Thomas Frederick Tout ‎

“ He lived simply and elegantly, loving good cheer and delicate meats, but always showing the utmost moderation, and being entirely free from the hard drinking habits of most of the German rulers of his time. He was the bravest and most adventurous of men, risking his life as freely in the rough chase of the chamois among the mountains of Tyrol as in the tiltyard or on the field of battle. ”

“ A large proportion of the Habsburg hereditary lands, including Tyrol and the scattered Swabian estates, were ruled by a rival branch of the ruling house represented by the Archduke Sigismund, while Austria itself fell into the hands of Matthias Corvinus. Yet in his cautious and slow-minded fashion Frederick was by no means lacking in ability and foresight. If he were indifferent to the Empire, he looked beyond the present distress of his house to a time when politic marriages and cunningly devised treaties of eventual succession would make Austria a real ruler of the world. ”

“ Maximilian was ever restless, a hard and quick, though by no means a thorough, worker, with real insight into many knotty problems and no small power of judging and knowing men. Keenly conscious of his own ability, and morbidly jealous of his own authority, he strove to keep the threads of affairs in his own hands, and seldom or never gave implicit confidence even to his most trusted ministers. ”

“ Neither from the lesser immediate nobility nor from the city communities was any real contribution to be expected towards imperial reform. The counts and knights were too poor, too numerous, and too helpless, to be able to safeguard even their own interests. Their absurd jealousies of each other, their feuds with the princes and the towns, their chronic policy of highway robbery, made them the chief difficulty in the way of that general Landfriede which had been proclaimed so often but never realised. The towns were almost equally incompetent to take up a general national policy. ”

“ All through the weary years of Frederick's reign projects of reform had been constantly shattered by the violence and jealousy of the greater princes and by the indifference and want of unanimity of the petty ones. A leader of ability and insight had long been wanted to dominate their sluggish natures and quicken their slow minds with worthier ideals. Such a leader was at last found in Count Berthold of Henneberg, who in 1484 became Elector of Mainz at the age of 42. ”

“ Maximilian was not likely to acquiesce in being deprived of all that made monarchy a reality. The knights with their passion for lawless freedom, the cities with their narrow outlook and strong local prejudices, might be likewise expected to have no good will towards a system in which the former had no part and the latter but a very small one. But a still greater difficulty lay in the princes, whose sectional ambitions and want of settled national policy wholly unfitted them for carrying out so delicate and difficult a task. ”

“ In Germany the dangerous confusion of the national monarchy with the tradition of the Roman Empire had continued fatal to the German Kingdom, even after the imperial idea had ceased to exert any commanding influence over men's minds. The royal power in consequence became the merest shadow of its former self. Central organisation ceased to exist. Private war and general anarchy were chronic. The national life waxed cold, when uncherished by a strong national monarchy ”

“ Though the financiers of Augsburg and Frankfort, and the merchants of Nürnberg or Basel or Cologne, were acquiring vast wealth, building palaces for their residence and through their luxurious ways raising the standard of civilisation and comfort for all ranks of Germans, they were not yet in a position so much as to aspire to political direction. Yet it was in the towns only that there could be found any non-noble class with even the faintest interest in politics. ”

“ Why should a small ring of elderly princes of the second rank deprive the younger generation of all power at home or prospect of distinction abroad? He appealed to the particularistic interests, which were endangered, like his own, by the unionist policy of the Electors. He invoked the chivalrous and adventurous spirit which might well find a more glorious career in fighting Turks and French under the brilliant ruler than in wrangling about constitutional reform at home. ”

“ Under the guidance of an aristocracy that was neither feudal nor particularist, and in which the ecclesiastical element was so strong that the dangers of hereditary influence were reduced to a minimum, a German State might have arisen as united and strong as the France of Louis XI or Francis I, while as free as Lancastrian England. Rude facts proved this ambition unworkable. Monarchy, and monarchy only, could be practically efficient as the formative element in national life. Since German monarchy refused to do its duty, German unity was destined not to be achieved. ”

“ The strength of the Swabian League was in no small measure due to the fact that towns and knights had both cooperated with the princes in its formation. Neither Emperors, nor Diets, nor the voluntary associations of classes and districts sufficed to give peace and prosperity to the Empire. The unwieldy fabric had outgrown its ancient organisation and no new system had arisen capable of supplying its needs. Every aspect of fifteenth century history shows how overwhelming and immediate a need existed for thoroughgoing and organic reform. ”

“ We have seen how anti-German were the ideals of such great imperial vassals as Charles the Bold of Burgundy, and the Dukes of Bavaria. Equally anti-national was the policy of the elder or Palatine branch of the Wittelsbach House, then represented by the Elector Frederick the Victorious (1449-76) . A magnificent and ambitious ruler, who gathered round his Court doctors of Roman law and early exponents of German humanism, Frederick pursued his selfish aims with something of the strength and ability as well as with something of the recklessness and unscrupulousness of the Italian despot. ”

“ In no way is their position comparable to that of the towns of Italy. The great Italian cities largely owed their political influence to the fact that they ruled without a rival over districts as large as most German principalities. But in Germany the territory of many of the strongest among the free cities, such as Augsburg, was almost confined to the limits of their city walls. There were very few towns which dominated so wide a stretch of the countryside as Nürnberg, but how insignificant was the Nürnberg territory as compared with that of Florence! ”

“ Yet Albert died half conscious that his ambition had been ill-directed. All projects and all warlike preparations, declared the dying hero, were of no effect so long as Germany as a whole had no sound peace, no good law or law-courts, and no general currency. But with Albert's death in 1486 the power of Brandenburg, based purely on his individuality, ceased to excite any alarm among the princes of the north. ”

“ The smaller tenants-in-chief, the imperial knights, were not regarded as an Estate of the Empire and were excluded from all part in the Diet. Neither the custom which secured that the voting power of a much divided house should be no greater than that of a family whose power was vested in a single hand, nor that which gave only collective votes to the counts, prelates and towns, had as yet sprung into existence. ”

“ Maximilian soon ceased to take much interest in reforming the Empire by royal prerogative. But he continued to busy himself with schemes for strengthening and unifying the administration of his hereditary dominions. He had long ago chased away the Hungarian conquerors of Vienna, and put an end to the division of the Austrian lands between two rival branches of the Habsburg House. The Aulic Council and the Innsbruck Chamber had a less direct bearing on the Empire than on the hereditary dominions, for the whole of which the Chamber might well have been the source of a single financial system. ”

“ Max betook himself to the Netherlands to wage war against Charles, Count of Egmont, the self-styled Duke of Gelderland, who upheld the French cause on the Lower Rhine. With war everywhere it was useless to go on with the farce of assembling the Estates. In 1499 an attempt to hold a Diet at Worms broke down, and, though Max went back from Gelderland to Cologne to meet the Estates, the rump of a Diet assembled at Worms refused to transfer its sittings to Cologne. Berthold lay dangerously sick. The helplessness and disorder of the Empire were as great as ever. ”

“ But the princely champions of reform would not lift a hand against the daring mountaineers who defied the authority of the Empire. Only the Swabian League gave Max any real help. Before long his armies were beaten and there was no money to raise fresh ones. In despair Max concluded the Peace of Basel (1499) in which he gave the Swiss their own terms. They were declared freed from the Common Penny and from the imperial Chamber and all other specific imperial jurisdiction. A vague and undefined relationship between the Swiss and the Empire was still allowed to remain until the Peace of 1648. ”

“ Counts and barons of the Empire were to equip a horseman for each 4000 florins of income, while knights were to do what they could. The princes of the Empire were to provide at least 500 cavalry from their private resources. It was hoped that these arrangements would give the King an army of 30,000 men; and the leaders of the Diet probably thought it a clever stroke of policy that, while they were themselves let off very lightly, the greater part of the burden fell upon the smaller property-owners. ”

“ In April, 1500, the Diet assembled at Augsburg. Maximilian himself now offered important concessions. Everybody hated the Common Penny, and neither the princes nor the cities were so rich or public-spirited as to submit permanently to the waste of money and time, and to the withdrawal from their own proper local work, involved in the assembling of annual Diets. As an alternative to the first of these hitherto necessary evils the King revived a proposal made at Frankfort in 1486, by which the Estates were to set on foot a permanent army of 34,000 men, and to provide means for its maintenance. ”

“ Their territories were so small, and so scattered, their resources were so meagre and so precarious, that feudal independence meant to them but a limited, localised, and stunted career, and afforded them few guarantees of protection against the aggressions of their stronger neighbours. In such men there was no strong bias of self-interest to prevent their giving rein to the wholesome sentiment of love of fatherland which still survived in German breasts. ”

“ While in France, Spain, and England national monarchies, both autocratic and popular, were establishing national unity, ordered progress, and strong administration, Germany was forced to content herself with the loosest and most impotent of federal governments. ”

“ Bohemia under George Podiebrad had become an almost purely Slavonic State, whose unfriendliness to German nationality and orthodox Catholicism might well threaten the renewal of those devastating Hussite invasions from which Germany had been saved by the Council of Basel. In Hungary German influence had disappeared with the extinction of the House of Luxemburg; the Magyar King Matthias Corvinus conquered the Duchy of Austria from the Habsburg Emperor, and died master of Vienna. The Swiss Confederacy was gradually drifting into hostility to the Empire ”

“ In a few years fresh royal ordinances upset the system as easily as it had been called into being; and in practice Maximilian's reforms were not much better carried out than those of the Diet. The Aulic Council ceased to exist, and its revival was only forced upon Maximilian by the Estates of his own dominions, which saw in a standing council of this sort a means of checking arbitrary prerogative. Max died before the renewed Aulic Council came into working order. Later, its permanent establishment was secured, and as time went on it proved a rather formidable rival to the imperial Chamber. ”

“ Before long want of money and want of coercive power vitiated the whole scheme of reform. The imperial Chamber ceased to be efficient when its decisions could not be enforced, and when its members, seeing no prospect of their promised salaries from an empty treasury, compensated themselves by taking bribes from suitors or transferred themselves to more profitable employments. ”

“ Another weighty advantage accrued to the German monarch from the circumstance that his chief rivals were every whit as badly off in dealing with their vassals as he was with his. The well-ordered territorial sovereignties of a later generation had not yet come into existence. The strongest of the imperial vassals were still feudal lords and not sovereign princes. The resources at their disposal were those of a great feudal proprietor rather than those of an independent ruler. Outside their own domains they had few means of exercising any real power. ”

“ The seventh Elector, the King of Bohemia, was excluded as a foreigner from all electoral functions save the actual choice of the King. The Golden Bull of 1356 had given privileges which raised the Electors above their brother princes into the first Estate of the Empire. They had such full jurisdiction over their territories that it became the ideal of all other princes to obtain the electoral privileges. Succession to their lands was to go by primogeniture, and every Easter they were to hold an electoral Diet. ”

“ Nevertheless the attempt of Berthold is among the most interesting experiments in history, and the spectacle of the feudal potentates of Germany reversing the role of their French or Spanish compeers and striving to build up a united German nation, despite the separatist opposition of the German monarch, shows how strong were the forces that made for nationality during the transition from medieval to modern times. ”

“ Although they could be trusted to struggle stoutly and unscrupulously for their immediate interests, they were the last body of men to frame a general policy or depart from their traditional principles in order to suit the temper of the coming age. The very numerous small princes were infinitely worse off than their greater brethren. The free towns, though much better able to protect themselves than the weaker princes, were powerless for aggression.
The Diet of the Empire (Reichstag) was the ancient and traditional council of the Emperor. ”

“ The excluded princes promptly set up a counter-league, which in 1515 received the adhesion of Frederick the Wise of Saxony. Thus the element of disunion, which had prevented any organised combination of the Empire as a whole, now also threatened to destroy the most successful of the local unions of parts of the Empire. In the midst of this confusion, the last Diets of Maximilian's reign were even more incompetent than their predecessors. The characteristic features of these years were the war of Franz von Sickingen against Worms and the feud between Ulrich of Wurtemberg and the Swabian League. ”