Federal Republic of Germany

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15th-Century Society

In Germany as in the rest of Europe, the 15th century was a time of transition from the land economy of the Middle Ages to the money economy of modern times. The process created painful tensions among all classes of society.

The German nobility ranged from the great electors and other princes of the 240 states of the empire to the minor knights who held fiefs directly from the emperor. They had supreme jurisdiction in their own lands, checked only by diets representing nobles, clergy, and burghers, which alone could levy the taxes needed to pay for new arms and mercenary soldiers. As prices rose and income from land did not, all the nobility felt pressed for funds. Some squeezed more goods and services out of their peasants. Others resorted to raiding their peers or the cities, and still others sold their military services as mercenaries.

As centres of commerce, the cities became increasingly important in a money economy. In the south, Nuremberg and Augsburg, home of the Fugger bank, thrived on mines and trade with Italy. In the north, Lübeck, Hamburg, and other cities of the Hanseatic League carried on brisk trade with Britain and Scandinavia. Within the cities the old merchant guilds and new craft guilds, both virtually hereditary, struggled for power. Common labourers had no say. As their trade grew, the cities’ demand for freedom from attack and from local tolls levied on roads and rivers often led to war with the nobles.

Perhaps as many as one-third of the peasants, the same estimate as for the rest of the population, died during the plague that swept Europe in the mid-14th century. Of the survivors, some peasants had lost their land through frequent subdivision among heirs. Many of these emigrated to the cities, while others charged landlords more for their labour. Most small peasants, however, lost whatever rights and freedoms they had traditionally possessed, as lords strove to keep them on the land and make them as profitable as possible. The peasants, especially in southern Germany, finally resorted to violent protest.

Cries for Church reform had been raised at least as early as the 11th-century Cluniac movement. During the late Middle Ages and early Renaissance they became more insistent. On the political level, the Church lost prestige as a result of the unedifying Babylonian Captivity and the ensuing Great Schism in the papacy.

On the economic level, the increasingly widespread need for cash led to criticism of the Church’s wealth. People objected that the Church owned much land and bore heavily on its tenants, but paid no taxes. Economic and political concerns came together in growing German resentment at sending money to maintain the pope in Rome.

The Church was also attacked on the intellectual level by the humanist study of classical antiquity, which spread north from Italy. Nicholas of Cusa proposed a heliocentric (Sun-centred) theory of astronomy that undermined the accepted biblical view of creation. Literary humanists such as Conradus Celtes, Willibald Pirkheimer, Johann Reuchlin, and Erasmus of Rotterdam urged linguistic purity in the study of biblical and other texts and satirized abuses in the Church. The invention of printing from movable type by Johann Gutenberg made it possible to produce Bibles, other books, and pamphlets in great quantity at low cost. As a result, the new learning could circulate widely, preparing the intellectual ground for the Reformation.

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Age of Religious Strife

The spiritual concerns of Martin Luther combined with secular ambitions of the German princes to produce the Protestant Reformation. The movement for Church reform created religious liberty at the cost of Western Christian unity. Religious strife intensified European political wars for 100 years.

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The Protestant Reformation

Charles V succeeded his grandfather Maximilian as Holy Roman Emperor in 1519. He devoted his life to preserving a medieval empire united in faith, a fruitless effort in the pluralistic society created by religious reformers and secular forces.

A key figure of the new age was Martin Luther, a friar of the Augustinians who was disturbed by abuses within the Church. He was particularly aroused by the unscrupulous campaign to sell indulgences, or remissions of punishment for sin. In 1517 Luther published a list of 95 theses attacking indulgences, which stirred up much controversy.

In 1520 Luther published three pamphlets stating his beliefs in the liberty of the Christian conscience informed only by the Bible, the priesthood of all believers, and a State-supported Church. Because these doctrines struck at the root of Church authority, Pope Leo X issued a bull condemning Luther’s works. Luther burned the bull and was excommunicated. Charles V summoned him to defend himself at the Diet of Worms (1521) and, when Luther refused to recant, outlawed him. On his way home, however, Luther was rescued by Frederick the Wise, Elector of Saxony; installed in the Wartburg castle, he began to translate the Bible into German.

Lutheran ideas, partly a continuation of Hussite traditions, were sympathetically received by many. Matters of conscience, however, were often carried to extremes or mixed with socio-economic grievances. The fanatical Karlstadt urged iconoclastic attacks on church painting, statuary, and stained glass. The mercenary knight Franz von Sickingen led impecunious south German knights against ecclesiastical lords in the hope of gaining Church lands. Peasant groups, wanting a return to old ways, looted and burned castles and monasteries in the Peasants’ War (1524-1526).

These revolutionaries looked to Luther for guidance in reordering the Church and German society, but Luther did not want to mix religious with secular concerns. Emerging from the Wartburg to restore order, he checked Karlstadt and urged the princes to crush every rising, which they did. The peasants then lost all traditional rights, sense of initiative, and status, while the princes set up state Churches supported by confiscated Catholic lands. In these new Churches the service was in German, and the clergy were permitted to marry.

At this early stage, a break with Rome did not seem inevitable. Many Lutherans would have remained in the Church if non-biblical practices had been eliminated. Charles V, busy with foreign wars, wanted to make peace at home, but Luther was not conciliatory. Furthermore, Protestants, as the reformers came to be called, were themselves divided. In addition to Lutherans there were Reformed Christians, inspired by the Swiss theologian Huldreich Zwingli, who wanted to set up theocratic states based on the Bible, and radical Anabaptists, mostly poor people who wanted to form Churches independent of the state.

At the Diet of Augsburg (1530) Lutherans and Reformed Christians presented separate confessions of faith, indicating that they could not compromise with the Catholics or each other. The Anabaptists were not represented at all. Both the princes and the pope blocked Charles’s desire for a council to mediate in the dispute. Despairing of peaceful means, Charles led his troops against the Protestant princes and cities of the Schmalkaldic League (1531), routing them at the Battle of Mühlberg in 1547. By this time, however, many nobles, who had acquired secularized Catholic lands, were staunch Protestants, and they forced on Charles the compromise Peace of Augsburg (1555). It recognized Lutheranism, but not the Reformed (Calvinist) faith, whose theocratic doctrines seemed revolutionary to the princes. Most significant, it gave the princes the right to choose the religion for their territory.

Luther died in 1546, his work done. Charles, who had failed at a hopeless task, abdicated in 1556. His vast empire was divided, with the Spanish and Burgundian lands going to his son Philip II and the imperial title and the German lands going to his brother Ferdinand.

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The Catholic Reformation

While the emperors Ferdinand I and his son Maximilian II were occupied with the threat of Turkish invasion, Protestantism in Germany expanded rapidly. Its progress was checked, however, by the Counter-Reformation. The long-delayed Council of Trent (1545-1563), dominated by the Jesuits, abolished the sale of indulgences but also reformulated doctrine and worship so as to preclude reconciliation with Protestantism. The Jesuits established centres in German cities, where they won many Germans back to Catholicism. The rulers of Bavaria, Austria, Salzburg, Bamberg, and Würzburg restored Catholicism by force, creating a Catholic bloc in southern Germany.

Tension mounted between Protestants and Catholics. Protestant princes under Frederick IV formed the Protestant Union in 1608. In 1609 Maximilian I, Duke of Bavaria, led the Catholic princes into the Catholic League. Emperor Rudolf II, a scholarly recluse in Prague, unable to govern, was forced to relinquish his authority to his brother Matthias, who proved no more effective.

Matthias was succeeded by his nephew, who ruled as Ferdinand II. The real power in Europe, however, was Philip II of Spain, with his well-armed troops highly paid in New World gold. Catholic France was determined not to be overwhelmed by Habsburgs on either side. Protestant England and the Netherlands were also opposed to a strong Habsburg dynasty. Denmark and Sweden were lured by the desire to dominate the Baltic. Taking advantage of the quarrelling German states, all these countries intervened to make Germany the scene of a devastating, four-phase European War.

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The Thirty Years’ War

The trouble began in Protestant Bohemia, which refused to accept the Catholic Ferdinand either as king or future emperor. In 1618 the Czechs set up their own government, supported by the Evangelical Union. After the death of Matthias in 1619, they chose the Protestant Elector Frederick V as their King. Ferdinand, however, crushed the Bohemian forces at the Battle of Weisserberg (1620); Frederick, called the Winter King, was exiled; and Catholicism was restored by force. The Bohemian nobles were killed, deprived of their lands, or fined. As a result of the war the population declined by more than one-half.

Protestant princes objected to Spanish troops in Germany. They supported Christian IV of Denmark, who, financed by the Dutch and English, invaded Germany in 1625. So began the second phase of the Thirty Years’ War, which ended with Christian’s defeat. The victorious Ferdinand issued the Edict of Restitution (1629), which ordered the return of all Catholic Church property seized by Protestants since 1552.

The third phase of the war began when Gustav II Adolph of Sweden, who had long wanted to extend Swedish control of the Baltic, invaded Pomerania as the champion of the Protestant princes. The Swedish army won a brilliant victory at Breitenfeld (1631) and took Mainz and Prague, but the war dragged on for years, the two opposing armies devastating the countryside and accomplishing little. In 1635 a truce was declared, and the Edict of Restitution was revoked.

The Swedish, however, were still land-hungry, and the French, led by Cardinal Richelieu, were determined to subdue the Habsburgs. Accordingly, in the fourth phase of the war, the French paid subsidies to the Swedish army to keep it fighting, and French troops crossed the Rhine. After another 13 years of struggle, Emperor Ferdinand III and the princes were ready for peace.