German Culture Past and Present

German Culture Past and Present.

by Ernest Belfort Bax.

PREFACE

The following pages aim at giving a general view of the social and intellectual life of Germany from the end of the mediaeval period to modern times. In the earlier portion of the book, the first half of the sixteenth century in Germany is dealt with at much greater length and in greater detail than the later period, a sketch of which forms the subject of the last two chapters. The reason for this is to be found in the fact that while the roots of the later German character and culture are to be sought for in the life of this period, it is comparatively little known to the average educated English reader. In the early fifteenth century, during the Reformation era, German life and culture in its widest sense began to consolidate themselves, and at the same time to take on an originality which differentiated them from the general life and culture of Western Europe as it was during the Middle Ages.

To those who would fully appreciate the later developments, therefore, it is essential thoroughly to understand the details of the social and intellectual history of the time in question. For the later period there are many more works of a generally popular character available for the student and general reader. The chief aim of the sketch given in Chapters IX and X is to bring into sharp relief those events which, in the Author"s view, represent more or less crucial stages in the development of modern Germany.

For the earlier portion of the present volume an older work of the Author"s, now out of print, ent.i.tled _German Society at the Close of the Middle Ages_, has been largely drawn upon. Reference, as will be seen, has also been made in the course of the present work to two other writings from the same pen which are still to be had for those desirous of fuller information on their respective subjects, viz. _The Peasants" War_ and _The Rise and Fall of the Anabaptists_ (Messrs.

George Allen & Unwin).

German Culture Past and Present

INTRODUCTORY

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 pa.s.s away, as others in their turn have since had. Society was organized on the feudal hierarchy of status. In the first place, a n.o.ble cla.s.s, spiritual and temporal, was opposed to a peasantry either wholly servile or but nominally free. In addition to this opposition of n.o.ble and peasant there was that of the township, which, in its 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 "free of the Empire," that is, that held nominally from the Emperor himself (_Reichstadt_), and secondly, there was the township that was under the domination of an intermediate lord. The economic basis of 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 modern 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 organization was outwardly intact, the thinker who was watching the signs of the times would not have been long in arriving at the conclusion that feudalism was "played out,"

that the whole fabric of mediaeval civilization 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 firearms in war; the rapid multiplication of printed books; the spread of the new learning after the taking of Constantinople in 1453, and the subsequent diffusion of Greek teachers throughout 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 da Gama"s discovery 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 struck.

Notwithstanding the apparent outward integrity of the system based on land tenures, land was ceasing to be the only form of productive wealth. Hence it was losing the exclusive importance attaching to it in the earlier period of the Middle Ages. The first form of modern capitalism had already arisen. Large aggregations of capital in the hands of trading companies were becoming common. The Roman law was establishing itself in the place of the old customary tribal law which had hitherto prevailed in the manorial courts, serving in some sort as a bulwark against the caprice of the territorial lord; and this change facilitated the development of the bourgeois principle of private, as opposed to communal, property. In intellectual matters, though theology still maintained its supremacy as the chief subject of human interest, other interests were rapidly growing up alongside of it, the most prominent being the study of cla.s.sical 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 traditional 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 exaggerated and distorted form. The old feudal relations had degenerated into a blood-sucking oppression; the old rough brutality, into excogitated and elaborated cruelty (aptly ill.u.s.trated in the collection of ingenious instruments preserved in the Torture-tower at Nurnberg); the old crude superst.i.tion, into a systematized 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 recognized only one virtue--to wit, animal courage. Again, all these exaggerated characteristics were mixed with new elements, which distorted them further, and which foreshadowed 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 centralization and the consequent suppression or curtailment of the local autonomies of the Middle Ages in the interests of some kind of national government, 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 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 n.o.ble cla.s.s from the princes of the empire down to the meanest knight. In the same year the Imperial Chamber (_Reichskammer_) was established, and in 1501 the Imperial Aulic Council. Maximilian also organized a standing army of mercenary troops, called _Landesknechte_. Shortly afterwards Germany was divided into Imperial districts called circles (_Kreise_), ultimately ten in number, all of which were under an imperial government (_Reichsregiment_), which had at its disposal a military force for the punishment of disturbers of the peace. But the public opinion of the age, conjoined with the particular circ.u.mstances, political and economic, of Central Europe, robbed the enactment in a great measure of its immediate effect.

Highway plundering and even private war were still going on, to a considerable extent, far into the sixteenth century. Charles V pursued the same line of policy as his predecessor; but it was not until after the suppression of the lower n.o.bility in 1523, and finally of the peasants in 1526, that any material change took place; and then the centralization, 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 centralization 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 wherever 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 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 sort of occurrence which was by no means unusual. In the immediate neighbourhood of Nurnberg, which was _bien entendu_ one of the chief seats of the Imperial power, a robber-knight leader, named Hans Thomas von Absberg, was a standing menace. It was the custom 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 Nurnberg tanner, whose hand was similarly treated, one of his a.s.sociates 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 fashion. The hands in these cases were collected and sent to the Burgermeister of Nurnberg, 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 a.s.sociated Georg von Giech and Hans Georg von Aufsess. Among other notable robber-knights of the time may be mentioned the Lord of Brandenstein and the Lord of Rosenberg. As ill.u.s.trating the strictly professional character of the pursuit, and the brutally callous nature of the society practising it, we may narrate that Margaretha von Brandenstein 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 a.s.sociates of his enterprise for the rehabilitation of the knighthood many gentlemen who had been accustomed to "let their horses on the high road bite off the purses of wayfarers." So strong was the public opinion of the n.o.ble cla.s.s as to the inviolability of the privilege of highway 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 a.s.serted that he had insulted the prerogatives of their order. Whenever this form of knight-errantry was criticized, there were never wanting scholarly pens to defend it as a legitimate means of aristocratic 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 independent republics. Their organization was a microcosm of that of the entire empire. At the apex of the munic.i.p.al society was the Burgermeister and the so-called "Honorability"

(_Ehrbarkeit_), which consisted of the patrician clans or _gentes_ (in most cases), those families which were supposed to be descended from the original chartered freemen of the town, the old Mark-brethren.

They comprised generally the richest families, and had monopolized the entire government of the city, together with the right to administer its various sources of income and to consume its revenue at their pleasure. By the time, however, of which we are writing, the trade-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 cla.s.s, who, as a rule, could alone sit in the Council (_Rath_). 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 munic.i.p.ality. They forestalled and regrated with impunity. They a.s.sumed the chief rights in the munic.i.p.al 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 n.o.bles themselves. The accounts of income and expenditure 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 cla.s.s, operated through the guilds and through the open a.s.sembly of the citizens. It had already frequently succeeded in establishing a representation of the general body of the guildsmen in a so-called Great Council (_Grosser Rath_), and in addition, as already said, in ousting the "honorables" 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 const.i.tute itself into a quasi-aristocratic body as against the ma.s.s of the poorer citizens and those outside the pale of munic.i.p.al rights. The latter cla.s.s 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.

We may here observe that the development of the mediaeval township from its earliest beginnings 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 circle of _gentes_ or group-families originally settled within the mark or district on which the town subsequently stood. These const.i.tuted 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 the original nucleus there gradually 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 a powerful lord, which they could not otherwise obtain when their native village-community had perchance been raided by some marauding n.o.ble and his retainers. Circ.u.mstances, 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 establishment of craft-guilds.

Another origin of the townsfolk, which must not be overlooked, is to be found in the attendants on the palace-fortress of some great overlord. In the early Middle Ages all such magnates kept up an extensive establishment, the greater ecclesiastical lords no less than the secular often having several castles. In Germany this origin of the township was furthered by Charles the Great, who established schools and other civil inst.i.tutions, with a magistrate at their head, round many of the palace-castles that he founded. "A new epoch," says Von Maurer, "begins with the villa-foundations of Charles the Great and his ordinances respecting them, for that his celebrated capitularies in this connection were intended for his 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 const.i.tution than completely reorganized 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 completely and effectively ordered."[2] The expression "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 immediately 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 condition was therefore considerably improved. It was only, however, when cities were "free of the empire"

(_Reichsfrei_) that they attained the ideal of mediaeval civic freedom.

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 patrician 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, owing to the changed conditions of the times.

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 organization as the other populations of Europe.

The barbarian nations at the time of their great migration in the fifth century were organized on a tribal and village basis. The head man was simply _primus inter pares_. In the course of their wanderings the successful military leader acquired powers and a.s.sumed 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 involve the movements of peoples and federations of tribes, and when, in consequence, the need of 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 organization, and a.s.sociated with his immediate followers on terms approaching equality.

A well-known ill.u.s.tration of this is the incident of the vase taken from the Cathedral of Rheims, and of Chlodowig"s efforts to rescue it from his independent comrade-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 ma.s.se_, carrying with them their tribal and village organization, under the overlordship of the various military leaders, were the indigenous 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 organization. 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, nevertheless held their land from the conquering body under conditions which const.i.tuted 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 centralization 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 overlord of the whole of Christendom being the Pope, who had his va.s.sals in the prince-prelates and subordinate ecclesiastical holders.

In addition to the princes sprung originally from the military leaders of the migratory nations, there were their free followers, who developed ultimately into the knighthood or inferior n.o.bility; the inhabitants of the conquered districts forming a distinct cla.s.s 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 conquering race, from every social group having the possession, under the trusteeship of his 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 religious motives, it pa.s.sed into the hands of the overlord, temporal or spiritual, as his possession; and the inhabitants, even in the case of populations which had not been actually conquered, became his va.s.sals, 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 realized, was not universally effected even in the West of Europe till within a measurable distance of our own time.[3]

From the foregoing it will be understood that the oppression of the peasant, under the feudalism of the Middle Ages, and especially of the later Middle Ages, was viewed by him as an infringement of his rights.

During the period of time const.i.tuting mediaeval history, the peasant, though he often slumbered, yet often started up to a sudden consciousness of his position. The memory of primitive communism was never quite extinguished, and the continual peasant-revolts of the Middle Ages, though immediately occasioned, probably, by some fresh invasion, by which it was sought to tear from the "common man" yet another shred of his surviving rights, always had in the background the ideal, vague though it may have been, of his ancient freedom.

Such, undoubtedly, was the meaning of the Jacquerie in France, with its wild and apparently senseless vengeance; of the Wat Tyler revolt in England, with its systematic attempt to envisage the vague tradition of the primitive village community in the legends of the current ecclesiastical creed; of the numerous revolts in Flanders and North Germany; to a large extent of the Hussite movement in Bohemia, under Ziska; of the rebellion led by George Doza in Hungary; and, as we shall see in the body of the present work, of the social movements of Reformation Germany, in which, with the partial exception of Ket"s rebellion in England a few years later, we may consider them as virtually coming to an end.

For the movements in question were distinctly the last of their kind.

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

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

The effects of the conquest of Constantinople in 1453, and the consequent dispersion of the acc.u.mulated Greek learning of the Byzantine Empire, had, by the end of the fifteenth century, begun to show themselves in a notable modification of European culture. The circle of the seven sciences, the Quadrivium, and the Trivium, in other words, the mediaeval system of learning, began to be antiquated.

Scholastic philosophy, that is to say, the controversy of the Scotists and the Thomists, was now growing out of date. Plato was extolled at the expense of Aristotle. Greek, and even Hebrew, was eagerly sought after. Latin itself was a.s.suming another aspect; the Renaissance Latin is cla.s.sical Latin, whilst Mediaeval Latin is dog-Latin. The physical universe now began to be inquired into with a perfectly fresh interest, but the inquiries were still conducted under the aegis of the old habits of thought. The universe was still a system of mysterious affinities and magical powers to the investigator of the Renaissance period, as it had been before. There was this difference, however; it was now attempted to _systematize_ the magical theory of the universe.

While the common man held a store of traditional magical beliefs respecting the natural world, the learned man deduced these beliefs from the Neo-Platonists, from the Kabbala, from Hermes Trismegistos, and from a variety of other sources, and attempted to arrange this somewhat heterogeneous ma.s.s of erudite lore into a system of organized thought.

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

The dispute of Reuchlin with the ecclesiastical authorities at Cologne excited literary Germany from end to end. It was the first general skirmish of the new and the old spirit in Central and Northern Europe.

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

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

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

There were, of course, persons who were eager to detect impostors: and amongst them some of the most zealous votaries of the occult arts--for example, Trittheim and the learned Humanist, Conrad Muth or Mutia.n.u.s, both of whom professed to have regarded Faust as a fraudulent person.

But this did not imply any disbelief in the possibility of the alleged pretensions. In the Faust-myth is embodied, moreover, the opposition between the new learning on its physical side and the old religious faith. The theory that the investigation of the mysteries of nature had in it something sinister and diabolical which had been latent throughout the Middle Ages, was brought into especial prominence by the new religious movements. The popular feeling that the line between natural magic and the black art was somewhat doubtful, that the one had a tendency to shade off into the other, now received fresh stimulus. The notion of compacts with the devil was a familiar one, and that they should be resorted to for the purpose of acquiring an acquaintance with hidden lore and magical powers seemed quite natural.

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

The opening of the sixteenth century thus presents to us mediaeval society, social, political, and religious, in Germany as elsewhere, "run to seed." The feudal organization was outwardly intact; the peasant, free and bond, formed the foundation; above him came the knighthood or inferior n.o.bility; parallel with them was the _Ehrbarkeit_ of the less important towns, holding from mediate lordship; above these towns came the free cities, which held immediately from the empire, organized into three bodies, a governing Council in which the _Ehrbarkeit_ usually predominated, where they did not entirely compose it, a Common Council composed of the masters of the various guilds, and the General Council of the free citizens.

Those journeymen, whose condition was fixed from their being outside the guild-organizations, usually had guilds of their own. Above the free cities in the social pyramid stood the Princes of the empire, lay and ecclesiastic, with the Electoral College, or the seven Electoral Princes, forming their head. These const.i.tuted the feudal "estates" of the empire. Then came the "King of the Romans"; and, as the apex of the whole, the Pope in one function and the Emperor in another, crowned the edifice. The supremacy, not merely of the Pope but of the complementary temporal head of the mediaeval polity, the Emperor, was acknowledged in a shadowy way, even in countries such as France and England, which had no direct practical connection with the empire.

For, as the spiritual power was also temporal, so the temporal political power had, like everything else in the Middle Ages, a quasi-religious significance.