LIBRARY

UNIVERSITY

CALIFORNIA

SAN DIEGO

c

^ociaf ^tce of 1 0e (geformaf ton in (germane

GERMAN SOCIETY

AT THE CLOSE OF

THE MIDDLE AGES

ABERDEEN UNIVERSITY PRESS.

GERMAN SOCIETY

AT THE CLOSE OF

THE MIDDLE AGES

BY

E. BELFORT BAX

AUTHOR OF " THE STORY OF THE FRENCH REVOLUTION," " THE RELIGION OF

SOCIALISM," "THE ETHICS OF SOCIALISM," "HANDBOOK OF THE

HISTORY OF PHILOSOPHY," ETC., ETC.

LONDON

SWAN SONNENSCHEIN & CO. 1894

CONTENTS.

CHAPTER PAGE

INTRODUCTION, x

I. FIRST SIGNS OF SOCIAL AND RELIGIOUS REVOLT, . 43

II. THE REFORMATION MOVEMENT, 92

III. LITERATURE OF REFORMATION PERIOD, . . . 114

IV. FOLKLORE OF THE REFORMATION, .... 139 V. THE GERMAN TOWN, 156

VI. THE REVOLT OF THE KNIGHTHOOD, .... 165

VII. COUNTRY AND TOWN AT THE END OF THE MIDDLE AGES, 194

VIII. THE NEW JURISPRUDENCE, 219

APPENDIX A, 231

„ B 260

„ C, 272

PREFACE.

THE work, of which the present volume is the first instalment, aims at giving English readers a general view of the social condition and the popular movements of Germany during the period known as that of the Reformation. In accordance with this plan, I have only touched incidentally upon the theological disputes then apparently uppermost in the thoughts of men, or upon the purely political side of things. They are dealt with merely in so far as they immediately strike across the path of social and internal affairs. The present volume, which has a more general character than its suc- cessors, deals with a period limited, roughly speaking, by the closing years of the fifteenth century on the one side, and by 1525, the year of the great Peasant rising, on the other. It contains a narrative of the earlier popular re- volutionary movements at the close of the Middle Ages, the precursors of the Peasants'

GERMAN SOCIETY.

War ; and it also deals with the underlying causes, economic, social and juridical, of the general disintegration of the time.

The next volume will treat more in detail the events of the years 1524 to 1526. The third will contain a history of the Anabaptist Movement in Central Europe from its rise at Zwickau in 1522 to its decline after the capture of Miinster by the Archiepiscopal and Imperial troops in 1536. The reign of the Saints in Munster naturally forms the leading feature of this portion of the work.

As to the sources for the history of the Ger- many of this period, I have endeavoured to in- corporate everything available that seemed to me important for the proper understanding of the time. The three chief general histories of the Reformation, Ranke's Geschichte Deutschlands wahrend der Reformations-Zeit, Janssen's Geschichte des Deutschen Volkes, and Egel- haafs Deutsche Geschichte im sechszehnten Jahrhundert, have, it is scarcely necessary to say, been laid under contribution. The stand- point of Ranke, whose history is detailed and

PREFACE. ix

in certain respects exhaustive, is that of general bourgeois Philistinism. Janssen represents the Ultramontane Catholic view; but, apart from its tendency, every one must admire the brilliant and in most cases accurate scholarship that characterises it. Egelhaaf s work may be re- garded as the counterblast to Janssen's. Its point of view is that of "liberal," middle-class German Protestantism; but it also contains many hints and clues which may be followed up by the industrious historian.

To rewrite history in the light of the re- searches of the later decades of the nineteenth century will be the great task of the next two or three generations. History has to be pre- sented afresh on the basis of primitive com- munism with its tribal and village groups, with its sexual relations based on the gens, with its totemistic religious conceptions, and from the standpoint of a continuous development from these beginnings up to the individualism of the present day founded on the complete disruption of early society.

The average student of any historical period

GERMAN SOCIETY,

invariably reads into his interpretation the in- tellectual, moral and social atmosphere that lies nearest to him. He cannot strip away the intervening time-content between himself and the period in question. It is the most difficult of all exercises of the imagination, and to most men, indeed, impossible, to realise that the same words, names, customs and institutions connote totally different actualities in different stages of historic evolution. People fail to conjure up the altered perspective, and the unfamiliar background on which men lived, thought and felt in another age. Agamemnon, " King of Men," is to them Kaiser Wilhelm differently made up. Lykurgos is a cross be- tween Pitt and Dr. Johnson. Cicero is a Sir Charles Russell who happened to live in the first century B.C. The formal continuity of names, notions or things hides from them the "true inwardness" of the rupture between the old and the new which has gradually accom- plished itself. Change in human affairs is of course ceaseless ; but it is only when it has reached a certain stage that it is borne in upon

PREFACE. xi

the consciousness of men in general, and, even then, it is only the sharp summits above the changing horizon that they recognise. The ground out of which these spring is not seen, and hence the true bearing of the summits themselves is not understood.

SOCIAL MOVEMENTS OF THE GERMAN REFORMATION.

INTRODUCTION.

THE close of the fifteenth century had left the whole structure of mediaeval Europe to all appearance intact. Statesmen and writers like Philip de Commines had apparently as little suspicion that the state of things they saw around them, in which they had grown up and of which they were representatives, was ever destined to pass away, as Lord Palmerston or any other statesman of the Cobden-Bright period had that the existing system of society, say in 1860, was at any time likely to suffer other changes than those of detail. Society was organised on the feudal hierarchy of status. In the first place, a noble class, spiritual and temporal, was opposed to a peasantry either wholly servile or but nominally free. In addi- tion to this opposition of noble and peasant there was that of the township, which, in its

GERMAN SOCIETY.

corporate capacity, stood in the relation of lord to the surrounding peasantry.

The township in Germany was of two kinds — first of all, there was the township that was k< free of the Empire," that is, that held nominally from the Emperor himself (Reick- stadt), and secondly, there was the township that was under the domination of an inter- mediate lord. The economic basis ojl_the whole was still land ; the status of a man or of a corporation was determined by the mode in which they held their land. " No land without a lord " was the principle of mediaeval polity ; just as " money has no master " is the basis of the bourgeois world with its self-made men. Every distinction of rank in the feudal system was still denoted for the most part by a special costume. It was a world of knights in armour, of ecclesiastics in vestments and stoles, of lawyers in robes, of princes in silk and velvet and cloth of gold, and of peasants in laced shoe, brown cloak, and cloth hat.

But although the whole feudal organisation was outwardly intact, the thinker who was watching the signs of the times would not have been long in arriving at the conclusion that

INTR OD UCTION.

feudalism was " played out," that the whole fabric of mediaeval civilisation was becoming dry and withered, and had either already begun to disintegrate or was on the eve of doing so. Causes of change had within the past half- century been working underneath the surface of social life, and were rapidly undermining the whole structure. The growing use of fire-arms in war ; the rapid multiplication of printed books; the spread of the new learning after the taking of Constantinople lrTT453,~and the subsequent diffusion of Greek teachers through- out Europe ; the surely and steadily increasing communication with the new world, and the consequent increase of the precious metals ; and, last but not least, Vasco de Gama's dis- covery of the new trade route from the East by way of the Cape — all these were indications of the fact that the death-knell of the old order of things had been struck.

Notwithstanding the apparent outward in- tegrity of the system based on land tenures, land was ceasing to be the only form of produc- v™-4 tive wealth. Hence it was losing the exclusive importance attaching to it in the earlier period of the Middle Ages. The first form of modern

GERMAN SOCIETY.

capitalism had already arisen. Large aggrega- tions of capital in the hands of trading companies were becoming common. The Roman law was establishing itself in the place of the old custom- ary tribal law which had hitherto prevailed in the manorial courts, serving in some sort as a bul- wark against the caprice of the territorial lord ; and this change facilitated the development of the bourgeois principleof^private, jis opposed to , communal^ property. In intellectual matters, though theology still maintained its supremacy as the chief subject of human interest, other in- terests were rapidly growing up alongside of it, the most prominent being the study of classical literature.

Besides these things, there was the dawning interest in nature, which took on, as a matter of course, a magical form in accordance with tradi- tional and contemporary modes of thought. In fact, like the flicker of a dying candle in its socket, the Middle Ages seemed at the beginning of the sixteenth century to exhibit all their own salient characteristics in an exag- gerated and distorted form. The old feudal relations had degenerated into ablood-suckingop- pression; the old rough brutality, into excogitated

INTRODUCTION.

and elaborated cruelty (aptly illustrated in the collection of ingenious instruments preserved in the Torture-tower at Niirnberg) ; the old crude superstition, into a systematised magical theory of natural causes and effects ; the old love of pageantry, into a lavish luxury and magnificence of which we have in the " field of the cloth of gold " the stock historical example ; the old chivalry, into the mercenary bravery of the soldier, whose trade it was to fight, and who recognised only one virtue — to wit, animal courage. Again, all these exaggerated char- acteristics were mixed with new elements, which distorted them further, and which fore- shadowed a coming change, the ultimate issue of which would be their extinction and that of the life of which they were the signs.

The growing tendency towards centralisation and the consequent suppression or curtailment of the local autonomies of the Middle Ages in the interests of some kind of national govern- ment, of which the political careers of Louis XI. in France, of Edward IV. in England, and of Ferdinand and Isabella in Spain were such conspicuous instances, did not fail to affect in a lesser degree that loosely connected political

GERMAN SOCIETY.

system of German States known as the Holy Roman Empire. Maximilian's first Reichstag in 1495 caused to be issued an imperial edict suppressing the right of private warfare claimed and exercised by the whole noble class from the princes of the Empire down to the meanest knight. In the same year the Imperial Chamber (Reickskammer) was established, and in 1501 the Imperial Aulic Council. Maximilian also organised a standing army of mercenary troops, called Landesknechte. Shortly afterwards Ger- many was divided into imperial districts called circles (Kreise], ultimately ten in number, all of which were under a Reichsregiment, which had at its disposal a military force for the punish- ment of disturbers of the peace. But the public opinion of the age, conjoined with the particular circumstances, political and economic, of central Europe, robbed the enactment in a great measure of its immediate effect. High- way plundering and even private war was still going on, to a considerable extent, far into the sixteenth century. Charles V. pursued the same line of policy ; but it was not until after the suppression of the lower nobility in 1523, and finally of the peasants in 1526, that any

INTRODUCTION.

material change took place ; and then the cen- tralisation, such as it was, was in favour of the princes, rather than of the imperial power, which, after Charles V.'s time, grew weaker and weaker. The speciality about the history of Germany is, that it has not known till our own day centralisation on a national or racial scale like England or France.

At the opening of the sixteenth century public opinion not merely sanctioned open plunder by the wearer of spurs and by the possessor of a stronghold, but regarded it as his special prerogative, the exercise of which was honourable rather than disgraceful. The cities certainly resented their burghers being waylaid and robbed, and hanged the knights whenever they could ; and something like a perpetual feud always existed between the wealthier cities and the knights who infested the trade routes leading to and from them. Still, these belligerent relations were taken as a matter of course ; and no disgrace, in the modern sense, attached to the occupation of highway robbery.

In consequence of the impoverishment of the knights at this period, owing to causes

GERMAN SOCIETY.

with which we shall deal later, the trade or profession had recently received an accession of vigour, and at the same time was carried on more brutally and mercilessly than ever before. We will give some instances of the

o

sort of occurrence which was by no means unusual. In the immediate neighbourhood of Nlirnberg, which was bien entendu one of the chief seats of the imperial power, a robber- knight leader, named Hans Thomas von Abs- berg, was a standing menace. It was the cus- tom of this ruffian, who had a large following, to plunder even the poorest who came from the city, and, not content with this, to mutilate his victims. In June, 1522, he fell upon a wretched craftsman, and with his own sword hacked off the poor fellow's right hand, notwithstanding that the man begged him upon his knees to take the left, and not destroy his means of earning his livelihood. The following August he, with his band, attacked a Niirnberg tanner, whose hand was similarly treated, one of his associates remarking that he was glad to set to work again, as it was "a long time since they had done any business in hands ". On the same occasion a cutler was dealt with after a similar

INTROD UCTION.

fashion. The hands in these cases were col- lected and sent to the Biirgermeister of Niirn- berg, with some such phrase as that the sender (Hans Thomas) would treat all so who came from the city. The princes themselves, when it suited their purpose, did not hesitate to offer an asylum to these knightly robbers. With Absberg were associated Georg von Giech and Hans Georg von Aufsess. Among other not- able robber-knights of the time may be men- tioned the Lord of Brandenstein and the Lord of Rosenberg. As illustrating the strictly pro- fessional character of the pursuit, and the brutally callous nature of the society practising it, we may narrate that Margaretha von Bran- denstein was accustomed, it is recorded, to give the advice to the choice guests round her board that when a merchant failed to keep his promise to them, they should never hesitate to cut off both his hands. Even Franz von Sickingen, known sometimes as the " last flower of German chivalry," boasted of having among the intimate associates of his enterprise for the rehabilitation of knighthood many gentlemen who had been accustomed to " let their horses on the high road bite off the purses of wayfarers ". So

io GERMAN SOCIETY.

strong was the public opinion of the noble class as to the inviolability of the privilege of high- way plunder that a monk, preaching one day in a cathedral and happening to attack it as unjustifiable, narrowly escaped death at the hands of some knights present amongst his congregation, who asserted that he had insulted the prerogatives of their order. Whenever this form of knight-errantry was criticised, there were never wanting scholarly pens to defend it as a legitimate means of aris- tocratic livelihood ; since a knight must live in suitable style, and this was often his only resource for obtaining the means thereto.

The free cities, which were subject only to imperial jurisdiction, were practically inde- pendent republics. Their organisation was a microcosm of that of the entire Empire. At the apex of the municipal society was the Bur- germeister and the so-called " Honorability " (Ehrbarkeif), which consisted of the patrician gentes, (in most cases) those families which were supposed to be descended from the origi- nal chartered freemen of the town, the old Mark-brethren. They comprised generally the richest families, and had monopolised the

INTRODUCTION.

entire government of the city, together with the right to administer its various sources of in- come and to consume its revenue at their plea- sure. By the time, however, of which we are writing the trading guilds had also attained to a separate power of their own, and were in some cases ousting the burgher-aristocracy, though they were very generally susceptible of being manipulated by the members of the patrician class, who, as a rule, could alone sit in the Council (Ratk}. The latter body stood, in fact, as regards the town, much in the relation of the feudal lord to his manor. Strong in their wealth and in their aristocratic privileges, the patricians lorded it alike over the townspeople and over the neighbouring peasantry, who were subject to the municipality. They forestalled and regrated with impunity. They assumed the chief rights in the municipal lands, in many cases imposed duties at their own caprice, and turned guild privileges and rights of citizenship into a source of profit for themselves. Their bailiffs in the country districts forming part of their territory were often more voracious in their treatment of the peasants than even the nobles themselves. The accounts of income and ex-

GERMAN SOCIETY.

penditure were kept in the loosest manner, and embezzlement clumsily concealed was the rule rather than the exception.

The opposition of the non-privileged citizens, usually led by the wealthier guildsmen not belonging to the aristocratic class, operated through the guilds and through the open assembly of the citizens. It had already fre- quently succeeded in establishing a representa- tion of the general body of the guildsmen in a so-called Great Council (Grosser Ratfi), and in addition, as already said, in ousting the " hon- orables " from some of the public functions. Altogether the patrician party, though still powerful enough, was at the opening of the sixteenth century already on the decline, the wealthy and unprivileged opposition beginning in its turn to constitute itself into a quasi-aristo- cratic body as against the mass of the poorer citizens and those outside the pale of municipal rights. The latter class was now becoming an important and turbulent factor in the life of the larger cities. The craft-guilds, consisting of the body of non-patrician citizens, were naturally in general dominated by their most wealthy section.

INTR OD UCTION. 1 3

We may here observe that the development of the mediaeval township from its earliest begin- nings up to the period of its decay in the sixteenth century was almost uniformly as follows : 1 At first the township, or rather what later became the township, was represented entirely by the group tfgentes or group-families originally settled within the mark or district on which the town subsequently stood. These constituted the original aristocracy from which the tradition of the Ehrbarkeit dated. In those towns founded by the Romans, such as Trier, Aachen, and others, the case was of course a little different. There the origin of the Ehrbarkeit may possibly be sought for in the leading families of the Roman provincials who were in occupation of the town at the coming of the barbarians in the fifth century. Round this nucleus there gradu- ally accreted from the earliest period of the Middle Ages the freed men of the surrounding districts, fugitive serfs, and others who sought that protection and means of livelihood in a community under the immediate domination of

1 We are here, of course, dealing more especially with Germany ; but substantially the same course was followed in the development of municipalities in other parts of Europe.

1 4 GERMAN SOCIETY.

a powerful lord, which they could not otherwise obtain when their native village-community had perchance been raided by some marauding noble and his retainers. Circumstances, amongst others the fact that the community to which they attached themselves had already adopted commerce and thus become a guild of merchants, led to the differentiation of industrial functions amongst the new-comers, and thus to the estab- lishment of craft-guilds.

Another origin of the townsfolk, which must not be overlooked, is to be found in the attend- ants on the palace-fortress of some great over- lord. In the early Middle Ages all such mag- nates kept up an extensive establishment, the greater ecclesiastical lords no less than the secular often having several palaces. In Germany this origin of the township was furthered by Charles the Great, who estab- lished schools and other civil institutions, with a magistrate at their head, round many of the palaces that he founded. " A new epoch," says Von Maurer, " begins with the villa-founda- tions of Charles the Great and his ordinances respecting them, for that his celebrated capitu- laries in this connection were intended for his

INTRODUCTION. 15

newly established villas is self-evident. In that proceeding he obviously had the Roman villa in his mind, and on the model of this he rather further developed the previously existing court and villa constitution than completely re- organised it. Hence one finds even in his new creations the old foundation again, albeit on a far more extended plan, the economical side of such villa-colonies being especially more com- pletely and effectively ordered." l The expres- sion " Palatine," as applied to certain districts, bears testimony to the fact here referred to. As above said, the development of the township was everywhere on the same lines. The aim of the civic community was always to remove as far as possible the power which controlled them. Their worst condition was when they were im- mediately overshadowed by a territorial magnate. When their immediate lord was a prince, the area of whose feudal jurisdiction was more extensive, his rule was less oppressively felt, and their con- dition was therefore considerably improved. It was only, however, when cities were " free of the Empire " (Reicksfrei] that they attained the ideal of mediaeval civic freedom.

^Einkitung, pp. 255, 256.

1 6 GERMAN SOCIETY.

It follows naturally from the conditions described that there was, in the first place, a conflict between the primitive inhabitants as embodied in their corporate society and the territorial lord, whoever he might be. No sooner had the township acquired a charter of freedom or certain immunities than a new antagonism showed itself between the ancient corporation of the city and the trade-guilds, these representing the later accretions. The territorial lord (if any) now sided, usually though not always, with the patrician party. But the guilds, nevertheless, succeeded in ultimately wresting many of the leading public offices from the exclusive possession of the patri- cian families. Meanwhile the leading men of the guilds had become hommes arrives. They had acquired wealth, and influence which was in many cases hereditary in their family, and by the beginning of the sixteenth century they were confronted with the more or less veiled and more or less open opposition of the smaller guildsmen and of the newest comers into the city, the shiftless proletariat of serfs and free peasants, whom economic pressure was fast driving within the walls, but who, owing to

INTRODUCTION. 17

the civic organisation having become crystallised, could no longer be absorbed into it. To this mass may be added a certain number of im- poverished burghers, who, although nominally within the town organisation, were oppressed by the wealth of the magnates, plebeian and patrician.

The number of persons who, owing to the decay, or one might almost say the collapse, of the strength of the feudal system, were torn from the old moorings and left to drift about shiftless in a world utterly unprepared to deal with such an increase of what was practically vagabondage, was augmenting with every year. The vagrants in all Western European countries had never been so numerous as in the earlier part of the sixteenth century. A portion of these disinherited persons entered the service of kings and princes as mercenary soldiers, and thus became the first germ of the modern stand- ing army. Another portion entered the begging profession, which now notably on the Continent became organised in orthodox and traditional form into guilds, each of which had its master and other officers. Yet another portion sought a more or less permanent domicile as journey-

i8 GERMAN SOCIETY.

men craftsmen and unskilled labourers in the cities. This fact is noteworthy as the first in- dication of the proletariat in modern history. " It will be seen," says Friedrich Engels,1 " that the plebeian opposition of the then towns con- sisted of very mixed elements. It united the degenerate components of the old feudal and guild organisation with the as yet undeveloped and new-born proletarian element of modern bourgeois society in embryo. Impoverished guildsmen there were, who through their privi- leges were still connected with the existing civic order on the one side, and serving-men out of place who had not as yet become prole- tarians on the other. Between the two were the " companions " (Gesellen) for the nonce out- side the official society, and in their position resembling the proletariat as much as was possible in the then state of industry and under the existing guild-privilege. But, nevertheless, almost all of them were future guild-masters by virtue of this very guild-privilege."1 A note-

1 Der Bauernkrieg, p. 31.

2 The three grades in the craft-guilds were those of ap- prentice, companion, and master. Every guildsman was supposed to pass through them.

INTR OD UCTION. 1 9

worthy feature of municipal life at this time was the difficulty and expense attendant on entry into the city organisation even for the status of a simple citizen, still more for that of a guilds- man. Within a few decades this had enor- mously increased.

The guild was a characteristic of all mediaeval life. On the model of the village-community, which was originally based on the notion of kin- ship, every interest, craft, and group of men formed itself into a " brotherhood " or " guild ". The idea of individual autonomy, of individual action independent altogether of the community, is a modern idea which never entered the mediaeval mind. As we have above remarked, even the mendicants and vagabonds could not conceive of adopting begging as a career except under the auspices of a beggars' guild. The guild was not like a modern commercial syndi- cate, an abstract body united only by the thread of one immediate personal interest, whose members did not even know each other. His guild-membership interpenetrated the whole life, religious, convivial, social and political, of the mediaeval man. The guilds were more or

20 GERMAN SOCIETY.

less of the nature of masonic societies, whose concerns were by no means limited to the mere trade-function that appeared on the surface. " Business " had not as yet begun to absorb the whole life of men. The craft or " mystery" was a function intimately interwoven with the whole concrete social existence. But it is interesting to observe among the symptoms of transition char- acterising the sixteenth century, as noted above, the formation of companies of merchants apart from ajid outside the old^ guild-organisation. These latter really seem a kind of foreshadow- ing of the rings, trusts, and joint-stock com- panies of our own day. Many and bitter were the complaints of the manner in which prices were forced up by these earliest examples of the capit- alistic syndicate, which powerfully contributed to the accumulation of wealth at one end of the scale and to the intensification of poverty at the other.1 The rich burgher loved nothing better than to display an ostentatious profusion of wealth in his house, in his dress, and in his entertain- ments. On the clothing and ornamentation of himself and his family he often squandered what might have been for his ancestor of the 1 See Appendix A.

INTR OD UCTION. 2 1

previous century the fortune of a lifetime. Especially was this the case at the Reichstags and other imperial assemblies held in the various free cities at which all the three feudal estates of the Empire were represented. It was the aim of the wealthy councillor or guild-master on these occasions to outbid the princes of the Empire in the magnificence of his person and establishment. The prince did not like to be outdone, and learnt to accustom himself to luxuries, and thereby to indefinitely increase his own expenditure. The same with all classes.

The knighthood or smaller nobles, no longer content with homely fare, sought after costly clothing, expensive food and exotic wines, and to approach the affluent furnishing of the city magnate. His one or two horses, his armour, his sword and his lance, his homespuns made almost invariably on his estates, the wine grown in the neighbourhood, his rough oatmeal bread, the constituents of which had been ground at his own mill, the venison and wild fowl hunted by himself or by his few retainers, no longer sufficed for the knight's wants. In order to compass his new requirements he had to set to work in two ways. Formerly he had little or no need of

22 GERMAN SOCIETY.

money. He received, as he gave, everything in kind. Now that he had to deal with the beginnings of a world-market, money was a prime necessity. The first and most obvious way of getting it was to squeeze the peasant on his estate, who, bitten by the new mania, had also begun to accumulate and turn into cash the surplus products of labour on his holding. From what we have before said of the ways and man- ners of the knighthood, the reader may well imagine that he did not hesitate to " tower" the recalcitrant peasant, as it was called, that is, to throw him into his castle-dungeon if other means failed to make him disgorge his treasure as soon as it came to his lord's ears that he had any. But the more ordinary method of squeezing the peasant was by doubling and trebling the tithes and other dues, by imposing fresh burdens (many of them utterly unwarranted by custom) on any or no pretext. The princes, lay and ecclesiastic, applied the same methods on a more extended scale. These were often effected in an ingenious manner by the ecclesias- tical lords through the forging of manorial rolls. The second of the methods spoken of for " raising the wind " was the mortgaging of

INTRODUCTION. 23

castle and lands to the money-lending syndicates of the towns, or, in the case of the greater princes, to the towns themselves in their cor- porate capacity. The Jews also came in for their share of land-mortgages. There were, in fact, few free or semi-free peasants whose lands were not more or less hypothecated. Meanwhile prices rose to an incredible extent in a few years.

Such were the causes and results of the change in domestic life which the economic evolution of the close of the Middle Ages was now bringing about amongst all classes.

The ecclesiastical lords, or lords spiritual, differed in no way in their character and conduct from the temporal princes of the Empire. In one respect they outdid the princes, namely, in the forgery of documents, as already men- tioned. Luxury had, moreover, owing to the com- munication which they had with Rome and thus indirectly with the Byzantine civilisation, already begun with the prelates in the earlier Middle Ages. It now burst all bounds. The ecclesiastical courts were the seat of every kind of debauchery. As we shall see later on, they also became the places where the new learning first flourished.

24 GERMAN SOCIETY.

But in addition to the general luxury in which the higher ecclesiastics outdid the lay element of the Empire, there was a special cause which rendered them obnoxious alike to the peasants, to the towns, and to their own feudatory nobles. This special cause was the enormous sum payable to Rome for the Pallium or Investiture, a tax that had to be raised by the inhabitants of the diocese on every change of archbishop, bishop, or abbot. In addition thereto the entire income of the first year after the investiture accrued to the Papal Treasury under the name of Annates. This constituted a continuous drain on the ecclesiastical dependencies and indirectly on the whole Empire. There must also be added the cost of frequent journeys to Rome, where each dignitary during his residence held court in a style of sumptuous magnificence. All these expenses tended to drain the resources of the territories held as spiritual fiefs in a more onerous degree than happened to other terri- tories. Moreover, the system of the sale of indulgences or remissions for all sins committed up to date was now being prosecuted to an ex- tent never heard of before with a view to meet the increased expenditure of the Papal See, and

INTR OD UCTJON. 2 5

especially the cost of completing the cathedral of St. Peter's at Rome. Thus by a sort of voluntary tax the wealth of Germany was still further transferred to Italy. Hence can readily be seen the reason of the venomous hatred which among all classes of the Empire had been gradually accumulating towards the Papacy for more than a generation, and which ultimately found expression in Luther's fulminations.

The peasant of the period was of three kinds : the leibeigener or serf, who was little better than a slave, who cultivated his lord's domain, upon whom unlimited burdens might be fixed, and who was in all respects amenable to the will of his lord ; the horiger or villein, whose services were limited alike in kind and amount ; and the freier or free peasant, who merely paid what was virtually a quit-rent in kind or in money for being allowed to retain his holding or status in the rural community under the protection of the manorial lord. The last was practically the counterpart of the mediaeval English copyholder. The Germans had undergone essentially the same transformations in social organisation as the other populations of Europe.

The barbarian nations at the time of their

26 GERMAN SOCIETY.

great migration in the fifth century were or- ganised on a tribal and village basis. The head man was simply primus inter pares. In the course of their wanderings the success- ful military leader acquired powers and assumed a position that was unknown to the previous times, when war, such as it was, was merely inter-tribal and inter-clannish, and did not in- volve the movements of peoples and federa- tions of tribes, and when, in consequence, the need for permanent military leaders or for the semblance of a military hierarchy had not arisen. The military leader now placed himself at the head of the older social organisation, and asso- ciated with his immediate followers on terms approaching equality. A well-known illustra- tion of this is the incident of the vase taken from the Cathedral of Rheims, and of Chlodo- wig's efforts to rescue it from his independent comrades-in-arms.

The process of the development of the feudal polity of the Middle Ages is, of course, a very complicated one, owing to the various strands that go to compose it. In addition to the German tribes themselves, who moved en masse, carrying with them their tribal and

INTRODUCTION. 27

village organisation, under the over-lordship of the various military leaders, were the indi- genous inhabitants amongst whom they settled. The latter in the country districts, even in many of the territories within the Roman Empire, still largely retained the primitive communal organisation. The new-comers, therefore, found in the rural communities a social system already in existence into which they naturally fitted, but as an aristocratic body over against the conquered inhabitants. The latter, though not all reduced to a servile condition, never- theless held their land from the conquering body under conditions which constituted them an order of freemen inferior to the new- comers.

To put the matter briefly, the military leaders developed into barons and princes, and in some cases the nominal centralisation culminated as in France and England in the kingly office ; while, in Germany and Italy, it took the form of the revived imperial office, the spiritual over-lord of the whole of Christendom being the Pope, who had his vassals in the prince-prelates and sub- ordinate ecclesiastical holders. In addition to the princes sprung originally from the military

28 GERMAN SOCIETY.

leaders of the migratory nations, there were their free followers, who developed ultimately into the knighthood or inferior nobility ; the inhabitants of the conquered districts forming a distinct class of inferior freemen or of serfs. But the essentially personal relation with which the whole process started soon degenerated into one based on property. The most primitive form of property — land — was at the outset what was termed allodial, at least among the con- quering race, from every__ social j[roup having the possession, under the trusteeship of its head man, of the land on which it settled. Now, owing to the necessities of the time, owing to the need of protection, to violence and to re- ligious motives, it passed into the hands of the over-lord, temporal or spiritual, as his posses- sion ; and the inhabitants, even in the case of populations which had not been actually conquered, became his vassals, villeins, or serfs, as the case might be. The process by means of which this was accomplished was more or less gradual ; indeed, the entire extinction of communal rights, whereby the notion of private ownership is fully realised, was not uni- versally effected even in the west of Europe

INTRODUCTION. 29

till within a measurable distance of our own time.1

From the foregoing it will be understood that the oppression of the peasant, under the feudalism of the Middle Ages, and especi- ally 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 im- mediately occasioned, probably, by some fresh in- vasion, by which it was sought to tear from the " common man " yet another shred of his surviv- ing rights, always had in the background the ideal, vague though it may have been, of his ancient free- dom. 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 em- body the vague tradition of the primitive village

1 Cf. Von Maurer's Einleitung zur Geschichte der Mark- Verfassung ; Gomme's Village Communities ; Stubbs' Con- stitutional History.

30 GERMAN SOCIETY.

community in the legends of the current eccle- siastical creed ; of the numerous revolts in Flanders and North Germany ; 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 Ger- many, in which, with the partial exception of Ket's rebellion in England a few years later, we may consider them as 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 the First, which alsoassumed 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 citi- zen, and the now independent yeoman, to assert its supremacy over the old feudal estates or orders. The new conditions had swept away the revolutionary tradition of the mediaeval period, whose golden age lay in the past with I its communal-holding and free men with equal rights on the basis of the village organisation- rights which with every century the peasant

INTR OD UCTION. 3 1

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 politi- cal, the way for which had been prepared by that very conception of individual pro- prietorship on the part of the landlord, against which the older revolutionary senti- ment had protested. A most powerful in- strument in accommodating men's minds to this change of view, in other words, to the es- tablishment of the new individualistic principle, was the Roman or Civil law, which, at the period dealt with in the present book, had be- come the basis whereon disputed points were settled in the Imperial Courts. In this respect also, though to a lesser extent, may be men- tioned the Canon or Ecclesiastical law, — consist- ing 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 recognised 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 differen-

32 GERMAN SOCIETY.

tiate 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 " pro- fessing " 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 influ- ential 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 centralising jpower, alike against the local jurisdictions^and against the peasantry.

i he effects ot 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 cen- tury, 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

INTRODUCTION. 33

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 Renais- sance 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 segis 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 systematise 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 organised 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 Renais-

3

34 GERMAN SOCIETY.

sance proper. Foremost among the exponents of this older Humanism, which dates from the middle of the fifteenth century, were Nkholas of Cusa and his disciples, Rudolpj^ Agrjcola. Alex- ander Hegius and Jacob Wimpheling. But the new Humanism and the new Renaissance move- ment 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 popularisa- tion of classical culture were enormous. The dispute of Reuchlin with the ecclesiastical autho- rities 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 des- tined to become the personification of the Humanist movement, as the new learning- was called, was Erasmus. The illegitimate son of the daughter of a Rotterdam burgher,

INTRODUCTION. 35

he early became famous on account of his erudition, in spite of the adverse circum- stances 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 typo- graphical centre. The whole intellectual move- ment 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 be- came 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 tradi- tional 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 corre-

3 6 GERMAN SOCIETY.

spondences between the planets and terrestrial bodies. Among the most prominent exponents of these investigations may be mentioned Philip- pus von Hohenheim or Paracelsus, and Cor- nelius Agrippa of Nettesheim, in Germany, Nostrodamus, in France, and Cardanus, in Italy. These men represented 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 pro- bably have had a 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 at- mosphere in which nature was enveloped, and to his insight we owe the foundation of astrono- mical science ; but otherwise the whole intellec- tual atmosphere was charged with occult views. In fact, the learned world of the sixteenth cen- tury would have found itself quite at home in the pretensions and fancies of our Jin de siecle theo- sophists, with their notions of making miracles

INTRODUCTION. 37

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 un- learned 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, calcu- lations of nativities, were matters earnestly in- vestigated 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 fraud. 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 diabo- lical which had been latent throughout the Middle Ages was brought into especial promi-

38 GERMAN SOCIETY.

nence 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 it 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-increas- ing exactions. 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 in- stances, at the outset, not averse to the move- ment ; 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.

INTRODUCTION. 39

The opening of the sixteenth century thus presents to us mediaeval society, social, political and religious, "run to seed". The feudal or- ganisation 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, organised into three bodies, a governing Coun- cil in which the Ehrbarkeit usually predomi- nated, 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-organisations, 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 Col- lege, or the seven Electoral Princes, forming their head. These constituted the feudal "es- tates " of the Empire. Then came the King of the Romans ; and, as the apex of the whole, the Pope in one function and the

40 GERMAN SOCIETY.

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 ^yj" shadowy way, even in countries such as Francq and England, which had no direct connection! X with the Empire. For, as the spiritual powei \ was also temporal, so the temporal politica 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 sal- vation by the^ faith of the individual, and not through the fact of Kplonging to a corporate organisation, which was the mediaeval concep- tion, 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, systematised and

INTRODUCTION. 41

reduced to rule, though here and there the later physical science, based on observation and ex- periment, peeped through. In jurisprudence the epoch is marked by the final conquest of the Roman rivil 1aw) in its spirit, where not in its forms, over the old customs, pre-feudal and feudal. This motley world of decayed knights, lavish princes, oppressed and rebellious peasants, turbulent townsmen, licentious monks and friars, mendicant scholars and hireling soldiers, is the world some of whose least- known aspects we are about to consider in the following pages.

CHAPTER I.

FIRST SIGNS OF SOCIAL AND RELIGIOUS REVOLT.

THE echoes of the Hussite movement in Bohe- mia spread far and wide through Central Europe at the beginning of the fifteenth century. It was not in vain that Ziska bequeathed his skin for the purposes of a drum, since the echoes of its beating made themselves heard for many a year in Bohemia and throughout Central Europe. The disciples of the movement settled in dif- ferent countries, and became centres of propa- ganda, and the movement attached itself to the peasants' discontent. Amid the various stir- rings that took place, there are one or two that may arrest our attention owing to their import- ance and their typical character.

It was in the year 1476, when Rudolph of Scherenberg occupied the Episcopal See of Wurzburg, that a cowherd, named Hans Bo- heim, of the neighbouring village of Niklashau- sen, who was accustomed to pipe and to drum at

local festivities, at places on the banks of the

(43)

44 GERMAN SOCIETY.

little stream called the Tauber, was suddenly seized with an inspiration of preaching for the conversion of his neighbours from their sins. It appeared to him that his life had been hither- to sinful ; he gave up all participation in village feasts, he became a dreamer, and announced that he had had visions of the Virgin. In the middle of Lent he proclaimed that he had been given a divine mission from the Mother of God herself to burn his pipe and drum and to devote himself entirely to preaching the Gospel to the common man. All were to abandon their former way of life, were to lay aside all personal ornament, and in humble attire to perform pilgrimages to Nik- lashausen, and there worship the Virgin as they esteemed their souls' salvation. In all this there was nothing very alarming to the authorities. Peasantly inspirations were by no means un- known in the Middle Ages ; but the matter as- sumed another aspect when the new seer, Hans Pfeifferlein, or "the little piper" as he was nick- named, announced that the Queen of Heaven had revealed to him that there should henceforth be neither Emperor, Pope, Prince, nor any lay or spiritual authority ; but that all men should be brothers, earning their bread by the sweat

SOCIAL AND RELIGIOUS REVOLT. 45

of their brows, and sharing alike in all things. There were to be no more imposts or dues ; land, woods, pastures, and water were to be free. The new Gospel struck root immedi- ately. The peasant folk streamed to Niklas- hausen, from all sides, — men and women, young and old, journeymen, lads from the plough, girls from the fields, their sickles in their hands, without leave of lord or master, and without preparation of any sort whatever. Food and the necessary clothing and shelter were given them by those on the way who had already embraced the new Kingdom of God. The universal greeting among the pilgrims was " brother" and "sister".

This went on for some months, the young prophet choosing chiefly Sundays and holi- days for his harangues. Ignorant even of writing, he was backed by the priest of Niklashausen, and by perhaps two or three other influential persons. Many were the offerings brought to the Niklashausen shrine. Well nigh all who journeyed thither left some token behind, were it only a rough peasant's cap or a wax candle. Those who could afford it gave costly clothes and jewellery. The pro-

46 GERMAN SOCIETY.

clamation of universal equality was indeed a Gospel that appealed to the common man ; the resumption of their old rights, the release from every form of oppression, as a proclamation from heaven itself, were tidings to him of great joy. The prophetic youth was hailed by all as the new Messiah. After each week's ser- mon he invited the congregation to return next week with redoubled numbers ; and his com- mands were invariably obeyed. Men, women and children fell on their knees before him, cry- ing : " Oh, man of God, sent from heaven, have mercy on us and pity us ". They tore the wool threads from his shaggy sheepskin cap, regard- ing them as sacred relics. The priests of the surrounding districts averred that he was a sorcerer and devil-possessed, and that a wizard had appeared to him, clad in white, in the form of the Virgin, and had instilled into him the pernicious doctrines he was preaching. In all the surrounding country his miracles were talked about. The Bishops of Mainz and Wiirzburg and the Council of Niirnberg forbade their villeins, under heavy penalties, from making the pilgrimage to Niklashausen. But the effect of such measures only lasted for a short time.

SOCIAL AND RELIGIOUS REVOLT. 4?

Finally, on the Sunday before the day of Saint Kilian, Hans Boheim, on the con- clusion of his discourse, invited his hearers, as usual, to come on the next occasion. This time, however, he ordered men only to appear, but with arms and ammunition ; women and children were to be left at home. No sooner did the tidings of this turn of affairs reach the ears of the Bishop at Wiirzburg than the latter resolved to forestall the movement. He sent thirty-four mounted men-at-arms after nightfall to Niklashausen ; they burst upon the sleeping youth, tore him from the house where he lay, and hurried him to Wiirzburg, bound on horse- back. But as it was near the end of the week, 4000 pilgrims had already arrived at Niklas- hausen, and, on hearing the news of the attack, they hurried after the marauders, and caught them up close by the Castle of Wiirzburg. One of the knights was wounded, but his comrades succeeded in carrying him within the walls. The peasants failed to effect the intended rescue. By the Sunday, 34,000 peasants had assembled at Niklashausen; but the report of the capture of Boheim had a depressing effect, and several thousands returned home. There were

48 GERMAN SOCIETY.

nevertheless some among the bands who, insti- gated probably by Boheim's friend, the parish priest of Niklashausen, endeavoured to rally the remaining multitude and incite them to a new attempt at rescue. One of them alleged that the Holy Trinity had appeared to him, and com- manded that they should proceed with their pil- grim candles in their hands to the Castle of Wlirz- burg, that the doors would open of themselves, and that their prophet would walk out to greet them. About 16,000 followed these leaders, marching many hours through the night, and arriving early next morning at the castle with flaming candles, and armed with the roughest weapons. Kunz von Thunfeld, a decayed knight, and Michael, his son, constituted themselves the leaders of the motley band. The marshal of the castle received them, demanding their pleasure. " We require the holy youth," said the peasants. " Sur- render him to us, and all will be well ; refuse, and we will use force." On the mar- shal's hesitating in his answer, he was greeted with a shower of stones, which drove him to seek safety within the walls. The bishop opened fire on the peasants, but after a short

SOCIAL AND RELIGIOUS REVOLT. 49

time sent one of his knights to announce that the cause of their preacher would be duly con- sidered at a proper time and place, conjuring them at the same time to depart immediately in accordance with their vows. By cajolery and threats he succeeded in his object ; the bands raised the siege of the castle, and dis- persed homewards in straggling parties. The ruffianly scoundrel no sooner observed that the unsuspecting peasants were quietly wending their way home in small bodies, without a thought of hostilities, than he ordered his knights to pursue them, to attack them in the rear, and to murder or capture the ringleaders. The poor people, nevertheless, defended themselves with courage against this cowardly onslaught ; twelve of them were left dead on the spot ; many of the remainder sought shelter in the church of the neighbouring village. Threatened there with fire and sword, they surrendered, and were brought back to Wiirz- burg and thrown into the dungeons of the castle. The majority were liberated before long ; but the peasant who was alleged to have received the vision of the Holy Trinity, as well as he who had wounded the knight on the occasion of the

4

50 GERMAN SOCIETY.

attempt at rescue a few days before, were de- tained in prison, and on the following Friday were beheaded outside the castle. Hans Bo- heim was at the same time burned to ashes. The leader of the revolt, Kunz von Thunfeld, a feudatory of the bishop, fled the territory, and was only allowed to return on his formally surrendering his lands in perpetuity to the bishopric. Such was the history of a movement that may be reckoned as one of the more direct forerunners of the peasants' war.

In the years 1491 and 1492 occurred the rising of the oppressed and plundered villeins of the Abbot of Kernpten. The ecclesiastics on this domain had exhausted every possible means of injuring the unfortunate peasants, and numbers of free villeins had been converted into serfs by means of forged documents. The im- mediate cause of the revolt, however, was the seizure, by the abbot, of the stock of wine of a peasant who had just died, in addition to the horse which he was empowered to claim. An onslaught was made by the infuriated peasants on the monastery, and the abbot had to retire to his stronghold, the Castle of Liebenthann, hard by. The Emperor ultimately intervened,

SOCIAL AND RELIGIOUS REVOLT. 51

and effected a compromise. But the first organised peasant movement took place in Elsass1 in 1493, and comprised burghers as well as peasants among its numbers. They were for the most part feudatories of the Bishop of Strassburg. By devious paths the members of this secret organisation were wont to betake themselves to the hill of Hungerberg, north- west of the little town of Schlettstadt. The ostensible objects of the association were com- plete freedom for the common man, reformation of the Church in the sense that no priest should have more than one benefice, the introduction of a year of jubilee, in which all debts should be abolished, the extinction of all tithes, dues and other burdens, and the abolition of the spiritual courts and the territorial juridical court at Roth- weil. A Judenhetze also appears amongst the articles. The leader of this movement was one Jacob Wimpfeling. The programme and plan of action was to seize the town of Schlettstadt,

1 We adopt the German spelling of the name of the pro- vince usually known in this country as Alsace, for the reason that at the time of which this history treats it had never been French ; and the French language was probably little more known there than in other parts of Germany.

52 GERMAN SOCIETY.

to plunder the monastery there, and then by forced marches to spread themselves over all Elsass, surprising one town after another. It would seem that this was the first peasant movement that received the name of Bimd- schuh, and the almost superstitious importance attached to the sign of this kind emblazoned on the flag is characteristic of the Middle Ages. The banner was the result of careful delibera- tions, and the final decision was that as the knight was distinguished by his spurs, so the peasant rising to obtain justice for his class should take as his emblem the common shoe he was accustomed to wear, laced from the ankle up to the knee with leathern thongs. They fondly hoped that the moment this banner was displayed, all capable of fighting would flock to the standard, from the villages and smaller towns.

Just as all was prepared for the projected stroke, the Bundschuh shared the common fate of similar movements, and was betrayed ; and this in spite of the terrible threats that were held out to all joining, in the event of their turning traitors. It must be admitted that there was much folly in the manner in which

SOCIAL AND RELIGIOUS REVOLT. 53

many persons were enrolled, and this may have led to the speedy betrayal. Everybody who was suspected of having an inkling of the move- ment was forced to swear allegiance to the secret league. Immediately on the betrayal, bodies of knights scoured the country, mercilessly seizing all suspected of belonging to the conspiracy, and dragging them to the nearest tribunal, where they were tortured and finally quartered alive or hung. Many of the fugitives succeeded in taking refuge in Switzerland, where they seem to have been kindly welcomed. But the Bund- schuh only slept, it was by no means extin- guished.

In the year 1502, nine years later, the bish- opric of Speyer, the court of which was noted for its extravagance and tyranny, had to face another Bundschuh. This second movement had able men at its head, and extended over well nigh all the regions of the Upper and Middle Rhine. It similarly took the nature of a conspiracy, rather than of an open rebellion. Within a few weeks, 7000 men and 400 women had been sworn into the league, from a large number of villages, hamlets and small towns, for the larger towns were purposely left out, the

54 GERMAN SOCIETY.

movement being essentially a peasant one. The village and mark of Untergrunbach was its centre. Its object and aim was nothing less than the complete overthrow of the existing ecclesiastical and feudal organisation of the Empire. The articles of the association de- clared : " We have joined ourselves together in order that we may be free. We will free our- selves with arms in our hands, for we would be as the Swiss. We will root out and abolish all authorities and lordships from the land, and march against them with the force of our host and with well-armed hand under our banner. And all who do not honour and acknowledge us shall be killed. The princes and nobles broken and done with, we will storm the clergy in their foundations and abbeys. WTe will overpower them, and hunt out and kill all priests and monks together." The property of the clergy and the nobles was to be seized and divided ; as in the former case, all feudal dues were to be abolished, the primitive communism in the use of the land, and of what was on it, was to be resumed. The pass-word, by means of which the members of the organisation were known to one another, was the answer to the question :

SOCIAL AND RELIGIOUS REVOLT. 55

" How fares it ? " The question and answer were in the form of a rhyme : —

" Loset ! Was ist nun fur ein Wesen ? "

" Wir mogen vor Pfaffen und Adel nit genesen."

This may be paraphrased as follows : —

" Well, now ! And how doth it fare ? "

" Of priests and of nobles we've enough and to spare."

The idea was to rise at the opportune moment, as the Swiss had done, to free themselves of all intermediate lordship, and to recognise no master below the King of the Romans and the Emperor. " Nought but the justice of God " was the motto of their flag, and their colours were white and blue. Before the figure of a crucifix a peasant knelt, and below was depicted a great Bimd- schuh,\he sign which had now become established as the symbol of the peasants' movements. With consummate tact, the leaders of the revolt for- bade any members to go to confession, and it was the disregard of this order that led to the betrayal of the cause. A peasant in confession revealed the secret to a priest, who in his turn revealed it to the authorities. Ecclesiastics, princes, and nobles at once took their measures. The most barbarous persecution and punish-

56 GERMAN SOCIETY.

ment of all suspected of having been engaged in the Bundschuh conspiracy followed. Those concerned had their property confiscated, their wives and children were driven from the country, and they themselves were in many cases quartered alive ; the more prominent men, by a refinement of cruelty, being dragged to the place of execution tied to a horse's tail. A tremendous panic seized all the privileged classes, from the Emperor to the knight. They earnestly discussed the situation in no less than three separate assemblies of the estates. Large numbers of those involved in this second Bundschuh managed to escape, owing to the pluck and loyalty of the peasants. A few bands were hastily got together, and, although quite insufficient to effect a successful revolt, they were able to keep the knightly warriors and landesknechte at bay at certain critical points, so as to give the men who had really been the life and intelligence of the movement time to escape into Switzerland or into other territories where they were unknown. In some cases the secret was so well kept that the local organisers remained unnoticed even in their own villages.

SOCIAL AND RELIGIOUS REVOLT. 57

For ten years after the collapse of the second Bundschuh in the Rhenish district, the peasants remained quiet. It was not till 1512 that things began again to stir. One of the leaders, who had escaped notice on the suppression of the former conspiracy, was Joss Fritz. He was himself a native of Untergriinbach, which had been its seat. He there acted as Bann- wart or ranger of the district lands. For nearly ten years Joss wandered about from country to country, but amid all his struggles for exist- ence he never forgot the Bundschuh. Joss was a handsome man, of taking and even superior manners. He was very careful in his dress, some- times apparelling himself in black jerkin with white hose, sometimes in red with yellow hose, sometimes in drab with green hose. He would seem to have been at one time a landesknecht, and had certainly taken part in various cam- paigns in a military capacity. Whether it was from his martial bearing or the engaging nature of his personality, it is evident that Joss Fritz was in his way a born leader of men. About 1512 Joss settled down in a village called Lehen, a few miles from the town of Freiburg, in Breisgau. Here he again obtained the

5 8 GERMAN SO CIE TV.

position of Bannwart, and here he began to seriously gather together the scattered threads of the old movement, and to collect recruits. He went to work cautiously ; first of all con- fining himself to general complaints of the degeneracy of the times in the village tavern, or before the doors of the cottagers on summer evenings. He soon became the centre of an admiring group of swains, who looked up to him as the much-travelled man of the world, who eagerly sought his conversation, and who followed his counsel in their personal affairs.

As Joss saw that he was obtaining the con- fidence of his neighbours, his denunciations of the evils of the time grew more earnest and im- passioned. At the same time he threw out hints as to the ultimate outcome of the existing state of things. But it was only after many months that he ventured to broach the real purpose of his life. One day when they were all assembled round him, he hinted that he might be able to tell them something to their advantage, would they but pledge themselves to secrecy. He then took each individually, and after calming the man's conscience with the assurance that the proposal for which he claimed strict secrecy

SOCIAL AND RELIGIOUS REVOLT. 59

was an honourable one, he expounded his plan of an organisation of all the oppressed, an un- dertaking which he claimed to be in full accord with Holy Writ. He never insisted upon an immediate adhesion, but preferred to leave his man to think the matter over.

Joss would sometimes visit his neighbours in their houses, explaining to them how all ancient custom, right and tradition was being broken through to gratify the rapacity of the ruling classes. He put forward as the objects of the undertaking the suppression of the payment of interest after it had amounted to an equivalent of the original sum lent ; also that no one was to be required to give more than one day's service per year to his lord. "We will," he declared, " govern ourselves according to our old rights and traditions, of which we have been forcibly and wrongfully deprived by our masters. Thou knowest well," he would continue, "how long we have been laying our claims before the Aus- trian Government at Ensisheim." l

1 It will be seen from the historical map that Breisgau and Sundgau were feudal appanages of the house of Austria. Ensisheim was the seat of the Habsbtirg overlordship in the district (not to be confounded with the imperial power).

60 GERMAN SOCIETY.

From speaking of small grievances, Joss was gradually led to develop his scheme for the over- throw of feudalism, and for the establishment of what was tantamount to primitive conditions. At the same time he gave his hearers a ren- dezvous at a certain hour of eventide in a meadow, called the Hardmatte, which lay out- side the village, and skirted a wood. The still- ness of the hour, broken only by the sounds of nature hushing herself to rest for the night, was, at the time appointed, invaded by the eager talk of groups of villagers. All his little company assembled, Joss Fritz here, for the first time, fully developed his schemes. In future, said he, we must see that we have no other lords than God, the Pope, and the Em- peror ; the Court at Rothweil, he said, must be abolished ; each must be able to obtain justice in his native village, and no churchman must be allowed to hold more than one benefice ; the superfluity of the monasteries must be distributed amongst the poor ; the dues and imposts with which the peasants are burdened must be re- moved ; a permanent peace must be established throughout Christendom, as the perpetual feuds of the nobles meant destruction and misery for

SOCIAL AND RELIGIOUS REVOLT. 61

the peasants ; finally, the primitive communism in woods, pasture, water, and the chase must be restored.

Joss Fritz's proposals struck a sympathetic chord in the hearts of his hearers. It was only when he wound up by insisting upon the necessity of forming a new Bvndsckuh that some few of them hung back and went to ob- tain the advice of the village priest on the matter. Father John (such was his name) was, however, in full accord in his ideas with Joss, and answered that the proposals were indeed a godly thing, the success of which was foretold in the Scriptures themselves.

The meetings on the Hardmatte led to the formation of a kind of committee, composed of those who were most devoted to the cause. These were Augustin Enderlin, Kilian Mayer, Hans Freuder, Hans and Karius Heitz, Peter Stublin, Jacob Hauser, Hans Hummel — Hum- mel hailed from the neighbourhood of Stuttgart — and Hieronymus, who was also a stranger, a journeyman baker working at the mill of Lehen, who had travelled far, and had acquired a considerable fund of oratory. All these men were untiring in their exertions to obtain re-

62 GERMAN SOCIETY.

cruits for the new movement. After having prepared the latter's minds, they handed over the new-comers to Joss for deeper initiation, if he thought fit. It was not in crusades and pilgrimages he taught them, but in the Bund-i schuh that the " holy sepulchre " was to be» obtained. The true " holy sepulchre " was to be found, namely, in the too long buried liberties of the people. The new Bundschuh, he maintained, had ramifications extending as far as Cologne, and embracing members from all orders.

Joss Fritz had indeed before coming to Lehen travelled through the Black Forest and the district of Speyer, in the attempt, by no means altogether unsuccessful, to reunite the crushed and scattered branches of the old Bund- schuh. Among the friends he had made in this way was a poor knight of the name of Stoffel, of Freiburg. The latter travelled incessantly in the cause ; he was always carefully dressed, .and usually rode on a white horse. The mis- sionaries of the Bundschuh, under the direction of Joss Fritz, assumed many different charac- ters; now they were peasants, now townsmen, now decayed knights, according to the localities

SOCIAL AND RELIGIOUS REVOLT. 63

they visited. The organisation of the move- ment was carried out on lines which have been since reproduced in the Fenian rising. It was arranged in " circles," the members of which knew one another, but not those outside the " circle". Even the beggars' guild was pressed into the service, and very useful adjuncts the beggars were, owing to their nomadic habits. The heads of the " circles " communicated with each other at intervals as to the number of re- cruits and as to the morale of their members. They compared notes with the two leaders of the movement, Joss and his friend Stoffel, both of whom rode constantly from place to place to keep their workers up to the mark. The muster-roll would be held on these occasions, as at Lehen itself, after dark, and in some woodland glade, near the village. The village taverns, generally the kitchens of some better- to-do peasant, were naturally among the best recruiting grounds, and the hosts themselves were often heads of "circles". Strange and picturesque must have been these meetings after night- fall, when the members of the "circle" came together, the peasants in their plain blue or grey cloth and buff leather, the

64 GERMAN SOCIETY.

leaders in what to us seem the fantastic cos- tumes of the period, red stockings, trunk-hose and doublet slashed with bright yellow, or the whole dress of yellow slashed with black, the slouch hat, with ostrich feather, surmounting the whole ; the short sword for the leaders, and a hoe or other agricultural implement for the peasant, constituted the arms of the company.

There was a visible sign by which the breth- ren recognised each other : it was a sign in the form of the letter H, of black stuff in a red field, sewn on to the breast-cloth. There appears also to have been another sign which certain of the members bore instead of the above ; this consisted of three cross slits or slashes in the stuff of the right sleeve. This Bundschuh, like the previous one in Unter- grunbach, had its countersign, which, to the credit of all concerned, be it said, was never revealed, and is not known to this day. The new Bnndschuh was now thoroughly organised with all its officers, none of whom received money for their services.

The articles of association drawn up were the result of many nightly meetings on the Hardmatte, and embodied the main points

SOCIAL AND RELIGIOUS REVOLT. 65

insisted upon by Joss in his exhortations to the peasants. They included the abolition of all feudal powers. God, the Pope, and the Emperor were alone to be recognised as hayfng authority. The Court at Rothweil and[_all_ the ecclesiastical courts were to be abolished, _and justice relegated to the village council as of old. The interest payable on the debts of the mortgaged holdings of the peasants was to be discontinued. Fishing, hunting, woods and pasture were to be free to all. The clergy were to be limited to one benefice apiece. The monasteries and ecclesi- astical foundations were to be curtailed, and their superfluous property confiscated. All feudal dues were to cease.

The strange and almost totemistic supersti- tion that the mediaeval mind attached to sym- bolism is here evinced by the paramount import- ance acquired by the question of the banner. A banner was costly, and the Bundschuh was poor, but the banner was the first necessity of every movement. In this case, it was obliga- tory that the banner should have a Bundschuh inscribed upon it. Artists of that time objected to painting Bundschuhs on banners ; they were

66 GERMAN SOCIETY,

afraid to be compromised. Hence it was, above all things, necessary to have plenty of money wherewith to bribe some painter. Kilian Mayer gave five vats of wine to a baker, also one of the brotherhood, in Freiburg, to be sold in that town. The proceeds were brought to Joss as a contribution to the banner fund. Many another did similarly ; some of those who met on the Hardmatte, however, objected to this tax. But ultimately Joss managed, by hook or by crook, to scrape together what was deemed needful. Joss then called upon a " brother " from a distant part of the country, one known to no one in Freiburg, to repair to the latter city and hunt up a painter. The "brother" was in a state of dire apprehension, and went to the house of the painter Friedrich, but at first appeared not to know for what he had come. With much hesitation, he eventually gasped out that he wanted a Bnndschuh painted. Friedrich did not at all like the proposal, and kicked the unfortunate peasant into the street, telling him not to come in future with such questionable orders. The artist instantly informed the Town Council of Freiburg of the occurrence ; but as the latter did not know whence the mysterious

SOCIAL AND RELIGIOUS REVOLT. 67

personage had come, nor whither he had gone, they had to leave the matter in abeyance. They issued orders, however, for all true and faithful burghers to be on the look-out for further traces of the mischief.

After this failure, Joss bethought him that he had better take the matter in hand him- self. Now, there was another artist of Frei- burg, by name Theodosius, who was just then painting frescoes in the church at Lehen ; to him Joss went one evening with Hans Enderlin, a person of authority in the village, and Kilian Mayer. They invited him to the house of one of the party, and emptied many a measure of wine. When they had all drunk their fill, they went to walk in the garden, just as the stars were beginning to come out. Joss now approached the painter with his pro- ject. He told him that there was a stranger in the village who wanted a small banner painted and had asked him (Joss) to demand the cost. Theodosius showed himself amenable as regards this point, but wanted to know what was to be the device on the banner. Directly Joss men- tioned the word Bundschuh, the worthy painter gave a start, and swore that not for the wrealth

68 GERMAN SOCIETY.

of the Holy Roman Empire itself would he undertake such a business. They all saw that it was no use pressing him any further, and so contented themselves with threatening him with dire consequences should he divulge the conversation that he had had with them. Hans Enderlin also reminded him that he had already taken an oath of secrecy in all matters relating to the village, on his engagement to do church work, a circumstance that curiously enough illustrates the conditions of mediaeval life. The painter, fearful of not receiving his pay for the church work, if nothing worse, prudently kept silent.

Joss was at his wits' end. The silk of the flag was already bought, and even sewn ; blue, with a white cross in the middle, were the colours ; but to begin operations before the sign of the Bundschuh was painted, entered into the head of no one. In accordance with the cur- rent belief in magic, the symbol itself was supposed to possess a virtue, without the aid of which it was impossible to hope for suc- cess. There was nothing left for it but for Joss to start on a journey to the free city of Heilbronn in Swabia, where he knew

SOCIAL AND RELIGIOUS REVOLT. 69

there lived a painter of some ability. Arrived there, Joss dissembled his real object, pretend- ing that he was a Swiss, who, when fighting in a great battle, had made a vow that if he came out safe and sound, he would undertake a pilgrimage to Aachen (Aix-la-Chapelle), and there dedicate a banner to the mother of God. He begged the painter to make a suitable design for him, with a crucifix, the Virgin and St. John the Baptist, and underneath a Bimd- schuh. The Heilbronn artist was staggered at the latter suggestion, and asked what he meant. Joss appeared quite innocent, and said that he was a shoemaker's son from Stein-am-Rhein, that his father had a Bundschuh as his trade- sign, and in order that it might be known that the gift was from him, he wished his family emblem to appear upon it. Round the flag were to be the words : " Lord, defend Thy Divine justice ". These representations over- came the painter's scruples, and in a few days the banner was finished. Hiding it under his doublet, Joss hurried back to Lehen.

At last all was ready for the great coup. The Kirchweihe (or village festival, held every year on the name-day of the patron saint of a village

70 GERMAN SOCIETY.

church) was being held at a neighbouring village on the 1 9th of October. This was the date fixed for a final general meeting of the conspirators to determine the plan of attack and to decide whether Freiburg should be its object, or some smaller town in the neighbourhood. The confederates in Elsass were ordered, as soon as the standard of revolt was raised in Breisgau (Baden), to move across the Rhine to Burkheim, where the banner of the league would be flying. Special instructions were given to the beggars to spy round the towns and in all inns and alehouses, and to bring reports to Lehen. Arrangements were also made for securing at least one or two adherents in each of the guilds in Freiburg. All these orders were carried out in accordance with the directions made by Joss before his departure. But whilst he was away the members lost their heads. When too late they bethought them- selves to win over an old experienced warrior who lived in Freiburg, a cousin of one of the chief conspirators at Lehen. Had they done so earlier it is likely enough that he would have been able to secure them possession of the city. As it happened, things were managed too

SOCIAL AND RELIGIOUS REVOLT. 71

hurriedly. Before matters were ripe the chief men grew careless of all precautions, so confident were they of success. One of the conspirators within the city set fire to a stable with a view to creating a panic, in the course of which the keys of the city gates might be stolen and the leaguers admitted. The attempt, however, was discovered before the fire gained any hold, and merely put the authorities on the alert. Again, three members of the league seized upon a peasant a short distance from the city, dragged him into a neighbouring wood, and made him swear allegiance. After he had done this under compulsion they exposed to him their intentions as to Freiburg. The peasant proving recalcitrant, even to the extent of expressing horror at the proposal, the three drew their knives upon him, and would have murdered him when the sound of horses was heard on the high road close by, and, struck with panic, they let him go and hid themselves in the recesses of the wood. The peasant, of course, revealed all to his confessor the same evening, and wanted to know whether the oath he had taken under compulsion was binding on him. The priest put himself at once in com-

7 2 GERMAN SOCIETY.

munication with the Imperial Commissary of Freiburg, who made the City Corporation acquainted with the facts. Two other traitors a few days after came to the assistance of the authorities, and revealed many important se- crets. Count Philip of Baden, their over-lord, to whom these disclosures were made, was not long in placing them at the disposal of the Corporation of Freiburg and of the Austrian Government at Ensisheim. Late the following night, October 4, messengers were sent in all directions to warn the authorities of the neigh- bouring villages and towns to prepare them- selves for the outbreak of the conspiracy. Double watches were placed at the gates of Freiburg and on all the towers of the walls. The guilds were called together, and their members instructed to wake each other up immediately on the sound of the storm-bell, when they were all to meet in the cathedral close. The moment that these preparations were known at Lehen, a meeting was called together on the Hardmatte at vespers ; but in the absence of Joss Fritz, and, as ill-luck would have it, in that also of one or two of the best organisers who were away on business of the

SOCIAL AND RELIGIOUS REVOLT. 73

league, divided counsels prevailed. In the very midst of all this, two hundred citizens of Freiburg armed to the teeth appeared in Lehen, seized Hans Enderlin and his son, as also Elsa, the woman with whom Joss had been living, besides other leading men of the movement. Panic now reigned amongst all concerned. Well nigh every one took to flight, most of them succeeding in crossing the frontier to Switzerland. The news of the collapse of the movement apparently reached Joss before he arrived in Lehen, as there is no evidence of his having returned there. Many of the conspira- tors met together in Basel, amongst them being Joss Fritz with his banner. They decided to seek an asylum in Zurich. But they were fallen upon on the way, and two were made prisoners, the rest, among them Joss, escaping. Those of the conspirators who were taken prisoners behaved heroically ; not the most severe tor- tures could induce them to reveal anything of importance. As a consequence, comparatively few of those compromised fell victims to the vengeance of their noble and clerical enemies. In Elsass they were not so fortunate as in Baden, many persons being executed on sus-

74 GERMAN SOCIETY.

picion. The Imperial Councillor Rudolph was even sent into Switzerland to demand the sur- render of the fugitives, and two were given up by Schaffhausen. Joss's mistress was liberated after three weeks, and she was suspected of having harboured him at different times after- wards. The last distinct traces of him are toj be found in the Black Forest ten years later, during the great rising ; but they are slight, and merely indicate his having taken a part in this movement. Thus this interesting personality disappears from human ken. Did the energetic and enthusiastic peasant leader fall a victim to noble vengeance in 1525, or did he withdraw from public life to a tranquil old age in some obscure village of Southern Germany ? These are questions which we shall now, it is pro- bable, never be able to answer.

At the same time that the foregoing events were taking place there was a considerable ferment in Switzerland. Increase of luxury was beginning to tell there also. The simple cloth or sheepskin of the old Eidgenosse was now frequently replaced, in the towns especially, by French and Italian dresses, by doublets of scarlet silk, by ostrich feathers, and even by

SOCIAL AND RELIGIOUS REVOLT. 75

cloth of gold. In the cities domestic architec- ture began to take on the sumptuousness of the Renaissance style. The coquettish alliance with Louis XI. in the preceding century had already opened a way for the introduction of French customs. Gambling for high stakes became the fashionable amusement in town and country alike. The story of Hans Waldmann, although belonging to a period some years earlier than that of this history, illustrates a decline from the primitive simplicity of the ancient Switzer, a decline which had become infinitely more accentuated and general at the time of which we treat. All this led, of course, to harder conditions for the peasants, which, in the summer of 1513, issued in several minor revolts. In some cases, notably in that of the peasants of Canton Bern, the issue was favour- able to the insurgents.

In the neighbouring country of Wtirtemberg an insurrection also burst forth. It is sup- posed to have had some connection with the Bundschuh movement at Lehen ; but it took the name of " The Poor Conrad". It was imme- diately occasioned by the oppression of Duke Ulrich of Wiirtemberg, who, to cover the ex-

76 GERMAN SOCIETY.

penses of his luxurious court, was burdening the peasants with ever-fresh exactions. He had already made debts to the extent of a million gulden. The towns, no less than the peasantry, were indignant at the rapacity and insolence of the minions of this potentate. First, an income-tax was imposed without the concurrence of the estates, which should have been consulted. Next, an impost was laid on the daily consumption of meal and wine. The butchers and millers and vintners were then allowed to falsify their weights and measures, on the condition that the greater part of their increased profits went to the duke. " The Poor Conrad " demanded the removal of all these abuses ; and, in addition, the freedom of the chase, of fishery and of wood-cutting, and the abolition of villein service. In the towns the poorer citizens, including both guildsmen and journeymen, were prepared to seize the opportunity of getting rid of their Ehrbarkeit. This movement was also, like the Bundschuh at Lehen, suppressed for the time being. We have gone at length into the history of the Lehen Bundschuh as a type of the manner in which the peasant movements of the time

SOCIAL AND RELIGIOUS REVOLT. 77

were planned and organised. The methods pursued by " The Poor Conrad," the midnight meetings, the secret pass-words, the prepara- tions for sudden risings, were in most respects similar. The skilled and well-equipped knight- hood of Duke Ulrich, though inferior in numbers, readily dispersed the ill-armed and inexperi- enced bands of peasants whom they encoun- tered. To this result the treacherous promises of Duke Ulrich, which induced large numbers of peasants to lay down their arms, contributed. The revolt proved a flash in the pan ; and although those who had partaken in it were not punished with the merciless severity shown by the Austrian Government at Ensisheim, it yet resulted in no amelioration of the conditions of the people. Many of the leaders, and not a few of the rank and file, fled the country, and, as in the case of the Lehen Bundschuh, found a refuge in Northern Switzerland.

In the autumn of 1517 Baden was once more the scene of an attempted peasant rising, its objects being again much the same as were those of the previous enterprises. Rent and interest were to be abolished, and no lord recognised except the Emperor. The plan

78 GERMAN SOCIETY.

was to surprise and capture the towns of Weissenburg and Hagenau, and to make a clean sweep of the imperial councillors and judges, as well as of the knights and nobles. This conspiracy was, however, also discovered before the time for action was ripe. There were also, in various parts of Central Europe, other minor attempts at revolt and conspiracies which it is not necessary to particularise here. The great rebellion of the year 1514, in Hungary, however, although not strictly coming within the limits of our subject, deserves a few words of notice.

At Easter, in that year, the whole of Hun- gary was stirred up by the preaching of a crusade against the Turks, then hard pressing the eastern frontier. All who joined the cru- sade, down to the lowest serf, were promised not merely absolution, but freedom. The move- ment was immensely popular, thousands crowd- ing to the standards. The nobles naturally viewed the movement with disfavour ; many, in fact, sallied forth from their castles with their retinues to fetch back the fugitives. In many cases the seizures were accompanied with every circumstance of cruelty. As the news of these events reached the assembled bands in their

SOCIAL AND RELIGIOUS REVOLT. 79

camp, a change of disposition became manifest. The enthusiasm for vanquishing the Turk abroad speedily gave way to an enthusiasm for vanquishing the Turk at home. Everywhere throughout the camp were heard threats of ven- geance. Finally, one George Doza, who would seem to have been a genuine popular hero in the best sense of the word, placed him- self at their head. George Doza's aims were not confined to mere vengeance on the offend- ing nobles. They extended to the. conception of a complete reorganisation of the conditions of the oppressed classes throughout the country. In vain an order came from the Court at Ofen for the army to disperse. Doza divided his forces into five bodies, each of which was to concentrate its efforts on a definite district, at the same time summoning the whole popu- lation to join. The destruction of castles, and the slaughter of their inmates, became general throughout the land. For a moment the nobles seemed paralysed ; but they soon re- covered themselves, and two of their number, Johann Zapolya and Johann Boremiszsza, aided by the inhabitants of the city of Buda-Pesth, got together an army to save the situation for their

8o GERMAN SOCIETY.

colleagues. They were not long in joining battle with the insurgents. The latter, deserted at the beginning by some of their leaders, who went over to the enemy, fought bravely, but had eventually to yield to superior arms and discipline. A large number of prisoners were taken, of whom the majority were barbarously executed, and the rest sent home, with ears and noses cut off.

Meanwhile, George Doza, who had been besieging Szegedin, withdrew his forces, and gave battle to Bishop Csaky and the Count of Temeswar, who were advancing with troops to relieve the town. After two days' hard fighting, victory rewarded the bravery of the peasants. Doza's followers demanded vengeance for their murdered and mutilated comrades. The bishop was impaled, and the royal treasurer of the district hanged on a high gallows. But Doza's was the only division of the popular army that met with any success. The rest, on coming to grips with the nobles, were dispersed and almost annihilated. The remnants joined the fo rces of their com mander-in- chief, whose army was thus augmented from day to day. Doza now issued a decree abolishing king and higher and lower nobility, deposing all

SOCIAL AND RELIGIO US RE VOL T. 8 r

bishops save one, and proclaiming the equality of all men before God. One of his lieutenants then succeeded in recruiting what amounted to a second army, containing a large force of cavalry. He moved on Temeswar, but com- mitted the imprudence of undertaking a long siege of this powerful fortress. After two months his army began to get demoralised. A few days before the place would have had to surrender, Doza was surprised by the Transylvanian Army. In spite of this, how- ever, he deployed his troops with incredible rapidity, and a terrific battle, long undecided, ensued. After several hours of hard fighting, one of the wings of Doza's army took to flight. General confusion followed, in the midst of which Doza might have been seen in the fore- front of the battle like an ancient hero, hewing down nobles right and left, until his sword broke in his hand. He was then instantly seized, and made prisoner in company with his brother Gregory. The latter was immediately beheaded. Doza and about forty of his officers were thrown into a vile dungeon in Temeswar and deprived of all nourishment. On the fourteenth day of

their incarceration, nine alone remained alive.

6

82 GERMAN SOCIETY.

These nine, Doza at their head, were led out into the open space before their prison. An iron throne was erected there and made red hot, and Doza, loaded with chains, was forcibly placed upon it. A red-hot iron crown was laid upon his head, and a red-hot iron sceptre thrust into his hand. His companions were then offered their lives on condition that they forth- with tore off and devoured the flesh of their leader. Three, who refused with indignation, were at once hewn in pieces. Six did as they were bidden. " Dogs ! " cried Doza. This was the only sound that escaped him. Torn with red-hot iron pincers, he died. The defeated peasants were impaled and hanged by the hundred. It is estimated that over 60,000 of them perished in this war, and in the reprisals that followed it. The result of the insurrection was a more brutal oppression than had ever been known before.

At the same time various insurrections of a local nature were taking place in Germany and in the Austrian territories. Amid the Styrian and Carinthian Alps there were movements of the peasants, who, in these remote mountain districts, seem to have retained more of their

SOCIAL AND RELIGIOUS REVOLT. 83

primitive independence. In the south-west of Austria there were three duchies — Karnthen (Carinthia), Steuermarck (Styria), and the Krain. At Karnburg, a short distance from Klagenfurt, was a round stone, on which were engraved the arms of the country. When a. duke assumed the sovereignty, a peasant belonging to one of the ancient families of a neighbouring village in which this particular right was hereditary, attended to offer the new duke the homage of the peasantry. Round the stone, on which sat the aged representative of the rural communities, the peasantry of the neighbourhood were gathered. The over-lord, attired in peasantly costume, advanced towards the stone. With him were two local dignitaries, one leading a lean black cow, the other an under- fed horse. Bringing up the rear followed the remaining nobility and knighthood, with the banner of the duchy. The peasant who was sitting on the fateful stone cried : " Who is he who advances so proudly into our country ? " The surrounding peasants answered : " It is our prince who conies ". "Is he a righteous judge ? " asked the peasant on the stone. " Will he promote the well-being of our land

84 GERMAN SOCIETY.

and its freedom ? Is he a protector of the Christian faith and of widows and orphans ? " The multitude shouted: "This he is, and will ever be so ". That part of the ceremony con- cluded, the duke had to take an oath to the peasant on the stone that he would not dis- dain, for the welfare of the land, in any of the respects mentioned, to nourish himself with such a wretched beast as the cow accompany- ing him, or to ride on such a lean and ill- favoured steed. The peasant on the stone then gave the duke a light box on the ears, and conjured him in patriarchal fashion to remain ever a righteous judge and a father to his people. The old countryman then stood up, and the nobles surrendered to him the cow and horse, which he led home as his property.

The above singular custom had been kept up in Carinthia until the middle of the fifteenth century, when the Emperor Frederick III. refused, in his capacity of local lord, to don the peasant garb, although he compromised the matter by giving the peasants a deed estab- lishing them in their ancient freedom. The growing pressure of taxation and the new imposts, which the wars of Maximilian entailed,

SOCIAL AND RELIGIOUS REVOLT. 85

led, at the beginning of the sixteenth century, to an agitation here also, and, finally, to a rising in which, it is said, as many as 90,000 peasants took part, but which did not immediately come to a head, owing to timely concessions on the part of the Emperor. The league of the pea- sants, in this case, extended over Styria as well as Carinthia and the Krain. It broke forth again in the spring of 1517, owing to renewed oppressions on the part of the nobles. Several castles, during the three months that the revolt lasted, were destroyed, and large stretches of country laid waste. Not a few nobles were hurled from their own turrets. The Emperor Maximilian, who, throughout the whole affair, showed himself not unfavourable to the cause of the peasants, held his hand, as it would seem, so long as the latter confined themselves to punishing the notoriously rapacious among the territorial magnates ; but afterwards, when the armed bodies of peasants gradually melted away, and those that remained lost all discipline, degenerating into mere plundering bands, he sent a party of a few hundred knights, who speedily routed the ill-armed and disorderly hordes. Little quarter was given to the fugi-

86 GERMAN SOCIETY.

tives, and the usual bloody executions followed. There was, in addition, a heavy indemnity laid on the whole peasantry, which took the form of a perpetual tax. The revolt in the Krain lasted longest, and was suppressed with the most bloodshed. Those in Styria and Carinthia came to an end much sooner, and with less disastrous results to those who had been en- gaged in them.

But it was not alone in Germany, or, indeed, in Central Europe, that a general stirring was visible among the peasant populations at the beginning of the sixteenth century. It is true that the great revolts, the Wat Tyler insurrec- tion in England, and the Jacquerie in France, took place long before ; but even when there was no great movement, sporadic excitement was everywhere noticeable. In Spain, we read of a peasant revolt, which Cornelius Agrippa of Nettesheim was engaged by the territorial lord to quell by his supposed magical powers. In England, the disturbances of Henry VIII.'s reign, connected with the suppression of the monasteries, are well known. The expropria- tion of the people from the soil to make room for sheep-farms also gave occasion to periodical

SO C1AL AND RELIGIO US RE VOL T. 87

disturbances of a local character, which culmin- ated in 'i 549 in the famous revolt led by John Ket in East Anglia.

The deep-reaching importance and effective spread of movements was infinitely greater in the Middle Ages than in modern times. The same phenomenon presents itself to-day in bar- baric and semi-barbaric communities. At first ••sight one is inclined to think that there has been no period in the world's history when it was so easy to stir up a population as the present, with our newspapers, our telegraphs, our postal arrangements and our railways. But this is just one of those superficial notions that are not confirmed by history. We are similarly apt to think that there was no age in which travel was so widespread, and formed so great a part of the education of mankind as at present. There could be no greater mistake. The true age of travelling was the close of the Middle Ages, or what is known as the Renaissance period. The man of learning, then just differentiated from the ecclesiastic, spent the greater part of his life in carrying his intellectual wares from court to court, and from university to uni- versity, just as the merchant personally carried

88 GERMAN SOCIETY.

his goods from city to city in an age in which commercial correspondence, bill-brokers, and the varied forms of modern business were but in em- bryo. It was then that travel really meant educa- tion, the acquirement of thorough and intimate knowledge of diverse manners and customs.

I Travel was then not a pastime, but a serious element in life.

In the same way the spread of a political or social movement was at least as rapid then as now, and far more penetrating. The methods were, of course, vastly different from the present ; but the human material to be dealt with was far easier to mould, and kept its shape much more readily when moulded, than is the case now-a-days. The appearance of a religious or political teacher in a village or small town of the Middle Ages was an event which keenly ex- cited the interest of the inhabitants. It struck across the path of their daily life, leaving behind it a track hardly conceivable to-day. For one of the salient symptoms of the change which has taken place since that time is the disappearance of local centres of activity, and the transference of the intensity of life to a few large towns. In the Middle Ages, every town,

SOCIAL AND RELIGIOUS REVOLT. 89

small no less than large, was a more or less self- sufficing organism, intellectually and industrially, and was not essentially dependent on the out- side world for its social sustenance. This was especially the case in Central Europe, where communication was jnuch more imperfect and dangerous than in Italy, France, or England. In a society without newspapers, without easy communication with the rest of the world, when the vast majority could neither read nor write, when books were rare and costly, and accessible only to the privileged few, a new idea bursting upon one of these communities was eagerly welcomed, discussed in the council chamber of the town, in the hall of the castle, in the refec- tory of the monastery, at the social board of the burgess, in the workroom, and, did it but touch his interests, in the hut of the pea- sant. It was canvassed, too, at church festivals (Kirchweihe), the only regular occasion on which the inhabitants of various localities came together. In theabsenceof all other distraction, men thought it out in all the bear- ings which their limited intellectual horizon permitted. If calculated in any way to appeal to them, it soon struck root, and became a

9o GERMAN SOCIETY.

part of their very nature, a matter for which, if occasion were, they were prepared to sacri- fice goods, liberty, and even life itself. In the present day a new idea is comparatively slow in taking root. Amid the myriad distrac- tions of modern life, perpetually chasing one another, there is no time for any one thought, however wide-reaching in its bearings, to take a firm hold. In order that it should do this in the modern mind, it must be again and again borne in upon this, not always too receptive intellectual substance. People require to read of it day after day in their newspapers, or to hear it preached from countless platforms, be- fore any serious effect is created. In the simple life of former ages it was not so.

The mode of transmitting intelligence, especially such as was connected with the stirring up of political and religious move- ments, was in those days of a nature of which we have now little conception. The sort of thing in vogue then may be compared to the methods adopted in India to prepare the mutiny of 1857, when the mysterious cake was passed from village to village, signifying that the moment had come for the outbreak. We have

1

SOCIAL AND RELIGIOUS REVOLT. 91

already seen how Joss Fritz used the guild of beggars as fetchers and carriers of news and as auxiliaries in his organisation generally. The fact is noteworthy, moreover, that his confi- dence in them does not seem to have been misplaced, for the collapse of the movement cannot certainly be laid to their account. The sense of esprit de corps and of that kind of honour most intimately associated with it is, it must also be remembered, infinitely keener in ruder states of society than under a high civilisation. The growth of civilisation, as implying the disruption of the groups in which the individual is merged under more primitive conditions, and his isolation as an autonomous unit having vague_and_very^ elastic^ moral duties to his "country" or to the whole of mankind, but none towards any definite and proximate social whole, necessarily destroys that com- munal spirit which prevails in the former case. This is one of the striking truths which the history of these peasant risings illustrates in various ways and brings vividly home 19 us.

CHAPTER II.

THE REFORMATION MOVEMENT.

THE " great man " theory of history, formerly everywhere prevalent, and even now common among non-historical persons, has long regarded the Reformation as the purely personal work of the Augustine monk who was its central figure. The fallacy of this conception is par- ticularly striking in the case of the Reforma- tion. Not only was it preceded by numerous sporadic outbursts of religious revivalism which sometimes took the shape of opposition to the dominant form of Christianity, though it is true they generally shaded off into mere move- ments of independent Catholicism within the Church ; but there were in addition at least two distinct religious movements which led up to it, while much which, under the re- formers of the sixteenth century, appears as a distinct and separate theology, is traceable in the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries in the

mystical movement connected with the names

(92)

THE REFORMATION MOVEMENT. 93

of Meister Eckhart^nd Tauler. Meister Eck- hart, whose free treatment of Christian doctrines, in order to bring them into consonance with his mystical theology, had drawn him into conflict with the Papacy, undoubtedly influenced Luther through his disciple, Tauler, and especially through the book which proceeded from the latter's school, the Deutsche Theologie. It is, however, in the much more important move- ment, which originated with Wyclif and ex- tended to Central Europe through Huss, that we must look for the more obvious influences determining the course of religious development in Germany.

The Wycliffite movement in England was less a doctrinal heterodoxy than a revolt against the Papacy and the priestly hierarchy. \ Mere theoretical speculations were seldom in- 'terfered with, but anything which touched their material interests at once aroused the vigilance of the clergy. It is noticeable that the diffusion of Lollardism, that is of the ideas of Wyclif, if not the cause of, was at least followed by the peasant rising under the leadership of John Ball, a connection which is also visible in the Tziska revolt following the Hussite movement.

94 GERMAN SOCIETY.

and the Peasants' War in Germany which came on the heels of the Lutheran Reformation. How much Huss was directly influenced by the teachings of Wyclif is clear. The works of the latter were widely circulated throughout Europe ; for one of the advantages of the custom of writing in Latin, which was universal during the Middle Ages, was that books of an important character were immediately current amongst all scholars without having, as now, to wait upon the caprice and ability of translators. Huss read Wyclif 's works as the preparation for his theological degree, and subsequently made them his text-books when teaching at the University of Prague. After his treacher- ous execution at Constance, and the events which followed thereupon in Bohemia, a num- ber of Hussite fugitives settled in Southern Germany, carrying with them the seeds of the new doctrines. An anonymous contemporary writer states that " to John Huss and his fol- lowers are to be traced almost all those false principles concerning the power of the spiritual and temporal authorities and the possession of earthly goods and rights which before in Bohemia, and now with us, have called forth

THE REFORMATION MOVEMENT. 95

revolt and rebellion, plunder, arson, and murder, and have shaken to its foundations the whole commonwealth. The poison of these false doctrines has been long flowing from Bohemia into Germany, and will produce the same deso- lating consequences wherever it spreads."

The condition of the Catholic Church, against which the Reformation movement generally was a. protest, needs here to be made clear to the reader. The beginning of clerical disintegra- tion is distinctly visible in the first half of the fourteenth century. The interdicts, as an insti- tution, had ceased to be respected, and the priesthood itself began openly to sink itself in debauchery and to play fast and loose with the rites of the Church. Indulgences for a hundred years were readily granted for a consideration. The manufacture of relics became an organised branch of industry ; and festivals of fools and festivals of asses were invented by the jovial/ ? priests themselves in travesty of sacred mysteries/? as a welcome relaxation from the monotony of prescribed ecclesiastical ceremony. Pilgrimages increased in number and frequency ; new saints were created by the dozen ; and the disbelief of the clergy in the doctrines they professed was

96 GERMAN SOCIETY.

manifest even to the most illiterate, whilst con- tempt for the ceremonies they practised was openly displayed in the performance of their clerical functions. An illustration of this is the joke of the priests related by Luther, who were wont during the celebration of the mass, when the worshippers fondly imagined that the sacred formula of transubstantiation was being repeated, to replace the words Panis es et carnem fiebis, " Bread thou art and flesh thou shalt become," by Panis es et panem manebis, " Bread thou art and bread thou shalt remain ". The scandals as regards clerical manners, growing, as they had been, for many genera- tions, reached their climax in the early part of the sixteenth century. It was a common thing for priests to drive a roaring trade as money- lenders, landlords of alehouses and gambling dens, and, even in some cases, brothel-keepers. Papal ukases had proved ineffective to stem the current of clerical abuses. The regular clergy evoked even more indignation than the secular. "Stinking cowls" was a favourite epithet for the monks. Begging, cheating, shameless ignorance, drunkenness and debauchery, are alleged as being their noted characteristics. One of the princes of

THE REFORM A TION MO VEMENT. g 7

the Empire addresses a prior of a convent largely patronised by aristocratic ladies as " Thou, our common brother-in-law!" In some of the convents of Friesland, promiscuous in- tercourse between the sexes was, it is said, quite openly practised, the offspring being reared as monks and nuns. The different orders competed with each other for the fame and wealth to be obtained out of the public credulity. A fraud attempted by the Dominicans at Bern, in 1 506, with the concurrence of the heads of the order throughout Germany, was one of the main causes of that city adopting the Reformation.1

In addition to the increasing burdens of in- vestitures, annates, and other Papal dues, the brunt of which the German people had directly or indirectly to bear, special offence was given at the beginning of the sixteenth century by the excessive exploitation of the practice of indul- gences by Leo X. for the purpose of completing the cathedral of St. Peter's at Rome. It was this, coming on the top of the exactions already rendered necessary by the increasing luxury and debauchery of the Papal Court and those of the other ecclesiastical dignitaries, that directly led

1 See Appendix B for this and an instance of a successful imposture. 7

98 GERMAN SOCIETY.

to the dramatic incidents with which the Lutheran Reformation opened.

The remarkable personality with which the religious side of the Reformation is pre-emi- nently associated was a child of his time, who had passed through a variety of mental strug- gles, and had already broken through the bonds of the old ecclesiasticism before that turning point in his career which is usually reckoned the opening of the Reformation, to wit — the nailing of the theses on to the door of the Schloss-Kirche in Wittenberg on the 3ist of October, 1517. Martin Luther, we must always bear in mind, however, was no Protestant in the English Puritan sense of the word. It was not merely that he retained much of what would be deemed by the old-fashioned English Protestant " Romish error " in his doctrine, but his prac- tical view of life showed a reaction from the ascetic pretensions which he had seen bred nothing but hypocrisy and the worst forms of sensual excess. It is, indeed, doubtful if- the man who sang the praises of "Wine, Women, and Song " would have been deemed a fit re- presentative in Parliament or elsewhere by the British Nonconformist conscience of our day ;

THE REFORM A TION MO VEMENT. 99

or would be acceptable in any capacity to the grocer-deacon of our provincial towns, who, not content with being allowed to sand his sugar and adulterate his tea unrebuked, would socially ostracise every one whose conduct did not square with his conventional shibboleths. Martin Luther was a child of his time also as a boon companion. The freedom of his living in the years following his rupture with Rome was the subject of severe animadversions on the part of the noble, but in this respect narrow- minded Thomas Mtinzer, who in his open letter addressed to the " Soft-living flesh of Witten- berg," scathingly denounces what he deems his debauchery. It does not enter into our province here to discuss at length the religious aspects of the Reformation ; but it is interesting to note in passing the more than modern liberality of Luther's views with respect to the marriage question and the celibacy of the clergy, con- trasted with the strong mediaeval flavour of his belief in witchcraft and sorcery. In his De Captivitate Babylonica Ecclesice (1519) he ex- presses the view that if, for any cause, husband or wife are prevented from having sexual inter- course they are justified, the woman equally

ioo GERMAN SOCIETY.

with the man, in seeking it elsewhere. He was opposed to divorce, though he did not forbid it, and recommended that a man should rather have a plurality of wives than that he should put away any of them. Luther held strenuously the view that marriage was a purely external contract for the purpose of sexual satis- faction, and in no way entered into the spiritual life of the man. On this ground he sees no objection in the so-called mixed marriages, which were, of course, frowned upon by the Catholic Church. In his sermon on " Married Life " he says : " Know therefore that marriage is an outward thing, like any other worldly busi- ness. Just as I may eat, drink, sleep, walk, ride, buy, speak and bargain with a heathen, a Jew, a Turk or a heretic ; so may I also be and remain married to such an one, and I care not one jot for the fool's laws which forbid it. ... A heathen is just as much man or woman, well and shapely made by God, as St. Peter, St. Paul, or St. Lucia." Nor did he shrink from applying his views to particular cases, as is instanced by his correspondence with Philip von Hesse, whose constitution appears to have required more than one wife. He here lays

THE RE FORM A TION MO VEMENT. i o i

down explicitly the doctrine that polygamy and concubinage are not forbidden to Christians, though, in his advice to Philip, he adds the caveat that he should keep the matter dark to the end that offence might not be given ; "for," says he, "it matters not, provided one's conscience is right, what others say ". In one of his sermons on the Pentateuch l we find the words : " Ic is not forbidden that a man have more than one wife. I would not forbid it to-day, albeit I would not advise it. ... Yet neither would I condemn it" Other opinions on the nature of the sexual relations were equally broad ; for in one of his writings on monastic celibacy his words plainly indicate his belief that chastity, no more than other fleshly mortifications, was to be considered a divine ordinance for all men or women. In an address to the clergy he says : "A woman not possessed of high and rare grace can no more abstain from a man than from eating, drinking, sleeping, or other natural function. Likewise a man cannot ab- stain from a woman. The reason is that it is as deeply implanted in our nature to breed

1 Sdmmt. Werke, xxxiii., 322-324.

io2 GERMAN SOCIETY.

children as it is to eat and drink."1 The worthy Janssen observes in a scandalised tone that Luther, as regards certain matters relat- ing to married life, " gave expression to prin- ciples before unheard of in Christian Europe ; " and the British Nonconformist of to-day, if he reads these " immoral " opinions of the hero of the Reformation, will be disposed to echo the sentiments of the Ultramontane historian.

The relation of the Reformation to the " New Learning " was in Germany not unlike that which existed in the other northern countries of Europe, and notably in England. Whilst the hostility of the latter to the mediaeval Church was very marked, and it was hence dis- posed to regard the religious Reformation as an ally, this had not proceeded very far before the tendency of the Renaissance spirit was to side with Catholicism against the new theology and dogma, as merely destructive and hostile to culture. The men of the Humanist move- ment were for the most part Freethinkers, and it was with them that freethought first appeared

1 Quoted in Janssen, Ein Zweiter Wort an nieine Kritiker, 1883, p. 94.

- Geschichte des Deutschen Volkes, vol. ii., p. 115.

THE REFORM A TION MO VEMENT. 103

in modern Europe. They therefore had little sympathy with the narrow bigotry of religious reformers, and preferred to remain in touch with the Church, whose then loose and toler- ant Catholicism gave freer play to intellectual speculations, provided they steered clear of overt theological heterodoxy, than the newer systems, which, taking theology au grand s^rieux, tended to regard profane art and learning as more or less superfluous, and spent their whole time in theological wrangles. Nevertheless, there were not wanting men who, influenced at first by the revival of learn- ing, ended by throwing themselves entirely into the Reformation movement, though in these cases they were usually actuated rather by their hatred of the Catholic hierarchy than by any positive religious sentiment.

Of such men Ulrich von Hutten, the descend- ant of an ancient and influential knightly family, was a note worthy example. After having already acquired fame as the author of a series of skits in the new Latin, and other works of classical scholarship, being also well known as the ardent supporter of Reuchlin in his dispute with the Church, and as the friend and correspondent

1 04 GERMAN SO CIE T Y.

of the central Humanist figure of the time, Erasmus, he watched with absorbing interest the movement which Luther had inaugurated. Six months after the nailing of the theses at Wittenberg, he writes enthusiastically to a friend respecting the growing ferment in ecclesiastical matters, evidently regarding the new movement as a Kilkenny-cat fight. " The leaders," he says, " are bold and hot, full of courage and zeal. Now they shout and cheer, now they lament and bewail, as loud as they can. They have lately set themselves to write ; the printers are getting enough to do. Propositions, corol- laries, conclusions, and articles are being sold. For this alone I hope they will mutually destroy each other." "A few days ago a monk was telling me what was going on in Saxony, to which I replied : ' Devour each other in order that ye in turn may be devoured (sic] '. Pray Heaven that our enemies may fight each other to the bitter end, and by their obstinacy ex- tinguish each other." From this it will be seen that Hutten regarded the Reformation in its earlier stages as merely a monkish squabble, and failed to see the tremendous upheaval of all the old landmarks of eccle-

THE REFORM A TION MO VEMENT. 1 05

siastical domination which was immanent in it. So soon, however, as he perceived its real significance, he threw himself wholly into the movement. It must not be forgotten, moreover, that, although Hutten's zeal for Humanism made him welcome any attempt to overthrow the power of the clergy and the monks, he had also an eminently political motive for his action in what was, in some respects, the main object of his life, viz., to rescue the " knighthood," or smaller nobility,/ from having their independence crushed out b)| the growing powers of the princes of the Empire] Probably more than one-third of the manors were held by ecclesiastical dignitaries, so that anything which threatened their possessions and privileges seemed to strike a blow at the very foundations of the imperial system. Hut- ten hoped that the new doctrines would set the princes by the ears all round ; and that then, by allying themselves with the reforming party, the knighthood might succeed in retaining the privileges which still remained to them, but were rapidly slipping awray, and might even regain some of those which had been already lost. It was not till later, however, that Hutten

io6 GERMAN SOCIETY.

saw matters in this light. He was at the time the above letter was written in the service of the Archbishop Albrecht of Mainz, the lead- ing favourer of the new learning amongst the prince-prelates, and it was mainly from the Humanist standpoint that he regarded the be- ginnings of the Reformation. After leaving the service of the archbishop he struck up a personal friendship with Luther, instigated thereto by his political chief, Franz von Sickingen, the leader of the knighthood, from whom he probably received the first intimation of the importance of the new movement to their common cause.

When, in 1520, the young Emperor, Charles V., was crowned at Aachen, Luther's party, as well as the knighthood, expected that consider- able changes would result in a sense favourable to their position from the presumed pliability of the new head of the Empire. His youth, it was supposed, would make him more sympathetic to the newer spirit which was rapidly developing itself; and it is true that about the time of his election Charles had shown a transient favour to the " recalcitrant monk ". It would appear, however, that this was only for the purpose of frightening the Pope into abandoning his de-

THE RE FORM A TION MO VEMENT. 107

clared intention of abolishing the Inquisition in Spain, then regarded as one of the mainstays of the royal power, and still more to exercise pressure upon him, in order that he should facilitate Charles's designs on the Milanese territory. Once these objects were attained, he was just as ready to oblige the Pope by suppressing the new anti- Papal movement as he might possibly otherwise have been to have favoured it with a view to humbling the only serious rival to his dominion in the Empire.

Immediately after his coronation, he proceeded to Cologne and convoked by imperial edict a Reichstag at Worms for the following 2/th of January, 1521. The proceedings of this famous Reichstag have been unfortunately so identi- fied with the edict against Luther that the other important matters which were there discussed have almost fallen into oblivion. At least two other questions were dealt with, however, which are significant of the changes that were then taking place. The first was the rehabilitation and strengthening of the Imperial Governing Council (Reuhs-Regiment\ whose functions under Maximilian had been little more than nominal. There was at first a feeling amongst

io8 GERMAN SOCIETY.

the States in favour of transferring all authority to it, even during the residence of the Emperor in the Empire ; and in the end, while having granted to it complete power during his absence, it practically retained very much of this power when he was present. In constitution it was very similar to the French " Parliaments," and like them was principally composed of learned jurists, four being elected by the Emperor and the remainder by the estates. The character and the great powers of this council, extending even to ecclesiastical matters during the ensuing years, undoubtedly did much to hasten on the substitution of the civil law for the older customary or common law, a matter which we shall consider more in detail later on. The financial condition of the Empire was also considered ; and it here first became evi- dent that the dislocation of economic conditions, which had begun with the century, would render an en^rmpusl^Jncreased taxajdoji_4iec£asaxy_ to maintain the imperial authority, amounting to five times as much as had previously been required.

It was only after these secular affairs of the Empire had been disposed of that the delibera-

THE REFORMATION MOVEMENT. 109

tions of the Reichstag on ecclesiastical matters were opened by the indictment of Luther in a long speech by Aleander, one of the papal nuncios, in introducing the Pope's letter. In spite of the efforts of his friends, Luther was not permitted to be present at the beginning of the proceedings ; but subsequently he was sent for by the Emperor, in order that he might state his case. His journey to Worms was one long triumph, especially at Erfurt, where he was received with enthusiasm by the Humanists as the enemy of the Papacy. But his presence in the Reichstag was unavailing, and the proceed- ings resulted in his being placed under the ban of the Empire. The safe-conduct of the Emperor was, however, in his case respected ; and in spite of the fears of his friends that a like fate might befall him as had befallen Huss a£&*uhe Council of Constance, he was allowed to depart unmo- lested.

On his way to Wittenberg Luther was seized by arrangement with his supporter, the Kur- ftirst of Saxony, and conveyed in safety to the Castle of Wartburg, in Thuringen, a report in the meantime being industriously circulated by certain of his adherents, with a view of arousing

GERMAN SOCIETY.

popular feeling, that he had been arrested by- order of the Emperor and was being tortured. In this way he was secured from all danger for the time being, and it was during his subsequent stay that he laid the foundations of the literary language of Germany.

Says a contemporary writer,1 an eye-witness of what went on at Worms during the sitting of the Reichstag : " All is disorder and confusion. Seldom a night doth pass but that three or four persons be slain. The Emperor hath in- stalled a provost, who hath drowned, hanged, and murdered over a hundred men." He proceeds : " Stabbing, whoring, flesh-eating (it was in Lent) . . . altogether there is an orgie worthy of the Venusberg". He further states that many gentlemen and other visitors had drunk themselves to death on the strong Rhenish wine. Aleander was in danger of being mur- dered by the Lutheran populace, instigated thereto by Hutten's inflammatory letters from the neighbouring Castle of Ebernburg, in which Franz von Sickingen had given him a refuge. The fiery Humanist wrote to Aleander himself, saying that he would leave no stone 1 Quoted in Janssen, bk. ii., 162.

THE RE FORM A TION MO VEMENT. 1 1 1

unturned " till thou who earnest hither full of wrath, madness, crime, and treachery shalt be carried hence a lifeless corpse ". Aleander naturally felt exceedingly uncomfortable, and other supporters of the Papal party were not less disturbed at the threats which seemed in a fair way of being carried out. The Emperor himself was without adequate means of with- standing a popular revolt should it occur. He had never been so low in cash or in men as at that moment. On the other hand, Sickingen, to whom he owed money, and who was the only man who could have saved the situation under the circumstances, had matters come to blows, was almost overtly on the side of the Lutherans ; while the whole body of the impoverished knight- hood were only awaiting a favourable opportu- nity to overthrow the power of the magnates, secular and ecclesiastic, with Sickingen as a leader. Such was the state of affairs at the beginning of the year 1521.

The ban placed upon Luther by the Reich- stag marks the date of the complete rupture be- tween the Reforming party and the old Church. Henceforward, many Humanist and Humanis- tically-influenced persons who had supported

ii2 GERMAN SO CIE T Y.

him withdrew from the movement and swelled the ranks of the Conservatives. Foremost amongst these were Pirckheimer, the wealthy merchant and scholar of Nurnberg, and many others who dreaded lest the attack on ecclesias- tical property and authority should, as indeed was the case, issue in a general attack on all property and authority. Thomas Murner, also, who was the type of the " moderate " of the situation, while professing to disapprove of the abuses of the Church, declared that Luther's manner of agitation could only lead to the de- struction of all order, civil no less than eccle- siastical. The two parties were now clearly defined, and the points at issue were plainly irreconcilable with one another or involved irreconcilable details.

The printing press now for the first time appeared as the vehicle for popular literature ; the art of the bard gave place to the art of the typographer, and the art of the preacher saWj confronting it a formidable rival in that o the pamphleteer. Similarly in the French Revolution modern journalism, till then un- important and sporadic, received its first great development, and began seriously to displace

THE REPORMA TION MO VEMENT. 1 1 3

. alike the preacher, the pamphlet, and the broadside. The flood of theological disquisi- tions, satires, dialogues, sermons, which now poured from every press in Germany, over- flowed into all classes of society. These writings are so characteristic of the time that it is worth while devoting a few pages to their consideration, the more especially because it will afford us the opportunity for considering other changes in that spirit of the age, partly diseased growths of decaying medisevalism, and partly the beginnings of the modern critical spirit, which also find expression in the litera- ture of the Reformation period.

CHAPTER III.

POPULAR LITERATURE OF THE REFORMATION.

IN accordance with the conventional view we have assumed in the preceding chapter that the Reichstag at Worms was a landmark in the history of the Reformation. This is, however, only true as regards the political side of the movement. The popular feeling was really quite continuous, at least from 1 5 1 7 to 1525. With the latter year and the collapse of the peasant revolt a change is noticeable. In 1525, the Reformation as a great upstirring of the popular mind of Central Europe, in contradistinction to its character as an academic and purely political movement, reached high-water mark, and may almost be said to have exhausted itself. Until the latter year it was purely a revolutionary move- ment, attracting to itself all the disruptive elements of its time. Later, the reactionary possibilities within it declared themselves. The emancipation from the thraldom of the Catholic

LITERATURE OF REFORMATION PERIOD. 115

hierarchy and its Papal head, it was soon found, meant not emancipation from the arbitrary tyranny of the new political and centralising authorities then springing up, but, on the con- trary, rather their consecration. The ultimate outcome, in fact, of the whole business was, as we shall see later on, the inculcation of the non- resistance theory as regards the civil power, and the clearing of the way for its extremest expression in the doctrine of the Divine Right of Kings, a theory utterly alien to the belief and practice of the Mediaeval Church.

The Reichstag of Worms, by cutting off all possibility of reconciliation, rather gave further edge to the popular revolutionary side of the movement than otherwise. The whole progress of the change in public feeling is plainly traceable in the mass of ephemeral literature that has come down to us from this period, broadsides, pamphlets, satires, folk- songs, and the rest. The anonymous literature to which we more especially refer is distin- guished by its coarse brutality and humour, €ven in the writings of the Reformers, which were themselves in no case remarkable for the suavity of their polemic.

1 1 6 GERMAN SOCIETY.

Hutten, in some of his later vernacular poems, approaches the character of the less cultured broadside literature. To the critical mind it is somewhat amusing to note the enthusiasm with which the modern Dissenting and Puritan class contemplates the period of which we are writing, — an enthusiasm that would probably be effectively damped if the laudators of the Reformation knew the real character of the movement and of its principal actors.

The first attacks made by the broadside literature were naturally directed against the simony and benefice-grabbing of the clergy, a characteristic of the priestly office that has always powerfully appealed to the popular mind. Thus the " Courtisan and Benefice- eater " attacks the parasite of the Roman Court, who absorbs ecclesiastical revenues wholesale, putting in perfunctory locum tenens on the cheap, and begins :—

I'm fairly called a Simonist and eke a Courtisan,

And here to every peasant and every common man

My knavery will very well appear.

I called and cried to all who'd give me ear,

To nobleman and knight and all above me :

" Behold me ! And ye'll find I'll truly love ye."

In another we read : —

LITERATURE OF REFORMATION PERIOD. 117

The Paternoster teaches well

How one for another his prayers should tell,

Thro' brotherly love and not for gold,

And good those same prayers God doth hold.

So too saith Holy Paul right clearly,

Each shall his brother's load bear dearly.

But now, it declares, all that is changed. Now we are being taught just the opposite of God's teachings :—

Such doctrine hath the priests increased, Whom men as masters now must feast, 'Fore all the crowd of Simonists, Whose waxing number no man wists, The towns and thorps seem full of them, And in all lands they're seen with shame. Their violence and knavery Leave not a church or living free.

A prose pamphlet, apparently published about the summer of 1520, shortly after Luther's ex- communication, was the so-called " Wolf Song" (Wolf-gesang), which paints the enemies of Luther as wolves. It begins with a screed on the creation and fall of Adam, and a disserta- tion on the dogma of the Redemption ; and then proceeds : " As one might say, dear brother, instruct me, for there is now in our times so great commotion in faith come upon us. There is one in Saxony who is called Luther, of whom many

1 1 8 GERMAN SOCIETY.

pious and honest folk tell how that he doth write so consolingly the good evangelical (evangeli$cke\ truth. But again I hear that the Pope and the cardinals at Rome have put him under the ban as a heretic ; and certain of our own preachers, too, scold him from their pulpits as a knave, a misleader, and a heretic. I am utterly con- founded, and know not where to turn ; albeit my reason and heart do speak to me even as Luther writeth. But yet again it bethinks me that when the Pope, the cardinal, the bishop, the doctor, the monk and the priest, for the greater part are against him, and so that all save the common men and a few gentlemen, doctors, councillors and knights, are his adversaries, what shall I do ? " " For answer, dear friend, get thee back and search the Scriptures, and thou shalt find that so it hath gone with all the holy prophets even as it now fareth with Doctor Martin Luther, who is in truth a godly Christian and manly heart and only true Pope and Apostle, when he the true office of the Apostles publicly fulfilleth. ... If the godly man Luther were pleasing to the world, that were indeed a true sign that his doctrine were not from God ; for the word of God is a fiery sword, a hammer

LITER A TURE OF RE FORM A TION PERIOD. 1 1 9

that breaketh in pieces the rocks, and not a fox's tail or a reed that may be bent according to our pleasure." Seventeen noxious qualities of the wolf are adduced, his ravenousness, his cunning, his falseness, his cowardice, his thirst for robbery, amongst others. The Popes, the cardinals and the bishops are compared to the wolves in all their attributes : " The greater his pomp and splendour, the more shouldst thou beware of such an one ; for he is a wolf that cometh in the shape of a good shepherd's dog. Beware ! it is against the custom of Christ and His Apostles." It is again but the song of the wolves when they claim to mix themselves with worldly affairs and maintain the temporal sup- remacy. The greediness of the wolf is discern- ible in the means adopted to get money for the building of St. Peter's. The interlocutor is warned against giving to mendicant priests and monks. In this strain is the pamphlet con- tinued, reference being made to Luther's dis- pute with Eck, who is sometimes called Dr. Geek, that is, Dr. Fop.

We have given this as a specimen of the almost purely theological pamphlet ; although, as will have been evident, even this is directly

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connected with the material abuses from which the people were suffering. Another pamphlet of about the same date deals with usury, the burden of which had been greatly increased by the growth of the new commercial combinations already re- ferred to in the Introduction, which combina- tions Dr. Eck had been defending at Bologna on theological grounds, in order to curry favour with the Augsburg merchant-prince, Fugger- schwatz.1 It is called "Concerning Dues. Hither comes a poor peasant to a rich citizen. A priest comes also thereby, and then a monk. Full pleasant to read." A peasant visits a burgher when he is counting money, and asks him where he gets it all from. "My dear peasant," says the townsman, " thou askest me who gave me this money. I will tell thee. There cometh hither a peasant, and beggeth me to lend him ten or twenty gulden. Thereupon I ask him an he possesseth not a goodly meadow or corn- field. ' Yea ! good sir ! ' saith he, ' I have in- deed a good meadow and a good corn-field. The twain are worth a hundred gulden.' Then say I to him : ' Good, my friend, wilt thou pledge me thy holding ? and an thou givest me one gulden 1 See Appendix C.

LITERATURE OF REFORMATION PERIOD. 121

of thy money every year I will lend thee twenty gulden now '. Then is the peasant right glad, and saith he : ' Willingly will I pledge it thee'. ' I will warn thee,' say I, 'that an thou furnishest not the one gulden of money each year, I will take thy holding for my own having.' There- with is the peasant well content, and writeth him down accordingly. I lend him the money ; he payeth me one year, or may be twain, the due ; thereafter can he no longer furnish it, and there- upon I take the holding, and drive away the peasant therefrom. Thus I get the holding and the money. The same things do I with handi- craftsmen. Hath he a good house? Hepledgeth that house until I bring it behind me. There- with gain I much in goods and money, and thus do I pass my days." '' I thought," rejoined the peasant, li that 'twere only the Jew who did usury, but I hear that ye also ply that trade." The burgher answers that interest is not usury, to which the peasant replies that in- terest (Gulf] is only a " subtle name ". The burgher then quotes Scripture, as commanding men to help one another. The peasant readily answers that in doing this they have no right to get advantage from the assistance they proffer.

1 2 2 GERMAN SOCIETY.

" Thou art a good fellow ! " says the townsman. " If I take no money for the money that I lend, how shall I then increase my hoard ? " The peasant then reproaches him that he sees well that his object in life is to wax fat on the sub- stance of others ; " But I tell thee, indeed," he says, " that it is a great and heavy sin ". Where- upon his opponent waxes wroth, and will have nothing more to do with him, threatening to kick him out in the name of a thousand devils ; but the peasant returns to the charge, and expresses his opinion that rich men do not willingly hear the truth. A priest now enters, and to him the townsman explains the dispute. " Dear peasant," says the priest, "wherefore earnest thou hither, that thou shouldst make of a due l usury ? May not a man buy with his money what he will ? " But the peasant stands by his previous assertion, demanding how anything can be considered as bought which is only a pledge. "We priests," replies the ecclesiastic, "must perforce lend money for dues, since

1 We use the word "due" here for the German word Gulf. The corresponding English of the time does not make any distinction between Giilt or interest, and Wucher or usury.

LITERATURE OF REFORMATION PERIOD. 123

thereby we get our living ; " to which, after sundry ejaculations of surprise, the peasant re- torts : "Who gave to you the power? I well hear ye have another God than we poor people. We have our Lord Jesus Christ, who hath for- bidden such money-lending for gain." Hence it comes, he goes on, that land is no longer free ; to attempt to whitewash usury under the name of due or interest, he says, is just the same as if one were to call a child christened Friedrich or Hansel, Fritz or Hans, and then maintain it was no longer the same child. They require no more Jews, he says, since the Christians have taken their business in hand. The townsman is once more about to turn the peasant out of his house, when a monk enters. He then lays the matter before the new-comer, who promises to talk the peasant over with soft words ; for. says he, there is nothing accomplished with vain- glory. He thereupon takes him aside and ex- plains it to him by the illustration of a merchant whose gain on the wares he sells is not called usury, and argues that therefore other forms of gain in business should not be described by this odious name. But the peasant will have none

i24 GERMAN SOCIETY.

of this comparison ; for the merchant, he says, needs to incur much risk in order to gain and traffic with his wares ; while money-lending on security is, on the other hand, without risk or labour, and is a treacherous mode of cheating. Finding that they can make nothing of the obstinate countryman, the others leave him ; but he, as a parting shot, exclaims : " Ah, well-a-day ! I would to have talked with thee at first, but it is now ended. Farewell, gracious sir, and my other kind sirs. I, poor little peasant, I go my way. Farewell, farewell, due remains usury for evermore. Yea, yea ! due, indeed ! " One more example will suffice to give the reader an idea of the character of these first specimens of pamphlet literature ; and this time it shall be taken from the widely-read anony- mous tract entitled " Der Karsthans ". [The Man who wields the Hoe, that is, the Peasant.] This production is specially directed against the monk, Murner, who had at first, as already stated, endeavoured to sit on the fence, admitting certain abuses in the Church, but who before long took sides against Luther and the Reformation, be- coming, in fact, after the disputation with Eck, the author of a series of polemical writings against

LITER A TURE OF RE FORM A TION PERIOD. 1 2 5

the hero of the Reformation. The most im- portant of these appeared in the autumn of 1520; and the " Karsthans " is the answer to them from the popular side of the movement. On the title-page Murner is depicted as a monk with a cat's head ; and in the dialogue there are five dramatis persona, Karsthans, Murner, Luther, a Student, and Mercury, the latter interjecting sarcastic remarks in Latin. Murner begins by mewing like a cat. Karsthans, the peasant, and his son, the student, listen, and describe to each other the manners and characters of cats, especi- ally their slyness and cunning. The son at the bidding of his father is about to pelt the cat with stones, but comes back, saying: "Oh, father! what a loathsome beast ! It is no true cat, though it looketh to be one. It waxeth even greater and greater. Its hue is grey, and it hath a wondrous head." As the father, Karsthans, is seeking his flail that he may annihilate the beast, his son discovers that it is human, at which the father exclaims: "It is a devil!" They ad- vance towards it, and discover it to be a church- man. " I am a clerk and more than a clerk," cries Murner in anger. " I am eke a man and a monk." Karsthans asks pardon ; but Murner

i26 GERMAN SOCIETY.

threatens him, and, as the monk grows more exasperated, the son exhorts the father to modesty in the presence of so exalted a spiritual personage. "Oh, father!" cries the son, "it is indeed a great man. I have read his title. He is a poet, who hath been crowned with the laurel wreath, and is a doctor in both disciplines, and also in the Holy Scriptures. Moreover, he is one of the free regular clergy, and is called Thomas Murner of Strassburg." Some chaff follows between the father and son as to all the monk's spirituality residing in his garb. This gives rise to a quarrel between Karsthans and Murner, in which the student again exhorts his father to moderation in his language, on the ground that Murner is a good jurist. Karsthans demands how it is compatible to be spiritual in the cloister and cunning in the , world, to which Murner replies : Incompatibilia auctoritate Papa unici possunt. (" Incompati- bles can be made to agree by the authority of the Pope.") Karsthans, who calls this a lie, is roundly abused by Murner : " Thou boorish clown, injustum est ut monachis operandibus servi eorum otio torpeunt". ("It is unjust that while monks are working, their servants should

LITERATURE OF REFORMATION PERIOD, 127

slumber in idleness.") " Yea, truly ! " answers Karsthans, " ye stink of secrets." During the dispute Luther enters. " Ah ! " exclaims Murner, "doth that fellow come? There are too many people here. Let me go out by the back." Karsthans wonders at Murner's attitude, as in a general way the Churches were glad to meet each other, and as Luther was everywhere recognised as a good man and a pious Christian. Murner begs Karst- hans not to reveal him, as he is pledged to regard Luther as a heretic, and he is deter- mined to prove him one. Karsthans wants to know why he does not dispute personally with Luther like " Dr. Genzkuss," meaning Eck, in Leipzig. " But, father," interposes the son, " Dr. Eck, as some say, hath not won for himself much honour or victory over Luther." Karsthans is amazed, and replies : " But yet he hath so cried out and fought that scarce an one might speak before him ". " He hath also," the student observes, " received 500 ducats from the Pope for his works ; and," he adds, " if Dr. Eckius had overcome Luther, as he hath been •overcome by him, he (that is, the Pope) would have made of him a camel with broad hoofs,"

i28 GERMAN SOCIETY.

the latter being a current phrase to indicate a cardinal; "and Murner also hopes to pluck some feathers out of the crow, like Eck/J Luther knocks again, and Murner tries to get away, but Karsthans holds him back. After sundry pleasantries between Karsthans and Murner, in the course of which the monk advises the peasant to go to the bookseller, Griininger, in Strassburg, and buy his two books, the one on " Baptism," and the other entitled " A Christian and Brotherly Warning," Murner takes his leave, and Luther enters. On Karsthans wanting to know what brings him to Germany, he replies : " The simplicity of the German people — to wit, that they are of so small an understanding. What any man feigns and lies to them, that they at once believe, and think no further of the matter. Therefore are they so much deceived, and a laughing stock for other peoples." The student reminds his father that Murner had declared Luther to be a heretic. Karsthans thereupon again seeks his flail ; but Luther demands impartiality. Since he had heard Murner he should hear him also. Karsthans agrees ; but the son objects, as the Dominicans and doctors in Cologne, especially

LITERATURE OF REFORMATION PERIOD. 129

Hochstraten,1 had said that it was dangerous to dispute with or give ear to such people, since even the Ketzermeister (refuters of heretics) often came off second best in the contest ; as in the case of Dr. Reuchlin, who in spite of their condemnation had been exonerated by Rome, and the Papal sentence against him revoked. " And again what a miracle happened in the 2oth year at Mainz ! There came a legate from Rome, who was to see that Luther's books were thoroughly burnt ; and while all were awaiting the issue at the appointed place, the hangman asked whether judgment had been given that the books should be burnt ; and since no one could tell him the truth, the care- less fellow would not execute the sentence, and went his way. Oh ! what great shame and ignominy was shown to the legate ! And since he was not willing to bear the shame, he must persuade the hangman with cunning and pre- sents that he should the next day burn two or four little books. I had thought," concluded the student, " that he had not need to have asked further in the face of the Pope's legate and strict command, and of the heretic-con-

1 Hochstraten was one of the great adversaries of Reuchlin.

9

130 GERMAN SOCIETY.

futer's office." Karsthans is indignant, and threatens every " rascal from Rome " with his flail; to which the student rejoins : " Oh, father! thou thinkest it is with the Pope's power as with thy headship in the village which thou hast, where thou canst not of thy will act a straw's breadth except with the knowledge and consent of thy neighbours, who are all vile peasants, and who think there will be sore trouble if they judge other than as witness- bearing dictateth. But it is not so with the Pope ; ofttimes it is : Sic volumus, sic jubemus, oportet ; sufficit, vicisse. (" As we will, as we command, so let it be; it sufficeth to have prevailed.") Karst- hans requires that if the Pope has divine power, he should also do divine works ; whereas the student defends the absolute power of the Pope and the bishops. He complains that his father is an enemy of the priests, like all the rest of the peasants. Karsthans rejoins that there are four propositions on which the whole controversy turns : " Thou art Peter ; on St. Peter I will build my Church. Feed my sheep. What I bid you, that do ye. He who despiseth you, despiseth me also." He then demands of Luther that he should write in the German

LITERATURE OF REFORMATION PERIOD. 131

tongue, and let them see whether they could not save him from the power of the Pope and from the wearers of broad-brimmed hats. But Luther declines such help, and thereupon de- parts. Karsthans is offended that the Pope is called by his son, the student, the highest authority of the Christian faith. u For," says he, " Christ alone is this authority. He is the only bridegroom, and the bride can know no other. Else were she impure and wrinkled, and not a pure bride. Moreover, the bride is not at variance with her bridegroom, but with the Pope she is well-nigh always at variance. That which one will, the other will not. Further- more, the bride is spiritual, but this Roman is bodily and worldly." The student answers : " The bridegroom hath given the bride a bodily head," a point which the peasant disputes, while admit- ting it may be good to have spiritual and carnal authority; "but," says he, "Christ has called to this office not only one but all the Apostles," and he enlarges on the difference between this and the scramble for office then apparent in the State. The student again remonstrates with his peasant father for his unceremonious treatment of the learned man ; and, at the same

1 32 GERMAN SOCIETY.

time, he blames Luther for attacking certain articles of the Christian faith, which all men ought to hold sacred. Karsthans wants to know if he refers to the dogma of the Trinity. This the student denies, saying that it is no such thing as that, or any other question which the theologians seek to prick with the point of a needle. He finally admits that he is referring to the question of the supremacy of the Pope, affirming that it " were a deadly sin to believe that the Pope had stood one quarter of an hour in deadly sin. Item, that the Pope alone shall interpret the right sense and meaning of the Scriptures, and shall alone have full power, not only on earth, but also in Purgatory." The student then proceeds to quote the various Credos, the Athanasian, the Nicene, and so forth ; till at last Karsthans bursts out : " Look you now ! if you make it so, the articles of faith will at last be a great bookful. . . . The pious doctor, Martin Luther, doth teach aright : ' Rest thy faith on Christ alone, and therewith hath the matter an end'." Karst- hans, in addition, proceeds to uphold the right of the common man to his own interpretation of the articles of faith, maintaining the appeal

LITER A TURE OF RE FORM A TION PERIOD. 1 3 3

to Holy Writ against all ecclesiastical authority; " for by the Scripture one knoweth unfail- ingly at all time whether such authority do rule righteously or not, since the Scripture is the true article of covenant which Christ hath left us ". The dispute continues, with occa- sional interjections in Latin by Mercury, in his capacity as cynical chorus, till Karsthans gets very rude indeed, accuses the absent Murner of having lice in his cowl, calls him an evil cat that licks before and scratches behind, and demands why he dare not go to Wittenberg to dispute with Dr. Martin Luther, as Eck had just done. Then with an Aldi, ich far dahin, equivalent to the modern English, " Well, I'm off," from the peasant, a Dii secundent from Mercury, and an Uterque valeat from the student, the party sepa- rates, and the dialogue comes to an end.

We have given a somewhat lengthy account of this dialogue, on account of its importance, even at the risk of wearying the reader. Its drastic assertion of the right of the common man to independence of his superiors in spiritual matters, with its side hints and sug- gestions justifying resistance to all authority that had become oppressive, was not without

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its effects on the social movements of the fol- lowing years. For the reader who wishes to further study this literature we give the titles, which sufficiently indicate their contents, of a selection of other similar pamphlets and broad- sheets : "A New Epistle from the Evil Clergy sent to their righteous Lord, with an answer from their Lord. Most merry to read" (1521). " A Great Prize which the Prince of Hell, hight Lucifer, now offereth to the Clergy, to the Pope, Bishops, Cardinals, and their like " (1521). "A Written Call, made by the Prince of Hell to his dear devoted, of all and every condition in his kingdom" (1521). "Dialogue or Converse of the Apostolicum, Angelica, and other spices of the Druggist, anent Dr. Martin Luther and his disciples " (1521). "A Very Pleasant Dialogue and Remonstrance from the Sheriff of Gaissdorf and his pupil against the pastor of the same and his assistant" (1521). The popularity of " Karsthans " amongst the people is illustrated by the publication and wide distribution of a new " Karsthans " a few months later, in which it is sought to show that the knighthood should make common cause with the peasants, the dramatis persona being Karsthans and Franz

LITER A TURE OF REFORM A TION PERIOD. 1 35

von Sickingen. Referring to the same subject we find a " Dialogue which Franciscus von Sickingen held fore heaven's gate with St. Peter and the Knights of St. George before he was let in ". This was published in 1523, almost immediately after the death of Sick- ingen. "A Talk between a Nobleman, a Monk, and a Courtier" (1523). " A Talk between a Fox and a Wolf" (1523). "A Pleasant Dia- logue between Dr. Martin Luther and the cun- ning Messenger from Hell " (1523). "A Con- versation of the Pope with his Cardinals of how it goeth with him, and how he may destroy the Word of God. Let every man very well note " (1523). " A Christian and Merry Talk, that it is more pleasing to God and more wholesome for men to come out of the monasteries and to marry, than to tarry therein and to burn ; which talk is not with human folly and the false teachings thereof, but is founded alone in the holy, divine, biblical and evangelical Scripture" (1524). "A Pleasant Dialogue of a Peasant with a Monk that he should cast his Cowl from him. Merry and fair to read " (1525). The above is only a selection of specimens taken hap-hazard from the mass of fugitive

136 GERMAN SOCIETY.

literature which the early years of the Refor- mation brought forth. In spite of a certain rough but not unattractive directness of diction, a prolonged reading of them is very tedious, as will have been sufficiently seen from the extracts we have given. Their humour is of a particularly juvenile and obvious character, and consists almost entirely in the childish de- vice of clothing the personages with ridiculous but non-essential attributes, or in placing them in grotesque but pointless situations. Of the more subtle humour, which consists in the dis- covery of real but hidden incongruities, and the perception of what is innately absurd, there is no trace. The obvious abuses of the time are satirised in this way ad nauseam. The rapacity of the clergy in general, the idleness and lasciviousness of the monks, the pomp and luxury of the prince-prelates, the inconsisten- cies of Church traditions and practices with Scripture, with which they could now be com- pared, since it was everywhere circulated in the vulgar tongue, form their never-ending theme. They reveal to the reader a state of things that strikes one none the less in English literature of the period, — the intense interest of all classes

LITER A TURE OF RE FORM A TION PERIOD. 1 3 7

in theological matters. It shows us how they looked at all things through a theological lens. Although we have left this phase of popular thought so recently behind us, we can even now scarcely imagine ourselves back into it. The idea of ordinary men, or of the vast majority, holding their religion as anything else than a very pious opinion absolutely unconnected with their daily life, public or private, has already become almost inconceivable to us. In all the writings of the time, the theological interest is in the forefront. The economic and social ground-work only casually reveals itself. This it is that makes the reading of the sixteenth century polemics so insufferably jejune and dreary. They bring before us the ghosts of controversies in which most men have ceased to take any part, albeit they have not been dead and forgotten long enough to have acquired a revived antiquarian interest. It reminds one of the faint echoes of the doctrinal disputes of a generation ago, which, already dying on the Continent of Europe, still continued to agitate the English middle classes of all ranks, and are remembered now with but a smile at their immense puerility. The great bomb-shell which Luther cast

138 GERMAN SOCIETY.

forth on the 24th of June, 1520, in his address to the German nobility,1 indeed contains strong appeals to the economical and political neces- sities of Germany, and therein we see the veil torn from the half-unconscious motives that lay behind the theological mask ; but, as already said, in the popular literature, with a few exceptions, the theological controversy rules undisputed.

The noticeable feature of all this irruption of the cacoethes scribendi was the direct appeal to the Bible for the settlement not only of strictly theological controversies but of points of social and political ethics also. This practice, which even to the modern Protestant seems insipid and played out after three centuries and a half of wear, had at that time the to us inconceivable charm of novelty ; and the perusal of the litera- ture and controversies of the time shows that men used it with all the delight of a child with a new toy, and seemed never tired of the game of searching out texts to justify their position. The diffusion of the whole Bible in the vernacular, itself a consequence of the rebellion against priestly tradition and the authority of the Fathers, intensified the revolt by making the pastime possible to all ranks of society. 1 " An der Christlichen Adel deutscher Nation."

CHAPTER IV.

THE FOLKLORE OF THE REFORMATION.

Now in the hands of all men, the Bible was not made the basis of doctrinal opinions alone. It lent its support to many of the popular superstitions of the time, and in ad- dition it served as the starting point for new superstitions and for new developments of the older ones. The Pan-daemonism of the New Testament, with its wonder - workings by devilish agencies, its exorcisms of evil spirits and the like, could not fail to have a deep effect on the popular mind. The authority that the book believed to be divinely inspired necessarily lent to such beliefs gave a vividness to the popular conception of the devil and his angels, which is apparent throughout the whole move- ment of the Reformation, and not least in the utterances of the great Luther himself. Indeed, with the Reformation there comes a complete change over the popular conception of the devil and diabolical influences.

It is true that the judicial pursuit of witches (^39)

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and witchcraft, in the earlier Middle Ages only a sporadic incident, received a great impulse from the Bull of Pope Innocent VIII. (1484), to which has been given the title of "Malleus Male- ficorum," or " The Hammer of Witchcraft," directed against the practice of sorcery ; but it was especially amongst the men of the New Spirit that the belief in the prevalence of compacts with the devil, and the necessity for suppressing them, took root, and led to the horrible persecutions that distinguished the "Reformed" Churches on the whole even more than the Catholic.

Luther himself had a vivid belief, tinging all his views and actions, in the ubiquity of the devil and his myrmidons. " The devils," says he, "are near us, and do cunningly contrive every moment without ceasing against our life, our salvation, and our blessedness. ... In woods, waters, and wastes, and in damp, marshy places, there are many devils that seek to harm men. In the black and thick clouds, too, there are some that make storms, hail, lightning, and thunder, that poison the air and the pastures. When such things happen, the philosophers and the physicians ascribe

FOLKLORE OF THE REFORMATION. 141

them to the stars, and show I know not what causes for such misfortunes and plagues." Luther relates numerous instances of personal encounters that he himself had had with the devil. A nobleman invited him, with other learned men from the University of Witten- berg, to take part in a hare hunt. A large, fine hare and a fox crossed the path. The nobleman, mounted on a strong, healthy steed, dashed after them, when, suddenly, his horse fell dead beneath him, and the fox and the hare flew up in the air and vanished. " For," says Luther, " they were devilish spectres."

Again, on another occasion, he was at E isle- ben on the occasion of another hare-hunt, when the nobleman succeeded in killing eight hares, which were, on their return home, duly hung- up for the next day's meal. On the following morning, horses' heads were found in their place. "In mines," says Luther, "the devil oftentimes deceives men with a false appear- ance of gold.'' All disease and all misfortune were the direct work of the devil ; God, who was all good, could not produce either. Luther gives a long history of how he was called to a parish priest, who complained of the devil's

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having created a disturbance in his house by throwing the pots and pans about, and so forth, and of how he advised the priest to exorcise the fiend by invoking his own authority as a pastor of the Church.

At the Wartburg, Luther complained of having been very much troubled by the Satanic arts. When he was at work upon his trans- lation of the Bible, or upon his sermons, or engaged in his devotions, the devil was always making disturbances on the stairs or in the room. One day, after a hard spell of study, he lay down to sleep in his bed, when the devil began pelting him with hazel nuts, a sack of which had been brought to him a few hours before by an attendant. He invoked, however, the name of Christ, and lay down again in bed. There were other more curious and more doubtful recipes for driving away Satan and his emissaries. Luther is never tired of urging that contemptuous treatment and rude chaff are among the most efficacious methods.

There was, he relates, a poor soothsayer, to whom the devil came in visible form, and offered great wealth provided that he would deny Christ and never more do penance. The

FOLKLORE OF THE REFORMATION. 143

devil provided him with a crystal, by which he could foretell events, and thus become rich. This he did ; but Nemesis awaited him, for the devil deceived him one day, and caused him to denounce certain innocent persons as thieves. In consequence, he was thrown into prison, where he revealed the compact that he had made, and called for a confessor. The two chief forms in which the devil appeared were, accord- ing to Luther, those of a snake and a sheep. He further goes into the question of the popu- lation of devils in different countries. On the top of the Pilatus at Luzern is a black pond, which is one of the devil's favourite abodes. In Luther's own country there is also a high mountain, the Poltersberg, with a similar pond. When a stone is thrown into this pond, a great tempest arises, which often devastates the whole neighbourhood. He also alleges Prussia to be full of evil spirits.

Devilish changelings, Luther said, were often placed by Satan in the cradles of human children. " Some maids he often plunges into the water, and keeps them with him until they have borne a child." These children are placed in the beds of mortals, and the true children are taken out and

1 44 GERMAN SOCIE TY.

hurried away. "But," he adds, "such changelings are said not to live more than to the eighteenth or nineteenth year." As a practical application of this, it may be mentioned that Luther advised the drowning of a certain child of twelve years old, on the ground of its being a devil's change- ling. Somnambulism is, with Luther, the result of diabolical agency. " Formerly," says he, " the Papists, being superstitious people, alleged that persons thus afflicted had not been pro- perly baptised, or had been baptised by a drunken priest." The irony of the reference to superstition, considering the "great reformer's" own position, will not be lost upon the reader.

Thus, not only is the devil the cause of pesti- lence, but he is also the immediate agent of nightmare and of nightsweats. At Mtflburg in Thiiringen, near Erfurt, a piper, who was accustomed to pipe at weddings, complained to his priest that the devil had threatened to carry him away and destroy him, on the ground of a practical joke played upon some companions, to wit, for having mixed horse-dung with their wine at a drinking bout. The priest consoled him with many passages of Scripture anent the devil and his ways, with the result that the piper

FOLKLORE OF THE REFORMATION. 145

expressed himself satisfied as regarded the wel- fare of his soul, but apprehensive as regarded that of his body, which was, he asserted, hope- lessly the prey of the devil. In consequence of this, he insisted on partaking of the Sacrament. The devil had indicated to him when he was going to be fetched, and watchers were accord- ingly placed in his room, who sat in their armour and with their weapons, and read the Bible to him. Finally, one Saturday at mid- night, a violent storm arose, that blew out the lights in the room, and hurled the luckless vic- tim out of a narrow window into the street. The sound of fighting and of armed men was heard, but the piper had disappeared. The next morning he was found in a neighbouring ditch, with his arms stretched out in the form of a cross, dead and coal-black. Luther vouches for the truth of this story, which he alleges to have been told him by a parish priest of Gotha, who had himself heard it from the parish priest of Molburg, where the event was said to have taken place.

Amongst the numerous anecdotes of a super- natural character told by " Dr. Martin " is one of a "Poltergeist," or "Robin Goodfellow," who

10

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was exorcised by two monks from the guest- chamber of an inn, and who offered his services to them in the monastery. They gave him a corner in the kitchen. The serving-boy used to torment him by throwing dirty water over him. After unavailing protests, the spirit hung the boy up to a beam, but let him down again before serious harm resulted. Luther states that this " brownie " was well known by sight in the neighbouring town (the name of which he does not give). But by far the larger num- ber of his stories, which, be it observed, are warranted as ordinary occurrences, as to the possibility of which there was no question, are coloured by that more sinister side of super- naturalism so much emphasised by the new theology.

The mediaeval devil was, for the most part, himself little more than a prankish Riibezahl, or Robin Goodfellow ; the new Satan of the Reformers was, in very deed, an arch-fiend, the enemy of the human race, with whom no truce or parley might be held. The old folklore belief in incubi and succubi as the parents of changelings is brought into connection with the theory of direct diabolic begettal. Thus Luther relates

FOLKLORE OF THE REFORMATION. 147

how Friedrich, the Elector of Saxony, told him of a noble family that had sprung from a siiccubus : " Just," says he, " as the Melusina at Luxembourg was also such a succubus, or devil ". In the case referred to. the succubus assumed the shape of the man's dead wife, and lived with him and bore him children, until, one day, he swore at her, when she vanished, leaving only her clothes behind. After giving it as his opinion that all such beings and their offspring are wiles of the devil, he proceeds : "It is truly a grievous thing that the devil can so plague men that he begetteth children in their likeness. It is even so with the nixies in the water, that lure a man therein, in the shape of wife or maid, with whom he doth dally and begetteth offspring of them." The change whereby the beings of the old naive folklore are transformed into the devil or his agents is significant of that darker side of the new theology, which was destined to issue in those horrors of the witchcraft-mania that reached their height at the beginning of the following century.

One more story of a " changeling " before we leave the subject. Luther gives us the follow- ing as having come to his knowledge near Hal-

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berstadt, in Saxony. A peasant had a baby, who sucked out its mother and five nurses, be- sides eating a great deal. Concluding that it was a changeling, the peasant sought the advice of his neighbours, who suggested that he should take it on a pilgrimage to a neighbouring shrine of the Mother of God. While he was crossing a brook on the way, an impish voice from under the water called out to the infant, whom he was carrying in a basket. The brat answered from within the basket, " Ho, ho ! " and the peasant was unspeakably shocked. When the voice from the water proceeded to ask the child what it was after, and received the answer from the hitherto inarticulate babe that it was going to be laid on the shrine of the Mother of God, to the end that it might prosper, the peasant could stand it no longer, and flung basket and baby into the brook. The changeling and the little devil played for a few moments with each other, rolling over and over, and crying "Ho, ho, ho ! " and then they disappeared together. Luther says that these devilish brats may be generally known by their eating and drinking too much, and especially by their exhausting their mother's milk, but they may not develop

FOLKLORE OF THE REFORMATION. 149

any certain signs of their true parentage until eighteen or nineteen years old. The Princess of Anhalt had a child which Luther imagined to be a changeling, and he therefore advised its being drowned, alleging that such creatures were only lumps of flesh animated by the devil or his angels. Some one spoke of a monster which infested the Netherlands, and which went about smelling at people like a dog, and whoever it smelt died. But those that were smelt did not see it, albeit the bystanders did. The people had recourse to vigils and masses. Luther improved the occasion to protest against the "superstition " of masses for the dead, and to insist upon his favourite dogma of faith as the true defence against assaults of the devil.

Among the numerous stories of Satanic com- pacts, we are told of a monk who ate up a load of hay, of a debtor who bit off the leg of his Hebrew creditor and ran off to avoid payment, and of a woman who bewitched her husband so that he vomited lizards. Luther observes, with especial reference to this last case, that lawyers and judges were far too pedantic with their witnesses and with their evidence ; that the devil hardens his clients against torture, and that the

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refusal to confess under torture ought to be of itself sufficient proof cf dealings with the prince of darkness. "Towards such," says he, "we should show no mercy ; I would burn them my- self." Black magic or witchcraft he proceeds to characterise as the greatest sin a human being can be guilty of, as, in fact, high treason against God Himself — crimen l&sce majestatis divince. The conversation closes with a storv of how

J

Maximilian's father, the Emperor Friedrich, who seems to have obtained a reputation for magic arts, invited a well-known magician to a banquet, and on his arrival fixed claws on his hands and hoofs on his feet by his cunning. His guest, being ashamed, tried to hide the claws under the table as long as he could, but finally he had to show them, to his great dis- comfiture. But he determined to have his revenge, and asked his host whether he would permit him to give proofs of his own skill. The Emperor assenting, there at once arose a great noise outside the window. Friedrich sprang up from the table, and leaned out of the casement to see what was the matter. Imme- diately an enormous pair of stag's horns ap- peared on his head, so that he could not draw

FOLKLORE OF THE REFORMATION. 151

it back. Finding the state of the case, the Emperor exclaimed : u Rid me of them again ! Thou hast won ! " Luther's comment on this was that he was always glad to see one devil getting the best of another, as it showed that some were stronger than others.

All this belongs, roughly speaking, to the side of the matter which regards popular theo- logy ; but there is another side which is con- nected more especially with the New Learning. This other school, which sought to bring the somewhat elastic elements of the magical theory of the universe into the semblance of a systema- tic whole, is associated with such names as those of Paracelsus, Cornelius Agrippa, and the Abbot von Trittenheim. The fame of the first named was so great throughout Germany that when he visited any town the occasion was looked upon as an event of exceeding importance.1 Para- celsus fully shared in the beliefs of his age, in spite of his brilliant insights on certain occa- sions. What his science was like may be imagined when we learn that he seriously speaks of animals who conceive through the

1 Cf. Sebastian Franck, Chronica, for an account of a visit of Paracelsus to Niirnberg.

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mouth, of basilisks whose glance is deadly, of petrified storks changed into snakes, of the still- born young of the lion which are afterwards brought to life by the roar of their sire, of frogs falling in a shower of rain, of ducks transformed into frogs, and of men born from beasts ; the menstruation of women he regarded as a venom whence proceeded flies, spiders, earwigs, and all sorts of loathsome vermin ; night was caused, not by the absence of the sun, but by the pre- sence of the stars, which were the positive cause of the darkness. He relates having seen a magnet capable of attracting the eyeball from its socket as far as the tip of the nose ; he knows of salves to close the mouth so effectually that it has to be broken open again by mechanical means, and he writes learnedly on the infallible signs of witchcraft. By mixing horse-dung with human semen he believed he was able to produce a medium from which, by chemical treatment in a retort, a diminutive human being, or homunculus, as he called it, could be produced. The spirits of the elements, the sylphs of the air, the gnomes of the earth, the salamanders of the fire, and the undines of the water, were to him real and undoubted existences in nature.

FOLKLORE OF THE REFORMATION. 153

Strange as all these beliefs seem to us now, they were a very real factor in the intellectual concep- tions of the Renaissance period, no less than of the Middle Ages, and amidst them there is to befound at times a foreshadowing of more modern know- ledge. Many other persons were also more or less associated with the magical school, amongst them Franz von Sickingen. Reuchlin himself, by his Hebrew studies, and especially by his introduction of the Kabbala to Gentile readers, also contributed a not unimportant influence in determining the course of the movement. The line between the so-called black magic, or operations conducted through the direct agency of evil spirits, and white magic, which sought to subject nature to the human will by the dis- covery of her mystical and secret laws, or the character of the quasi-personified intelligent principles under whose form nature presented herself to their minds, had never throughout the Middle Ages been very clearly defined. The one always had a tendency to shade off into the other, so that even Roger Bacon's practices were, although not condemned, at least looked upon somewhat doubtfully by the Church. At the time of which we treat, how-

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ever, the interest in such matters had become universal amongst all intelligent persons. The scientific imagination at the close of the Middle Ages and during the Renaissance period was mainly occupied with three questions : the dis- covery of the means of transmuting the baser metals into gold, or otherwise of producing that object of universal desire; to discover the Elixir Vitse, by which was generally understood the invention of a drug which would have the effect of curing all diseases, restoring man to perennial youth, and, in short, prolonging human life indefinitely ; and, finally, the search for the Philosopher's Stone, the happy possessor of which would not only be able to achieve the first two, but also, since it was supposed to con- tain the quintessence of all the metals, and therefore of all the planetary influences to which the metals corresponded, would have at his command all the forces which mould the des- tinies of men. In especial connection with the latter object of research may be noted the uni- versal interest in astrology, whose practitioners were to be found at every Court, from that of the Emperor himself to that of the most insigni- ficant prince or princelet, and whose advice was

FOLKLORE OF THE REFORMATION. 155

sought and carefully heeded on all important occasions. Alchemy and astrology were thus the recognised physical sciences of the age, under the auspices of which a Copernicus and a Tycho Brahe were born and educated.

CHAPTER V.

THE GERMAN TOWN.

FROM what has been said the reader may form for himself an idea of the intellectual and social life of the German town of the period. The wealthy patrician class, whose mainstay politically was the Rath, gave the social tone to the whole. In spite of the sharp and some- times brutal fashion in which class distinctions asserted themselves then, as throughout the Middle Ages, there was none of that aloofness between class and class which characterises the bourgeois society of the present day. Each town, were it great or small, was a little world in itself, so that every citizen knew every other citizen more or less. The schools attached to its ecclesiastical institutions were practically free of access to all the children whose parents could find the means to maintain them during their studies ; and consequently the intellectual differences between the different classes were by no means necessarily propor- tionate to the difference in social position. So

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THE GERMAN TOWN. 157

far as culture and material prosperity were con- cerned, the towns of Bavaria and Franconia, Munich, Augsburg, Regensburg, and perhaps above all Nlirnberg, represented the high- water mark of mediaeval civilisation as regards town-life. On entering the burg, should it have happened to be in time of peace and in day- light, the stranger would clear the drawbridge and the portcullis without much challenge, passing along streets lined with the houses and shops of the burghers, in whose open frontages the master and his apprentices and gesellen plied their trades, discussing eagerly over their work the politics of the town, and at this period probably the theological questions which were uppermost in men's minds, our visitor would make his way to some hostelry, in whose courtyard he would dismount from his horse, and, entering the common room, or Stube, with its rough but artistic furniture of carved oak, partake of his flagon of wine or beer, according to the district in which he was travelling, whilst the host cracked a rough and possibly coarse jest with the other guests, or narrated to them the latest gossip of the city. The stranger would probably find himself be-

158 GERMAN SOCIETY,

fore long the object of interrogatories respecting his native place and the object of his journey (although his dress would doubtless have given general evidence of this), whether he were a merchant or a travelling scholar or a practiser of medicine ; for into one of these categories it might be presumed the humble but not servile traveller would fall. Were he on a diplomatic mission from some potentate he would be travelling at the least as a knight or a noble, with spurs and armour, and moreover would be little likely to lodge in a public house of enter- tainment.

In the Stube he would probably see drinking heavily, representatives of the ubiquitous Lands- knechte, the mercenary troops enrolled for im- perial purposes by the Emperor Maximilian towards the end of the previous century, who in the intervals of war were disbanded and wandered about spending their pay, and thus constituted an excessively disintegrative element in the life of the time. A contemporary writer x •describes them as the curse of Germany, and stigmatises them as "unchristian, God-forsaken folk, whose hand is ever ready in striking, stab- 1 Sebastian Franck, Chronica, ccxvii.

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bing, robbing, burning, slaying, gaming, who delight in wine-bibbing, whoring, blaspheming, and in the making of widows and orphans ".

Presently perhaps a noise without indicates the arrival of a new guest. All hurry forth into the courtyard, and their curiosity is more keenly whetted when they perceive by the yellow knitted scarf round the neck of the new-comer that he is an itinerans scholasticus, or travelling scholar, who brings with him not only the possibility of news from the outer world, so important in an age when journals were non-existent, and communications irregular and deficient, but also a chance of beholding wonder-workings, as well as of being cured of the ailments which local skill had treated in vain. Already surrounded by a crowd of admirers waiting for the words of wisdom to fall from his lips, he would start on that exordium which bore no little resemblance to the patter of the modern quack, albeit interlarded with many a Latin quotation and great display of mediaeval learning. " Good people and worthy citizens of this town," he might say, " behold in me the great master . . . prince of necromancers, astrologer, second mage, chiromancer, agro-

160 GERMAN SOCIETY.

mancer, pyromancer, hydromancer. My learn- ing is so profound that were all the works of Plato and Aristotle lost to the world, I could from memory restore them with more elegance than before. The miracles of Christ were not so great as those which I can perform wherever and as often as I will. Of all alchemists I am the first, and my powers are such that I can obtain all things that man desires. My shoe- buckles contain more learning than the heads of Galen and Avicenna, and my beard has more experience than all your high schools. I am monarch of all learning. I can heal you of all diseases. By my secret arts I can procure you wealth. I am the philosopher of philoso- phers. I can provide you with spells to bind the most potent of the devils in Hell. I can cast your nativities and foretell all that shall befall you, since I have that which can unlock the secrets of all things that have been, that are, and that are to come." 1 Bringing forth strange- looking phials, covered with cabalistic signs, a crystal globe and an astrolabe, followed by an

1 Cf. Trittheim's letter to Wirdung of Hasfurt regarding Faust. J. Tritthemii Epistolarum Familiarum, 1536, bk. ii., ep. 47 ; also the works of Paracelsus.

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imposing scroll of parchment inscribed with mys- terious Hebraic-looking characters, the travel- ling student would probably drive a roaring trade amongst the assembled townsmen in love- philtres, cures for the ague and the plague, and amulets against them, horoscopes, predictions of fate and the rest of his stock-in-trade.

As evening approaches, our traveller strolls forth into the streets and narrow lanes of the town, lined with overhanging gables that al- most meet overhead and shut out the light of the afternoon sun, so that twilight seems already to have fallen. Observing that the burghers, with their wives and children, the work of the day being done, are all wending toward the western gate, he goes along with the stream till, passing underneath the heavy portcullis and through the outer rampart, he finds himself in the plain outside, across which a rugged bridle- path leads to a large quadrangular meadow, rough and more or less worn, where a con- siderable crowd has already assembled. This is the Allerwiese, or public pleasure ground of the town. Here there are not only high festivities on Sundays and holidays, but every fine evening in summer numbers of citizens

ii

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gather together to watch the apprentices exer- cising their strength in athletic feats, and competing with one another in various sports, such as running, wrestling, spear-throwing, sword-play, and the like, wherein the inferior rank sought to imitate and even emulate the knighthood, whilst the daughters of the city watched their progress with keen interest and applauding laughter. As the shadows deepen and darkness falls upon the plain, our visitor joins the groups which are now fast leaving the meadow, and repasses the great embrasure just as the rushlights begin to twinkle in the windows, and a swinging oil-lamp to cast a dim light here and there in the streets. But as his company passes out of a narrow lane debouching on to the chief market-place their progress is stopped by the sudden rush of a mingled crowd of un- ruly apprentices and journeymen returning from their sports, with hot heads well beliquored. Then from another side street there is a sudden flare of torches borne aloft by guildsmen come out to quell the tumult and to send off the ap- prentices to their dwellings, whilst the watch also bears down and carries off some of the more turbulent of the journeymen to pass the

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night in one of the towers which guard the city wall. At last, however, the visitor reaches his inn by the aid of a friendly guildsman and his torch ; and retiring to his chamber with its straw- covered floor, rough oaken bedstead, hard mat- tress, and coverings not much better than horse- cloths, he falls asleep as the bell of the minster tolls out ten o'clock over the now dark and silent city.

Such approximately would have been the view of a German city in the sixteenth century as presented to a traveller in a time of peace. More stirring times, however, were as frequent, — times when the tocsin rang out from the steeple all night long, calling the citizens to arms. By such scenes, needless to say, the year of the Peasant War was more than usually characterised. In the days when every man carried arms and knew how to use them, when the fighting instinct was imbibed with the mother's milk, when every week saw some street brawl, often attended by loss of life, and that by no means always among the most worthless and dissolute of the inhabitants, every dissatisfaction immedi- ately turned itself into an armed revolt, whether it were of the apprentices or the journeymen

1 64 GERMAN SOCIETY.

against the guild-masters, the body of the towns- men against the patriciate, the town itself against its feudal superior, where it had one, or of the knighthood against the princes. The extremity to which disputes can at present be carried without resulting in a breach of the peace, as evinced in modern political and trade conflicts, exacerbated though some of them are, was a thing unknown in the Middle Ages, and indeed to any considerable extent until comparatively recent times. The sacred right of insurrec- tion was then a recognised fact of life, and but very little straining of a dispute led to a resort to arms. In the subsequent chapters we have to deal with the more important of those out- bursts to which the ferment due to the dis- solution of the mediaeval system of things, then beginning throughout Central Europe, gave rise, of which the religious side is represented by what is known as the Reformation.

CHAPTER VI.

THE REVOLT OF THE KNIGHTHOOD.

WE have already pointed out in more than one place the position to which the smaller nobility, or the knighthood, had been reduced by the concatenation of causes which was bringing about the dissolution of the old mediaeval order of things, and, as a consequence, ruining the knights both economically and politically : — eco- nomically by the rise of capitalism as repre- sented by the commercial syndicates of the cities ; by the unprecedented power and wealth of the city confederations, especially of the Hanseatic j League ; by the rising importance of the newly- developed world-market; by the growing luxury and the enormous rise in the prices of commodi- ties concurrently with the reduction in value of the feudal land-tenures ; and by the limitation of the possibilities of acquiring wealth by highway robbery, owing to imperial constitutions on the one hand and increased powers of defence on the

part of the trading community on the other : —

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politically, by the new modes of warfare in which artillery and infantry, composed of compara- tively well-drilled mercenaries (Landsknechte\ were rapidly making inroads into the omnipo- tence of the ancient feudal chivalry, and reduc- ing jhe importance of individual skill or prowess in the handling of weapons, and by the develop- ment of the power of the princes or higher nobility, partly due to the influence which the Roman civil law now began to exercise over thlTolder ^customary constitution of the Empire, and partly to the budding centralism of autho- rity— which in France and England became a national centralisation, but in Germany, in spite of the temporary ascendancy of Charles V., finally issued in a provincial centralisation in which the

princes were de_ facto independent monarchs.

The imperial constitution of 1495, forbidding private war, applied, it must be remembered, only to the lesser nobility and not to the higher, thereby placing the former in a decidedly igno- minious position as regards their feudal superiors. And though this particular enactment had little immediate result, yet it was none the less re- sented as a blow struck at the old knightly privilege.

THE REVOLT OF THE KNIGHTHOOD. 167

The mental attitude of the knighthood in the face of this progressing change in their position was naturally an ambiguous one, composed partly of a desire to hark back to the haughty inde- pendence of feudalism, and partly of sympathy with the growing discontent among other classes and with the new spirit generally. In order that the knights might succeed in recovering their old or even in maintaining their actual position against the higher nobility, the princes, backed as these now largely were by the imperial power, the co-operation of the cities was absolutely essential to them, but the obstacles in the way of such a co-operation proved insurmountable. The towns hated the knights for their lawless prac- tices, which rendered trade unsafe and not in- frequently cost the lives of the citizens. The knights for the most part, with true feudal hauteur, scorned and despised the artisans and traders who had no territorial family name and were un- exercised in the higher chivalric arts. The griev- ances of the two parties were, moreover, not identical, although they had their origin in the same causes. The cities were in the main solely concerned to maintain their old independent position, and especially to curb the growing dis-

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position at this time of the other estates to use them as milch cows from which to draw the taxation necessary to the maintenance of the Empire. For example, at the Reichstag opened at Nurnberg on the i/th November, 1522— to discuss the questions of the establishment of perpetual peace within the Empire, of organis- ing an energetic resistance to the inroads of the Turks, and of placing on a firm foundation the Imperial Privy Council (Kammergericht) and the Supreme Council (Reichsregimenf) — at which were represented twenty-six imperial towns, thirty-eight high prelates, eighteen princes, and twenty-nine counts and barons— the representatives of the cities complained grievously that their attendance was reduced to a farce, since they were always out-voted, and hence obliged to accept the decisions of the other estates. They stated that their position was no longer bearable, and for the first time drew up an Act of Protest, which further com- plained of the delay in the decisions of the imperial courts ; of their sufferings from the right of private war which was still allowed to subsist in defiance of the constitution ; of the increase of customs-stations on the part of the

THE REVOLT OF THE KNIGHTHOOD. 169

princes and prince-prelates ; and, finally, of the debasement of the coinage due to the unscru- pulous practices of these notables and of the Jews. The only sympathy the other estates vouchsafed to the plaints of the cities was with regard to the right of private war, which the higher nobles were also anxious to suppress amongst the lower, though without prejudice of course to their own privileges in this line. All the other articles of the Act of Protest were coolly waived aside. From all this it will be seen that not much co-operation wras to be expected between such heterogeneous bodies as the knighthood and the free towns, in spite [of their common interest in checking the

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threateningly advancing power of the princes and the central imperial authority, which was for the most part manned and manipulated by the princes.

Amid the decaying knighthood there was, as we have already intimated, one figure which stood out head and shoulders above every other noble of the time, whether prince or knight ; and that was Franz von Sickingen. He has been termed, not without truth, " the last flowTer of German chivalry," since in him

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the old knightly qualities flashed up in conjunc- tion with the old knightly power and splendour with a brightness hardly known even in the palmiest days of mediaeval life. It was, however, the last flicker of the light of German chivalry. With the death of Sickingen and the collapse of his revolt the knighthood of Central Europe ceased any longer to play an independent part in history.

Sickingen, although technically only one of the lower nobility, was deemed about the time of Luther's appearance to hold the immediate destinies of the Empire in his hand. Wealthy, inspiring confidence and enthusiasm as a leader, possessed of more than one powerful and strategically-situated stronghold, he held court at his favourite residence, the Castle of the Landstuhl, in the Rhenish Palatinate, in a style which many a prince of the Empire might have envied. As honoured