Germany was inhabited from earliest times, but it took many millennia of migration, conquest, and intermingling to produce the Germans.
Stone Age Peoples
During the Old Stone Age, the German forests were thinly populated by wandering bands of hunters and gatherers. They belonged to the earliest forms of Homo sapiens, such as Heidelberg man, who lived about 400,000 years ago. Somewhat later more advanced forms of Homo sapiens appeared, as exemplified by skeletal finds near Steinheim, some 300,000 years old, and near Ehringsdorf, from about 100,000 years ago. Another human type was the Neandertal, found near Düsseldorf, who lived about 100,000 years ago. The most recent type, which appeared by 40,000 BC, was the Cro-Magnon, a member of Homo sapiens sapiens, essentially of the same group as modern Europeans.
During the New Stone Age, the indigenous hunters encountered farming peoples from the more advanced southwest Asia, who were migrating up the Danube Valley into central Germany about 4500 BC. These populations mixed and settled in villages to raise crops and breed stock. Villagers of this Danubian culture lived with their animals in large, gabled wooden houses, made pottery, and traded with Mediterranean peoples for fine stone and flint axes and shells. As their hand-hoed fields wore out, they moved on, often returning years later.
Bronze Age Peoples
The Bronze Age began in central Germany, Bohemia, and Austria in about 2500 BC with the working of copper and tin deposits by prospectors from the eastern Mediterranean. In about 2300 BC new waves of migrating peoples arrived, probably from southern Russia. These battle-ax-wielding Indo-Europeans were the ancestors of the Germanic peoples that settled in northern and central Germany, the Baltic and Slavic peoples in the east, and the Celts in the south and west. The central and southern groups mixed with the so-called Bell-Beaker people, who moved east from Spain and Portugal about the year 2000 BC. The Bell-Beaker folk, probably Indo-Europeans, were skilled metalworkers. They developed a thriving Bronze Age culture in Germany and traded amber from the Baltic coast for bronze, pottery, and beads from the Mediterranean.
From 1800 to 400 BC, Celtic peoples in southern Germany and Austria developed a sequence of advanced metalworking cultures—Urnfield, Hallstatt, and La Tène—each of which spread throughout Europe. They introduced the use of iron for tools and weapons. The La Tène Celts did fine metalwork and used ox-drawn plows and wheeled vehicles. The Germanic tribes absorbed much Celtic culture and eventually displaced the Celts themselves.
Germans and Romans
From the 2nd century BC to the 5th century AD the Germanic and Celtic tribes, constantly pressed by migrations from the north and east, were in contact with the Romans, who controlled southern and western Europe. Roman accounts by Julius Caesar and Cornelius Tacitus describe these encounters.
The Cimbri and Teutons, about to invade Italy, were defeated by the Roman general Gaius Marius in 101 and 102 BC. The Suevi and other tribes in Gaul (modern France), west of the Rhine, were subdued by Julius Caesar around 50 BC. The Romans tried unsuccessfully to extend their rule to the Elbe, and the emperors held the border at the Rhine and the Danube. Between the two rivers they erected a limes, a line of fortifications to keep out raiding tribes.
In the 2nd century AD the Romans prevented confederations of Franks, Alamanni, and Burgundians outside the empire from crossing the Rhine. But in the 4th and 5th centuries, the pressure proved too much for the weakened Romans. The Huns, sweeping in from Asia, set off waves of migration, during which the Ostrogoths, Visigoths, Vandals, Franks, Lombards, and other Germanic tribes overran the empire.
Beginnings of a German State
In the late 5th century the Frankish chieftain Clovis defeated the Romans, and he established a kingdom that included most of Gaul and southwestern Germany. He converted his subjects, believers in the Arian heresy, to orthodox Christianity.
Carolingian Germany
Clovis's work was carried on in the 8th century by Charlemagne, who fought the Slavs south of the Danube, annexed southern Germany, and ferociously subdued and converted the pagan Saxons in the northwest. As champion of Christianity and supporter of the papacy against the restive people of Rome, Charlemagne was crowned emperor of the Romans by Pope Leo III in Rome in 800. This milestone event revived the Roman imperial tradition in the west, but it also set a precedent for the dependence of the emperors on papal approval.
The Carolingian Empire was based on the social structure of the late Roman Empire. The official language of the court and the church was Latin, but Franks in Gaul adopted the Latinate vernacular that became French, and Franks and other Germanic tribes in the east spoke various languages that became German. The only relic of Old High German is the Hildebrandslied (“Lay of Hildebrand”), a fragmentary 8th-century poem, based on early pagan heroic tales, about the tragic duel between a father and son.
Carolingian rulers encouraged missionary work among the Germans. Saint Willibrord founded the monastery of Echternach, and Saint Boniface founded Reichenau and Fulda and reformed the Frankish church. Non-Frankish Germans, however, retained much pagan belief beneath their newly acquired faith. The Heliand, a 9th-century epic, depicts Christ as a Saxon warrior king.
East Francia
The Carolingian Empire, unwieldy and prey to tribal dissension, did not long survive Charlemagne's death in 814. By the Treaty of Verdun (843), the empire was divided among his three grandsons. One received West Francia (modern France). Another acquired the imperial title and an area running from the North Sea through Lotharingia (Lorraine) and Burgundy to Italy. The third, Louis the German, received East Francia (modern Germany). The Treaty of Mersen (870) divided the middle kingdom, with Lotharingia going to East Francia and the rest to West Francia. In 881 Charles the Fat of East Francia, heir of Louis the German, received the imperial title. Six years later he was deposed by Arnulf, the last Carolingian emperor.
The Tribal Duchies
By the 10th century East Francia was being buffeted by new waves of pagan Danes, Magyars, and Moravians from the north and east and was virtually torn apart by rival tribes. The Carolingians had granted tribal military leaders (dukes) and appointed officials (counts and margraves) lands as temporary fiefs for their services to the state, and many of the high clergy had also received fiefs. As royal authority declined, these feudal lords, or princes, provided local government and defense. The secular lords gradually made their fiefs hereditary. The greatest of them were the rulers of five stem (tribal) duchies—Franconia, Swabia, Bavaria, Saxony, and Lorraine. Lesser warriors joined princely retinues out of tribal loyalty and in exchange for smaller grants of land and other gifts. Common people lost the right to bear arms. They worked the fields of warriors and churchmen in return for protection and a share of the crops. Thus, the Carolingian governmental system blended with the German tradition of free tribesmen to form a society in which a military nobility was supported by an agricultural peasantry of freemen and serfs.
By ancient German tradition, the kings were elected. Because no noble family wanted to be subject to another family or to a strong king, weak kings were often chosen, and none could safely assume the loyalty of his nobles. These conditions delayed for centuries the consolidation of a strong German state.
Early Middle Ages
Medieval German kings had three major concerns. One was checking the rebellious princes—usually with the help of churchmen. The second was controlling Italy and being crowned emperor of the West by the pope, a policy considered an essential part of the Carolingian heritage. The third was expansion to the north and east.
The Saxon Kings
When the last Carolingian died without an heir, the Franks and Saxons elected Conrad, duke of Franconia, their king; he proved incompetent. After his death in 918 they chose the Saxon duke Henry I, the Fowler, a sober, practical soldier, who made peace with a rival king chosen by the Bavarians, defeated Magyars and Slavs, and regained Lorraine.
Otto I, the Great
At Henry's death in 936, the princes elected his son Otto I, who combined extraordinary forcefulness, dignity, and military prowess with great diplomatic skill and genuine religious faith. Determined to create a strong centralized monarchy, Otto gave the duchies to his relatives and then broke them up into nonhereditary fiefs granted to bishops and abbots. By nominating these churchmen and subjecting them to the royal court, he ensured their loyalty. This Ottonian system of government through alliance with the German state church was carried much further by his successors.
Otto also had to defend his realm from outside pressures. In the west he strengthened his hold on Lorraine and gained influence over Burgundy (Arles). In the north and east he defeated the Danes and Slavs, and he permanently broke the power of the Magyars (Hungarians) at the Battle of the Lechfeld in 955. Otto established the archbishopric of Magdeburg (968) and other sees as centers of civilization in the conquered lands. Germans settled these regions.
Wanting to emulate Charlemagne as the divinely sanctioned emperor of Christendom, Otto began the disastrous policy of German entanglement in Italy. The temptation was the greater because Italy was a rich land and a scene of feudal disorder and Saracen invasions. When Adelaide, widowed queen of the Lombards, asked Otto for help against her captor, Berengar, king of Italy, Otto invaded Italy in 951, married her, and took her dead husband's title.
The papacy at this time was struggling to hold its land against encroaching nobles from the north and Byzantine Greeks and Saracens from the south. When Pope John XII appealed to Otto for aid against Berengar, Otto invaded Italy a second time, defeated Berengar, and was crowned emperor by the pope in 962. By a treaty called the Ottonian Privilege, Otto guaranteed the pope's claim to papal lands, and all future papal candidates had to swear fealty to the emperor.
Later Saxon Kings
Otto's successors in the 10th and 11th centuries continued his German and Italian policies as best they could. Otto II established the Eastern March (Austria) under the Babenbergs as a military outpost but was defeated by the Saracens in his efforts to secure southern Italy. The pious Otto III supported the Benedictine reform movement originating in Cluny, Burgundy, which encouraged a more austere, disciplined life. The childless Henry II, gentle and devout, also encouraged the Cluniac movement and sent out missionaries from his court in the new bishopric of Bamberg.
Salian Kings
For 100 years (1024-1125) German kings were chosen from the Salian line, which was related to the Saxons. The Salians brought the empire to its height.
High Tide of Empire
Conrad II, a clever and ruthless ruler, reasserted royal authority over princely opposition by making the fiefs of lesser nobles hereditary and by appointing ministerials, lower-class men responsible directly to him, as officials and soldiers. He seized Burgundy, strengthened his hold on northern Italy, and became overlord of Poland.
Conrad's son Henry III, the Black, was the first undisputed king of Germany. A pious visionary, he introduced to a Germany torn by civil strife the Cluny-inspired Truce of God, a respite from war lasting from Wednesday night to Monday morning, and tried in vain to extend it to a permanent peace. He ended the payment by new bishops of tribute to the Crown—a practice called simony—although he still invested churchmen, who remained his vassals. During his reign he deposed three rival popes and created four new ones, notably the reform-minded Leo IX.
Henry IV
While still a child, Henry IV succeeded his father, Henry III, in 1056. During his mother's regency, long-restive princes annexed much royal land; cities, popes, and Normans controlled Italy; and the Lateran synod of 1059 declared that only cardinals could canonically elect the pope. Henry IV was wily, opportunistic, and headstrong in an era of violence and treachery, and as ruler he sought to recover lost imperial power. His efforts to retrieve crown lands aroused the Saxons, who resented the Salian kings. He crushed a Saxon rebellion in 1075 and proceeded to confiscate land, thus intensifying their enmity.
Henry's control of the clergy embroiled him with the militant reform pope Gregory VII, who wanted to free the church from secular bondage. When Gregory forbade lay investiture of churchmen, Henry had him deposed by the Synod of Worms in 1076. The pope promptly excommunicated Henry and released his subjects from their oath of loyalty to him. To keep his crown, Henry cleverly sought the pope at Canossa in the Apennines in January 1077, where, after three days of humble penitence, he was forgiven. The princes, however, elected a rival king, Rudolf of Swabia. The result was nearly 20 years of civil war. In 1080 Gregory excommunicated Henry again and recognized Rudolf. Deposing Gregory, Henry marched on Rome, installed the antipope Clement III, and was crowned emperor in 1084. Henry returned to Germany to continue the civil war against a new rival king (Rudolf had died in 1080). Finally, betrayed and imprisoned by his son Henry, the emperor was forced to abdicate.
Compromise
The treacherous, brutal, and greedy Henry V vainly continued his father's struggle for supremacy. Suffering military defeats, he lost control of Poland, Hungary, and Bohemia. Despite the support of churchmen, ministerials, and the towns, he could not suppress the princes, who forced the weary emperor and Pope Callistus II to compromise on investiture. They accepted the Concordat of Worms (1122), which stipulated that clerical elections in Germany were to take place in the imperial presence without simony and that the emperor was to invest the candidate with the symbols of his temporal office before a bishop invested him with the spiritual ones. The pope, however, had the better of the bargain, and the rivalry between empire and papacy took on new dimensions.
Early Medieval Society
German kings had no fixed capital, but traveled unceasingly about their realm. They had no income beyond that from their family lands and gifts from churchmen. Feudalism was the rule. The great lords, theoretically vassals of the king, in fact usurped royal rights to build castles and administer justice. The vast majority of common people lived on country manors belonging to nobles or churchmen. The few cities, such as Trier and Cologne, were chiefly Roman foundations or imperial fortifications. There, merchants, artisans, and uprooted peasants settled as free citizens under the authority of a prince. The cities also sheltered Jews, who were not allowed to hold land.
The clergy, which included many nobles, spread the faith, provided education, and carried on the functions of government. Monasteries such as Reichenau, Regensburg, Fulda, Echternach, and Saint Gall became centers of scholarship. Monks wrote Latin works (such as the Walthariuslied, based on a German legend) and translated biblical and other Christian texts into Old High German. Their illuminated manuscripts with flat, dignified images imitated the art of classical antiquity and Byzantium. Churches, notably Saint Michael at Hildesheim and the cathedrals of Mainz, Speyer, and Worms, were massive, stone-vaulted basilicas with towers and small, round-arched windows. Their walls were adorned with painted murals and expressive sculpture in wood and bronze.
High Middle Ages
In the 12th and 13th centuries Germany and Italy were rent by rivalry between two princely families. The Hohenstaufen, or Waiblingen, of Swabia, known as Ghibellines in Italy, held the German and imperial crowns. The Welfs of Bavaria and Saxony, known as Guelphs in Italy, were allied with the papacy.
Henry V died childless in 1125. The princes, avoiding the principle of heredity, passed over his nephews, Frederick and Conrad Hohenstaufen, to choose Lothair, duke of Saxony. As emperor, Lothair II revived German efforts to convert and dominate the east. To assert his authority in Italy, he made two expeditions supporting the pope, who crowned him in 1133. In Germany he fought a civil war with the Hohenstaufen princes, who refused to accept him as emperor.
The Hohenstaufen Kings
At Lothair's death the princes avoided his powerful Welf son-in-law and heir, Henry the Proud, lord of Bavaria and Saxony. Instead, they chose Conrad Hohenstaufen. Civil war erupted again, this time between the weak but charming Conrad III and the Welf dukes Henry the Proud and his son Henry the Lion. It continued while Conrad led the ill-fated Second Crusade and was paralleled by the Guelph-Ghibelline conflict in Italy. The struggle in Germany was temporarily resolved at Conrad's death by the election of his nephew Frederick, a Hohenstaufen born of a Welf mother.
Frederick I, Barbarossa
Handsome and intelligent, warlike, just, and charming, Frederick I Barbarossa was the ideal medieval Christian king. Regarding himself as the successor of Augustus, Charlemagne, and Otto the Great, he took the title Holy Roman emperor and spent most of his reign shuttling between Germany and Italy trying to restore imperial glory in both.
In the north he joined Germany and Burgundy by marrying Beatrice, heiress to Burgundy. He declared an imperial peace; to ensure it, he placated the Welfs by recognizing Henry the Lion as duke of Saxony and Bavaria, and for balance he made Austria a duchy. But when Henry refused to contribute troops to a critical Italian campaign, Frederick and jealous princes exiled him as a traitor. Henry's duchies were split up, Bavaria going to the Wittelsbach family.
In the south, Frederick made six expeditions to Italy to assert full imperial authority over the Lombard city-states and the popes. In 1155, on his first trip, he was crowned emperor. On his second, he had the Diet of Roncaglia (1158) declare his rights, and he installed podestas (imperial representatives) in the cities. Some cities had Ghibelline sympathies, but most objected to being ruled and taxed by uncouth, greedy foreigners. The popes needed imperial support against a Roman rising, but they believed that their spiritual office gave them sovereignty over the emperors. Also, they wanted to maintain independent control of the Papal States. Consequently, some cities revolted against imperial authority and formed the Lombard League in alliance with Pope Alexander III. Frederick reacted by creating an antipope. On his next two trips, Ghibelline cities joined Guelph cities in a revived league and threw out the podestas. Alexander, who had excommunicated Frederick, fled to his Norman allies in Sicily, and Frederick captured Rome in 1166.
During his fifth invasion of Italy, lacking the support of Henry the Lion, Frederick was defeated by the league at the Battle of Legnano (1176). As a result, the Peace of Constance (1183) recognized the autonomy of the cities, which remained only nominally subject to the emperor. Stubbornly, Frederick made a last trip in which he gained new support among the quarrelsome cities. He died leading the Third Crusade.
Henry VI
More ambitious even than his father, Henry VI wanted to dominate the known world. To secure peace in Germany, he put down a rebellion by the returned exile Henry the Lion and then restored him to power. He forced the northern Italian cities to submit to him and seized Sicily from a usurping Norman king. Intending to create an empire in the Mediterranean, he exacted tribute from North Africa and the weak Byzantine emperor. Henry died suddenly in 1197 while planning a crusade to the Holy Land.
The empire immediately fell apart. Henry's infant son, Frederick II, inherited Sicily, but northern Italy reasserted its independence. The Germans refused to accept a child or make the Crown hereditary in the Hohenstaufen line. Once more civil war raged as two elected kings—the Hohenstaufen Philip of Swabia and the Welf Otto of Brunswick, son of Henry the Lion—struggled for the Crown. When Otto invaded Italy, Pope Innocent III secured the election of Frederick II on the promise that Frederick would give up Sicily so as not to surround the pope.
Frederick II, Stupor Mundi
Outstandingly accomplished in many fields, the new king was called Stupor Mundi (“wonder of the world”). He was gracious and amiable but also crafty and ruthless. Determined to keep Sicily as his base of operations, he revised his coronation promise, giving Germany rather than Sicily to his young son Henry. In Sicily he suppressed the barons, reformed the laws, founded the University of Naples, and kept a brilliant court, where he shone as scientist, artist, and poet. He was also an excellent soldier, diplomat, and administrator.
To gain German support for his campaigns in northern Italy, Frederick allowed the princes to usurp royal powers. The confirmation of their rights by the Privilege of Worms (1231) made them virtually kings in their own territories. Henry, when he came of age, objected to this policy and revolted but was quickly deposed and imprisoned by his father.
An aggressive emperor such as Frederick was regarded as dangerous by the popes. Angered by his claims to Lombardy, Pope Gregory IX excommunicated him for his delay in leading a promised crusade. Frederick finally went to Jerusalem in 1228, was crowned king, and gained the chief Christian sites in the Holy Land. His success did not mollify Gregory, however, who in his absence invaded Sicily. Frederick rushed home and made peace. But by 1237 he was battling in northern Italy against the second Lombard League of cities. The league was allied with the pope, who excommunicated him again. Frederick then seized the Papal States. The new pope, Innocent IV, fled to Lyon and declared him deposed. Undaunted, Frederick was making headway against the league when he suddenly died.
Frederick's young son Conrad IV inherited Sicily and the imperial title, but Italy and Germany were never united again. The popes, allied with the French, ousted the Hohenstaufens from Sicily. Germany suffered the turmoil of the Great Interregnum (1254-1273), during which foreigners claimed the Crown and the princes won a six-century ascendancy.
Society and Culture in the High Middle Ages
By the late 13th century the empire had lost Poland and Hungary and effective control of Burgundy and Italy. Within its borders the principalities were virtually autonomous. The ancient right of royal election was limited to seven princes, who purposely chose weak men unlikely to thwart their own dynastic ambitions.
The church continued to be a dominant force in society. Cistercian monks and Premonstratensian canons settled new lands in the east, and friars of the Dominicans and Franciscans preached and taught in the towns. The Teutonic Knights moved their headquarters to Marienburg in eastern Germany, where they led a crusade against the pagan Prussians. The knights opened the Baltic coast to the German church and to German merchants.
The struggle between emperors and princes benefited the towns, who paid taxes to the emperors in exchange for freedom from feudal obligations. Trade greatly increased. Cologne and Frankfurt gave access to the fairs of Champagne. Mainz lay on the route across the Alps to Italy. Lübeck and Hamburg dominated North Sea and Baltic trade, and Leipzig was in contact with Russia. Rhine towns and, later, north German towns began to form trade associations, the most powerful of which was the Hanseatic League. This trade association arranged advantageous commercial treaties, created new centers of trade and civilization, contributed to the development of agriculture and industrial arts, constructed canals and highways, and even declared war. Disintegration of the league began toward the end of the 15th century, and was complete in 1669.
At the height of the league, the rich burghers built city walls, cathedrals, and elaborate town halls and guildhalls as expressions of civic pride. By the mid-13th century, French Gothic influences were affecting German architecture. The lofty cathedrals of Bamberg, Strasbourg, Naumburg, and Cologne were richly decorated with sculpture, and they were filled with light from the stained glass in their large, pointed-arched windows.
French culture also affected German literature. Wandering nobles and knights, called minnesinger, wrote and recited courtly love poems in the tradition of Provençal troubadours and French trouvères (see TROUBADOURS AND TROUVERES). Foremost among them were Reinmar von Hagenau and Walther von der Vogelweide. Other poets, called Spielleute, composed epics. Gottfried von Strassburg and Wolfram von Eschenbach dealt with Christian themes from the French Arthurian cycle. Nonetheless, the two most important epics—the Niebelungenlied and the Gudrunlied—were based on pagan Germanic traditions.
Late Middle Ages and Early Renaissance
By the late Middle Ages, the great stem duchies had been broken up and new principalities created. Three princely families—Habsburg, Wittelsbach, and Luxemburg—struggled for dynastic rights to the imperial crown.
Princely Rivalry
In 1273 the electors ended the Great Interregnum by choosing Rudolf of Habsburg, a minor Swabian prince unable to repossess the lands they had usurped. Rudolf I concentrated on aggrandizing his family. Aided by the Wittelsbachs and others, he defeated the rebellious Ottokar II of Bohemia and took the lands Ottokar had usurped—Austria, Styria, Carinthia, and Carniola—for his two sons, thus making the Habsburgs one of the great powers in the empire.
On Rudolf's death the electors chose Adolf of Nassau but deposed him when he asserted his authority. They next chose Rudolf's son, Albert of Austria, but when he displayed appetite for additional territory, he was murdered. Still seeking a weak emperor, the electors voted for Henry, count of Luxemburg. Anxious to restore imperial claims to Italy, Henry VII crossed the Alps in 1310 and temporarily subdued Lombardy; he was crowned by the Roman people, because the popes had left Rome and were then living in Avignon, France—the so-called Babylonian Captivity. He died trying to conquer Naples from the French.
Civil war then raged until the Wittelsbach candidate for the throne, Louis the Bavarian, defeated his Habsburg rival at the Battle of Mühldorf in 1322. Louis IV obtained a secular coronation in Italy, but Pope John XXII, objecting to his interference in Italian politics, declared his title invalid and excommunicated him. Louis then called for a church council and installed an antipope in Rome. At Rhense in 1338 the electors made the momentous declaration that henceforth the king of the Germans would be the majority electoral choice, thus avoiding civil war, and that he would automatically be emperor without being crowned by the pope. This was reflected in the title, official in the 15th century, Holy Roman Emperor of the German Nation.
The Luxemburg Line
The popes, of course, objected. Clement VI opened negotiations with Charles, king of Bohemia, grandson of Henry VII. In 1347 he was chosen by five of the seven electors, who had previously deposed Louis. Charles IV diplomatically ignored the question of papal assent. In the Golden Bull (1356) he specified the seven electors as the archbishops of Mainz, Trier, and Cologne, the count palatine of the Rhine, the duke of Saxony (an old title for a new state in the east), the margrave of Brandenburg, and the king of Bohemia. Because the bull made their lands indivisible, granted them monopolies on mining and tolls, and secured them “gifts” from candidates, they were the strongest of all the princes.
Having ensured the power of the princes, the astute Charles entrenched his own dynasty in Bohemia. He bought Brandenburg and took Silesia from Poland to build a great state to the east. To obtain cash, he encouraged the silver, glass, and paper industries of Bohemia. He adorned Prague, his capital, with new buildings in the late Gothic style, founded a noted university, and kept a brilliant court.
Charles's son, Sigismund, forced Pope John XXIII to call the Council of Constance (1414-1418), which ended the Great Schism in the papacy. But as the king of Bohemia he was chiefly concerned with his own dynastic lands. Bohemia was convulsed by the Hussite movement, which combined traditional Czech national feeling with desire for much-needed church reform. Sigismund invited the reformer John Huss (also spelled Jan Hus) to state his views, under imperial protection, at the Council of Constance, but failed to prevent the council from subsequently burning him as a heretic. This led to the Hussite Wars by which the moderate Calixtine Hussites won some concessions from the church and Sigismund in exchange for their reconciliation.
The Habsburg Line
When Sigismund died without an heir, the electors unanimously chose his Habsburg son-in-law Albert of Austria, who became emperor as Albert II. From that time on, the imperial crown became in practice, although not in theory, hereditary in the Habsburg line. Albert II died in the midst of civil war in Bohemia and an Ottoman invasion of Hungary. His cousin and successor, Frederick III, lost Hungary and Bohemia and sold Luxemburg to France, while he struggled with the German princes and the Turks on his borders. In 1486 the princes forced him to cede his authority to his son but he retained the title of Holy Roman Emperor until 1493.
Maximilian I, knight and art patron, enthusiastically laid many plans, which never materialized. His chief success was in arranging marriages to benefit his family. By his own marriage to Mary of Burgundy he acquired a rich territory that included the thriving Flemish towns. French-speaking Burgundy was the initial cause of the Habsburg-Valois feud that lasted for the next three centuries. By marrying his son, Philip the Handsome, to the heiress of Spain, Maximilian acquired Spain and its possessions in Italy and the New World. By betrothing his grandson Ferdinand to the heiress of Hungary and Bohemia, he added those states to the inheritance.
15th-Century Society
In Germany as in the rest of Europe, the 15th century was a time of transition from the land economy of the Middle Ages to the money economy of modern times. The process created painful tensions among all classes of society.
The Nobility
The German nobility ranged from the great electors and other princes of the 240 states of the empire to the minor knights who held fiefs directly from the emperor. They had supreme jurisdiction in their own lands, checked only by diets representing nobles, clergy, and burghers, which alone could levy the taxes needed to pay for new arms and mercenary soldiers. As prices rose and income from land did not, all the nobility felt pressed for funds. Some squeezed more goods and services out of their peasants. Others resorted to raiding their peers or the cities, and still others sold their military services as mercenaries.
The Cities
As centers of commerce, the cities became increasingly important in a money economy. In the south, Nuremberg and Augsburg, home of the Fugger bank, thrived on mines and trade with Italy. In the north, Lübeck, Hamburg, and other cities of the Hanseatic League carried on brisk trade with Britain and Scandinavia. Within the cities the old merchant guilds and new craft guilds, both virtually hereditary, struggled for power. Common laborers had no say. As their trade grew, the cities' demand for freedom from attack and from local tolls levied on roads and rivers often led to war with the nobles.
The Peasants
Perhaps as many as one-third of the peasants, the same estimate as for the rest of the population, died during the Plague that swept Europe in the mid-14th century. Of the survivors, some peasants had lost their land through frequent subdivision among heirs. Many of these streamed to the cities, while others charged landlords more for their labor. Most small peasants, however, lost whatever rights and freedoms they had traditionally possessed, as lords strove to keep them on the land and make them as profitable as possible. The peasants, especially in southern Germany, finally resorted to violent protest.
The Church
Cries for church reform had been raised at least as early as the 11th-century Cluniac movement. During the late Middle Ages and early Renaissance they became more insistent. On the political level, the church lost prestige as a result of the unedifying Babylonian Captivity and the ensuing Great Schism in the papacy.
On the economic level, the increasingly widespread need for cash led to criticism of the church's wealth. People objected that the church owned much land and bore heavily on its tenants but paid no taxes. Economic and political concerns came together in growing German resentment at sending money to maintain the pope in Rome.
The church was also attacked on the intellectual level by the humanist study of classical antiquity, which spread north from Italy. Nicholas of Cusa proposed a heliocentric theory of astronomy that undermined the accepted biblical view of creation. Literary humanists such as Conradus Celtes, Willibald Pirkheimer, Johann Reuchlin, and Erasmus of Rotterdam urged linguistic purity in the study of biblical and other texts and satirized abuses in the church. The invention of printing from movable type by Johann Gutenberg made it possible to produce Bibles, other books, and pamphlets in great quantity at low cost. As a result, the new learning could circulate widely, preparing the intellectual ground for the Reformation.
Age of Religious Strife
The spiritual concerns of Martin Luther combined with secular ambitions of the German princes to produce the Protestant Reformation. The movement for church reform created religious liberty at the cost of Western Christian unity. Religious strife intensified European political wars for 100 years.
The Protestant Reformation
Charles V succeeded his grandfather Maximilian as Holy Roman emperor in 1519. He devoted his life to preserving a medieval empire united in faith, a fruitless effort in the pluralistic society created by religious reformers and secular forces.
Luther
A key figure of the new age was Martin Luther, a friar of the Augustinians who was disturbed by abuses within the church. He was particularly aroused by the unscrupulous campaign to sell indulgences, or remissions of punishment for sin. In 1517 Luther published a list of 95 theses attacking indulgences, and these stirred up much controversy.
In 1520 Luther published three pamphlets stating his beliefs in the liberty of the Christian conscience informed only by the Bible, the priesthood of all believers, and a state-supported church. Because these doctrines struck at the root of church authority, Pope Leo X issued a bull condemning Luther's works. Luther burned the bull and was then excommunicated. Charles V summoned him to defend himself at the Diet of Worms (1521) and, when Luther refused to recant, outlawed him. On his way home, however, Luther was rescued by Frederick the Wise, elector of Saxony; installed in the Wartburg castle, he began to translate the Bible into German.
Lutheran ideas, partly a continuation of Hussite traditions, were sympathetically received by many. Matters of conscience, however, were often carried to extremes or mixed with socioeconomic grievances. The fanatical Karlstadt urged iconoclastic attacks on church painting, statuary, and stained glass. The mercenary knight Franz von Sickingen led impecunious south German knights against ecclesiastical lords in the hope of gaining church lands. Peasant groups, wanting a return to old ways, looted and burned castles and monasteries in the Peasants' War (1524-1526).
These revolutionaries looked to Luther for guidance in reordering the church and German society, but Luther did not want to mix religious with secular concerns. Emerging from the Wartburg to restore order, he checked Karlstadt and urged the princes to crush every rising, which they did. The peasants then lost all traditional rights, sense of initiative, and status, while the princes set up state churches supported by confiscated Catholic lands. In these new churches the service was in German, and the clergy were permitted to marry.
Conflict and Compromise
At this early stage, a break with Rome did not seem inevitable. Many Lutherans would have remained in the church if nonbiblical practices had been eliminated. Charles V, busy with foreign wars, wanted to make peace at home, but Luther was not conciliatory. Furthermore, Protestants, as the reformers came to be called, were themselves divided. In addition to Lutherans there were Reformed Christians, inspired by the Swiss theologian Huldreich Zwingli, who wanted to set up theocratic states based on the Bible, and radical Anabaptists, mostly poor people who wanted to form churches independent of the state.
At the Diet of Augsburg (1530) Lutherans and Reformed Christians presented separate confessions of faith, indicating that they could not compromise with the Catholics or each other. The Anabaptists were not represented at all. Both the princes and the pope blocked Charles's desire for a council to mediate the dispute. Despairing of peaceful means, Charles led his troops against the Protestant princes and cities of the Schmalkaldic League (1531), routing them at the Battle of Mühlberg in 1547. By this time, however, many nobles, who had acquired secularized Catholic lands, were staunch Protestants, and they forced on Charles the compromise Peace of Augsburg (1555). It recognized Lutheranism, but not the Reformed (Calvinist) faith, whose theocratic doctrines seemed revolutionary to the princes. Most significant, it gave the princes the right to choose the religion for their territory.
Luther died in 1546, his work done. Charles, who had failed at a hopeless task, abdicated in 1556. His vast empire was divided, with the Spanish and Burgundian lands going to his son Philip II and the imperial title and the German lands going to his brother Ferdinand.
The Catholic Reformation
While the emperors Ferdinand I and his son Maximilian II were occupied with the threat of Turkish invasion, Protestantism in Germany grew apace. Its progress was checked, however, by the Counter Reformation. The long-delayed Council of Trent (1545-1563), dominated by the Jesuits, abolished the sale of indulgences but also reformulated doctrine and worship so as to preclude reconciliation with Protestantism. The Jesuits established centers in German cities, where they won many Germans back to Catholicism. The rulers of Bavaria, Austria, Salzburg, Bamberg, and Würzburg restored Catholicism by force, creating a Catholic bloc in southern Germany.
Tension mounted between Protestants and Catholics. Protestant princes under Frederick IV formed the Protestant Union in 1608. In 1609 Maximilian I, duke of Bavaria, led the Catholic princes into the Catholic League. Emperor Rudolf II, a scholarly recluse in Prague, unable to govern, was forced to relinquish his authority to his brother Matthias, who proved no more effective.
Matthias was succeeded by his nephew, who ruled as Ferdinand II. The real power in Europe, however, was Philip II of Spain, with his well-armed troops highly paid in New World gold. Catholic France was determined not to be overwhelmed by Habsburgs on either side. Protestant England and the Netherlands were also opposed to a strong Habsburg dynasty. Denmark and Sweden were lured by the desire to dominate the Baltic. Taking advantage of the quarreling German states, all these countries intervened to make Germany the scene of a devastating, four-phase European War.
The Thirty Years' War
The trouble began in Protestant Bohemia, which refused to accept the Catholic Ferdinand as king or future emperor. In 1618 the Czechs set up their own government, supported by the Evangelical Union. After the death of Matthias in 1619, they chose the Protestant elector Frederick V as their king. Ferdinand, however, crushed the Bohemian forces at the Battle of Weisserberg (1620); Frederick, called the Winter King, was exiled; and Catholicism was restored by force. The Bohemian nobles were killed, deprived of their lands, or fined. As a result of the war the population declined by more than one-half.
Protestant princes objected to Spanish troops in Germany. They supported Christian IV of Denmark, who, financed by the Dutch and English, invaded Germany in 1625. So began the second phase of the Thirty Years' War, which ended with Christian's defeat. The victorious Ferdinand issued the Edict of Restitution (1629), which ordered the return of all Catholic church property seized by Protestants since 1552.
The third phase of the war began when Gustav II Adolph of Sweden, who had long wanted to extend Swedish control of the Baltic, invaded Pomerania as the champion of the Protestant princes. The Swedish army won a brilliant victory at Breitenfeld (1631) and took Mainz and Prague, but the war dragged on for years, the two opposing armies devastating the countryside and accomplishing little. In 1635 a truce was declared, and the Edict of Restitution was revoked.
The Swedish, however, were still land-hungry, and the French, led by Cardinal Richelieu, were determined to subdue the Habsburgs. Accordingly, in the fourth phase of the war, the French paid subsidies to the Swedish army to keep it fighting, and French troops crossed the Rhine. After another 13 years of struggle, Emperor Ferdinand III and the princes were ready for peace.
The Peace of Westphalia
The long war ended in a draw, finalized by the Peace of Westphalia in 1648. By the terms of the treaty, the sovereignty and independence of each state of the Holy Roman Empire was fully recognized, making the Holy Roman emperor virtually powerless. In addition, the religion of each German state was to be determined by its prince. The religious status quo of 1624 was accepted, meaning that the Habsburg lands and the south and west were Catholic, the Reformed faith was recognized, and Protestants could retain acquired lands.
Politically, the Holy Roman Empire, or First Reich, continued in name, but it had lost all claim to universality or effective centralized government. Economically and socially, Germany had lost about one-third of its people to war, famine, and plague and much of its livestock, capital, and trade. Bands of refugees and mercenaries roamed the countryside, seizing what they could.
Cultural Life in the Renaissance and Reformation
Renaissance classicism and the Protestant Reformation deeply affected the arts of the 16th century and transformed education.
The Visual Arts
In painting and sculpture the late Gothic style, characterized by religious devotion and love of fine detail, lingered on. Great effort was expended on stained-glass windows and altarpieces by such masters as the painters Matthias Grunewald and Stefan Lochner and the sculptors Veit Stoss, Peter Vischer the Elder, Adam Kraft, and Tilman Riemenschneider. The Renaissance style, marked by classical motifs and interest in the natural world, was introduced from Italy by Albrecht Durer, who brought German painting to heights previously unknown. Lucas Cranach and Hans Holbein the Younger expressed the humanist emphasis on the individual in portraits. Dürer and Martin Schongauer combined Gothic and Renaissance elements in the new arts of woodcut and copper engraving, used for printed book illustration.
Architecture was late Gothic until the Reformation, when church building virtually stopped. Protestants frowned on church art, but they spent lavishly on the steep-roofed, half-timbered, decoratively painted houses of the burghers and on imposing palaces and guildhalls in the Renaissance style.
Literature and Scholarship
Medieval tradition continued in popular German literature in the form of folk songs, anecdotes about folk heroes, and religious and secular folk plays. Folk and classical themes provided source material for the Meistersinger, lyric poets who wrote according to the strict forms of the earlier minnesingers. Foremost among them was Hans Sachs, a cobbler of Nuremberg.
The most important development in literature was Luther's translation of the Bible into a vigorous vernacular that helped give the German people a unified literary language. It became the basis for standardized “High” German. Luther and others wrote German hymns for Protestant congregations, a liturgical innovation that laid the foundation for German church music and influenced worship throughout the Protestant world. Melanchthon, a professor at the University of Wittenberg, lucidly presented Protestant doctrines in Latin to the non-German world. He and other humanists introduced classical scholarship to universities in Cologne, Leipzig, Vienna, and other cities, and he helped found new universities in Königsberg, Jena, and Marburg.
Education
Medieval German education had been limited chiefly to schools and universities run by religious orders to train churchmen and a few government officials. Even the new humanist learning was at first intended for a small, scholarly elite. But Luther, consistent with his belief in the priesthood of all believers and individual study of the Bible, thought that state schools should be open to children of every class. In the Protestant states, primary schools were set up to teach German and religion. Latin was the principal subject in the secondary schools (Gymnasien) founded by Melanchthon, which presented for the first time a graded course of study. Saxony and other Protestant states gradually opened Gymnasien, which influenced German education into the 20th century. In the Catholic states similar but highly centralized schools were established. All these schools were attended chiefly by boys whose families could afford the fees.
Rise of Austria and Prussia
In the late 17th and 18th centuries, the empire was overshadowed by France and England. Its creaking framework was supported by lesser German princes, who wanted its protection, and undermined by greater princes, who wanted freedom to develop on their own. The Wettins of Saxony, expanding eastward, became kings of Poland. The Welfs of Brunswick-Lüneburg became electors of Hannover and gained great influence when Elector George inherited England in 1714. The Wittelsbachs of Bavaria intrigued for a crown in the Spanish Netherlands. Dominating the other princes were the Habsburgs of Austria, who also held Bohemia and Hungary, and the Hohenzollerns of Brandenburg, who became kings of Prussia.
"Germany," Microsoft (R) Encarta. Copyright (c) 1994 Microsoft Corporation. Copyright (c) 1994 Funk & Wagnall's Corporation.
