s rivals and neighbors to the north, the counts of Württemberg, had combined with the Swabian nobles to foil the attempt of Rudolf to revive the defunct duchy of Swabia for one of his sons. (The counts, insatiably acquisitive and the inveterate enemies of the cities of the region, were finally raised to ducal status in 1495.) The margraves of Baden were chiefly preoccupied with the southward expansion of their territory on the upper Rhine at the expense of the independent small nobles and cities of Swabia.
These three large entities contained lesser lordships, which were in constant danger of absorption by marriage, purchase, or feud. Bavaria, granted to the house of Wittelsbach as a duchy in 1180, was strengthened by the acquisition of the Palatinate in 1214; but subsequent testamentary partition restricted this important gain to the Upper Palatinate.
Central Germany
In central Germany the margraves of Meissen of the Wettin dynasty thrust steadily eastward and received the electorate of Saxony in 1423, when the Ascanian line of electors died out; in the west they obtained Thuringia (1263) and clung to it tenaciously despite repeated royal attempts to oust them by claiming it as a vacant fief. The landgraves of Hesse, though surrounded by powerful neighbors, contrived to make modest territorial gains at the expense of the Wettin dynasty and the archbishops of Mainz. East and south of Hesse, the Rhine-Main region was a land of great ecclesiastical princes: the archbishops of Mainz, Trier, and Cologne; the bishops of Speyer, Worms, Würzburg, and Bamberg; and the wealthy abbots of Fulda and Lorsch. It abounded in counts of the second rank, dominated by a great secular prince, the count palatine of the Rhine. The area contained four electorates and was therefore of crucial political importance.
Northern Germany
In northern Germany the dukes of Brunswick dissipated their strength by frequent divisions of their territory among heirs. Farther east the powerful duchy of Saxony was also split by partition between the Wittenberg and Lauenburg branches; the Wittenberg line was formally granted an electoral vote by the Golden Bull of 1356. The strength of the duchy lay in the military and commercial qualities of its predominantly free population. But the vigor of its eastward expansion into the Slav lands beyond the Elbe tended to diminish its involvement in the internal politics of the Reich. As in central Germany, large areas of northern Germany were held by ecclesiastical princes, including the archbishops of Bremen and Magdeburg and the bishops of Utrecht, Münster, and Osnabrück. During the 13th and 14th centuries the major trading cities of the north, including Münster, Bremen, Hamburg, and Lübeck, joined together to form the Hanseatic League, which was a powerful economic and political force not only in northern Germany but in most of the lands surrounding the North and Baltic seas.
Eastern Germany
In eastern Germany the duchy of Mecklenburg, Germanized by a steady stream of immigrants, was drawn deeply into Scandinavian affairs and in 1363 provided Sweden with a new royal dynasty in the person of Albert of Mecklenburg. The electorate of Brandenburg, purchased by Charles IV and bequeathed to his second son, Sigismund, was dominated by a disorderly and rapacious nobility. Sigismund granted this dubious asset in 1415 to his faithful ally Frederick, burgrave of Nürnberg. The kingdom of Bohemia remained the durable territorial core of the Luxembourg dominions, and its silver mines at Kuttenberg (now Kutná Hora, in the Czech Republic), under German supervision, vastly increased crown revenues. The Czech population increasingly resented the economic and cultural influence of the German minority, and this created antagonisms profoundly disturbing to the monarchy.
Continued dispersement of territory
Inside the various territories the consolidation of princely authority was far from complete. The principalities were often ragged in outline and territorially dispersed because of the accidents of inheritance, grant, partition, and conquest. Everywhere lesser nobles disputed the power of the prince and formed associations in defense of their rights and fiefs. In the ecclesiastical princedoms the ascendancy of an archbishop or a bishop was contested by the cathedral chapter, which had become a preserve of the nobility. The self-governing cities fought to protect their chartered liberties and drew together in formidable leagues to resist princely encroachment. Thus the princes, in trying to enforce their authority, tended to consolidate the opposition and to excite potential or open hostility.
In this crucial struggle the great secular potentates undermined their own strength by persisting in the Germanic custom of dividing their territory among their sons instead of transmitting it intact to the eldest. By 1378 the Bavarian lands of the house of Wittelsbach were shared between three grandsons of Louis IV. In 1379 the wide possessions of the Habsburgs were partitioned by family agreement between Albert III and his younger brother Leopold.
The ecclesiastical princes, vowed to celibacy and elected by their cathedral chapters, could not hand on their lands to descendants. Still, their policies and aspirations were not much different from those of the secular princes, and most of them managed to install their relatives in rich canonries and prebends.
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 labor force and the revenues of territorial lords. Others who stayed on the land accepted the protection and jurisdiction of the neighboring 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 neighboring 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 long 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 favored 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 favored 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 favor. 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 Roman 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 honor 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 favor 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 favor 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) had not been fully decided by 1500. The vigor 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 labor 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 favored 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 Martin 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 laborers 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 labor 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 labor 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 rigors 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 had sunk 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 (Stadträte) 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 laborers 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 vigor 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 ardor 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.
Charles Calvert Bayley Lawrence G. DugganGermany from 1493 to c. 1760
Reform and Reformation, 1493–1555
The empire in 1493
The reign of Maximilian I (1493–1519) was dominated by the interplay of three issues of decisive importance to the future of the Holy Roman Empire: the rise of the Austrian house of Habsburg to international prominence, the urgent need to reform the empire’s governing institutions, and the beginnings of the religious and social movement known as the Reformation. The accession of the dynamic and imaginative Maximilian to the German throne aroused in many Germans, and in particular among humanists, expectations of a time when the old imperial idea—the vision of the empire as the political expression of a united Christendom in which the emperor, as God’s deputy, rules over a universal realm of peace and order—might become a reality. Since the extinction of the Hohenstaufen dynasty in 1254, imperial authority had been in disarray. As weak emperors had become absorbed in struggles against foreign and domestic, secular and ecclesiastical rivals, real power in the empire had moved toward the governments of territorial states and independent cities. From their first appearance on the historical scene (briefly from 1273 to 1308, then from 1438 in a nearly unbroken line until the dissolution of the empire in 1806), Habsburg rulers had fostered imperial unity. But they had been notably unsuccessful in creating agencies for its attainment, partly because they were assiduously working to build up a power base for their own house. This in turn brought them into conflict with European antagonists, chiefly France. The long reign of Maximilian’s father, Frederick III (1440–93), was regarded by nationalists as lamentable in its inattention to the problems pressing on the empire. The solutions proposed for them were subsumed under the name of “reform,” a highly charged word that acquired enormous additional force in the 15th century when the conciliar movement and its lay and clerical proponents exerted pressure for religious renewal. Maximilian’s arrival on the throne thus generated a surge of anticipation, expressed in an outpouring of agendas for restructuring what was then coming to be called the “Holy Roman Empire of the German Nation.”
Imperial reform
Inevitably, perhaps, Maximilian’s performance with regard to the empire disappointed, but he was successful in significantly extending the dynastic might of his family. He took over the duchy of Tirol with its vast mining resources. Ambitious marriage alliances spread Habsburg entitlements west and east: in 1496 Maximilian’s son Philip wed Joan, the daughter of the king and queen of Spain, thus linking Habsburg Austria to Spain and the Netherlands (the future Charles V was born of this union in 1500), and in 1516 Maximilian’s grandson Ferdinand was betrothed to the heiress of Hungary and Bohemia. These connections, however, only escalated Maximilian’s internal and external problems. In foreign politics his ventures ended, for the most part, in calamities for the empire. Switzerland was lost in 1499, several Italian campaigns were repulsed, and an attempt against the duchy of Burgundy brought the hostility of France and led to the fall of Milan. Even the imperial crown eluded Maximilian: his advance on Rome for this purpose was halted, and he had to be content with the self-bestowed title of Roman emperor-elect.
These reverses strengthened a reform party among leading members of the empire’s estates (Stände); especially prominent was their spokesman, the archbishop-elector of Mainz, Berthold von Henneberg. Given the long rivalry between emperor and estates, it goes without saying that their respective plans for reforming the empire diverged on crucial points of direction and control. The estates, acting from their—to them entirely legitimate—sense of the prerogatives of particularism, favored a central administration responsive to them; the emperor, to the contrary, insisted on organs subservient to him, modeled on bureaucratic agencies recently established in Burgundy and Austria and shored up by the authority-enhancing principles of Roman law.
At the imperial diet held in the city of Worms in 1495, the estates, whose members had begun to see themselves as the authentic representatives of the whole country, prevailed. The four reform measures adopted on this occasion were in large part intended to limit the emperor’s powers. An “Eternal Peace” outlawed private feuds, with steps taken, and agreed to by the emperor, to implement this pacification. An Imperial Chamber Court functioned as supreme tribunal for the empire, most of its judges being named by the estates. An empirewide tax, the “Common Penny,” was imposed, the collection of which fell to the estates. To these measures was added, in 1500, an Imperial Governing Council to monitor, under the domination of the electors, the empire’s foreign policy. Maximilian was able to impede the operation of this body (it was reestablished in 1521), but overall the emperor’s reform objectives had come to nothing.
The historical judgment of this failure has swung widely, on one hand between scorn for Maximilian’s imperial “fantasies”—for whose realization a reorganized Germany was to furnish the means—and respect for his grasp of the country’s perilous geopolitical situation, and on the other hand between sympathy for the estates’ single-minded pursuit of the imperatives of regional state building and disdain for the parochialism of their political vision. Most historians have found Maximilian’s actions distorted by a brand of romantic idealism. (In all seriousness he proposed to Bayezid II that Turks and Christians should settle their differences by the rules of the tournament; he also cherished for a time the hope of becoming pope as well as emperor.) What is clear is that the reform effort so briskly launched at the beginning of his reign resulted in permanent confrontation between sovereign and estates, a posture in which neither party could outmaneuver the other and every matter of policy required tenacious negotiation. In light of this permanent tug of war, the notion of a universal realm ruled by a “German” emperor does seem fantastic, though it never lost its ideological force. No one in the empire possessed plenary authority, but real power was shifting to territorial rulers and their bureaucratic agents and to the magistrates of larger cities. This shift was to be of the greatest importance in determining the direction in which the Reformation established itself in Germany.

The Reformation
The Reformation presents the historian with an acute instance of the general problem of scholarly interpretation—namely, whether events are shaped primarily by individuals or by the net of historical circumstances enmeshing them. The phenomenon that became the Protestant Reformation is unthinkable without the sense of mission and compelling personality of Martin Luther. But in social and intellectual conditions less conducive to drastic change, Luther’s voice would have gone unheard and his actions been forgotten. Among the preconditions—which are the deeper causes of the Reformation—the following stand out: (1) Everyone agreed that the Roman Catholic Church was in need of correction. The lack of spirituality in high places, the blatant fiscalism, of which the unrestrained hawking of indulgences—the actual trigger of the Reformation—was a galling example, and the embroilment in political affairs—all were symptoms of corruption long overdue for purgation. While the church continued to be accepted as the only legitimate mediator of divine grace, denunciations of its abuses, perceived or actual, became more strident in the decades before 1517. (2) A subtle change, moreover, had been occurring in people’s religious needs and expectations, leading to demands for a more personal experience of the divine. Failing to meet this aspiration, the church was widely, if diffusely, rebuked for its unresponsiveness. (3) More-focused criticism came from the Christian humanists, an influential group of scholars bent on restoring the fundamental texts of Western Christianity. Led by Desiderius Erasmus, the most renowned biblical scholar of the time, these men held the Catholic church up to the spiritual ideals for which it claimed to stand and, finding it wanting, set the principle of Evangelicalism against the church’s secularized ambitions. (4) Still more fatefully, by 1500 the church had come under attack from European rulers whose administrative, legal, and financial hegemony could not be completed in their respective states without domination of the ecclesiastical sector. In the empire, as elsewhere, the trend in ecclesiastical politics was toward state churches (Landeskirchen), in which governments, using “reform” as a pretext, gradually gained, while church authorities lost, a large measure of control over clerical properties, personnel, and functions. The Reformation was the culmination of this process, which, in the empire, took place in nearly all princely territories and in most independent cities, where governments brought the administration of the church under political direction. (5) In Germany this development was facilitated by an ancient feudal custom entitling a landlord to extend “protection” to churches located on his estates. Over this “owner’s church” (Eigenkirche) he enjoyed the right of patronage, allowing him to appoint incumbents and manage properties. In the course of extending their sovereignty, territorial princes took over this right to patronage and fashioned of it the legal basis on which, in the Reformation, they assumed full control over the administration of the church. (6) In every segment of German society, but particularly among the poor, voices were being raised against injustice and exploitation. Wide disparities in income and discriminatory laws in cities as well as the deteriorating standard of living of small peasants and agricultural laborers caused riots and uprisings, which by the early 1500s had become endemic.
These, then, were the forces driving events toward a crisis. In the first decade of the 16th century they coalesced into a powerful surge of religious, social, and political agitation, for which “reform” (of church and society) was the code word. Ironically, Luther, who was to channel this agitation into the Reformation, had, until his emergence as a national figure in the 1520s, nothing to do with it. For him one issue alone mattered: the imperative of faith. His personal path to the Reformation was an inner search for religious truth, to which his conscience was his guide.
When he wrote his Ninety-five Theses against indulgences in October 1517, Luther was an Augustinian friar, a preacher in the Saxon city of Wittenberg, and a theology professor at the university founded there in 1502 by the elector of Saxony, Frederick III, called “the Wise.” His ambitious father had pushed him toward a career in law, but in 1505 the fervently devout Martin entered a monastic house. His order, that of the Augustinian eremites, was a strict reform congregation dedicated to prayer, study, and the ascetic life. Deeply troubled by the question of justification—of how a human being, a sinner, may be justified (saved) in God’s sight—Luther found no comfort in monastic routine and turned to an exploration of the sources of Christian doctrine, notably St. Paul and St. Augustine. His intellectual promise having been recognized, he was sent by his order to study theology at Erfurt and Wittenberg. He was awarded a doctorate in 1512 and commenced his teaching of the Bible in Wittenberg that same year. According to his own account, it was during his close reading of Paul’s Epistle to the Romans, while preparing to give a course of lectures on that text, that he discovered what struck him as the solution to the problem posed by the huge gap between human sin and divine grace. Justification is not earned as a reward for human effort through good works (a position Luther now attributed to a misguided and misguiding Roman church). To the contrary, human beings are justified without any merit of their own by God’s freely given and prevenient (i.e., coming before any worthy human deeds) grace, through faith, which is a gift of God. This is the meaning Luther found in the crucial passage in Romans 1:17: “For in it [i.e., the Gospel] the righteousness of God is revealed through faith for faith: as it is written, ‘He who through faith is righteous shall live.’” “Righteousness”—justitia in Latin—does not refer, Luther believed, to God’s activity as judge but to the justifying righteous condition he effects in the human sinner, a condition expressing itself as faith. The momentous consequences of this theological insight, which Luther appears to have taken as a unique discovery but which had in fact been espoused by a score of theologians before him, were not then apparent to him. They asserted themselves powerfully, however, once he began to lecture and preach on the—for him—paramount themes of salvation by faith alone (sola fide) and exclusive reliance on scripture (sola scriptura). It was the indulgence controversy of October 1517 that brought it all into the open.
Few other issues could so clearly have exposed the gulf that separated this ardent friar from an urbane and pragmatic church. The indulgence offered in Saxony in 1517 had its origin in two purely financial arrangements. First, Popes Julius II and Leo X needed funds for rebuilding St. Peter’s Basilica in Rome. Second, Bishop Albert of Hohenzollern, forced to buy papal dispensations in order to gain the archbishoprics of Mainz and Halberstadt, agreed to promote indulgences in his domains, half the income from which was to go to Rome, the other half to him and his bankers. For Luther, the issue turned not so much on the outrageous venality of this deal as on the indulgence itself. Truly contrite sinners do not desire relief through an indulgence (which is a remission of the penance, or temporal punishment, that the sinner would otherwise owe following absolution); they crave penance. This is the gist of Luther’s argument in the Ninety-five Theses, which he sent to his ecclesiastical superiors to persuade them to abandon the indulgence sale. (The story that he nailed a copy of the theses to the door of the Castle Church in Wittenberg may be the invention of a later time.)
Luther intended no defiance with this action. He intervened as a priest on behalf of his flock and as a conscientious theologian against a corrupting church. But the public reaction to the theses (he had written them in Latin, but they were soon translated and printed) made it evident that he had touched a nerve. Encouraged by expressions of support and goaded by opponents, Luther became more outspoken, harsher in his criticism of the church, and more focused in his attacks on the papacy. By 1520 he was well on his way to becoming the spokesman for Germany’s grievances against Rome. A pamphlet he published that year, Address to the Christian Nobility of the German Nation, urged the empire’s secular rulers to reform a church that would not set its own house in order. Popes and prelates are not sacrosanct, he argued; they may be brought to justice. As every Christian can read the Bible for himself, papal claims to interpretive authority are a vain boast. Luther prodded the German princes to consider the state of the church and to reform it for the sake of the faith. In this way Luther drew out, albeit reluctantly, the full consequences of his principle of “salvation by faith alone.” No church was needed to act as God’s agent; grace was available without mediation. No priest, not even the pope, has special powers, for, so Luther argued, all human beings are priests, made so by their faith. It is scarcely surprising that a bull of excommunication against him (Exsurge domine) issued from Rome in June 1520.
Imperial election of 1519 and the Diet of Worms
At any other time the Lutheran matter would probably have ended there. But 1521 was no ordinary moment in the empire’s history. When he died in 1519, Maximilian had not succeeded in having his grandson and heir, Charles, designated his successor. King of Castile and Aragon since 1516 and suzerain also over Habsburg lands in the Netherlands, Naples, and central and eastern Europe—not to mention the Spanish possessions in the New World—Charles posed a formidable problem for the electors. Should they choose a man whose vast resources might well empower him to centralize authority in the empire when this would limit their hard-won autonomy? Should they elect a prince whose international commitments would entangle Germany in European conflicts? The only other viable candidate was the king of France, Francis I, who recognized in the rapidly growing Habsburg ascendancy a serious threat to his own power. But, though Francis made tempting promises, the electors, in the end, opted for Charles—not, however, without drawing from him a 36-point “electoral capitulation” in which he swore to uphold the estates’ prerogatives. In making this choice, the electors strove to secure their own privileges, but the German public tended to see in the new monarch a fulfillment of national aspirations—mistakenly, as it turned out, but giving rise, at the time, to patriotic expressions of hopes for a brighter future. Coinciding with these events in the political realm and gaining resonance from them, the Lutheran matter was inevitably drawn into the political vortex, thereby acquiring the features of a national cause.
Delayed by disturbances in his Spanish domains, Charles reached Germany late in 1520. He was crowned king in Aachen, assuming at the same time the title of Roman emperor-elect. He then proceeded to Worms, where he was to meet with the German estates in early 1521. By then no other issue counted as much on the agenda as the Lutheran affair. Acting out of what appears to be a blend of conviction and political expediency, the estates’ leaders, prompted by Frederick the Wise, the elector of Saxony, demanded that the Diet of Worms reopen Luther’s case by allowing the excommunicated friar to speak before the estates. Unable to resist, the emperor issued a safe-conduct, and Luther traveled to Worms, treated on his way to such extravagant public acclaim that he must have felt like a national hero. On April 17 and 18 he stood before the emperor and representatives of the estates. He refused to revoke his views on justification and other points of theology, reiterated his denial of ultimate authority to pope and church councils, and—when pressed—asserted the principle of individual responsibility in matters of faith:
As long as my conscience is held captive by the words of God, I cannot and will not revoke anything, for it is dangerous, and a great peril to salvation, to act against conscience. God help me. Amen.
These words, and all else that transpired, were broadcast to the country in scores of pamphlets in which Luther was cast in the role of the man sent by God to cleanse the German church. While an imperial edict condemned his teachings and placed him and his adherents under the ban, Luther himself was offered a refuge in the Wartburg, Frederick the Wise’s castle in the Thuringian Forest. There, fretting over his enforced absence from events, he turned to the translation of the New Testament, while the movement, of which he was now the acknowledged head, gained momentum.
Analysis of what happened at Worms reveals the first signs of what was to become a fateful split in the self-perception of this movement. The estates saw it as a means of promoting ecclesiastical reform; on questions of faith, they were willing to compromise. Luther, on the contrary, tolerated no distinction between points of faith and aspects of church practice, and on his understanding of the former he stood rock-solid. He and his political patrons were thus pursuing different ends; for the present, however, his support in official circles was, for whatever reason, substantial.
Luther’s hold on the general public was even more impressive than his hold on the political leadership. Historians are not unanimous in explaining how this friar from the German east, utterly obscure only five years earlier, could have gained such a following by 1521 that few governments would enforce the ban against him, knowing that they would face strong resistance if they tried to do so. It is not clear whether the general population, still largely illiterate, understood the doctrine of faith alone well enough to make it the object of informed choice. More likely, the German populace took Luther not as the preeminently religious prophet he was but saw in him their best hope of achieving an amelioration of the many troubles vexing them in their respective stations, not only in religion but also, and perhaps mainly, in their social condition. Against these troubles, the products of deeply rooted legal and institutional structures, Luther—or so people seem to have understood him—raised the standard of Evangelical morality: all things were to be judged by scripture and God’s law.
Scholars have often pointed out that this view is less attributable to the Wittenberg reformer than to another theologian and preacher, Huldrych Zwingli, who was then beginning to be active in the Swiss city of Zürich. Luther explicitly rejected the use of the—to him purely spiritual—New Testament as a norm for social reform. But Zwingli affirmed it. On the other hand, Luther’s vehemence and forceful rhetoric were so compelling that, rightly or wrongly, his name came to be fused with the general hope of improvement in human affairs. His partisans, proficient in their use of the media of print and woodcut illustration, helped shape this conviction by furnishing propaganda for a strong popular drive toward Lutheranism. This drive from below, further nourished by traditional anticlerical sentiments, was met from above by the eagerness of territorial and urban governments to utilize Lutheran ideas as legitimation for the extension of political control over the church. Thus, by the mid-1520s a number of German cities and states had formally turned Lutheran, meaning that they had severed their legal and administrative ties to Rome and its prelates and were building new ecclesiastical institutions and framing new doctrines.
The revolution of 1525
The events of the revolutionary years 1524–25 impelled Lutheran rulers to establish centrally controlled church organizations. In their own time and often since then, these events were labeled a “peasant rebellion,” but modern scholarship has made it clear that the insurrection was far more than a series of uprisings by rural bands. The tens of thousands of peasants drawn into the movement, some of them massed in major military actions, were a symptom of the general unrest that had gripped Germany since the middle of the 15th century. Both peasants and city dwellers resented the concentration of land and economic and political power in the hands of the landed nobility and wealthy merchants, as well as the burden of the tributes, taxes, and forced labor that these elites exacted. The growth of the population heightened these resentments by causing a shortage of available land, particularly in the south, and driving up prices and rents. The particular demands pressed in the 1520s—mitigation of fiscal and labor burdens imposed on peasants by their lords, autonomy for village communes, and relief from high taxes—had been voiced before.
New were the linkage of these demands with the grievances of restive urban groups also protesting exploitation and disenfranchisement and their formulation as an agenda of social reform on the principle of Christian communitarianism. This ideological redirection of old patterns of resistance could not have occurred without the impetus of the Reformation, specifically the incendiary preaching in towns and villages of Evangelical pastors who presented Lutheran and Zwinglian ideas as solutions to the problems at hand. The clearest evidence of the Reformation’s impact on the shaping of what some modern scholars call “the revolution of the common man” are the Twelve Articles drawn up for the Swabian peasantry by an Evangelical cleric and associate of Zwingli’s. Article 3 of this document asserts, “The Bible proves that we are free, and we want to be free,” while another article claims for every congregation the right to choose its minister. These articles are a strong indication of how vital the principle of biblicism had become to people preeminently concerned with worldly life.
In the regions involved—Franconia, Swabia, the Upper Rhine and Alsace, Thuringia, and Tirol—large forces of peasants attacked castles, monasteries, and some cities. News of these actions encouraged discontented urban groups to rise against their oligarchic town governments, and for a while it looked as though a united revolutionary front of ordinary—i.e., nonprivileged—people might be forged. Manifestos and lists of articles abounded; there was talk everywhere of judging things by “God’s law” (meaning the Gospel), and some groups even laid plans for a “Christian association” across regional and urban-rural lines. But before long the forces of the propertied won the upper hand, and the insurrectionaries were put down with the ferocity customary in those days. The war’s final stage was dominated by Thomas Müntzer, a visionary theologian with a message of social deliverance for and by the poor. The defeat of his forces at Frankenhausen in May 1525 marked the final victory of the old order over the would-be new dispensation.
Luther was heavily implicated in this turnabout. Realizing that his words and deeds had served to encourage popular action against rulers, he sought to separate himself drastically from the movement, going so far as to urge the rulers’ soldiers to “cut [the peasants] down, hit them, choke them wherever you can.” His brush with revolution confirmed Luther in the rigorous segregation he made between “two realms,” the worldly and the spiritual, the respective laws and ideals of which must not be confounded, as, he claimed, the revolutionaries had done. The Gospel, he said, cannot be used as a standard for governing in the world, which has its own rules and ways of justice, many of them, he acknowledged, unfair and blameworthy. Luther’s separation of worldly and Evangelical values, soon made binding law by Lutheran governments, brought an abrupt end to the early phase of the Reformation, during which events seemed to many to be moving toward a sweeping transformation of social, as well as religious, structures. At the same time, Lutheran governments read 1525 as a lesson on the need to control subjects, concluding that preaching in particular, and religious behaviour generally, must be controlled. To accomplish this purpose, new laws and bureaucracies were set up everywhere.
Lutheran church organization and confessionalization
The 1525 revolution was but one of several upheavals worrying German rulers. Three years earlier a group of imperial knights led by Franz von Sickingen had declared a feud against the archbishop of Trier, claiming to derive from scripture their right to despoil Roman Catholic prelates. The ensuing “Knights’ War” was quickly crushed. But about the same time a disturbance broke out in Wittenberg where, during Luther’s exile in the Wartburg, a group of reforming spiritualist activists forced the city council to abolish many traditional Catholic practices. Upset by this rash move, Luther intervened to reverse it. But this incident and the knights’ attack caused consternation among the heads of government, who feared loss of control. Their anxiety was deepened by the spread from Switzerland in the mid-1520s of Anabaptism, a radical religious movement whose most distinctive tenet was adult baptism. The events of 1525 thus strengthened a growing resolution that firm structures and clear doctrines were needed to reassert authority in a situation of drift.
The foreign entanglements of the Habsburgs, champions of Roman Catholicism in Germany, helped free Lutheran states to act on this resolution. Far from seeing to the execution of the 1521 edict against Luther, Charles V left his brother Ferdinand in charge of imperial affairs and departed from Germany after the Worms diet to deal with the many problems besetting his far-flung interests. The most perilous of these was the war with France, which implicated the emperor in a constantly shifting balance of alliances with other powers and in a seesaw of military actions in which sometimes Charles had the upper hand and sometimes Francis I did. Charles’s victory at the Battle of Pavia in 1525 led to the formation of a coalition against him (the so-called “Holy League of Cognac”), intended to forestall Habsburg hegemony in Europe (a scenario to be replayed many times in the following two centuries). In 1526, therefore, Charles was in no position to dictate to the German estates on the Lutheran matter. Within a year, however, the situation turned in his favor. Spanish troops captured and plundered Rome in 1527, and by 1529 Charles had become dominant once more, though it had become clear that neither warring party could bring the other to its knees. At the same time a potentially fatal danger loomed in the east where the Turks, under Süleyman I (the Magnificent), began to aim their path of conquest at the Balkans and Hungary. The death of King Louis II at the Battle of Mohács in 1526 put Ferdinand in line for the Bohemian and Hungarian crowns, thereby exposing the already overextended Habsburgs on a new front. By 1529 the Turks were moving toward Buda (now part of Budapest), which they captured in September of that year, and Vienna. Facing these perils, Charles concluded peace with France, sealing his triumph in the west with his coronation as emperor at Bologna, Italy. He then returned to Germany.
These events formed the larger political context in which Lutheran church organization took place. Forced to solicit military aid from the estates in 1526, Ferdinand postponed implementation of the Worms edict, accepting a declaration by the Diet of Speyer of that year to the effect that every estate “will, with its subjects, act, live, and govern in matters touching the Worms edict in a way each can justify before God and his Imperial Majesty.” This declaration gave Lutheran rulers the signal to proceed with their intended legal, administrative, financial, and liturgical reforms, and the years following 1526 saw the construction in every Lutheran territory of what amounted to a state church, headed by the ruling prince.
In 1529 this process was interrupted when, following the emperor’s military successes, Ferdinand demanded at a diet, also held in Speyer, that, pending a general council to decide the religious issue, Lutherans and other religious dissenters should end their separation. (It was the “protest” of a number of princes and cities against this abrogation of the earlier Speyer decree that attached to the followers of Luther and other Reformation theologians the name “Protestants.”) By then Protestants were no longer a united party. Luther and Zwingli had met at Marburg in 1529 in an attempt to iron out differences, but they could not agree on the question of Christ’s real presence in the Eucharist. While a few Lutheran princes prepared for military action, a compromise-minded group led by the humanist Philipp Melanchthon, who dreaded the prospect of fragmentation within Protestantism, drew up a moderate outline of Lutheran positions. These were presented for discussion at the Diet of Augsburg in 1530, which was attended by the emperor. The Augsburg Confession, which became a fundamental statement of Lutheran belief, assumed that reconciliation with the Roman Catholics was still possible. This view was shared by Charles, who was pushing the pope toward the summoning of a general council to mend the religious split. Negotiations among theologians and politicians, however, came to nothing, and the end result was that, the Augsburg Confession having been rejected by Catholic theologians, Lutheranism was outlawed again. The militant Protestant faction, led by Philip, landgrave of Hesse, now established a formal organization of resistance, the Schmalkaldic League (1531), and the empire moved toward armed conflict as Lutherans became not just a political party but a military force as well.
About this time much more rigid standards of religious orthodoxy and conformity were imposed. This development has been called “confessionalization,” a concept used by some historians to define developments in the empire during the mid-16th century. Confessionalization completed the process, under way since the late Middle Ages, of meshing religious and church politics with the objectives of the state. Central to this process was the institution of a territorial religion that was based on an authorized declaration of doctrines (a “Confession”) binding on all subjects and implemented by an established church responsible to the ruler (or, in city-states, to the magistrates). Tending toward exclusiveness and therefore intolerance, this system contributed to the warlike turn taken by events after 1530. More important in the long run, confessionalism promoted a social drive, also long under way, toward the inculcation of discipline and order in public and private as well as in religious and civic affairs. Through catechisms, schooling, family and welfare legislation, norms for work, and standards for personal life, state and church attempted to restructure society in accordance with the goals of what has since been called the Protestant temperament. Success was slow in coming and never more than partial. But there is no doubt that, through the confessional process, Protestantism left a deep imprint on the German character.
Religious war and the Peace of Augsburg
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 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. Craftspeople 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 favored 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 craftspeople 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 had been 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 favored 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 craftspeople. 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.
Religion and politics, 1555–1618
Four forces contended for supremacy in the Holy Roman Empire in the aftermath of the Peace of Augsburg. Lutherans—that is to say, Lutheran estates and governments—sought to extend the rights they had won in 1555 to parts of Germany that were still Roman Catholic. Calvinists, having been excluded from the Augsburg settlement, strove for recognition and made major territorial gains in the 1560s and ’70s. Adherents of the old faith, invigorated by the Catholic Reformation issuing from Spain and Rome, attempted to turn back the Protestant advance by making common cause with strong governments. Habsburg emperors tried to serve the Catholic cause by weakening Protestant princes wherever possible and by holding the line against Protestantism in their dynastic lands. Political conflicts were constant under these circumstances and wars frequent, since the empire’s institutions were powerless to neutralize or channel these competing endeavours. Maximilian II (from 1564), Rudolf II (from 1576), and Matthias (from 1612), though ardent Catholics, were preoccupied with the intertwined problems of retaining the loyalty of their dynastic lands and securing the eastern borders against the Turks. They had, in any case, been stripped of the ability to maintain order in the empire, as the Augsburg terms had placed public security under the supervision of the empire’s administrative districts, which were controlled by the estates. The period leading up to the Thirty Years’ War was therefore one of more or less constant strife in nearly all parts of the empire.
The second half of the 16th century introduced two new agents of change to this scene. The Catholic Reformation, operating mainly through the Council of Trent (1545–63) and the Jesuits (Society of Jesus), brought about major changes in Roman Catholicism. Trent produced authoritative definitions of dogma for the first time in the long history of the church; declared tradition to be, with the Bible, a source of revelation; reaffirmed the sacraments as mediators of grace; declared the church to be a hierarchical institution headed by the pope (against Luther’s formulation of the “priesthood of all believers”); and issued a large number of reform mandates to meet, at last, the age-old charges of laxness and corruption. After the 1560s the Catholic Reformation’s chief energies went to the implementation of the Trent decrees. Most effective in this endeavour were the Jesuits, a militant order founded by Ignatius of Loyola in 1534, pledged to strict obedience to the pope and to acting as the church’s instrument for regaining ground lost to Protestantism. Germany was a major area of Jesuit activity; the order settled in Cologne in 1544 and later in Vienna, Ingolstadt, and Prague. In close collaboration with Catholic rulers, often as their confessors, the Jesuits embodied the activist phase of Catholic reform that is known as the Catholic Reformation.
On the Protestant side, this activism was represented by the Calvinists, who made so forceful an impact on German society in these decades that some historians have called their appearance a “Second Reformation.” The Palatine electorate went Calvinist when its ruler converted; later the “Reformed” creed (as its partisans named it, denying to other Protestant denominations the claim to have truly reformed the faith) established itself, among other places, in the electorates of Brandenburg and (for a time) Saxony, the territories of Hesse-Kassel, Nassau, Durlach, and Anhalt, and the cities of Bremen, Emden, and Münster. Unlike Genevan Calvinism, the Reformed religion in Germany coexisted easily with the autocratic territorial church. Calvinist German princes, for their part, saw the faith as a far more aggressive theological and political weapon with which to wage the struggle for Protestant supremacy in the empire. Calvinist theology, with its emphasis on action in the world and its association of success with sanctification, even with election, was well suited, in the use made of it by German state churches, to act as an aggressive creed of social discipline. Calvinism also inspired the formation of militant parties pressing for its recognition as a legitimate religion under the cuius regio, eius religio (“whose region, his religion”) rule, which had been formulated in the Peace of Augsburg.
With the religious situation thus more inflamed than ever and the confessional and political issues inextricably intertwined, any incident might have triggered renewed conflict, which—given the competition for power in Europe among the Habsburg dynasties, France, England, and the Netherlands—was likely to lead to a general war. A series of incidents moved events toward the brink. In 1582 the archbishop-elector of Cologne, having converted to Calvinism, challenged the Ecclesiastical Reservation of the 1555 Augsburg treaty by holding on to his title, thus threatening to give the majority vote in the College of Electors to the Protestants. In the “Cologne War” of 1583 he was expelled by Spanish troops, and Duke Ernst of Bavaria was chosen as his successor. Throughout the 1590s the incorporation of church properties by Protestant governments was a cause of litigation before the empire’s courts, as Roman Catholic authorities sought to compel the return of everything confiscated since 1555; Protestant states in turn made support for the emperor’s war against the Turks dependent on further concessions.
The Habsburgs, meanwhile, were hampered in their advancement of the Roman Catholic cause by the growing mental incapacity of Rudolf II; indeed, much of the direction of affairs was transferred to his brother Matthias, who eventually succeeded him in 1612. A more serious undermining of Habsburg imperial power occurred in the dynastic lands. Rigorous Catholic reform occasioned peasant uprisings in Austria and resistance by nobles in Hungary and Bohemia (where Calvinism had made inroads among the ruling classes). In Hungary a nationalist party under Bocskay István forged an alliance with Lutheran princes and obtained support from the Turks. In Bohemia in 1609 the estates extracted from the emperor a guarantee of religious freedom, the so-called Letter of Majesty.
At about the same time, the city of Donauwörth was occupied by Bavarian troops, since the emperor had empowered Duke Maximilian of Bavaria to “protect” the Roman Catholic minority there. Seeing this “Donauwörth incident” as a straw in the wind, Lutheran and Calvinist rulers formed a Protestant Union (1608), the answer to which was the Catholic League (1609), headed by Maximilian, the most resolute Catholic prince in the empire. Each party organized an army and allied itself with foreign powers, the Protestants with France and Bohemia, the Catholics with Spain. In this way the German struggle was both militarized and internationalized.
General war nearly broke out in 1609–10 over the Jülich-Cleves succession crisis. When the Roman Catholic ruler of these counties, which formed the strategically most important block of territories on the lower Rhine, died without an heir, two Protestant claimants occupied his lands, aided not only by the German Protestant Union but also by France and England; they were, however, militantly opposed by Spain and the emperor. The assassination of Henry IV of France, who had been about to launch an invasion in support of the Protestant claimants, defused the crisis in 1610.
Peace was preserved, although not for long. The Bohemian situation finally precipitated the war. Because neither Rudolf II nor Matthias had left legitimate heirs, the governance of the Habsburg dynastic lands fell to Archduke Ferdinand of Styria (later Emperor Ferdinand II), a ruthless counterreformer who reduced the religious liberties granted to Bohemians under the Letter of Majesty. In response, the Bohemian estates in May 1618 mounted a protest in Hradčany (the Prague Castle district), which prompted a militant faction of deputies to throw two imperial councillors from a castle window (defenestration being a traditional Bohemian gesture of defiance). In response to this event, which came to be known as the Defenestration of Prague, Ferdinand now prepared military action, while the Bohemian estates elected a Calvinist, Frederick V of the Palatinate, to be their king. As the alliances fell into place on each side, the stage was set for the sequence of large-scale military actions that constituted the Thirty Years’ War.
The Thirty Years’ War and the Peace of Westphalia
The Bohemian problem was resolved swiftly. Two Roman Catholic armies, the emperor’s and the League’s, converged on the kingdom, routing Frederick at the White Mountain in November 1620 and replacing the regime of the estates in Bohemia with a system of “confessional absolutism” based on rigid Catholic conformity and political authoritarianism. At the same time, the Palatinate was conquered by Spanish and Bavarian troops, and the electoral title was transferred to Maximilian of Bavaria in 1623. In the Palatinate, too, the Counter-Reformation sought to bring Protestantism to an end. As the war spread into Hesse and Westphalia and as Spain resumed its attack on the Netherlands, Catholic forces seemed near triumph. This prospect, however, renewed the old fear, as in the time of Charles V, of Habsburg hegemony. An anti-Habsburg alliance was therefore forged by France (where Cardinal Richelieu took charge of affairs in 1624), England (whose ruler, James I, was father-in-law to the deposed Frederick V), the Netherlands, and Denmark (whose Protestant king, Christian IV, had extensive territorial interests in northern Germany, now threatened by Catholic armies). In 1625 Christian IV commenced hostilities. He was opposed by a much-enlarged imperial force under the war’s most flamboyant figure, Albrecht von Wallenstein, a military entrepreneur with a gift for mobilizing troops and supplying them through ruthless plundering. Wallenstein’s plan was to wreck Dutch and English commerce in the Baltic by subduing all of northern Germany and by dislodging the Swedish king, Gustav II Adolf, from Prussia (taken in the course of Sweden’s war against Poland). By 1628 much of this objective was realized. Christian IV had been decisively defeated in 1626 in the Battle of Lutter am Barenberge and forced to make peace in 1629. To crown these successes, Ferdinand II issued in March of that year the Edict of Restitution, by which Protestant rulers were to restore to the church more than 500 bishoprics, monasteries, abbeys, and other ecclesiastical properties secularized since 1552.
But this impressive strengthening of the sovereign’s power in the empire brought his foreign and domestic enemies together once more, the latter including now not only Protestants but also Roman Catholic estates concerned about their liberties. Subsidized by the Dutch and French and allied with Saxony, Sweden entered the conflict in 1630, winning commanding victories at Breitenfeld (1631) and Lützen (1632) but suffering defeat at Nördlingen in 1634. This phase of the war was marked by unprecedented brutality; for example, in 1631, imperial troops massacred two-thirds of the population of Magdeburg, a city of 20,000 that had withstood a long siege.
A way out of the long conflict appeared in 1635 when Saxony, Brandenburg, and other Protestant states seeking to end foreign intervention joined the emperor in the Peace of Prague, which included the revocation of the Edict of Restitution. But in the war’s final phase, France, seeking to forestall Spanish preponderance on the Continent, offered large subsidies to Sweden and to German princes to enable them to fight on. Combined Swedish-French campaigns commenced in 1638, and a decade later foreign armies operated as far south as Bavaria, while the French held Lorraine and Alsace, which was important to France to prevent construction of a Spanish land bridge from the Netherlands to Italy.
By then most belligerents were exhausted. Several German princes had quit the war. Since 1644, representatives of the powers had been talking about terms, although military operations continued in hopes of improving bargaining positions. In 1648, finally, treaties were signed in Münster and Osnabrück (both in Westphalia) by agents of the emperor, the German states, Sweden, and France as well as between Spain and the Netherlands. Fighting continued for some years—France and Spain did not conclude peace until 1659—but the war was at last winding down.
The Peace of Westphalia brought territorial gains to Sweden and France, awarded an electoral seat to Bavaria, and secured for Protestant rulers the church properties they had confiscated, according to the status quo of 1624. More importantly, it brought Calvinists into the religious settlement and established the independence of the Netherlands from Spain and of Switzerland from the empire. Most significant of all, it guaranteed the nearly unlimited territorial sovereignty of German princes, bringing to an end the last effort (until the 19th century) to centralize power in the empire. In this way the Peace of Westphalia sealed the fragmentation of the Holy Roman Empire into hundreds of autonomous political entities, most of them small. At the same time, it brought to an end the last major conflict in continental Europe in which religion was a central issue; indeed, the war itself had demonstrated that reason of state was a stronger determinant of policy than faith. In declaring the religious situation fixed as of 1624, the treaty mandated that, if a prince converted, his land no longer converted with him. Religious pluralism and—albeit grudgingly—coexistence were now the norm.
The war’s social and economic cost is difficult to gauge, modern scholarship having greatly modified original claims of vast human losses and near-total economic ruin. Nonetheless, in the most embattled realms, such as Württemberg, more than 50 percent of the people died or disappeared; elsewhere, the loss was less severe. Most historians agree that an overall population decline of 15 to 20 percent (from about 20 million to 16 or 17 million) occurred during the war and the ensuing epidemics. In addition, historians agree that in theatres of war rural impoverishment and displacement of people were widespread, while economic regression happened nearly everywhere. For German society overall, the war was a traumatic experience; it is rivaled in the national consciousness only by World War II as a time of unmitigated disaster.
To gain perspective on these calamities, their wider European aspects must be considered. Wars, uprisings, and political turmoil had occurred in many countries during the first half of the 17th century. The Fronde—a series of civil wars in France between 1648 and 1653 whose goal, at least in part, was to halt the growing power of royal government—and the Civil Wars in England (1642 to 1651) are only the most famous of these disturbances. Turmoil had occurred also in Catalonia, Portugal, Naples, Ireland, Scotland, Sweden, and Russia. Historians have referred to these events, including the numerous local manifestations of the Thirty Years’ War, as parts of a general crisis in the fabric of European society, the causes of which range from a worsening of the climate (Little Ice Age) to plagues, often spread by the armies roaming Europe almost continuously at that time. But the most destabilizing factor burdening society was the centralizing monarchy with its expanding bureaucracy, extravagant courts, swollen armies, and incessant wars, all of them supported by heavy taxation. No social group, or estate, was unaffected by the effort of monarchs to alter in their favor traditional ways of distributing power and wealth. Resentment of this and of its social cost was widespread—hence the proliferation and the scale of rebellions.
Territorial states in the age of absolutism
The empire after Westphalia
The empire was an awkward structure. German historians of an older, nationalistic generation deplored the fact that the empire lacked the attributes of a Great Power and lamented its victimization by more-unified foreign states. Such critics always quote the 17th-century legal scholar Samuel von Pufendorf, who called the empire a “monstrosity” and interpret this term as a value judgment rather than an expression indicating the inapplicability of standard categories of political classification. Recent scholars have been more appreciative of the post-1648 empire as a loose-jointed but not ineffective constitutional edifice within which could coexist 300 large and small secular and ecclesiastical principalities, 51 imperial (i.e., independent within the empire) cities, and nearly 2,000 imperial counts and knights, each of whom possessed the same territorial sovereignty as an elector or a duke. The empire proved a working federation for the varied interests of these distinct sovereign entities, some of them large and powerful (such as Saxony, whose electors were also kings of Poland from 1697 to 1763, or Brandenburg, whose prince was also king of Prussia) and some laughably tiny (such as the Abbey of Baindt in Swabia, a fully independent territory of a few hundred acres inhabited by 29 nuns and governed by a princess-abbess). The empire’s administrative organs, especially the districts (Kreise), protected the small and weak from the predatory aims of the strong. Because most constituent members were vulnerable, there was no general inclination, despite disunity among the estates on matters of taxation and religious parity, to break the frame that guarded the status quo. The emperor’s suzerainty over the entire realm went unchallenged, but virtually no real power adhered to his title, executive authority having been thoroughly particularized between 1555 and 1648. To prevent a resurgence of imperial power, princes formed alliances among themselves, such as the League of the Rhine (Rheinbund), tied in 1658 to France and Sweden. In the princely territories, authority fell increasingly to the princes (though Württemberg and Mecklenburg were exceptions), while territorial estates dwindled in political importance. In each of the empire’s constituent units, estates served mainly to uphold established hierarchies and traditions, as did the empire as a whole. It was an inherently conservative system.
The consolidation of Brandenburg-Prussia and Austria
Against an overall tendency among the empire’s constituent units to keep things as they were, the larger territories pursued an insistent policy of dynastic and personal aggrandizement. A number of factors favored state building in the post-1618 era. General economic exhaustion made central direction of, and active intervention in, commerce and production seem to be the only way out of stagnation. War taxes, raised to a steep level during the French wars of the 1670s (see below The age of Louis XIV), greatly increased the financial might of rulers, who came to control an unprecedented share of society’s wealth by preparing for and engaging in military conflict. Because territorial assemblies opposed this siphoning process—whose proceeds, augmented by subsidies from abroad, served mostly to create standing armies and a supporting state apparatus—rulers attempted to reduce even further the estates’ role in policy making. The nobility, growing economically dependent on princely service, adapted itself to an essentially ancillary function at court and in the military. In society at large, the view gained ground that the country’s welfare was safest with the ruler—a view vigorously promoted by official propaganda. Two of the empire’s territories, Brandenburg-Prussia and Austria, profited above all others from these developments.
For historians over the years, the story of Brandenburg-Prussia has exemplified the triumph of political skill and audacity over unfavorable conditions. Sparsely populated and deficient in resources, Brandenburg in 1648 held sovereignty over a patchwork of scattered territories. Its ruler, Frederick William (1640–88), later known as the “Great Elector,” faced the problem of integrating and defending widely separated possessions, which included the duchy of Prussia, inherited in 1619 but remaining under Polish suzerainty and geographically separated from the electorate of Brandenburg; the counties of Cleves, Mark, and Ravensberg in the Rhineland and Westphalia regions, gained in 1614, also distant from Brandenburg and not contiguous with each other; and eastern Pomerania and various small lands and bishoprics acquired in the Treaty of 1648. Through nimble diplomatic maneuvering, such as changing sides several times between Sweden and Poland and between France and the emperor, he augmented and solidified his realm and his authority within it; moreover, he won direct rule over Prussia as its duke and acquired the important episcopal territory of Magdeburg.
Frederick William’s instrument in the attainment of these and subsequent prizes was the army, a permanent force of 30,000 disciplined professionals, the adequate financial support of which dictated every aspect of his government. Large revenues from taxes required a flourishing economy, the stimulation and direction of which by mercantilist principles was a main undertaking. Economic growth was further accelerated late in the Great Elector’s reign by the influx of nearly 20,000 skilled Huguenot refugees following the revocation of the Edict of Nantes by Louis XIV in 1685 and by the resettlement of Dutch colonists. A territorywide system of state administration undergirded this economic and fiscal effort and resulted in the creation of a professional bureaucracy that permitted the Great Elector to govern essentially without estate participation. The landowning nobility supported their prince in exchange for the freedom to exploit their peasants as they saw fit. In these ways Frederick William laid the foundation for what was to become an autocratically ruled state, enabled by its strong economy, tightly run administration, efficient fiscal organization, and powerful army to play a prominent role in the empire’s and Europe’s affairs.
The Great Elector’s efforts were rewarded in 1701 when his successor, Frederick III (1688–1713), obtained from the emperor—who needed the Brandenburg army for the impending War of the Spanish Succession—the right to style himself Frederick I, King in Prussia (Prussian rulers renumbered themselves upon bestowal of the royal title). The title of king, recognized internationally upon the conclusion of the war in 1713, was of considerable importance to Brandenburg in its competition with Saxony, whose ruler had become king of Poland in 1697, for preeminence in northern Germany. But it was Frederick’s son, Frederick William I (1713–40), who perfected the combination of statist structure, productive energy, and ethical drive that came to be identified with modern Prussia. Known as the “soldier-king,” Frederick William built his standing army into a force of more than 80,000 men. Although Prussia was only the 13th most populous country in Europe, it had the continent’s fourth largest army (after those of France, Russia, and Austria), a superbly drilled and equipped force that served mainly defensive purposes. Only peasants and journeymen served in the ranks, while the middle classes were safe from the draft but obliged to quarter soldiers in their homes. A huge war chest obviated foreign subsidies, and reliable revenues, more than 70 percent of which went to the army, provided ample support.
For the state to continue to draw high taxes without ruining land and people, the country’s level of wealth had to be raised. Frederick William therefore pursued an aggressive policy (known as cameralism) of stimulating agriculture and manufacturing while reducing unnecessary expenditures; even his court was stripped of many of its royal trappings. Export bans preserved raw materials, and sumptuary laws limited indulgence in luxuries. Town governments were subordinated to royal commissioners, whose powers included supervision of urban production. A work ethos suffused society from the top: the king’s ascetic Calvinism, which dictated to him a life of hard work and personal engagement, was spread to his Lutheran subjects by a Pietist clergy who instilled in their flocks habits of intense labor, frugal living, and dutiful subservience to the state.
Organizationally, Frederick William completed the centralizing process begun by the Great Elector, its capstone being the General Directory, set up in 1723. Tied to regional and local organs by a network of commissioners, this supreme body of state policy and administration directed industry, trade, finance, internal affairs, and military matters in all the state’s territories. Upper-level bureaucrats came entirely from the nobility, as did the army’s officer corps; in this way nobles were bound more closely than ever to the state. Ruling, not merely reigning, over the entire edifice was the king-elector in his “cabinet,” a small circle of close advisers and trusted secretaries. So successful were these measures in lifting the state to influence and prestige that by 1740 Prussia counted as a full-fledged member of Europe’s concert of Great Powers.
In Austria the ruling Habsburg house’s lasting conflict with France and the Ottoman Empire dominated all questions of statecraft. With their powers as emperors greatly diminished, Leopold I (1658–1705), his son Joseph I (1705–11), and Joseph’s brother Charles VI (1711–40) bent all their efforts to the consolidation of their dynastic and crown lands in central and eastern Europe. Although they failed to achieve Prussian-style streamlining, they raised Austria to the rank of a major state. The Habsburgs’ conglomeration of territories included the Austrian lands (the duchies of Austria, Styria, Carinthia, and Krain [now in Slovenia] and the county of Tirol), the Bohemian provinces (kingdoms of Bohemia and Moravia [both now in the Czech Republic] and of Silesia [now mainly in Poland]), the kingdom of Hungary, and—after 1714, following the War of the Spanish Succession—the southern Netherlands (including Brabant and Flanders [both now in Belgium], the duchy of Luxembourg [now divided between Belgium and Luxembourg]), and the duchy of Milan (in Italy).
These disparate lands were held together only by the Habsburg monarchy, but the monarchs were distracted from the task of integrating them. They were preoccupied by imperial concerns and by dynastic complications, notably the succession question. Until the reforms of Maria Theresa’s reign (1740–80), Austrian administration never became effective. Finances were especially muddled, because tax administration remained with the estates of the various territories, along with control over other sources of revenue. The army of 100,000 men, though the third largest in Europe, was barely adequate for the defense of so large and scattered a realm. A supreme war council and a central financial chamber overlapped with special commissions created by the emperor’s privy council, which also handled military and fiscal affairs. Nonetheless, the realm held together.
The prospect of a succession without a male heir, however, presented the severest test to the realm’s cohesion. It became the chief enterprise of Charles VI to persuade the estates of his territories to accept an order of succession, known as the “Pragmatic Sanction,” by which the Habsburg lands were declared indivisible and Charles’s eldest daughter, Maria Theresa, was to inherit them. The other European powers assented, because splitting the Habsburg complex would have thrown the European balance into disarray and played into the hands of France; the Sanction was proclaimed a basic law in 1713. By then Austria had met successfully a series of Turkish incursions from the east and French invasions in the west.
The age of Louis XIV
For the empire as a whole, the half century following the Peace of Westphalia was almost entirely shaped by the dominant political figure of the time, King Louis XIV of France. The response of the empire and its members to the aggressive undertakings of this monarch, whose aim, from his assumption of power in 1661 to his death in 1715, was to make France the mightiest state in Europe, was largely reactive (for a different interpretation, see France: The age of Louis XIV: Foreign affairs). Only in its struggles against Louis’s ally in the east, the Ottoman Turks, did the empire show some initiative. After a Polish relief army helped imperial, Bavarian, and Saxon troops to lift a three months’ Turkish siege of Vienna in 1683 in the Battle of Kahlenberg, imperial armies took the offensive, winning battles at Ofen (1686), Mohács (1687), and, most notably, Zenta (1697). In the Treaty of Carlowitz (1699), Austria gained parts of Hungary, Transylvania (now in Romania), Slavonia (now in Croatia), and Croatia, all formerly occupied by the Turks. The eastern wars resumed in the early and mid-18th century, but the Turks were never again a threat to Europe, since Russia became the chief bulwark against Ottoman expansionism.
Matters were different on the empire’s western and southern fronts. The overriding political question in Europe in the second half of the 17th century was the future of Spain and its vast holdings in the southern Netherlands, Italy, and the Americas, because it was expected that the Spanish Habsburg line would die out with the feeble Charles II. Contenders for the Spanish inheritance were the Habsburg emperor, Leopold I, husband of a younger Spanish princess, and Louis XIV. The French monarch, son of the eldest daughter of Philip III, had further strengthened his claim to the Spanish throne in 1659 when, in accordance with the Peace of the Pyrenees, which had ended the long conflict between Spain and France, he had married Marie-Thérèse, daughter of Philip IV of Spain.
While waiting for the Spanish throne to become vacant, Louis pursued an aggressive expansionist policy. He pushed his forces toward Germany to make the Rhine River France’s new eastern border. In 1667 he occupied Flanders and in 1670 Lorraine; in 1672 he attacked Cleves and invaded the United Provinces of the Netherlands, his main antagonist in the wars that followed. In 1679 he began to penetrate Alsace, occupying the imperial city of Strassburg (now Strasbourg) in 1681. Lacking the military power to bring the whole empire to its knees, Louis resorted to the lure of money: at one time or another almost every German state was in his pocket, either serving as ally or remaining neutral. Though not incapable of acting on national impulses, German princes—the Great Elector being a case in point—always served territorial interests first. This prevented the emperor, himself at times allied with Louis, from forging a solid front against France.
Leadership of the anti-France coalition passed to the Dutch Republic. William of Orange, as stadtholder of Holland and captain general of the United Provinces, emerged as the most determined opponent of French aggression. Upon becoming king of England in 1689, he changed the direction of English politics, which had been pro-French under the last Stuart king. The threat of a French universal monarchy arose dramatically as the death of the last Habsburg in Spain approached and Louis’s plans for a French claim on the entire Spanish inheritance swung into place. When the Spanish king died in 1700, he left all of his realm, including his American colonies, to Louis’s grandson, Philip, duc d’Anjou, thus dramatically shifting the balance of European power in France’s favor. Against this a Grand Alliance took shape (it was formally concluded in 1701), consisting of the empire (except Bavaria and the electorate of Cologne), the Netherlands, England, Sweden, Brandenburg-Prussia, and Savoy (Portugal also eventually joined the alliance). Its aim was to restore the European balance to the status of 1648 and 1659 by ejecting Louis from his conquests and by splitting the Spanish empire. From 1701 to 1714, France, with a few minor allies, fought the Grand Alliance in the War of the Spanish Succession. Despite a number of major battles, including Blenheim (1704), Ramillies (1706), Oudenarde (1708), and Malplaquet (1709), neither side was able to win a decisive victory (though the Alliance did seem to be prevailing). The death of the emperor Joseph I in 1711 placed his brother Charles, who had been proclaimed the Spanish king, on the imperial throne as Charles VI (1711–40). This raised the spectre of a Habsburg reunion of the Holy Roman and Spanish empires—a situation no more agreeable to European powers than the prospect of French hegemony. Thus, the alliance was severed and the war began to wind down.
Peace negotiations began in 1712, resulting in a number of treaties, signed at Utrecht and Rastatt in 1713–14. The Spanish empire was partitioned, with the Spanish Netherlands, Milan, Naples, and Sicily going to Austria and Spain itself coming under the rule of Philip V of Bourbon, a grandson of Louis XIV. The alliance’s original aim, to prevent French hegemony, had been achieved, though in the follow-up War of the Polish Succession (1733–35) France acquired control of Lorraine. Austria profited substantially in territorial terms, and a few other German rulers profited as well, albeit less so. As for the empire itself, it had gained no real benefit from more than half a century of intermittent warfare.
German society, however, was deeply affected. Economic stagnation and slow demographic recovery after the Thirty Years’ War made Germany dependent on governmental intervention as a means of stimulating recovery. As centers of economic vitality, the princely courts, attended by an international nobility, exposed Germany to a variety of cultural innovations that originated in other, more prosperous European countries.
Baroque art—the preeminent expression of monarchical power and of Roman Catholic resurgence after the Reformation—came from Spain and Italy, opera from Italy, and polite language and manners from France. The style of this period took French patterns as its model, from elaborately coded court ceremonials to dress, social conventions, food, and conversation. French absolutism not only became the political model, however scaled down, for the governance of all states in the empire, but every German prince and princeling imitated the lavish display with which Louis XIV created his aura of majesty and outshone his rivals. This started up a lively domestic market in luxuries, not to mention splendid works of architecture and decoration. But the cost of these luxuries was prohibitive (in 1719 the Palatine court consumed 50 percent of the territory’s revenues) and represented an enormous burden on the people, especially when added to the cost of large armies and proliferating bureaucracies. Not only did this conspicuous consumption widen the social division between the court-oriented elite and the bulk of the urban and rural population, but the preference for foreign cultural products also inhibited creative impulses at home.
In the second half of the 17th century, German energies were to a large extent still focused on religion. The confessional pluralism legitimized by the settlement of 1648 encouraged emphasis on theological distinctions, exacerbating the move toward religious orthodoxy under way in each denomination since the 16th century. The one genuinely German product of this religious preoccupation was Pietism, a movement within Lutheranism that opposed rigid dogmatism and promoted instead a subjective, mystical devoutness and an emphasis on a pious life guided by love of one’s neighbor as well as of God. Influenced by English Puritanism, Pietism was shaped in its theology by Philipp Jakob Spener (1635–1705) and in its organization by his disciple August Hermann Francke (1663–1727), who established a center for its promulgation in Halle. There he founded schools, orphanages, medical facilities, and a printing house for publishing cheap Bibles and devotional works, which made Pietism a widely influential program of Evangelical activism. The intensely emotional and mystical flavour of Pietist poetry is preserved in the cantata texts set to music by Johann Sebastian Bach, in whose deeply spiritual church music Protestant chorale singing, another indigenous German product, reached its apogee.
The contest between Prussia and Austria
In 1740 the death of the Habsburg emperor Charles VI without a male heir unleashed the most embittered conflict in Germany since the wars of Louis XIV. The question of the succession to the Austrian throne had occupied statesmen for decades. Rival claimants disputed the right—by the terms of the Pragmatic Sanction (1713)—of Charles’s daughter Maria Theresa to succeed. France supported them, its aim being, as before, the fragmentation of the Habsburg state, but it was the new Prussian king, Frederick II (1740–86), who began the conflict. To understand what follows, the modern reader should remember that few observers, even in the enlightened 18th century, disputed a ruler’s right to do what he wished with his state. Dynastic aggrandizement, territorial expansion, prestige, honor, power, and princely glory were legitimate grounds for war and sound reasons for demanding the sacrifices necessary to wage it. The only position from which to oppose this arrogation was the Christian ethic, but to do so had proved futile when last tried by Erasmus and Sir Thomas More in the 16th century. No checks—philosophical, moral, or political—therefore restrained kings from indulging their taste for conquests.
Soon after assuming power, Frederick reversed his father’s cautious policy of building and hoarding, rather than deploying, Brandenburg-Prussia’s military potential. He attacked Silesia, a province in the kingdom of Bohemia and thus part of the Habsburg monarchy, which Prussia had long desired for its populousness, mineral resources, and advanced economy. In exchange for an Austrian cession of Silesia, he offered to accept the Pragmatic Sanction (formally recognized by his predecessor in the 1728 Treaty of Berlin) and support the candidacy of Maria Theresa’s husband, Francis Stephen, as emperor. But the resolute woman who now headed the Austrian Habsburgs (1740–80) decided to defend the integrity of her realm, and the War of the Austrian Succession (1740–48; including the Silesian Wars between Prussia and Austria) began in 1740. Austria was helped only by a Hungarian army, though initial financial support came from Britain. Prussia was joined by Bavaria and Saxony in the empire as well as by France and Spain. The Prussian armies, though greatly outnumbered by Austria’s forces, revealed themselves as by far the best as well as the best-led. The Treaties of Dresden (1745) and Aix-la-Chapelle (1748) confirmed the Prussian conquest of Silesia. During the succeeding Seven Years’ War (1756–63), Prussian forces occupied Saxony, which had allied itself with Austria. In the Treaty of Hubertusburg of 1763, Prussia kept Silesia but could not hold on to Saxony.
In a sense, the War of the Austrian Succession was another of the many internal struggles over the constitutional balance in the empire, in which territorial states opposed imperial authority. But it was also part of an international struggle, in which France and Britain fought out their rivalry in western and southern Europe, North America, and India. In this way it prefigured the worldwide Seven Years’ War, except that the latter followed the “diplomatic revolution” in which Britain switched its support from Austria to Prussia and France allied itself with its traditional foe, Austria. (A part of this agreement was the marriage, in 1770, of the Austrian princess Marie-Antoinette to the future Louis XVI.) The real significance of the Seven Years’ War lay in the Treaty of Paris of 1763, which concluded for a time the maritime and colonial conflict between France and Britain.
After these wars Prussia—which had increased in size and immeasurably in prestige—and Austria dominated German affairs in a condition of tension usually called “the German dualism,” meaning that each had become so powerful that only the other could keep it in some sort of check. The monarchs of both realms carried out important internal reforms. Guided by her interior minister, Count Friedrich Wilhelm Haugwitz, Maria Theresa streamlined the Austrian administrative structure on the Prussian model, thus drawing together, to the extent possible, the multiethnic and polyglot regions of the vast Habsburg empire. The remaining powers of the estates were curtailed everywhere and centralization institutionalized in absolutist fashion but without attaining the full integration of the Prussian system. Maria Theresa’s son, Joseph II (1765–90), completed this program of modernization.
In Prussia, Frederick II further tightened his control of all aspects of public life in his far-flung kingdom. However, in accordance with his personal commitment to rational tolerance and free-thinking skepticism, he also undertook extensive legal reforms. He virtually abolished judicial torture, lifted some of the tax burden from the poorest of his subjects, established religious tolerance as a policy of his state, and encouraged scientific and scholarly activity in the Prussian Academy of the Sciences. Like his father, he was a vigorous promoter of economic development. His taste for French Enlightenment thought and his own prolific creativity in letters and music lent his reign the flavour of an era shaped by a philosopher-king, albeit one with the instincts of a ruthless power politician. His successes in war and peace earned him a place as national hero as well as the title “the Great.”
Gerald Strauss