The secular and ecclesiastical princes who presided over the chaos contributed to it by their venality, their diverse coinages and customs dues, their confused competition for wealth and place, their distortion of Roman Law to give themselves almost absolute authority at the expense of the people, the knights, and the emperor. Great families like the Hohenzollerns in Brandenburg, the Wettins in Saxony, the Wittelsbachers in the Palatinate, the dukes of Württemberg, not to speak of the Hapsburgs of Austria, behaved like irresponsible sovereigns. If the power of the Catholic emperor over the German princes had been greater the Reformation might have been defeated or postponed. And the rejection of Rome by many of the princes was a further move toward financial and political independence.
The character of the emperors in this period accentuated the weakness of the central government. Frederick III (r. 1440–93) was an astrologer and alchemist who so loved the studious tranquillity of his gardens at Graz that he allowed Schleswig-Holstein, Bohemia, Austria, and Hungary to detach themselves from the Empire. But toward the end of his fifty-three-year reign he played a saving stroke by betrothing his son Maximilian to Mary, heiress to Charles the Bold of Burgundy. When Charles fought himself into an icy grave in 1477, the Hapsburgs inherited the Netherlands.
Maximilian I (r. 1493–1519), emperor-elect but never crowned, began his reign with every omen of success. All the Empire rejoiced in his good looks and good nature, his unassuming sensibility, his effervescent cheerfulness, his generosity and chivalry, his courage and skill in joust and hunt; it was as if an Italian of the High Renaissance had mounted a German throne. Even Machiavelli was impressed, calling him “a wise, prudent, God-fearing prince, a just ruler, a great general, brave in peril, bearing fatigue like the most hardened soldier... a pattern of many princely virtues.”24 But “Max” was not a great general, and he lacked the cynical intellect required for Machiavelli’s model prince. He dreamed of restoring the grandeur of the Holy Roman Empire by recapturing its former possessions and influence in Italy; he invaded the peninsula time and again in futile wars which the more practical Diet refused to finance; he allowed himself to think of deposing the doughty Julius II and making himself pope as well as emperor;25 and (like his contemporary, Charles VIII of France) he excused his territorial ambitions as necessary preludes to an overwhelming assault upon the Turks. But he was constitutionally and financially incapable of sustained enterprise; he was unable to will the means as well as to wish the ends; and at times he was so poor that he lacked funds to pay for his dinner. He labored to reform the administration of the Empire, but he violated his own reforms, and they died with him. He thought too much in terms of the Hapsburg power. After many disappointments in war he returned to his father’s policy of diplomatic marriages. So for his son Philip he accepted Ferdinand’s offer of Juana’s hand; she was a bit off-color mentally, but she brought Spain as her dowry. In 1515 he betrothed his granddaughter Mary and his grandson Ferdinand to Louis and Anne, son and daughter of Ladislas, King of Bohemia and Hungary; Louis was killed at Mohacs (1526), Ferdinand became King of Bohemia and (so far as the Turks would permit) of Hungary, and the Hapsburg power reached its widest range.
The most amiable facet of Maximilian was his love and encouragement of music, learning, literature, and art. He applied himself zealously to the study of history, mathematics, and languages; we are assured that he could speak German, Latin, Italian, French, Spanish, Walloon, Flemish, and English, and that on one campaign he talked with seven alien commanders in their seven different tongues. Partly through his example and exertions, the dialects of South and North Germany merged into a gemeines Deutsch which became the language of German government, of Luther’s Bible, and of German literature. Between wars he tried to be an author, and left compositions on heraldry, artillery, architecture, hunting, and his own career. He planned an extensive collection of monumenta—relics and inscriptions—from the German past, but again funds ran out. He proposed to the popes a calendar reform which they effected eighty years later. He reorganized the University of Vienna, established new professorships of law, mathematics, poetry, and rhetoric, and made Vienna for a time the most active seat of learning in Europe. He invited Italian humanists to Vienna, and empowered Conradus Celtes to open there an academy of poetry and mathematics. He favored humanists like Peutinger and Pirkheimer, and made the harassed Reuchlin a Count Palatine of the Empire. He gave commissions to Peter Vischer, Veit Stoss, Burgkmair, Dürer, and the other artists who flourished in his reign. He ordered at Innsbruck an ornate tomb to cherish his remains; it was left incomplete at his death, but it gave occasion for Peter Vischer’s fine statues of Theodoric and Arthur. If Maximilian had been as great as his plans he would have rivaled Alexander and Charlemagne.
In the Emperor’s last year Dürer painted an honest portrait of him—worn out and disillusioned, defeated by the maddening stinginess of time. “Earth possesses no joy for me,” said this once joyous soul, and he mourned, “Alas, poor land of Germany!”26 But he exaggerated his failure. He left Germany and the Empire (if only through economic developments) far stronger than he had found them. Population had risen, education had spread; Vienna was becoming another Florence; and soon his grandson, inheriting half of Western Europe, would become the most powerful ruler in Christendom.
III. THE GERMANS: 1300-1517
They were probably at this time the healthiest, strongest, most vital and exuberant people in Europe. As we see them in Wolgemut and Dürer, in Cranach and Holbein, the men were stout, thick-necked, massive-headed, lion-hearted animals ready to consume the world and wash it down with beer. They were coarse but jolly, and tempered their piety with sensuality. They could be cruel, as witness the awful instruments of torture that they used on criminals, but they could be merciful and generous, too, and rarely displayed their theological ferocity in physical ways; in Germany the Inquisition was bravely resisted and usually subdued. Their robust spirits made for bibulous humor rather than dry wit, dulled their sense of logic and beauty, and denied them the grace and subtlety of the French or Italian mind. Their meager Renaissance foundered in bibliolatry; but there was a steady persistence, a disciplined industry, a brute courage, in German thought that enabled them to break the power of Rome, and already gave promise of making them the greatest scholars in history.
By comparison with other nations they were clean. Bathing was a national passion. Every well-arranged house, even in rural districts, had its bathroom. As in ancient Rome, the numerous public bathhouses provided much more than baths; men could be shaved there, women could have their hair dressed, diverse forms of massage were offered, drinking and gambling were allowed, and relief could be found from monogamy. Usually the two sexes bathed together, chastely clothed; but there were no laws against flirtations, and an Italian scholar, visiting Baden-Baden in 1417, remarked that “no baths in the world are more fit for the fecundity of women.”27
The Germans of that age could not be accused of puritanism. Their conversation, correspondence, literature, and humor were sometimes coarse by our standards, but that went with their vigor of body and soul. They drank too much at all ages, and imbibed sexual experience lavishly in their youth; Erfurt in 1501 seemed to the pious Luther “nothing better than a brothel and beerhouse.”28 German rulers, ecclesiastical as well as secular, agreed with St. Augustine and St. Thomas Aquinas that prostitution must be permitted if women are to be safe from seduction or assault. Houses of prostitution were licensed and taxed. We read of the bishops of Strasbourg and Mainz receiving revenues from brothels; and the bishop of Würzburg gave the municipal brothel to Graf von Hennenberg as a revenue-producing fief.29 Hospitality to valued guests included placing at their disposal the Frauenhaüser, or houses of women; King Sigismund was honored with this privilege at Bern (1414) and Ulm (1434), so heartily to his satisfaction that he publicly thanked his hosts for it.30 Unlicensed women sometimes set up Winkelhaüser—irregular houses; in 1492 the licensed prostitutes of Nuremberg complained to the b
urgomaster of this unfair competition; in 1508 they received permission to storm the Winkelhaus; they did. In the actual moral code of Europe in the later Middle Ages resort to a prostitute was condoned as a venial but normal sin. Perhaps the spread of syphilis after 1492 made it a mortal affair.
Marriage, as elsewhere, was a union of properties. Love was considered a normal result, not a reasonable cause, of marriage. Betrothal was as binding as matrimony. Weddings were ceremonious and luxurious in all classes; festivities might last for a week or two; the purchase of a husband was as expensive as the upkeep of a wife. The authority of the male was theoretically absolute, but was more real in deeds than in words; we note that Frau Dürer had much to say to her husband. The women of Nuremberg were undaunted enough to pull the half-naked Emperor Maximilian from bed, throw a wrap around him, and lead him in a merry nocturnal dance in the street.31 According to a hoary legend, some men of the upper classes in fourteenth-century Germany, when leaving for extended absences from home, locked an iron “chastity belt” around the waist and thighs of their wives, and took the key with them.32 Traces of the custom are found in medieval Venice and sixteenth-century France; but in the rare cases that seem authentic the belt was voluntarily donned by wife or mistress, and the key was given to husband or lover, as a guarantee of fidelity in marriage or sin.33
Family life flourished. An Erfurt chronicle reckons eight or ten offspring per couple as normal; households of fifteen children were not uncommon. These numbers included bastards, for illegitimate children, who abounded, were usually taken into the father’s home after his marriage. Family names came into use in the fifteenth century, often indicating ancestral occupation or place of origin, but now and then congealing a moment’s jest into the rigor of time. Discipline was firm at home and school; even the future Emperor Max received many a spanking, and no harm seems to have come from it except to parent or teacher. German homes were now (c. 1500) the most comfortable in Europe, with wide staircases, sturdy balustrades, massive furniture, cushioned seats, carved chests, windows of colored glass, canopied beds, tapestried walls, carpeted floors, bulging stoves, shelves crowded with books or flowers or musical instruments or silver plate, and kitchens gleaming with all the utensils for a German feast.
Externally the houses were mostly of wood, and fires were frequent. Overhanging eaves and windowed balconies shaded the streets. Only a few avenues in the larger towns were paved. Street lighting was unknown except on festival evenings; life was unsafe outdoors at night. Petty criminals were as numerous as the pigs and cows that strayed in the street. There was no organized police; severe punishments were relied upon to deter crime. The penalty for robbery was death, or, in mild theft, cutting off the ears. Blasphemers had their tongues torn out; exiles illegally returning to Nuremberg had their eyes gouged out. Women who had murdered their husbands were buried alive, or were tortured with red-hot tongs and then hanged.34 Among the mechanisms of torture formerly exhibited in the Schloss or Castle of Nuremberg were chests filled with sharp stones, against which the victim was crushed; racks for stretching his limbs; braziers to apply fire to the soles of his feet; sharp iron frames to dissuade him from sitting, lying, or sleeping; and die verflüchte Jungfer, or Cursed Maiden of iron, who received the condemned with arms of steel, enclosed him in a spiked embrace, and then, relaxing, let him fall, pierced and bloody and broken, to a slow death in a pit of revolving knives and pointed bars.35
Political morality accorded with the general moral laxity. Bribery was widespread, and worst at the top. Adulteration of goods was common, despite the live burial of two men at Nuremberg for adulterating wine (1456). Commercialism—the sacrifice of morals to money—was as intense as in any age; money, not man, was the measure of all things. Yet these same hustling burghers gave large sums to charity. “In papal times,” Luther wrote, “men gave with both hands, joyfully and with great devotion. It snowed alms, foundations, and legacies. Our forefathers, lords and kings, princes and other folk, gave richly and compassionately—yes, to overflowing—to churches, parishes, burses [scholarships], hospitals.”36 It was a sign of a secularizing age that many charitable bequests were left not to ecclesiastical bodies but to town councils, for distribution to the poor.
Manners became coarser—in France and England as well as in Germany—when the plutocracy of money superseded the aristocracy of birth in controlling the economy. Drunkenness was the national vice; both Luther and Hutten denounced it, though Hutten preferred it to “the deceit of the Italians, the thievery of the Spaniards, the pride of the French.”37 Some of the drinking may have been due to the sharp spices used in preparing meals. Table manners were rough and ready. Forks had come to Germany in the fourteenth century, but men and women still liked to eat with their fingers; even in the sixteenth century a preacher condemned forks as contrary to the will of God, Who “would not have given us fingers if He had wanted us to use forks.” 38
Dress was grandiose. Workmen were content with cap or felt hat, short blouse, and trousers overlapping—or tucked into—boots or high shoes. The middle classes added a vest, and an open coat lined and/or bordered with fur. But the possessors of pedigree competed feverishly with the collectors of guilders in the glory of their garb. In both these classes the hats of the men were spacious involutions of costly cloth, sometimes trimmed with feathers, ribbons, pearls, or gold. Shirts were often of silk. Outer garments, brightly colored, were lined with fur, and might be threaded with silver. Rich women wore crowns of gold, or gold-embroidered hoods, and braided gold thread into their hair; but modest maidens covered their heads with muslin handkerchiefs tied under the chin. Geiler von Kaisersberg alleged that smart women had wardrobes costing as much as 4,000 florins ($100,000?) .39 Men wore their chins shaved but their hair long; male curls were carefully fostered; note Dürer’s proud ringlets, and Maximilian’s fancy locks. Finger rings were a sign or pretense of class, as now. Conradus Celtes remarked that fashions in clothing changed more rapidly in Germany than elsewhere, and as often for men as for women. On festive occasions the men might outshine the women in magnificence.
Festivals were numerous, continuing the medieval spirit of make-believe and gay display, with a happy moratorium on labor and the Commandments. Christmas was still Christian, despite its pagan vestiges; the Christmas tree was to be a seventeenth-century innovation. Every town celebrated a Kermis (Dutch kerk, church, and mis, Mass) or feast of its patron saint; men and women would then dance together in the streets, merriment would be de rigueur, and no saint or preacher could abate the revel’s rough hilarity. Dancing sometimes became an epidemic mania, as in Metz, Cologne, and Aix in 1374, or at Strasbourg in 1412. In some such cases sufferers from St. Vitus’s dance would seek relief from what they thought to be demoniacal possession, by dancing themselves to exhaustion, as some young maniacs do today. Men found other outlets for their instincts in hunting, or in the dying sport of the joust. Thousands of men and women traveled, often using a distant shrine as an excuse. They moved in painful delight on horses or mules or in coaches or sedan chairs, bearing the discomforts of unpaved roads and unwashed inns. Sensible persons, when they could, journeyed by boat along the Rhine, the Danube, or the other majestic streams of Central Europe. By 1500 a postal service, open to all, united the major towns.
All in all the picture is one of a people too vigorous and prosperous to tolerate any longer the manacles of feudalism or the exactions of Rome. A proud sense of German nationality survived all political fragmentation, and checked supernational emperors as well as supernatural popes; the Reformation would defeat the Holy Roman Empire as well as the papacy. In the 1,500-year war between Teuton and Roman victory was once more, as in the fifth century, inclining toward Germany.
IV. THE MATURING OF GERMAN ART
This coming of age first manifested itself in art. We may find it hard to believe, but it is true, that at the very height of the Italian Renaissance—from the birth of Leonardo (1452) to the death of Raphael (1520)—German artist
s were in demand throughout Europe for their excellence in every craft in wood, iron, copper, bronze, silver, gold, engraving, painting, sculpture, architecture. Perhaps with more patriotism than impartiality, Felig Fabri of Ulm wrote in 1484: “When anyone wishes to have a first-rate piece of workmanship in bronze, stone, or wood, he employs a German craftsman. I have seen German jewelers, goldsmiths, stonecutters, and carriage makers do wonderful things among the Saracens; they surpassed even the Greeks and Italians in art.”40 Some fifty years later an Italian found this still true: “The Germans,” wrote Paolo Giovio, “are carrying everything before them in art, and we, sluggish Italians, must needs send to Germany for good workmen.” 41 German architects were engaged by Florence, Assisi, Orvieto, Siena, Barcelona, and Burgos, and were called upon to complete the duomo at Milan. Veit Stoss captivated Cracow, Dürer received honors in Venice, and Holbein the Younger took England by storm.