German Culture Past and Present

E >> Ernest Belfort Bax >> German Culture Past and Present

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From the foregoing it will be understood that the oppression of the
peasant, under the feudalism of the Middle Ages, and especially of the
later Middle Ages, was viewed by him as an infringement of his rights.
During the period of time constituting mediaeval history, the peasant,
though he often slumbered, yet often started up to a sudden
consciousness of his position. The memory of primitive communism was
never quite extinguished, and the continual peasant-revolts of the
Middle Ages, though immediately occasioned, probably, by some fresh
invasion, by which it was sought to tear from the "common man" yet
another shred of his surviving rights, always had in the background
the ideal, vague though it may have been, of his ancient freedom.
Such, undoubtedly, was the meaning of the Jacquerie in France, with
its wild and apparently senseless vengeance; of the Wat Tyler revolt
in England, with its systematic attempt to envisage the vague
tradition of the primitive village community in the legends of the
current ecclesiastical creed; of the numerous revolts in Flanders and
North Germany; to a large extent of the Hussite movement in Bohemia,
under Ziska; of the rebellion led by George Doza in Hungary; and, as
we shall see in the body of the present work, of the social movements
of Reformation Germany, in which, with the partial exception of Ket's
rebellion in England a few years later, we may consider them as
virtually coming to an end.

For the movements in question were distinctly the last of their kind.
The civil wars of religion in France, and the great rebellion in
England against Charles I, which also assumed a religious colouring,
open a new era in popular revolts. In the latter, particularly, we
have clearly before us the attempt of the new middle class of town and
country, the independent citizen, and the now independent yeoman, to
assert supremacy over the old feudal estates or orders. The new
conditions had swept away the special revolutionary tradition of the
mediaeval period, whose golden age lay in the past with its
communal-holding and free men with equal rights on the basis of the
village organization--rights which with every century the peasant felt
more and more slipping away from him. The place of this tradition was
now taken by an ideal of individual freedom, apart from any social
bond, and on a basis merely political, the way for which had been
prepared by that very conception of individual proprietorship on the
part of the landlord, against which the older revolutionary sentiment
had protested. A most powerful instrument in accommodating men's minds
to this change of view, in other words, to the establishment of the
new individualistic principle, was the Roman or Civil law, which, at
the period dealt with in the present book, had become the basis
whereon disputed points were settled in the Imperial Courts. In this
respect also, though to a lesser extent, may be mentioned the Canon
or Ecclesiastical law--consisting of papal decretals on various points
which were founded partially on the Roman or Civil law--a juridical
system which also fully and indeed almost exclusively recognized the
individual holding of property as the basis of civil society (albeit
not without a recognition of social duties on the part of the owner).

Learning was now beginning to differentiate itself from the
ecclesiastical profession, and to become a definite vocation in its
various branches. Crowds of students flocked to the seats of learning,
and, as travelling scholars, earned a precarious living by begging or
"professing" medicine, assisting the illiterate for a small fee, or
working wonders, such as casting horoscopes, or performing
thaumaturgic tricks. The professors of law were now the most
influential members of the Imperial Council and of the various
Imperial Courts. In Central Europe, as elsewhere, notably in France,
the civil lawyers were always on the side of the centralizing power,
alike against the local jurisdictions and against the peasantry.

The effects of the conquest of Constantinople in 1453, and the
consequent dispersion of the accumulated Greek learning of the
Byzantine Empire, had, by the end of the fifteenth century, begun to
show themselves in a notable modification of European culture. The
circle of the seven sciences, the Quadrivium, and the Trivium, in
other words, the mediaeval system of learning, began to be antiquated.
Scholastic philosophy, that is to say, the controversy of the Scotists
and the Thomists, was now growing out of date. Plato was extolled at
the expense of Aristotle. Greek, and even Hebrew, was eagerly sought
after. Latin itself was assuming another aspect; the Renaissance Latin
is classical Latin, whilst Mediaeval Latin is dog-Latin. The physical
universe now began to be inquired into with a perfectly fresh
interest, but the inquiries were still conducted under the aegis of the
old habits of thought. The universe was still a system of mysterious
affinities and magical powers to the investigator of the Renaissance
period, as it had been before. There was this difference, however; it
was now attempted to _systematize_ the magical theory of the universe.
While the common man held a store of traditional magical beliefs
respecting the natural world, the learned man deduced these beliefs
from the Neo-Platonists, from the Kabbala, from Hermes Trismegistos,
and from a variety of other sources, and attempted to arrange this
somewhat heterogeneous mass of erudite lore into a system of organized
thought.

The Humanistic movement, so called, the movement, that is, of revived
classical scholarship, had already begun in Germany before what may be
termed the _sturm und drang_ of the Renaissance proper. Foremost among
the exponents of this older Humanism, which dates from the middle of
the fifteenth century, were Nicholas of Cusa and his disciples,
Rudolph Agricola, Alexander Hegius, and Jacob Wimpheling. But the new
Humanism and the new Renaissance movement generally throughout
Northern Europe centred chiefly in two personalities, Johannes
Reuchlin and Desiderius Erasmus. Reuchlin was the founder of the new
Hebrew learning, which up till then had been exclusively confined to
the synagogue. It was he who unlocked the mysteries of the Kabbala to
the Gentile world. But though it is for his introduction of Hebrew
study that Reuchlin is best known to posterity, yet his services in
the diffusion and popularization of classical culture were enormous.
The dispute of Reuchlin with the ecclesiastical authorities at Cologne
excited literary Germany from end to end. It was the first general
skirmish of the new and the old spirit in Central and Northern Europe.

But the man who was destined to become the personification of the
Humanist movement, us the new learning was called, was Erasmus. The
illegitimate son of the daughter of a Rotterdam burgher, he early
became famous on account of his erudition, in spite of the adverse
circumstances of his youth. Like all the scholars of his time, he
passed rapidly from one country to another, settling finally in Basel,
then at the height of its reputation as a literary and typographical
centre. The whole intellectual movement of the time centres round
Erasmus, as is particularly noticeable in the career of Ulrich von
Hutten, dealt with in the course of this history. As instances of the
classicism of the period, we may note the uniform change of the
patronymic into the classical equivalent, or some classicism supposed
to be the equivalent. Thus the name Erasmus itself was a classicism of
his father's name Gerhard, the German name Muth became Mutianus,
Trittheim became Trithemius, Schwarzerd became Melanchthon, and so on.

We have spoken of the other side of the intellectual movement of the
period. This other side showed itself in mystical attempts at reducing
nature to law in the light of the traditional problems which had been
set, to wit, those of alchemy and astrology: the discovery of the
philosopher's stone, of the transmutation of metals, of the elixir of
life, and of the correspondences between the planets and terrestrial
bodies. Among the most prominent exponents of these investigations may
be mentioned Philippus von Hohenheim or Paracelsus, and Cornelius
Agrippa of Nettesheim, in Germany, Nostrodamus in France, and Cardanus
in Italy. These men represent a tendency which was pursued by
thousands in the learned world. It was a tendency which had the honour
of being the last in history to embody itself in a distinct mythical
cycle. "Doctor Faustus" may probably have had an historical germ; but
in any case "Doctor Faustus," as known to legend and to literature, is
merely a personification of the practical side of the new learning.

The minds of men were waking up to interest in nature. There was one
man, Copernicus, who, at least partially, struck through the
traditionary atmosphere in which nature was enveloped, and to his
insight we owe the foundation of astronomical science; but otherwise
the whole intellectual atmosphere was charged with occult views. In
fact, the learned world of the sixteenth century would have found
itself quite at home in the pretensions and fancies of our modern
theosophist and psychical researchers, with their notions of making
erstwhile miracles non-miraculous, of reducing the marvellous to
being merely the result of penetration on the part of certain seers
and investigators of the secret powers of nature. Every wonder-worker
was received with open arms by learned and unlearned alike. The
possibility of producing that which was out of the ordinary range of
natural occurrences was not seriously doubted by any. Spells and
enchantments, conjurations, calculations of nativities, were matters
earnestly investigated at Universities and Courts.

There were, of course, persons who were eager to detect impostors: and
amongst them some of the most zealous votaries of the occult arts--for
example, Trittheim and the learned Humanist, Conrad Muth or Mutianus,
both of whom professed to have regarded Faust as a fraudulent person.
But this did not imply any disbelief in the possibility of the alleged
pretensions. In the Faust-myth is embodied, moreover, the opposition
between the new learning on its physical side and the old religious
faith. The theory that the investigation of the mysteries of nature
had in it something sinister and diabolical which had been latent
throughout the Middle Ages, was brought into especial prominence by
the new religious movements. The popular feeling that the line between
natural magic and the black art was somewhat doubtful, that the one
had a tendency to shade off into the other, now received fresh
stimulus. The notion of compacts with the devil was a familiar one,
and that they should be resorted to for the purpose of acquiring an
acquaintance with hidden lore and magical powers seemed quite natural.

It will have already been seen from what we have said that the
religious revolt was largely economical in its causes. The intense
hatred, common alike to the smaller nobility, the burghers, and the
peasants, of the ecclesiastical hierarchy, was obviously due to its
ever-increasing exactions. The chief of these were the _pallium_ or
price paid to the Pope for an ecclesiastical investiture; the
_annates_ or first year's revenues of a church fief; and the _tithes_
which were of two kinds, the great tithe paid in agricultural produce,
and the small tithe consisting in a head of cattle. The latter seems
to have been especially obnoxious to the peasant. The sudden increase
in the sale of indulgences, like the proverbial last straw, broke down
the whole system; but any other incident might have served the purpose
equally well. The prince-prelates were in some instances, at the
outset, not averse to the movement; they would not have been
indisposed to have converted their territories into secular fiefs of
the empire. It was only after this hope had been abandoned that they
definitely took sides with the Papal authority.

The opening of the sixteenth century thus presents to us mediaeval
society, social, political, and religious, in Germany as elsewhere,
"run to seed." The feudal organization was outwardly intact; the
peasant, free and bond, formed the foundation; above him came the
knighthood or inferior nobility; parallel with them was the
_Ehrbarkeit_ of the less important towns, holding from mediate
lordship; above these towns came the free cities, which held
immediately from the empire, organized into three bodies, a governing
Council in which the _Ehrbarkeit_ usually predominated, where they did
not entirely compose it, a Common Council composed of the masters of
the various guilds, and the General Council of the free citizens.
Those journeymen, whose condition was fixed from their being outside
the guild-organizations, usually had guilds of their own. Above the
free cities in the social pyramid stood the Princes of the empire, lay
and ecclesiastic, with the Electoral College, or the seven Electoral
Princes, forming their head. These constituted the feudal "estates" of
the empire. Then came the "King of the Romans"; and, as the apex of
the whole, the Pope in one function and the Emperor in another,
crowned the edifice. The supremacy, not merely of the Pope but of the
complementary temporal head of the mediaeval polity, the Emperor, was
acknowledged in a shadowy way, even in countries such as France and
England, which had no direct practical connection with the empire.
For, as the spiritual power was also temporal, so the temporal
political power had, like everything else in the Middle Ages, a
quasi-religious significance.

The minds of men in speculative matters, in theology, in philosophy,
and in jurisprudence, were outgrowing the old doctrines, at least in
their old forms. In theology the notion of salvation by the faith of
the individual, and not through the fact of belonging to a corporate
organization, which was the mediaeval conception, was latent in the
minds of multitudes of religious persons before expression was given
to it by Luther. The aversion to scholasticism, bred by the revived
knowledge of the older Greek philosophies in the original, produced a
curious amalgam; but scholastic habits of thought were still dominant
through it all. The new theories of nature amounted to little more
than old superstitions, systematized and reduced to rule, though here
and there the later physical science, based on observation and
experiment, peeped through. In jurisprudence the epoch is marked by
the final conquest of the Roman civil law, in its spirit, where not
in its forms, over the old customs, pre-feudal and feudal.

The subject of Germany during that closing period of the Middle Ages,
characterized by what is known as the revival of learning and the
Reformation, is so important for an understanding of later German
history and the especial characteristics of the German culture of
later times, that we propose, even at the risk of wearying some
readers, to recapitulate in as short a space as possible, compatible
with clearness, the leading conditions of the times--conditions which,
directly or indirectly, have moulded the whole subsequent course of
German development.

Owing to the geographical situation of Germany and to the political
configuration of its peoples and other causes, mediaeval conditions of
life as we find them in the early sixteenth century left more abiding
traces on the German mind and on German culture than was the case with
some other nations. The time was out of joint in a very literal sense
of that somewhat hackneyed phrase. At the opening of the sixteenth
century every established institution--political, social, and
religious--was shaken and showed the rents and fissures caused by time
and by the growth of a new life underneath it. The empire--the Holy
Roman--was in a parlous way as regarded its cohesion. The power of the
princes, the representatives of local centralized authority, was
proving itself too strong for the power of the Emperor, the recognized
representative of centralized authority for the whole German-speaking
world. This meant the undermining and eventual disruption of the
smaller social and political unities,[4] the knightly manors with the
privileges attached to the knightly class generally. The knighthood,
or lower nobility, had acted as a sort of buffer between the princes
of the empire and the Imperial power, to which they often looked for
protection against their immediate overlord or their powerful
neighbour--the prince. The Imperial power, in consequence, found the
lower nobility a bulwark against its princely vassals. Economic
changes, the suddenly increased demand for money owing to the rise of
the "world-market," new inventions in the art of war, new methods of
fighting, the rapidly growing importance of artillery, and the
increase of the mercenary soldier, had rendered the lower nobility,
as an institution, a factor in the political situation which was fast
becoming negligible. The abortive campaign of Franz von Sickingen in
1523 only showed its hopeless weakness. The _Reichsregiment_, or
Imperial governing council, a body instituted by Maximilian, had
lamentably failed to effect anything towards cementing together the
various parts of the unwieldy fabric. Finally, at the Reichstag held
in Nuernberg, in December 1522, at which all the estates were
represented, the _Reichsregiment_, to all intents and purposes,
collapsed.

The Reichstag in question was summoned ostensibly for the purpose of
raising a subsidy for the Hungarians in their struggle against the
advancing power of the Turks. The Turkish movement westward was, of
course, throughout this period, the most important question of what in
modern phraseology would be called "foreign politics." The princes
voted the proposal of the subsidy without consulting the
representatives of the cities, who knew the heaviest part of the
burden was to fall upon themselves. The urgency of the situation,
however, weighed with them, with the result that they submitted after
considerable remonstrance. The princes, in conjunction with their
rivals, the lower nobility, next proceeded to attack the commercial
monopolies, the first fruits of the rising capitalism, the appanage
mainly of the trading companies and the merchant magnates of the
towns. This was too much for civic patience. The city representatives,
who, of course, belonged to the civic aristocracy, waxed indignant.
The feudal orders went on to claim the right to set up vexatious
tariffs in their respective territories, whereby to hinder
artificially the free development of the new commercial capitalist.
This filled up the cup of endurance of the magnates of the city. The
city representatives refused their consent to the Turkish subsidy and
withdrew. The next step was the sending of a deputation to the young
Emperor Karl, who was in Spain, and whose sanction to the decrees of
the Reichstag was necessary before their promulgation. The result of
the conference held on this occasion was a decision to undermine the
_Reichsregiment_ and weaken the power of the princes, by whom and by
whose tools it was manned, as a factor in the Imperial constitution.
As for the princes, while some of their number were positively opposed
to it, others cared little one way or the other. Their chief aim was
to strengthen and consolidate their power within the limits of their
own territories, and a weak empire was perhaps better adapted for
effecting this purpose than a stronger one, even though certain of
their own order had a controlling voice in its administration. As
already hinted, the collapse of the rebellious knighthood under
Sickingen, a few weeks later, clearly showed the political drift of
the situation in the _haute politique_ of the empire.

The rising capitalists of the city, the monopolists, merchant princes,
and syndicates, are the theme of universal invective throughout this
period. To them the rapid and enormous rise in prices during the early
years of the sixteenth century, the scarcity of money consequent on
the increased demand for it, and the impoverishment of large sections
of the population, were attributed by noble and peasant alike. The
whole trend of public opinion, in short, outside the wealthier
burghers of the larger cities--the class immediately interested--was
adverse to the condition of things created by the new world-market,
and by the new class embodying it. At present it was a small class,
the only one that gained by it, and that gained at the expense of all
the other classes.

Some idea of the class-antagonisms of the period may be gathered from
the statement of Ulrich von Hutten about the robber-knights already
spoken of, in his dialogue entitled "Predones," to the effect that
there were four orders of robbers in Germany--the _knights_, the
_lawyers_, the _priests_, and the _merchants_ (meaning especially the
new capitalist merchant-traders or syndicates). Of these, he declares
the robber-knights to be the least harmful. This is naturally only to
be expected from so gallant a champion of his order, the friend and
abettor of Sickingen. Nevertheless, the seriousness of the
robber-knight evil, the toleration of which in principle was so deeply
ingrained in the public opinion of large sections of the population,
may be judged from the abortive attempts made to stop it, at the
instance alike of princes and of cities, who on this point, if on no
other, had a common interest. In 1502, for example, at the Reichstag
held in Gelnhausen in that year, certain of the highest princes of the
empire made a representation that, at least, the knights should permit
the gathering in of the harvest and the vintage in peace. But even
this modest demand was found to be impracticable. The knights had to
live in the style required by their status, as they declared, and
where other means were more and more failing them, their ancient right
or privilege of plunder was indispensable to their order. Still,
Hutten was right so far in declaring the knight the most harmless kind
of robber, inasmuch as, direct as were his methods, his sun was
obviously setting, while as much could not be said of the other
classes named; the merchant and the lawyer were on the rise, and the
priest, although about to receive a check, was not destined speedily
to disappear, or to change fundamentally the character of his
activity.

The feudal orders saw their own position seriously threatened by the
new development of things economic in the cities. The guilds were
becoming crystallized into close corporations of wealthy families,
constituting a kind of second _Ehrbarkeit_ or town patriciate; the
numbers of the landless and unprivileged, with at most a bare footing
in the town constitution, were increasing in an alarming proportion;
the journeyman workman was no longer a stage between apprentice and
master craftsman, but a permanent condition embodied in a large and
growing class. All these symptoms indicated an extraordinary economic
revolution, which was making itself at first directly felt only in the
larger cities, but the results of which were dislocating the social
relations of the Middle Ages throughout the whole empire.

Perhaps the most striking feature in this dislocation was the transition
from direct barter to exchange through the medium of money, and the
consequent suddenly increased importance of the role played by usury in
the social life of the time. The scarcity of money is a perennial theme
of complaint for which the new large capitalist-monopolists are made
responsible. But the class in question was itself only a symptom of the
general economic change. The seeming scarcity of money, though but the
consequence of the increased demand for a circulating medium, was
explained, to the disadvantage of the hated monopolists, by a crude form
of the "mercantile" theory. The new merchant, in contradistinction to
the master craftsman working _en famille_ with his apprentices and
assistants, now often stood entirely outside the processes of
production, as speculator or middleman; and he, and still more the
syndicate who fulfilled the like functions on a larger scale (especially
with reference to foreign trade), came to be regarded as particularly
obnoxious robbers, because interlopers to boot. Unlike the knights, they
were robbers with a new face.

The lawyers were detested for much the same reason (cf. _German
Society at the Close of the Middle Ages_, pp. 219-28). The
professional lawyer class, since its final differentiation from the
clerk class in general, had made the Roman or civil law its
speciality, and had done its utmost everywhere to establish the
principles of the latter in place of the old feudal law of earlier
mediaeval Europe. The Roman law was especially favourable to the
pretensions of the princes, and, from an economic point of view, of
the nobility in general, inasmuch as land was on the new legal
principles treated as the private property of the lord; over which he
had full power of ownership, and not, as under feudal and canon law,
as a _trust_ involving duties as well as rights. The class of jurists
was itself of comparatively recent growth in Central Europe, and its
rapid increase in every portion of the empire dated from less than
half a century back. It may be well understood, therefore, why these
interlopers, who ignored the ancient customary law of the country, and
who by means of an alien code deprived the poor freeholder or
copyholder of his land, or justified new and unheard-of exactions on
the part of his lord on the plea that the latter might do what he
liked with his own, were regarded by the peasant and humble man as
robbers whose depredations were, if anything, even more resented than
those of their old and tried enemy--the plundering knight.

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