Beneath the whole mediaeval system lay the idea that the land was the only economic basis of wealth. During the earlier Middle Ages this was largely true everywhere, and was specially so in Germany. Each little district produced almost all that it needed for its own wants; and the economic value of the town consisted in its being a corporation of artisans exchanging the fruits of their industries for the surplus of farm produce which the peasants brought to their market-place. But the increasing trade of the towns, developed at first along the greater rivers, the arteries of the countries, gradually produced another source of wealth; and this commerce made great strides after the Crusades had opened the Eastern markets to European traders. Trade, commerce, and manufactures were the life of the towns, and were rapidly increasing their importance.

In mediaeval times each town was an independent economic centre, and the regulation of industry and of trade was an exclusively munic.i.p.al affair.

This state of matters had changed in some countries before the time of the Reformation, and statesmen had begun to recognise the importance of a national trade, and to take steps to further it; but in Germany, chiefly owing to its hopeless divisions, the old state of matters remained, and the munic.i.p.alities continued to direct and control all commercial and industrial affairs.

The towns had originally grown up under the protection of the Emperor, or of some great lord of the soil, or of an ecclesiastical prince or foundation, and the early officials were the representatives of these fostering powers. The descendants of this early official cla.s.s became known as the "patricians" of the city, and they regarded all the official positions as the hereditary privileges of their cla.s.s. The town population was thoroughly organised in a.s.sociations of workmen, commonly called "gilds," which at first concerned themselves simply with the regulation and improvement of the industry carried on, and with the education and recreations of the workers. But these "gilds" soon a.s.sumed a political character. The workmen belonging to them formed the fighting force needed for the independence and protection of the city. Each "gild" had its fighting organisation, its war banner, its armoury; and its members were trained to the use of arms, and practised it in their hours of recreation.

The "gilds" therefore began to claim some share in the government of the town, and in most German cities, in the decades before the Reformation, the old aristocratic government of the "patricians" had given place to the more democratic rule of the "gilds." The chief offices connected with the "gilds" insensibly tended to become hereditary in a few leading families, and this created a second "patriciat," whose control was resented by the great ma.s.s of the workmen. Nurnberg was one of the few great German cities where the old "patricians" continued to rule down to the times of the Reformation.

These "gilds" were for the most part full of business energy, which showed itself in the twofold way of making such regulations as they believed would insure good workmanship, and of securing facilities for the sale of their wares. All the workmen, it was believed, were interested in the production of good articles, and the bad workmanship of one artisan was regarded as bringing discredit upon all. Hence, as a rule, every article was tested in private before it was exposed for public sale, and various punishments were devised to check the production of inferior goods. Thus in Bremen every badly made pair of shoes was publicly destroyed at the pillory of the town. Such regulations belonged to the private administration of the towns, and differed in different places. Indeed, the whole munic.i.p.al government of the German cities presents an endless variety, due to the local history and other conditions affecting the individual towns. While the production was a matter for private regulation in each centre of industry, distribution involved the towns in something like a common policy. It demanded safe means of communication between one town and another, between the towns and the rural districts, and safe outlets to foreign lands. It needed roads, bridges, and security of travel. The towns banded themselves together, and made alliances with powerful feudal n.o.bles to secure these advantages. Such was the origin of the great Hanseatic League, which had its beginnings in Flanders, spread over North Germany, included the Scandinavian countries, and grew to be a European power.(48) The less known leagues among the cities of South Germany did equally good service, and they commonly secured outlets to Venice, Florence, and Genoa, by alliances with the peasantry in whose hands were the chief pa.s.ses of the Alps. All this meant an opposition between the burghers and the n.o.bles-an opposition which was continuous, which on occasion flamed out into great wars, and which compelled the cities to maintain civic armies, composed partly of their citizens and partly of hired troops. It was reckoned that Stra.s.sburg and Augsburg together could send a fighting force of 40,000 men into the field.

The area of trade, though, according to modern ideas, restricted, was fairly extensive. It included all the countries in modern Europe and the adjacent seas. The sea-trade was carried on in the Mediterranean and Black Seas, in the Baltic and North Seas, and down the western coasts of France and Spain. The North Sea was the great fishing ground, and large quant.i.ties of dried fish, necessary for the due keeping of Lent, were despatched in coasting vessels, and by the overland routes to the southern countries of Europe. Furs, skins, and corn came from Russia and the northern countries. Spain, some parts of Germany, and above all England, were the wool-exporting countries. The eastern counties of England, many towns in Germany and France, and especially the Low Countries, were the centres of the woollen manufactures. The north of France was the great flax-growing country. In Italy, at Barcelona in Spain, and at Lyons in France, silk was produced and manufactured. The spices and dried fruits of the East, and its silks and costly brocades and feathers, came from the Levant to Venice, and were carried north through the great pa.s.ses which pierce the range of the Alps.

Civic statesmen did their best, by mutual bargains and the establishment of factories, to protect and extend trading facilities for their townsmen.

The German merchant had his magnificent _Fondaco dei Tedeschi_ in Venice, his factories of the Hanseatic League in London, Bruges, Bergen, and even in far-off Novgorod; and Englishmen had also their factories in foreign parts, within which they could buy and sell in peace.

The perils of the German merchant, in spite of all civic leagues, were at home rather than abroad. His country swarmed with Free n.o.bles, each of whom looked upon himself as a sovereign power, with full right to do as he pleased within his own dominions, whether these were an extensive princ.i.p.ality or a few hundred acres surrounding his castle. He could impose what tolls or customs dues he pleased on the merchants whose heavily-laden waggons entered his territories. He had customary rights which made bad roads and the lack of bridges advantages to the lord of the soil. If an axle or wheel broke, if a waggon upset in crossing a dangerous ford, the bales thrown on the path or stranded on the banks of the stream could be claimed by the proprietor of the land. Worse than all were the perils from the robber-knights-men who insisted on their right to make private war even when that took the form of highway robbery, and who largely subsisted on the gains which came, as they said, from making their "horses bite off the purses of travellers."

In spite of all these hindrances, a capitalist cla.s.s gradually arose in Germany. Large profits, altogether apart from trade, could be made by managing, collecting, and forwarding the money coming from the universal system of Indulgences. It was in this way that the Fuggers of Augsburg first rose to wealth. Money soon bred money. During the greater part of the Middle Ages there was no such thing as lending out money on interest, save among the Italian merchants of North Italy or among the Jews. The Church had always prohibited what it called usury. But Churchmen were the first to practise the sin they had condemned. The members of ecclesiastical corporations began to make useful advances, charging an interest of from 7 to 12 per cent.-moderate enough for the times.

Gradually the custom spread among the wealthy laity, who did not confine themselves to these reasonable profits, and we find Sebastian Brand inveighing against the "Christian Jews," who had become worse oppressors than the Israelite capitalists whom they copied.

But the great alteration in social conditions, following change in the distribution of wealth, came when the age of geographical discovery had made a world commerce a possible thing.

-- 2. Geographical Discoveries and the beginning of a World Trade.

The fifteenth century from its beginning had seen one geographical discovery after another. Perhaps we may say that the sailors of Genoa had begun the new era by reaching the Azores and Madeira. Then Dom Henrique of Portugal, Governor of Ceuta, organised voyages of trade and discovery down the coast of Africa. Portuguese, Venetian, and Genoese captains commanded his vessels. From 1426, expedition after expedition was sent forth, and at his death in 1460 the coast of Africa as far as Guinea had been explored.

His work was carried on by his countrymen. The Guinea trade in slaves, gold, and ivory was established as early as 1480; the Congo was reached in 1484; and Portuguese ships, under Bartholomew Diaz, rounded the Cape of Good Hope in 1486. During these later years a new motive had prompted the voyages of exploration. The growth of the Turkish power in the east of Europe had destroyed the commercial colonies and factories on the Black Sea; the fall of Constantinople had blocked the route along the valley of the Danube; and Venice had a monopoly of the trade with Egypt and Syria, the only remaining channels by which the merchandise from the East reached Europe. The great commercial problem of the times was how to get some hold of the direct trade with the East. It was this that inspired Bristol skippers, familiar with Iceland, with the idea that by following old Norse traditions they might find a path by way of the North Atlantic; that sent Columbus across the Mid-Atlantic to discover the Bahamas and the continent of America; and that drove the more fortunate Portuguese round the Cape of Good Hope. Young Vasco da Gama reached the goal first, when, after doubling the Cape, he sailed up the eastern coast of Africa, reached Mombasa, and then boldly crossed the Indian Ocean to Calicut, the Indian emporium for that rich trade which all the European nations were anxious to share. The possibilities of a world commerce led to the creation of trading companies; for a larger capital was needed than individual merchants possessed, and the formation of these companies overshadowed, discredited, and finally destroyed the gild system of the mediaeval trading cities. Trade and industry became capitalised to a degree previously unknown. One great family of capitalists, the Welser, had factories in Rome, Milan, Genoa, and Lyons, and tapped the rich Eastern trade by their houses in Antwerp, Lisbon, and Madeira. They even tried, unsuccessfully, to establish a German colony on the new continent-in Venezuela. Another, the Fuggers of Augsburg, were interested in all kinds of trade, but especially in the mining industry. It is said that the mines of Thuringia, Carinthia, and the Tyrol within Germany, and those of Hungary and Spain outside it, were almost all in their hands. The capital of the family was estimated in 1546 at sixty-three millions of gulden. This increase of wealth does not seem to have been confined to a few favourites of fortune.

It belonged to the ma.s.s of the members of the great trading companies. Von Bezold instances a "certain native of Augsburg" whose investment of 500 gulden in a merchant company brought him in seven years 24,500 gulden.

Merchant princes confronted the princes of the State and those of the Church, and their presence and power dislocated the old social relations.

The towns, the abodes of these rich merchants, acquired a new and powerful influence among the complex of national relations, until it is not too much to say, that if the political future of Germany was in the hands of the secular princes, its social condition came to be dominated by the burgher cla.s.s.

-- 3. Increase in Wealth and luxurious Living.

Culture, which had long abandoned the cloisters, came to settle in the towns. We have already seen that they were the centres of German Humanism and of the New Learning. The artists of the German Renaissance belonged to the towns, and their princ.i.p.al patrons were the wealthy burghers. The rich merchants displayed their civic patriotism in aiding to build great churches; in erecting magnificent chambers of commerce, where merchandise could be stored, with halls for buying and selling, and rooms where the merchants of the town could consult about the interests of the civic trade; in building _Artushofe_ or a.s.sembly rooms, where the patrician burghers had their public dances, dinners, and other kinds of social entertainments; in raising great towers for the honour of the town. They built magnificent private houses. aeneas Sylvius tells us that in Nurnberg he saw many burgher houses that befitted kings, and that the King of Scotland was not as n.o.bly housed as a Nurnberg burgher of the second rank.

They filled these dwellings with gold and silver plate, and with costly Venetian gla.s.s; their furniture was adorned with delicate wood-carving; costly tapestries, paintings, and engravings decorated the walls; and the reception-room or _stube_ was the place of greatest display. The towns in which all this wealth was acc.u.mulated were neither populous nor powerful.

They cannot be compared with the city republics of Italy, where the town ruled over a large territory: the lands belonging to the imperial cities of Germany were comparatively of small extent. Nor could they boast of the population of the great cities of the Netherlands. Nurnberg, it is said, had a population of a little over 20,000 in the middle of the fifteenth century. Stra.s.sburg, a somewhat smaller one. The population of Frankfurt-on-the-Main was about 10,000 in 1440.(49) The number of inhabitants had probably increased by one-half more in the decades immediately preceding the Reformation. But all the great towns, with their elaborate fortifications, handsome buildings, and ma.s.sive towers, had a very imposing appearance in the beginning of the sixteenth century.

There was, however, another side to all this. There was very little personal "comfort" and very little personal refinement among the rich burghers and n.o.bles of Germany-much less than among the corresponding cla.s.ses in Italy, the Netherlands, and France. The towns were badly drained, if drained at all; the streets were seldom paved, and mud and filth acc.u.mulated in almost indescribable ways; the garbage was thrown out of the windows; and troops of swine were the ordinary scavengers. The increase of wealth showed itself chiefly in all kinds of sensual living.

Preachers, economists, and satirists denounce the luxury and immodesty of the dress both of men and women, the gluttony and the drinking habits of the rich burghers and of the n.o.bility of Germany. We learn from Hans von Schweinichen that n.o.blemen prided themselves on having men among their retainers who could drink all rivals beneath the table, and that n.o.ble personages seldom met without such a drinking contest.(50) The wealthy, learned, and artistic city of Nurnberg possessed a public waggon, which every night was led through the streets to pick up and convey to their homes drunken burghers found lying in the filth of the streets. The _Chronicle of the Zimmer Family_ relates that at the castle of Count Andrew of Sonnenberg, at the conclusion of a carnival dance and after the usual "sleeping drink" had been served round, one of the company went to the kennels and carried to the ball-room buckets of sc.r.a.ps and slops gathered to feed the hounds, and that the lords and ladies amused themselves by flinging the contents at each other, "to the great detriment," the chronicler adds, "of their clothes and of the room."(51) A like licence pervaded the relations between men and women, of which it will perhaps suffice to say that the public baths, where, be it noted, the bathing was often promiscuous, were such that they served Albert Durer and other contemporary painters the purpose of a "life school" to make drawings of the nude.(52) The conversation and behaviour of the n.o.bles and wealthy burghers of Germany in the decades before the Reformation displayed a coa.r.s.eness which would now be held to disgrace the lowest cla.s.ses of the population in any country.(53)

The gradual capitalising of industry had been sapping the old "gild"

organisation within the cities; the extension of commerce, and especially the shifting of the centre of external trade from Venice to Antwerp, in consequence of the discovery of the new route to the Eastern markets, and above all, the growth of the great merchant companies, whose world-trade required enormous capital, overshadowed the "gilds" and destroyed their influence. The rise and power of this capitalist order severed the poor from the rich, and created, in a sense unknown before, a proletariat cla.s.s within the cities, which was liable to be swollen by the influx of discontented and ruined peasants from the country districts. The corruption of morals, which reached its height in the city life of the first quarter of the sixteenth century, intensified the growing hatred between the rich burgher and the poor workman. The ostentatious display of burgher wealth heightened the natural antipathy between merchant and n.o.ble. The universal hatred of the merchant cla.s.s is a p.r.o.nounced feature of the times. "They increase prices, make hunger, and slay the poor folk,"

was a common saying. Men like Ulrich von Hutten were prepared to justify the robber-knights because they attacked the merchants, who, he said, were ruining Germany. Yet the merchant cla.s.s increased and flourished, and with them, the towns which they inhabited.

-- 4. The Condition of the Peasantry.

The condition of the peasantry in Germany has also to be described. The folk who practise husbandry usually form the most stable element in any community, but they could not avoid being touched by the economic movements of the time. The seeds of revolution had long been sown among the German peasantry, and peasant risings had taken place in different districts of south-central Europe from the middle of the fourteenth down to the opening years of the sixteenth centuries. It is difficult to describe accurately the state of these German peasants. The social condition of the n.o.bles and the burghers has had many an historian, and their modes of life have left abundant traces in literature and archaeology; but peasant houses and implements soon perished, and the chronicles seldom refer to the world to which the "land-folk" belonged, save when some local peasant rising or the tragedy of the Peasants' War thrust them into history. Our main difficulty, however, does not arise so much from lack of descriptive material-for that can be found when diligently sought for-as from the varying, almost contradictory statements that are made. Some contemporary writers condescend to describe the peasant cla.s.s. A large number of collections of _Weisthumer_, the consuetudinary laws which regulated the life of the village communities, have been recovered and carefully edited;(54) folk-songs preserve the old life and usages; many of the _Fastnachtspiele_ or rude carnival dramas deal with peasant scenes; and Albert Durer and other artists of the times have sketched over and over again the peasant, his house and cot-yard, his village and his daily life. We can, in part, reconstruct the old peasant life and its surroundings. Only it must be remembered that the life varied not only in different parts of Germany, but in the same districts and decades under different rural proprietors; for the peasant was so dependent on his over-lord that the character of the proprietor counted for much in the condition of the people.

The village artisan did not exist. The peasants lived by themselves apart from all other cla.s.ses of the population. That is the universal statement.

They carried the produce of their land and their live-stock to the nearest town, sold it in the market-place, and bought there what they needed for their life and work.

They dwelt in villages fortified after a fashion; for the group of houses was surrounded sometimes by a wall, but usually by a stout fence, made with strong stakes and interleaved branches. This was entered by a gate that could be locked. Outside the fence, circling the whole was a deep ditch crossed by a "falling door" or drawbridge. Within the fence among the houses there was usually a small church, a public-house, a house or room (_Spielhaus_) where the village council met and where justice was dispensed. In front stood a strong wooden stake, to which criminals were tied for punishment, and near it always the stocks, sometimes a gallows, and more rarely the pole and wheel for the barbarous mediaeval punishment "breaking on the wheel."

The houses were wooden frames filled in with sun-dried bricks, and were thatched with straw; the chimneys were of wood protected with clay. The cattle, fuel, fodder, and family were sheltered under the one large roof.

The timber for building and repairs was got from the forest under regulations set down in the _Weisthumer_, and the peasants had leave to collect the fallen branches for firewood, the women gathering and carrying, and the men cutting and stacking under the eaves. All breaches of the forest laws were severely punished (in some of the _Weisthumer_ the felling of a tree without leave was punished by beheading); so was the moving of landmarks; for wood and soil were precious.

Most houses had a small fenced garden attached, in which were grown cabbages, greens, and lettuce; small onions (cibolle, _Scottice_ syboes), parsley, and peas; poppies, garlic, and hemp; apples, plums, and, in South Germany, grapes; as well as other things whose mediaeval German names are not translatable by me. Wooden beehives were placed in the garden, and a pigeon-house usually stood in the yard.

The scanty underclothing of the peasants was of wool and the outer dress of linen-the men's, girt with a belt from which hung a sword, for they always went armed. Their furniture consisted of a table, several three-legged stools, and one or two chests. Rude cooking utensils hung on the walls, and dried pork, fruits, and baskets of grain on the rafters.

The drinking-cups were of coa.r.s.e clay; and we find regulations that the table-cloth or covering ought to be washed at least once a year! Their ordinary food was "some poor bread, oatmeal porridge, and cooked vegetables; and their drink, water and whey." The live-stock included horses, cows, goats, sheep, pigs, and hens.(55)

The villagers elected from among themselves four men, the _Bauernmeister_, who were the Fathers of the community. They were the arbiters in disputes, settled quarrels, and arranged for an equitable distribution of the various feudal a.s.sessments and services. They had no judicial or administrative powers; these belonged to the over-lord, or a representative appointed by him. This official sat in the justice room, heard cases, issued sentences, and exercised all the mediaeval powers of "pit and gallows." The whole list of mediaeval punishments, ludicrous and gruesome, were at his command. It was he who ordered the scolding wife to be carried round the church three times while her neighbours jeered; who set the unfortunate charcoal-burner, who had transgressed some forest law, into the stocks, with his bare feet exposed to a slow fire till his soles were thoroughly burnt; who beheaded men who cut down trees, and ordered murderers to be broken on the wheel. He saw that the rents, paid in kind, were duly gathered. He directed the forced services of ploughing, sowing, and harvesting the over-lord's fields, what wood was to be hewn for the castle, what ditches dug, and what roads repaired. He saw that the peasants drank no wine but what came from the proprietor's vineyards, and that they drank it in sufficient quant.i.ty; that they ground their grain at the proprietor's mill, and fired their bread at the estate bakehouse. He exacted the two most valuable of the moveable goods of a dead peasant-the hated "death-tax." There was no end to his powers. Of course, according to the _Weisthumer_, these powers were to be exercised in _customary_ ways; and in some parts of Germany the indefinite "forced services" had been commuted to twelve days' service in the year, and in others to the payment of a fixed rate in lieu of service.

This description of the peasant life has been taken entirely from the _Weisthumer_, and, for reasons to be seen immediately, it perhaps represents rather a "golden past" than the actual state of matters at the beginning of the sixteenth century. It shows the peasants living in a state of rude plenty, but for the endless exactions of their lords and the continual robberies to which they were exposed from bands of st.u.r.dy rogues which swarmed through the country, and from companies of soldiers, who thought nothing of carrying off the peasant's cows, slaying his swine, maltreating his womenkind, and even firing his house.

The peasants had their diversions, not always too seemly. On the days of Church festivals, and they were numerous, the peasantry went to church and heard Ma.s.s in the morning, talked over the village business under the lime-trees, or in some open s.p.a.ce near the village, and spent the afternoon in such amus.e.m.e.nts as they liked best-eating and drinking at the public-house, and dancing on the village green. In one of his least known poems, Hans Sachs describes the scene-the girls and the pipers waiting at the dancing-place, and the men and lads in the public-house eating calf's head, tripe, liver, black puddings, and roast pork, and drinking whey and the sour country wine, until some sank under the benches; and there was such a jostling, scratching, shoving, bawling, and singing, that not a word could be heard. Then three young men came to the dancing-place, his sweetheart had a garland ready for one of them, and the dancing began; other couples joined, and at last sixteen pairs of feet were in motion.

Rough jests, gestures, and caresses went round.

"Nach dem der Messner von Hirschau, Der tanzet mit des Pfarrhaus Frau Von Budenheim, die hat er lieb, Viel Scherzens am Tanz mit ihr trieb."

The men whirled their partners off their feet and spun them round and round, or seized them by the waist and tossed them as high as they could; while they themselves leaped and threw out their feet in such reckless ways that Hans Sachs thought they would all fall down.

The winter amus.e.m.e.nts gathered round the spinning house. For it was the custom in most German villages for the young women to resort to a large room in the mill, or to the village tavern, or to a neighbour's house, with their wool and flax, their distaffs and spindles, some of them old heirlooms and richly ornamented, to spin all evening. The lads came also to pick the fluff off the la.s.ses' dresses, they said; to hold the small beaker of water into which they dipped their fingers as they span; and to cheer the spinsters with songs and recitations. After work came the dancing. On festival evenings, and especially at carnival times, the lads treated their sweethearts to a late supper and a dance; and escorted them home, carrying their distaffs and spindles.(56) All the old German love folk-songs are full of allusions to this peasant courtship, and it is not too much to say that from the singing in the spinning house have come most of the oldest folk-songs.

These descriptions apply to the German peasants of Central and South Germany. In the north and north-east, the agricultural population, which was for the most part of Slavonic descent, had been reduced by their conquerors to a serfdom which had no parallel in the more favoured districts.

-- 5. Earlier Social Revolts.

It was among the peasants of German descent that there had been risings, successful and unsuccessful, for more than a century. The train for revolution had been laid not where serfdom was at its worst, but where there was ease enough in life to allow men to think, and where freedom was nearest in sight. It may be well to refer to the earlier peasant revolts, before attempting to investigate the causes of that permanent unrest which was abundantly evident at the beginning of the sixteenth century.

The first great successful peasant rebellion was the fight for freedom made by the people of the four forest cantons in Switzerland. The weapons with which they overthrew the chivalry of Europe, rude pikes made by tying their scythes to their alpenstocks, may still be seen in the historical museums of Basel and Constance. They proved that man for man the peasant was as good as the n.o.ble. The free peasant soldier had come into being.

These free peasants did not really secede from the Empire till 1499, and were formally connected with it till 1648. The Emperor was still their over-lord. But they were his free peasants, able to form leagues for their mutual defence and for the protection of their rights. Other cantons and some neighbouring cities joined them, and the Swiss Confederacy, with its flag, a white cross on a red ground, and its motto, "Each for all and all for each," became a new nation in Europe. During the next century (1424-1471) the peasants of the Rhaetian Alps also won their freedom, and formed a confederacy similar to the Swiss, though separate from it. It was called the _Graubund_.

The example of these peasant republics, strong in the protection which their mountains gave them, fired the imagination of the German peasantry of the south and the south-west of the Empire, and the leaders of lost popular causes found a refuge in the Alpine valleys while they meditated on fresh schemes to emanc.i.p.ate their followers. We have evidence of the popularity of the Swiss in the towns and country districts of Germany all through the fifteenth and into the sixteenth century.(57)

But while the social tumults and popular uprisings against authority, which are a feature of the close of the Middle Ages, are usually and rightly enough called peasant insurrections, the name tends to obscure their real character. They were rather the revolts of the poor against the rich, of debtors against creditors, of men who had scanty legal rights or none at all against those who had the protection of the existing laws, and they were joined by the poor of the towns as well as by the peasantry of the country districts. The peasants generally began the revolt and the townsmen followed; but this was not always the case. Sometimes the mob of the cities rose first and the peasants joined afterwards. In many cases, too, the poorer n.o.bles were in secret or open sympathy with the insurrectionary movement. On more than one occasion they led the insurgents and fought at their head. The union of poor n.o.bles and peasants had made the Bohemian revolt successful.