CHAPTER VII
Middle Europe
1300–1460

I. LAND AND LABOR

SINCE man lives by permission of physical geography, it is his fate to be divided by mountains, rivers, and seas into groups that develop, in semi-isolation, their diverging languages and creeds, their climatically conditioned features, customs, and dress. Driven by insecurity to suspect the strange, he dislikes and condemns the alien, outlandish looks and ways of other groups than his own. All those fascinating varieties of terrain—mountains and valleys, fiords and straits, gulfs and streams—that make Europe a panorama of diverse delight, have broken the population of a minor continent into a score of peoples cherishing their differences, and self-imprisoned in their heritage of hate. There is a charm in this mosaic of originalities, and one would deprecate a world of people confined in identical myths and pantaloons. And yet, above and beneath these dissimilarities of costume, custom, faith, and speech, nature and man’s needs have forced upon him an economic uniformity and interdependence that become more visible and compelling as invention and knowledge topple barriers away. From Norway to Sicily, from Russia to Spain, the unprejudiced surveying eye sees men not so much as diversely dressed and phrased, but as engaged in like pursuits molding like characters: tilling and mining the earth, weaving garments, building homes, altars, and schools, rearing the young, trading surpluses, and forging social order as man’s strongest organ of defense and survival. For a moment we shall contemplate Middle Europe as such a unity.

In Scandinavia man’s prime task was to conquer the cold, in Holland the sea, in Germany the forests, in Austria the mountains; agriculture, the ground of life, hung its fate on these victories. By 1300 the rotation of crops had become general in Europe, multiplying the yield of the soil. But from 1347 to 1381 half the population of Central Europe was wiped out by the Black Death; and the mortality of men arrested the fertility of the earth. In one year Strasbourg lost 14,000 souls, Cracow 20,000, Breslau 30,000.¹ For a century the Harz mines remained without miners.² With simple animal patience men resumed the ancient labors, digging and turning the earth. Sweden and Germany intensified their extraction of iron and copper; coal was mined at Aachen and Dortmund, tin in Saxony, lead in the Harz, silver in Sweden and the Tyrol, gold in Carinthia and Transylvania.

The flow of metals fed a growing industry, which fed a spreading trade. Germany, leader in mining, naturally led in metallurgy. The blast furnace appeared there in the fourteenth century; with the hydraulic hammer and the rolling mill it transformed the working of metals. Nuremberg became an ironmongers’ capital, famous for its cannon and its bells. The industry and commerce of Nuremberg, Augsburg, Mainz, Speyer, and Cologne made them almost independent city-states. The Rhine, Main, Lech, and Danube gave the South German towns first place in the overland traffic with Italy and the East. Great commercial and financial firms, with far-flung outlets and agencies, rose along these routes, surpassing, in the fifteenth century, the reach and power of the Hanseatic League. The League was still strong in the fourteenth century, dominating trade in the North and Baltic seas; but in 1397 the Scandinavian countries united to break this monopoly, and soon thereafter the English and Dutch began to carry their own goods. Even the herring conspired against the Hanse; about 1417 they decided to spawn in the North Sea rather than the Baltic; Lübeck, a pillar of the League, lost the herring trade and declined; Amsterdam won it and flourished.

Underneath this evolving economy class war seethed—between country and city, lords and serfs, nobles and businessmen, merchant guilds and craft guilds, capitalists and proletarians, clergy and laity, Church and state. In Sweden, Norway, and Switzerland serfdom was going or gone, but elsewhere in Middle Europe it was taking on new life. In Denmark, Prussia, Silesia, Pomerania, and Brandenburg, where peasants had earned their freedom by clearing the wilderness, serfdom was restored in the fifteenth century by a martial aristocracy; we may judge the harshness of these Junkers from a proverb of the Brandenburg peasants, which wished long life to the lord’s horses, lest he should take to riding his serfs.³ In the Baltic lands the barons and the Teutonic knights, at first content to enserf the conquered Slav inhabitants, were induced, by the labor shortages that followed the Black Death and the Polish war of 1409, to impress into bondage any “idlers who roam on the road or in the towns”;⁴ and treaties were made with neighboring governments for the extradition of fugitive serfs.

The mercantile bourgeoisie, favored by the emperors as a foil to the barons, ruled the municipalities so definitely that in many cases the city hall and the merchants’ guildhall were one. Craft guilds were reduced to subjection, submitted to municipal regulation of wages, and were prohibited from united action;⁵ here, as in England and France, proud craftsmen were turned into defenseless prolétaires. Now and then the workers tried revolt. In 1348 the artisans of Nuremberg captured the municipal council and ruled the city for a year, but the Emperor’s soldiers restored the patrician merchants to power.⁶ In Prussia an ordinance of 1358 condemned any striker to have an ear cut off.⁷ Peasant rebellions flared up in Denmark (1340, 1441), Saxony, Silesia, Brandenburg, and the Rhineland (1432), in Norway and Sweden (1434); but they were too laxly organized to achieve more than a passing cathartic violence. Revolutionary ideas circulated through cities and villages. In 1438 an anonymous radical wrote a pamphlet expounding an imaginary “Kaiser Sigismund’s Reformation” on socialistic principles.⁸ The stage was slowly prepared for the Peasants’ War of 1525.

II. THE ORGANIZATION OF ORDER

Order is the mother of civilization and liberty; chaos is the midwife of dictatorship; therefore history may now and then say a good word for kings. Their medieval function was to free the individual in rising measure from local domination, and to centralize in one authority the power to legislate, judge, punish, mint, and make war. The feudal baron mourned the loss of local autonomy, but the simple citizen thought it good that there should be, in his country, one master, one coinage, one law. Men rarely hoped, in those half-illiterate days, that even kings might disappear, and leave no master but the laws and blunders that men had freely made.

Scandinavia had some remarkable monarchs in the fourteenth century. Magnus II of Sweden organized the conflicting laws of his kingdom into a homogeneous national code (1347). In Denmark Eric IV disciplined the barons and strengthened the central power; Christopher II weakened it; Waldemar IV restored it, and made his country one of the major forces in European politics. But the supreme figure in the Scandinavian dynasties of this age was Waldemar Y daughter Margaret. Married at ten (1363) to Haakon VI of Norway, who was the son of Magnus II of Sweden, she seemed destined by blood and marriage to unite the kindred thrones. When her father died (1375) she hurried to Copenhagen with her five-year-old son Olaf, and persuaded the baronial and ecclesiastical electors to accept him as king and herself as regent. When her husband died (1380) Olaf inherited the crown of Norway; but as he was still only ten, Margaret, now twenty-seven, there too acted as regent. Her prudence, tact, and courage astonished her contemporaries, who were accustomed to male incompetence or violence; and the feudal lords of Denmark and Norway, after dominating many kings, proudly supported this wise and beneficent queen. When Olaf came of age (1385) her diplomacy won for him the succession to the Swedish throne. Two years later he died, and her patient, far-seeing plans for the unification of Scandinavia seemed frustrated by his death. But the royal council of Denmark, seeing no male heir available who could match “Margrete” in ability to maintain order and peace, overrode Scandinavian laws against a woman ruler, and elected her Regent of the Realm (1387). Proceeding to Oslo, she was chosen Regent of Norway for life (1388), and a year later the Swedish nobles, having deposed an unsatisfactory king, made her their queen. She prevailed upon all three kingdoms to recognize her grandnephew Eric as heir to their thrones. In 1397 she summoned the three councils of state to Kalmar in Sweden; there Sweden, Norway, and Denmark were declared to be forever united, all to be under one ruler, but each to keep its own customs and laws. Eric was crowned king, but as he was only fifteen, Margaret continued to act as regent till her death (1412). No other European ruler of the age had so extensive a realm, or so successful a reign.

Her grandnephew did not inherit her wisdom. Eric allowed the Union to become in effect a Danish Empire, with a council at Copenhagen ruling the three states. In this empire Norway declined, losing the literary leadership that she had held from the tenth to the thirteenth century. In 1434 Engelbrekt Engelbreksson led a revolt of Sweden against the Danish hegemony; he gathered at Arboga (1435) a national diet of nobles, bishops, yeomen, and burghers; and this broad-based assembly became, through a continuity of 500 years, the Swedish Riksdag of today. Engelbreksson and Kark Knutsen were chosen regents. A year later the hero of the revolution was assassinated, and Knutsen ruled Sweden as regent, then intermittently as king, till his death (1470).

Meanwhile Christian I (1448–81) began the Oldenburg dynasty that governed Denmark till 1863 and Norway till 1814. Iceland came under Danish rule during Margaret’s regency (1381). The high point of the island’s history and literature had passed, but it continued to give chaotic Europe an unheeded lesson in competent and orderly government.

The strongest democracy in the world at this time was in Switzerland. In the history of that invincible country the heroes are the cantons. First were the German-speaking “forest cantons” of Uri, Schwyz, and Unterwalden, which in 1291 united in a Confederation for mutual defense. After the historic victory of the Swiss peasants over the Hapsburg army at Morgarten (1315) the Confederation, while formally acknowledging the sovereignty of the Holy Roman Empire, maintained a virtual independence. New cantons were added: Lucerne (1332), Zurich (1351), Glarus and Zug (1352), Bern (1353); and the name Schwyz was in 1352 extended to the whole. Encouraged to autonomy by geographical barriers, and accepting French, German, or Italian speech and ways according to the slope of its valleys and the course of its streams, each canton made its own laws, through assemblies chosen by the vote of the citizens. The extent of the franchise varied from canton to canton and from time to time, but all cantons pledged themselves to a united foreign policy and to the arbitration of their disputes by a federal diet. Though the cantons sometimes fought one another, nevertheless, the constitution of the Confederation became and remains an inspiring example of federalism—the union of self-governing regions under freely accepted common agencies and laws.

To defend its liberty the Confederation required military training of all males, and military service, at call, from all men between ten and sixty years of age. The Swiss infantry, armed with pikes and sturdy discipline, provided the most feared and expensive legions in Europe. The cantons, to eke out their income, leased their regiments to foreign powers, and for a time “made Swiss valor an article of merchandise.”⁹ Austrian overlords still claimed feudal rights in Switzerland, and occasionally tried to enforce them; they were repulsed at Sempach (1386) and Näfels (1388) in battles that merit some remembrance in the records of democracy. In 1446 the Treaty of Constance once more confirmed the formal allegiance of Switzerland to the Empire, and its actual liberty.

III. GERMANY CHALLENGES THE CHURCH

Germany too was a federation, but its constituent parts were ruled not by democratic assemblies but by secular or ecclesiastical princes acknowledging only a limited fealty to the head of the Holy Roman Empire. Some of these states—Bavaria, Württemburg, Thuringia, Hesse, Nassau, Meissen, Saxony, Brandenburg, Carinthia, Austria, and the Palatinate—were ruled by dukes, counts, margraves, or other secular lords; some—Magdeburg, Mainz, Halle, Bamberg, Cologne, Bremen, Strasbourg, Salzburg, Trier, Basel, Hildesheim—were politically subject in varying degrees to bishops or archbishops; but nearly a hundred cities had by 1460 won charters of practical freedom from their lay or church superiors. In each principality delegates of the three estates—nobles, clergy, commons—met occasionally in a territorial diet that exercised some restraint, through its power of the purse, on the authority of the prince. Principalities and free cities sent representatives to the Reichstag or Imperial Diet. A special Kurfürstentag, or Diet of Electors, was called to choose a king; normally it was composed of the king of Bohemia, the duke of Saxony, the margrave of Brandenburg, the count palatine, and the archbishops of Mainz, Trier, and Cologne. Their choice created only a king, who became the acknowledged head of the Holy Roman Empire when he was crowned emperor by the pope; hence his precoronation title of “King of the Romans.” He made his capital primarily in Nuremberg, often elsewhere, even in Prague. His authority rested on tradition and prestige rather than on possessions or force; he owned no territory beyond his own domain as one feudal prince among many; he was dependent upon the Reichstag or Kurfürstentag for funds to administer his government or to wage war; and this dependence condemned even able men like Charles IV or Sigismund to humiliating failures in foreign affairs. The destruction of the Hohenstaufen dynasty by the powerful popes of the thirteenth century had fatally weakened the Holy Roman Empire founded (A.D. 800) by Pope Leo III and Charlemagne. In 1400 it was a loose association of Germany, Austria, Bohemia, Holland, and Switzerland.

The conflict between Empire and papacy revived when, on the same day in 1314, two rival groups of electors chose Louis of Bavaria and Frederick of Austria as rival kings. John XXII, from his papal seat at Avignon, recognized both as kings, neither as emperor, and argued that since only a pope could crown a king as emperor, he should be accepted as judge of the validity of the election; moreover, said the ambitious pontiff, the administration of the Empire should belong to the papacy between the death of an emperor and the coronation of his successor. Louis and Frederick preferred the arbitrament of war. At Miihldorf (1322) Louis defeated and captured Frederick, and thenceforth assumed full Imperial authority. John ordered him to resign all titles and powers, and to appear before the papal court to receive sentence as a rebel against the Church. Louis refusing, the Pope excommunicated him (1324), bade all Christians in the Empire to resist his rule, and laid an interdict upon any region that recognized him as king. Most of Germany ignored these edicts, for the Germans, like the English, rated the Avignon popes as servants or allies of France. In the progressive weakening of faith and the papacy men were beginning to think of themselves as patriots first and Christians afterward. Catholicism, which is supernational, declined; nationalism, which is Protestant, rose.

At this juncture Louis received aid and comfort from incongruous allies. Pope John’s bull Cum inter nonnulla (1323) had branded as heresy the notion that Christ and the Apostles refused to own property, and he had directed the Inquisition to summon before its tribunal the “Spiritual Franciscans” who affirmed that view. Many friars retorted the charge of heresy upon the Pope; they expressed holy horror at the wealth of the Church; some of them called the aged pontiff Antichrist; and the general of the Spirituals, Michael Cesena, led a large minority of them into open alliance with Louis of Bavaria (1324). Emboldened by their support, Louis issued at Sachsenhausen a manifesto against “John XXII, who calls himself pope”; denounced him as a man of blood and a friend of injustice, who was resolved to destroy the Empire; and demanded that a general council should try the Pope for heresy.¹⁰

The King was further encouraged by the appearance, at his court in Nuremberg, of two professors from the University of Paris—Marsilius of Padua and John of Jandun—whose book, Defensor Pacis, attacked the Avignon papacy in terms that must have pleased the royal ears: “What do you find there but a swarm of simoniacs from every quarter? What but the clamor of pettifoggers, the... abuse of honorable men? There justice to the innocent falls to the ground, unless they can buy it for a price.”¹¹ Echoing the Albigensian and Waldensian preachers of the thirteenth century, and anticipating Luther by two hundred years, the authors argued that Christianity should be based exclusively upon the Bible. A general council of the Church should be summoned not by the pope but by the emperor; the latter’s consent should be required for the election of any pontiff; and the pope, like everybody else, should be subject to the emperor.

Delighted to hear this, Louis decided to go to Italy and have himself crowned emperor by the people of Rome. Early in 1327 he set out with a small army, some Franciscans, and the two philosophers whom he employed to compose his public pronouncements. In April the Pope issued new bulls, excommunicating John and Marsilius, and ordering Louis to leave Italy. But Louis was welcomed into Milan by the ruling Visconti, and received the iron crown as the formal sovereign of Lombardy. On January 7, 1328, he entered Rome amid the acclamations of a populace resentful of the papal residence in Avignon. He established himself in the Vatican palace, and summoned a public assembly to meet at the Capitol. To the multitude there he appeared as a candidate for investiture with the Imperial crown. It gave its tumultuous consent; and on January 17 the coveted diadem was placed upon his head by the old syndic Sciarra Colonna—that same unrelenting foe of the papacy who, almost a quarter of a century before, had fought and threatened with death Boniface VIII, and who again symbolized for a moment the challenge of the rising state to the weakened Church.

Pope John, now seventy-eight, never dreamed of accepting defeat. He proclaimed a holy crusade to depose Louis from all authority, and bade the Romans, under pain of interdict, to expel him from their city and return to the papal obedience. Louis replied in terms recalling his excommunicated predecessor Henry IV; he convoked another popular assembly, and in its presence issued an Imperial edict accusing the Pope of heresy and tyranny, deposing him from ecclesiastical office, and sentencing him to punishment by secular powers. A committee of Roman clergy and laity, under his instructions, named Peter of Corvara as a rival pope. Reversing the roles of Leo III and Charlemagne, Louis placed the papal tiara upon Peter’s head, and proclaimed him Pope Nicholas V (May 12, 1328). The Christian world marveled, and divided into two camps, almost along the same lines that would divide Europe after the Reformation.

Petty local events changed the situation dramatically. Louis had appointed Marsilius of Padua spiritual administrator of the capital; Marsilius ordered the few priests who remained in Rome to celebrate Mass as usual, despite the interdict; some who refused were tortured; and an Augustinian friar was exposed in a den of lions on the Capitol.¹² Many Romans felt that this was carrying philosophy too far. The Italians had never learned to love Teutons; when some German soldiers took food from the markets without paying for it, riots ensued. To support his troops and retinue Louis needed money; he imposed a tribute of 10,000 florins ($250,000?) upon the laity, and equal sums upon the clergy and the Jews. Resentment mounted so dangerously that Louis thought it time to return to Germany. On August 4, 13 2 8, he began a retreat through Italy. Papal troops took possession of Rome the next day; the palaces of Louis’s Roman supporters were destroyed, and their goods were confiscated to the Church. The people made no resistance, but returned to their devotions and their crimes.

Louis was consoled at Pisa by receiving another recruit, the most famous philosopher of the fourteenth century. William of Ockham had fled from a papal prison in Avignon; now he offered his services to the Emperor, saying (according to an unverified tradition), “Tu me defendas gladio, ego te defendam calamo”—“Defend me with the sword, and I will defend you with the pen.” ¹³ He wrote vigorously, but he could not save the situation. Louis had alienated all the ruling elements in Italy. His Ghibelline adherents had hoped to rule the peninsula in his name for their own good; they were chagrined to find him assuming all the powers and perquisites of government; moreover, he made them levy unpopular taxes for his exchequer. As his forces were ill proportioned to his pretensions, many Ghibellines, even the Visconti, abandoned him and made what peace they could with the Pope. The Antipope, left to his own resources, submitted to arrest by papal officers, was led before John XXII with a halter around his neck, threw himself at the Pope’s feet and begged for pardon (1328). John forgave him, embraced him as a returned prodigal, and imprisoned him for life.

Louis returned to Germany, and sent repeated embassies to Avignon offering recantations and apologies for papal pardon and recognition. John refused, and fought on till his death (1334). Louis recovered some ground when England, beginning the Hundred Years’ War, sought his alliance; Edward III recognized Louis as Emperor, and Louis hailed Edward as King of France. Seizing the opportunity provided by this alliance of two major powers against the papacy, an assembly of German princes and prelates at Rense (July 16. 1338) proclaimed that the choice of a German king by the German electors could not be annulled by any other authority; and a diet at Frankfurt-am-Main (August 3, 1338) declared the papal pronouncements against Louis null and void; the Imperial title and power, it ruled, were the gift of the Imperial electors, and needed no confirmation by a pope.¹⁴ Germany and England ignored the protests of Pope Benedict XII, and moved a step toward the Reformation.

Reckless with success, Louis now decided to apply to the full the theories of Marsilius, and to exercise ecclesiastical as well as secular supremacy. He removed papal appointees from church benefices, and put his own candidates in their place; he appropriated the funds that papal collectors were raising for a crusade; he dissolved the marriage of Margaret of Carinthia—heiress to much of Tyrol—and wedded her to his own son, who was related to her by a degree of kinship canonically invalidating marriage. The repudiated husband, his elder brother Charles, and their father, King John of Bohemia, vowed vengeance; and Clement VI, who had become pope in 1342, saw an opportunity to unseat the aging enemy of the Papal See. Skillful diplomacy won elector after elector to the view that peace and order could be restored in the Empire only by deposing Louis and making Charles of Bohemia emperor; and Charles, as the price of papal support, pledged obedience to papal commands. In July 1346, an electoral diet at Rense unanimously declared Charles to be King of Germany. Louis, having failed to secure a hearing at Avignon for his offers of submission, prepared to fight to the death for his throne. Meanwhile, aged sixty, he hunted vigorously, fell from his horse, and was killed (1347).

Charles IV, as King and Emperor, governed well. The Germans disliked him because he made Prague the Imperial capital; but in Germany as well as in his homeland he improved administration, protected commerce and transport, reduced tolls, and maintained an honest currency; and to the whole Empire he gave a generation of comparative peace. In 1356 he acquired equivocal fame in history by issuing a series of regulations known as the Golden Bull—though they were only a few of many documents bearing the Imperial golden seal. Perhaps convinced that his long absence from Germany necessitated such an arrangement, he granted to the seven electors such powers as almost annulled the Imperial authority. The electors were to meet annually to legislate for the realm; the king or emperor was to be merely their president and executive arm. They themselves in their own states were to enjoy full judiciary power, ownership of all minerals and metals in the soil, the right to mint their own coinages, to raise revenue, and, within limits, to make war and peace. The Bull gave its legal sanction to existing facts, and tried to build upon them a co-operative federation of Principalities. The electors, however, absorbed themselves in their regional affairs, and so neglected their responsibilities as an Imperial council that Germany remained only a name. This local independence of the electors made possible the protection of Luther by the Elector of Saxony, and the consequent spread of the Protestant faith.

In his old age Charles secured the Imperial succession for his son by wholesale bribery (1378). Wenceslaus IV had some virtues, but he loved alcohol and his native land; the electors resented his tastes, and deposed him (1400) in favor of Rupert III, who left no trace on history. Sigismund of Luxembourg had at the age of nineteen been chosen King of Hungary (1387); in 1411 he was elected King of the Romans, and soon assumed the title of emperor. He was a man of varied accomplishments and personal charm, handsome and vain, generous and amiable, occasionally cruel; he learned several languages and loved literature only next to women and power. His good intentions might have paved a small inferno, but his courage failed him in crisis. He tried honorably to reform the abuses and weaknesses of the German government; he passed some excellent laws, and enforced a few of them; but he was frustrated by the autonomy and inertia of the electors, and their unwillingness to share in the cost of checking the advancing Turks. In his later years he consumed his funds and energies in fighting the Hussites of Bohemia. When he died (1437) Europe mourned that one who for a time had been the voice of European progress had failed in everything but dignity.

He had commended his son-in-law, Albert of Hapsburg, to the electors of Bohemia, Hungary, and Germany. Albert II graced the three crowns, but before his abilities could bear fruit he died of dysentery in a campaign against the Turks (1440). He left no son, but the electors voted the royal and Imperial crowns to another Hapsburg, Frederick of Styria; thereafter their choice fell repeatedly to a Hapsburg prince, and the Imperial power became in effect the hereditary possession of that talented and ambitious family. Frederick III made Austria an archduchy; the Hapsburgs made Vienna their capital; the heir presumptive was regularly the archduke of Austria; and the genial quality of the Austrian and Viennese character entered like a graceful feminine theme to cross with the brusque masculinity of the north in the Teutonic soul.

IV. THE MYSTICS

The fourteenth and fifteenth centuries sowed the seeds of the Reformation: Louis of Bavaria, Wyclif in England, Huss in Bohemia, rehearsed the play for Luther, Henry VIII, Calvin, and Knox. In Scandinavia the rapidly rising wealth of the clergy, exempt from taxation, became an irritating burden to the people and the state. Critics alleged that the Church owned half the land of Denmark, holding a fief on Copenhagen itself.¹⁵ Nobles looked with ominous envy upon possessions protected by only a creed; and even the orthodox were anticlerical. In Switzerland the proud independence of the cantons was a prelude to Zwingli and Calvin. In 1433 Magdeburg expelled her archbishop and clergy; Bamberg revolted against episcopal rule; Passau besieged her bishop in his citadel.¹⁶ In 1449 a professor in the University of Erfurt (where Luther was to study) addressed to Pope Nicholas V a defense of general councils as superior in authority to the popes.¹⁷ Echoes of the Hussite revolt in neighboring Bohemia spread through Germany; here and there Waldensian congregations furtively preserved old heresies and semi-communistic aspirations.¹⁸ Piety itself tended toward a mysticism that hovered near heresy.

In Johannes Eckhart mysticism became a pantheism that by-passed the Church and almost ignored the defined creed. This Dominican friar was so learned that the title Meister became part of his name. His philosophical writings were phrased in such scholastic Latin that had these been his sole works he would never have come to any harm or fame. But in his monastery at Cologne he preached in epigrammatic German the audacious pantheism that invited the Inquisition. Following Dionysius the Areopagite and Johannes Scotus Erigena, he struggled to express his overwhelming sense of an omnipresent God. This all-bathing ocean of deity Eckhart conceived as not a person or a spirit, but only “absolute bare unity .. . the abyss, without a mode and without form, of the silent and waste divinity... where never was seen difference, neither Father, Son, nor Holy Ghost, where there is no one at home, yet where the spark of the soul is more at peace than within itself.”¹⁹ Essentially only this formless divinity exists.

In each individual there is a fragment of God; through it we can communicate directly with Him, and can identify ourselves with Him. Not through church ritual, not even through the Bible, but through this cosmic consciousness alone the soul can approach and see God. The more one renounces individual and worldly aims, the clearer and more farseeing this divine spark becomes, until at last God and soul are one, and “we are totally transformed into God.”²¹ Heaven, purgatory, and hell are not places; they are states of the soul: separation from God is hell, union with Him is paradise.²² Some of these propositions smelled of heresy to the Archbishop of Cologne. He summoned Eckhart to trial (1326); Eckhart affirmed his docile orthodoxy, and proposed that his statements should be viewed as literary hyperboles. The bishop condemned him nevertheless. The friar appealed to Pope John XXII, and then escaped the faggots by a timely death (1327).

His influence was spread by two Dominican pupils who knew how to keep his pantheism within safe bounds. Heinrich Suso tortured himself for sixteen years with ascetic austerities, cut the name of Jesus into his flesh over his heart, claimed to have received into his mouth blood from the wounds of Christ, and wrote his Little Book of Eternal Wisdom in German because, he said, it was in German that God had revealed it to him.²³ Johannes Tauler called Eckhart his “most holy Master,” and preached at Strasbourg and Basel the doctrine of mystic union with God. It was to Tauler that Luther ascribed a book, Deutsche Theologie, which moved him deeply with its simple creed: God, Christ, and immortality.

The Church looked with some concern upon mystics who ignored most of her dogmas, neglected her ritual, and claimed to reach God without the help of priests or sacraments. Here lay in germ the Reformation doctrines of private judgment, and every man a priest, and justification not by good works but by transcendent faith. The Church held that supernatural revelations could come from demons and maniacs as well as from God and the saints, and that some authoritative guidance was needed to keep religion from disintegrating into a chaos of individual visions and theologies. That difference of view still divides honest men.

V. THE ARTS

The Gothic style lingered in Germany long after it had given way, in Italy and France, to the classic influences of the Renaissance. Now it crowned the thriving cities of Central Europe with churches not as overpowering in grandeur as the great shrines of France, yet lifting the spirit with a quiet beauty and unpretentious dignity. Uppsala began its cathedral in 1287, Saxon Freiberg in 1283, Ulm in 1377 (with the highest Gothic tower in the world), Vienna its Stefansdom in 1304, Stralsund its Marienkirche in 1382, Danzig another Marienkirche in 1425. Aachen and Cologne added the choirs of their cathedrals, Strasbourg completed the “frozen music” of its cathedral in 1439; Xanten built a graceful Collegiate Church of St. Victor, which was destroyed in the second World War. Nuremberg gloried in four famous churches that gave piety a schooling in art and taste. The Lorenzkirche (1278–1477) owed to the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries its stately portal and resplendent rose. The Stefansdom, or Cathedral of St. Stephen (1304–1476), was a beloved landmark; its steep roof covered nave and aisles in a single span, and fell to Mars in 1945. About 1309 the Sebalduskirche rebuilt its aisles; in 1361 it raised a new choir; about 1498 it completed its western towers; from 1360 to 1510 it installed magnificent stained glass. The Frauenkirche, or Church of Our Lady (1355–61), with its richly sculptured vestibule, was almost demolished in the second World War, but is already restored; and every day at noon the four manikin electors in the famous clock of the façade bow to Charles IV in untiring acknowledgment of his famous Bull. Sculpture was still crude, but churches in Breslau and Hallgarten, and the Sebalduskirche in Nuremberg, received stone or wood Madonnas of some nobility.

The cities beautified not only their churches but their public buildings, their shops, and their homes. Now rose those gabled and half-timbered houses that give the German towns a wistful medieval charm for idealizing modern eyes. The Rathaus, or Council Hall, was the center of civic life, sometimes also the rendezvous of the greater guilds; its walls might bear frescoes, and its woodwork was usually carved with Teutonic fullness and strength. The Grosse Saal of the Rathaus at Bremen (1410–50) had a ceiling of carved beams, a winding staircase with posts and railing of carved wood, and gaudy chandeliers in the shape of ships. The Rathaus of Cologne (1360–1571), which had seated the first general convocation of the Hanseatic League; of Münster (1335), where the Treaty of Westphalia was signed; of Brunswick, a fourteenth-century gem of civic Gothic; of Frankfurt-am-Main (1405), where the electors dined a newly chosen emperor: all were destroyed in the second World War. In Marienburg the Grand Masters of the Teutonic Order built their massive Deutschordenschloss (1309–80). In Nuremberg the Rathaus confronted the Sebalduskirche; it was built (1340) to hold the fully assembled Reichstag of the Empire; half a dozen restorations have left little of its medieval form. In the market place before the Frauenkirche a Prague sculptor, Heinrich Parler, raised the Schöner Brunnen, or Beautiful Fountain (1361 f.), crowded with statues of pagan, Jewish, and Christian heroes. With its sculptures, churches, and secular architecture Nuremberg, in the three centuries between 1250 and 1550, represented the German spirit at its highest and best. The meandering streets were mostly narrow and unpaved; yet the future Pope Pius II wrote of Nuremberg:

In the German cities the industrial and minor arts—in wood, ivory, copper, bronze, iron, silver, gold—reached now the full ripening of their medieval growth. Artists and weavers composed amazing tapestries; the wood engravers prepared for Dürer and Holbein; the miniaturists illuminated fine manuscripts on the eve of Gutenberg; woodworkers carved gorgeous furniture; and the metal founders cast for the churches, in the fifteenth century, bells whose beauty of tone has never been surpassed. Music was not merely an art; it was half the leisure life of the towns. Nuremberg and other cities staged great carnivals of popular drama and song. The Volkslied expressed the pious or amorous sentiments of the people. The middle classes made a mass attack upon the problems of polyphony; the guilds competed in gigantic choruses; butchers, tanners, bell casters, and other mighty men contested the Meistersinger prize in tumultuous vocal tournaments. The first famous school of Meistersinger was established at Mainz in 1311; others rose at Strasbourg, Frankfurt-am-Main, Würzburg, Zurich, Augsburg, Nuremberg, and Prague. Students who passed through the four degrees of Schüler, Schulfreund, Dichter, and Saenger (scholar, friend of the school, poet, and singer) earned the title of Meister. The romantic and idealistic strain of the minnesingers was brought to earth as the German burghers tied their lusty realism to the wings of song.

Since the business class dominated the cities, all the arts except church architecture took a realistic turn. The climate was cold and often wet, discouraging nudity; the pride and cult of the body did not find a congenial home here as in Renaissance Italy or ancient Greece. When Konrad Witz of Constance painted Solomon and the Queen of Sheba he dressed them as if for a winter in the Alps. A dozen cities, however, had schools of painting in the fifteenth century—Ulm, Salzburg, Würzburg, Frankfurt, Augsburg, Munich, Darmstadt, Basel, Aachen, Nuremberg, Hamburg, Colmar, Cologne; and samples survive from all of them. We read in a chronicle of 1380: “There was in Cologne at this time a famous painter named Wilhelm, whose like could not be found in all the land. He portrayed men so cunningly that it seemed they were alive.”²⁵ Meister Wilhelm was one of many “primitives”—Meister Bertram, Meister Francke, The Master of St. Veronica, The Master of the Heisterbacher Altar—who, chiefly under Flemish influence, created a discipline of mural painting in Germany, and suffused the traditional Gospel themes with an emotional piety traceable, it may be, to Eckhart and the other German mystics.

In Stephen Lochner, who died at Cologne in 1451, this preliminary development ends, and we reach the zenith of the early school. His Adoration of the Magi, now a prize of the Cologne Cathedral, can bear comparison with most paintings produced before the middle of the fifteenth century: a lovely Virgin at once modest and proud, a delightful Infant, the Wise Men of the East very German but credibly wise, the composition orthodox, the coloring bright with blue and green and gold. In The Virgin of the Rose Trellis and The Madonna of the Violet, ideal young German mothers, of a soft and pensive beauty, are portrayed with all the technical resources of a medieval art visibly moving toward modernity. Germany was on the threshold of its greatest age.

VI. GUTENBERG

What put an end to the Middle Ages? Many causes, operating through three centuries: the failure of the Crusades; the spreading acquaintance of renascent Europe with Islam; the disillusioning capture of Constantinople; the resurrection of classic pagan culture; the expansion of commerce through the voyages of Henry the Navigator’s fleet, and Columbus, and Vasco da Gama; the rise of the business class, which financed the centralization of monarchical government; the development of national states challenging the supernational authority of the popes; the successful revolt of Luther against the papacy; printing.

Before Gutenberg nearly all education had been in the hands of the Church. Books were costly; copying was laborious and sometimes careless. Few authors could reach a wide audience until they were dead; they had to live by pedagogy, or by entering a monastic order, or by pensions from the rich or benefices from the Church. They received little or no payment from those who published their works; and even if one publisher paid them they had no copyright protection, except occasionally by a papal grant. Libraries were numerous but small; monasteries, cathedrals, colleges, and some cities had modest collections, seldom more than 300 volumes; the books were usually kept inside the walls, and some were chained to lecterns or desks. Charles V of France had a library renowned for its size—910 volumes; Humphrey, Duke of Gloucester, had 600; the library of Christ Church Priory at Canterbury was probably as large as any outside of Islam, having some 2,000 volumes in 1300. The best publicized library in England was that of Richard de Bury St. Edmunds, who wrote affectionately of his books in The Philobiblon (1345), and made them complain of their maltreatment by “that two-legged beast called woman,” who insisted on exchanging them for fine linen or silk.²⁶

As schools multiplied and literacy rose, the demand for books increased. The business classes found literacy useful in the operations of industry and trade; women of the middle and upper classes escaped, through reading, into a world of compensatory romance; by 1300 the time had passed when only the clergy could read. It was this rising demand, even more than the increased supply of paper and the development of an oily ink,²⁷ that led to Gutenberg. Moslems had brought paper manufacture to Spain in the tenth century, to Sicily in the twelfth; it passed into Italy in the thirteenth, into France in the fourteenth; the paper industry was a hundred years old in Europe when printing came. In the fourteenth century, when linen clothing became customary in Europe, castoff linens provided cheap rags for paper; the cost of paper declined, and its readier availability co-operated with the extension of literacy to offer a material and market for printed books.

Printing itself, as imprinting, was older than Christianity. The Babylonians had printed letters or symbols upon bricks, the Romans and many others upon coins, potters upon their wares, weavers upon cloths, bookbinders upon book covers; any ancient or medieval dignitary used printing when he stamped documents with his seal. Similar methods had been employed in the production of maps and playing cards. Block printing—by blocks of wood or metal engraved with words, symbols, or images—goes back in China and Japan to the eighth century, probably beyond; the Chinese in this way printed paper money in or before the tenth century. Block printing appeared in Tabriz in 1294, in Egypt toward 1300; but the Moslems preferred calligraphy to printing, and did not serve in this case, as in so many others, to carry cultural developments from the East to the West.

Typography—printing with separate and movable type for each character or letter—was used in China as early as 1041. In 1314 Wang Chên employed nearly 60,000 movable wooden type characters to print a book on agriculture;²⁸ he had tried metal type first, but had found that it did not take or hold ink as readily as wood. Movable type, however, offered little advantage or convenience to a language that had no alphabet, but had 40,000 separate characters; consequently block printing remained customary in China till the nineteenth century. In 1403 a Korean emperor printed a large number of volumes from movable metal type; characters were engraved in hard wood, molds of porcelain paste were made from these models, and in these molds metal type were cast.

In Europe printing from movable type may have developed first in Holland; according to Dutch traditions not traceable beyond 1569, Laurens Coster of Haarlem printed a religious manual from movable metal type in 1430; but the evidence is inconclusive.²⁹ Nothing further is heard of movable type in Holland till 1473, when Germans from Cologne set up a press in Utrecht. But these men had learned the art in Mainz.

Johann Gutenberg was born there of a prosperous family about 1400. His father’s name was Gensfleisch—Gooseflesh; Johann preferred his mother’s maiden name. He lived most of his first forty years in Strasbourg, and appears to have made experiments there in cutting and casting metal type. Toward 1448 he became a citizen of Mainz. On August 22, 1450, he entered into a contract with Johann Fust, a rich goldsmith, by which he mortgaged his printing press to Fust for a loan of 800 guilders, later raised to 1,600. A letter of indulgence issued by Nicholas V in 1451 was probably printed by Gutenberg; several copies exist, bearing the oldest printed date, 1454.³⁰ In 1455 Fust sued Gutenberg for repayment; unable to comply, Gutenberg surrendered his press. Fust carried on the establishment with Peter Schöffer, who had been employed by Gutenberg as typesetter. Some believe that it was Schöffer who had by this time developed the new tools and technique of printing: a hard “punch” of engraved steel for each letter, number, and punctuation mark, a metal matrix to receive the punches, and a metal mold to hold the matrix and letters in line.

In 1456 Gutenberg, with borrowed funds, set up another press. From this he issued, in that year or the next, what has been generally considered his first type-printed book, the famous and beautiful “Gutenberg Bible”*—a majestic folio of 1,282 large double-columned pages. In 1462 Mainz was sacked by the troops of Adolf of Nassau; the printers fled, scattering the new art through Germany. By 1463 there were printers in Strasbourg, Cologne, Basel, Augsburg, Nuremberg, and Ulm. Gutenberg, one of the fugitives, settled in Eltville, where he resumed his printing. He struggled painfully through one financial crisis after another, until Adolf gave him (1465) a benefice yielding a protective income. Some three years later he died.

Doubtless his use of movable type would have been developed by others had he never been born; it was an obvious demand of the times; this is true of most inventions. A letter written in 1470 by Guillaume Fichet of Paris suggests how enthusiastically the invention was welcomed: “There has been discovered in Germany a wonderful new method for the production of books, and those who have mastered the art are taking it from Mainz out into the world.... . The light of this discovery will spread from Germany to all parts of the earth.”³¹ But not all welcomed it. Copyists protested that printing would destroy their means of livelihood; aristocrats opposed it as a mechanical vulgarization, and feared that it would lower the value of their manuscript libraries; statesmen and clergy distrusted it as a possible vehicle of subversive ideas. It made its triumphant way nevertheless. In 1464 two Germans set up a press in Rome; in or before 1469 two Germans opened a printing shop in Venice; in 1470 three Germans brought the art to Paris; in 1471 it reached Holland, in 1472 Switzerland, in 1473 Hungary, in 1474 Spain, in 1476 England, in 1482 Denmark, in 1483 Sweden, in 1490 Constantinople. Nuremberg with the Koberger family, Paris with the Étiennes, Lyons with Dolet, Venice with Aldus Manutius, Basel with Amerbach and Froben, Zurich with Froschauer, Leiden with the Elzevirs, became humming hives of printing and publishing. Soon half the European population was reading as never before, and a passion for books became one of the effervescent ingredients of the Reformation age. “At this very moment,” writes a Basel scholar to a friend, “a whole wagon load of classics, of the best Aldine editions, has arrived from Venice. Do you want any? If you do, tell me at once, and send the money, for no sooner is such a freight landed than thirty buyers rise up for each volume, merely asking the price, and tearing one another’s eyes out to get hold of them.”³² The typographical revolution was on.

To describe all its effects would be to chronicle half the history of the modern mind. Erasmus, in the ecstasy of his sales, called printing the greatest of all discoveries, but perhaps he underestimated speech, fire, the wheel, agriculture, writing, law, even the lowly common noun. Printing replaced esoteric manuscripts with inexpensive texts rapidly multiplied, in copies more exact and legible than before, and so uniform that scholars in diverse countries could work with one another by references to specific pages of specific editions. Quality was often sacrificed to quantity, but the earliest printed books were in many cases models of art in typography and binding. Printing published—i.e., made available to the public—cheap manuals of instruction in religion, literature, history, and science; it became the greatest and cheapest of all universities, open to all. It did not produce the Renaissance, but it paved the way for the Enlightenment, for the American and French revolutions, for democracy. It made the Bible a common possession, and prepared the people for Luther’s appeal from the popes to the Gospels; later it would permit the rationalist’s appeal from the Gospels to reason. It ended the clerical monopoly of learning, the priestly control of education. It encouraged the vernacular literatures, for the large audience it required could not be reached through Latin. It facilitated the international communication and co-operation of scientists. It affected the quality and character of literature by subjecting authors to the purse and taste of the middle classes rather than to aristocratic or ecclesiastical patrons. And, after speech, it provided a readier instrument for the dissemination of nonsense than the world has ever known until our time.