Outlines of Universal History, Designed as a Text-book and for Private Reading

by George Park Fisher

I. GERMANY.

THE GREAT INTERREGNUM.—After the death of Frederick II. (1250), Germany and Italy, the two countries over which the imperial authority extended, were left free from its control. Italy was abandoned to itself, and thus to internal division. The case of Germany was analogous. During the "great interregnum," lasting for twenty-three years, the German cities, by their industry and trade, grew strong, as did the burghers in France, and in the towns in England, in this period. But in Germany the feudal control was less relaxed. This interval was a period of anarchy and trouble. William of Holland wore the title of emperor until 1256. Then the electors were bribed, and Alfonso X. of Castile, great-grandson of Frederick Barbarossa, and Richard, Earl of Cornwall, younger son of King John of England, were chosen by the several factions; but their power was nominal. The four electors on the Rhine, and the dukes and counts, divided among themselves the imperial domains. The dismemberment of the duchies of Swabia and Franconia (1268), and at an earlier day (1180) of Saxony, created a multitude of petty sovereignties. The great vassals of the empire, the kings of Denmark, of Poland, of Hungary, etc., broke away from its suzerainty. There was a reign of violence. The barons sallied out of their strongholds to rob merchants and travelers. The princes, and the nobles in immediate relation to the empire, governed, each in his own territory, as they pleased. New means of protection were created, as the League of the Rhine, comprising sixty cities and the three Rhenish archbishops, and having its own assemblies; and the Hanseatic League, which has been described (p. 303). Moreover, corporations of merchants and artisans were established in the cities. In the North, where the Crusades, and war with the Slaves, had thinned the population, colonies of Flemings, Hollanders, and Frisians came in to cultivate the soil. During the long-continued disturbances after the death of Frederick II., the desire of local independence undermined monarchy. The empire never regained the vigor of which it was robbed by the interregnum.

HOUSE OF HAPSBURG.—Rudolph, Count of Hapsburg (1273-1291), was elected emperor for the reason, that, while he was a brave man, he was not powerful enough to be feared by the aristocracy. He wisely made no attempt to govern in Italy. He was supported by the Church, to which he was submissive. He devoted himself to the task of putting down disorders in Germany. Against Ottocar II., king of Bohemia, who now held also Austria, Styria, Carinthia, and Carniola, and who refused to acknowledge Rudolph, the emperor twice made war successfully. In a fierce battle at the Marchfield, in 1278, Ottocar was slain. Austria, Styria, and Carniola fell into the hands of the emperor. They were given as fiefs to Rudolph's son Albert; and Carinthia to Albert's son-in-law, the Count of Tyrol. This was the foundation of the power of the house of Hapsburg. Rudolph strove with partial success to recover the crown lands, and did what he could to put a stop to private war and to robbery. Numerous strongholds of robbers he razed to the ground. His practical abandonment of Italy, his partial restoration of order in Germany, and his service to the house of Hapsburg, are the principal features of Rudolph's reign.

HENRY VII. (1308-1313): ITALY.—Adolphus of Nassau (1292-1298) was hired by Edward I. to declare war against France. His doings in Thuringia. which he tried to buy from the Landgrave Albert, led the electors to dethrone him, and to choose Albert I. (1298-1308), Duke of Austria, son of Rudolph. His nephew John, whom he tried to keep out of his inheritance, murdered him. Henry VII. (1308-1313), who was Count of Luxemburg, the next emperor, did little more than build up his family by marrying his son John to the granddaughter of King Ottocar. John was thus made king of Bohemia. In these times, when the emperors were weak, they were anxious to strengthen and enrich their own houses. Henry went to Italy to try his fortunes beyond the Alps. He was crowned in Pavia king of Italy, and in Rome emperor (1312). But the rival parties quickly rose up against him: he was excommunicated by Clement V., an ally of France, and died—it was charged, by poison mixed in the sacramental cup—in 1313. He was a man of pure and noble character, but the time had passed for Italy to be governed by a German sovereign.

CIVIL WAR: ELECTORS AT RENSE.—One party of the electors chose Frederick of Austria (1314-1330), and the other Louis of Bavaria (1314-1347). A terrible civil war, lasting for ten years, was the consequence. In a great battle near Mühldorf, the Austrians were defeated, and Frederick was captured. Louis had now to encounter the hostility of Pope John XXII. (at Avignon), who wished to give the imperial crown to Philip the Fair of France. Louis maintained that he received the throne, not from the popes, but from the electors. He was excommunicated by John, who refused to sanction the agreement of Louis and of Frederick, now set at liberty, to exercise a joint sovereignty. Louis was in Italy from 1327 to 1330, where he was crowned emperor by a pope of his own creation. All efforts of Louis to make peace with Pope John and his successor, Benedict XII., were foiled by the opposition of France. The strife which had been occasioned in Germany by this interference from abroad created such disaffection among the Germans, that the electors met at Rense, in 1338, and declared that the elected king of the Germans received his authority from the choice of the electoral princes exclusively, and was Roman emperor even without being crowned by a pope.

DEPOSITION OF LOUIS OF BAVARIA.—The imprudence of Louis in aggrandizing his family, and his assumption of an acknowledged papal right in dissolving the marriage of the heiress of Tyrol with a son of King John of Bohemia, turned the electors against him. In 1346 Pope Clement VI. declared him deposed. The electors chose in his place Charles, the Margrave of Moravia, the son of King John of Bohemia. Louis did not give up his title, but he died soon after.

CHARLES IV. (1347-1378).—Charles IV. visited Italy, and was crowned emperor (1355); but, according to a promise made to the Pope, he tarried in Rome only a part of one day. He was crowned king of Burgundy at Arles (1365). In Italy "he sold what was left of the rights of the empire, sometimes to cities, sometimes to tyrants." His principal care was for building up his own hereditary dominion, which he so enlarged that it extended, at his death, from the Baltic almost to the Danube. He fortified and adorned Prague, and established there, in 1348, the first German university.

THE GOLDEN BULL.—The great service of Charles IV. to Germany was in the grant of the charter called the Golden Bull (1356). This expressly conferred the right of electing the emperor on the SEVEN ELECTORS, who had, in fact, long exercised it. These were the archbishops of Mentz, of Trier, and of Cologne, and the four secular princes, the King of Bohemia, the Count Palatine of the Rhine, the Duke of Saxony, and the Margrave of Brandenburg. The electoral states were made indivisible and inalienable, and hereditary in the male line. The electors were to be sovereign within their respective territories, and their persons were declared sacred.

THE BLACK DEATH.—Germany, like the other countries, was terribly afflicted during the reign of Charles by the destructive pestilence that swept over the most of Europe (p. 319). One effect was an outbreaking of religious fervor. At this time the movement of the "Flagellants," which started in the thirteenth century, reached its height in Germany and elsewhere. They scourged and lacerated themselves for their sins, marching in processions, and inflicting their blows to the sound of music. Another result of the plague was a savage persecution of the Jews, who were falsely suspected of poisoning wells. Many thousands of them were tortured and killed.

ANARCHY IN GERMANY.—The son of Charles IV. (1378-1400), Wenceslaus, or Wenzel, was a coarse and cruel king. Under him the old disorders of the Interregnum sprang up anew. The towns had to defend themselves against the robber barons, and formed confederacies for this purpose. Private war raged all over Germany.

ACCESSION OF SIGISMUND.—Wenceslaus was deposed by the electors in 1400. But Rupert, the Count Palatine, his successor (1400-1410), was able to accomplish little, in consequence of the strife of parties. Sigismund (1410-1437), brother of Wenceslaus, margrave of Brandenburg, and, in right of his wife, king of Hungary, was chosen emperor, first by a part, and then by all, of the electors. The most important events of this period were the Council of Constance (1414-1418) and the war with the Hussites.

JOHN HUSS.—The principal end for which the Council of Constance was called was the healing of the schism in the Church,—in consequence of which there were three rival popes,—and the securing of ecclesiastical reforms. But at this council John Huss, an eminent Bohemian preacher, was tried for heresy. The doctrines of Wickliffe had penetrated into Bohemia; and a strong party, of which Huss was the principal leader, had sprung up in favor of innovations, doctrinal and practical, one of which was the giving of the cup in the sacrament to the laity. Huss made a great stir by his attack upon abuses in the Church. Under a safe-conduct from Sigismund, he journeyed to Constance. There he was tried, condemned as a heretic, and burnt at the stake (1415). Jerome of Prague, another reformer, was dealt with in the same way by the council (1416).

HUSSITE WAR.—The indignation of the followers of Huss was such that a great revolt broke out in Bohemia. The leader was a brave man, Ziska. The imperial troops, after the coronation of Sigismund as king of Bohemia, were defeated, and driven out. The Hussite soldiers ravaged the neighboring countries. The council of Basel (1431-1449) concluded a treaty with the more moderate portion of the Hussites, in which concessions were made to them. The Taborites, the more fanatical portion, were at length defeated and crushed.

SWITZERLAND.—Switzerland, originally a part of the kingdom of Arles, had been ceded, with this kingdom, to the German Empire in 1033. Within it, was established a lay and ecclesiastical feudalism. In the twelfth century the cities—Zürich, Basel, Berne, and Freiburg—began to be centers of trade, and gained municipal privileges. The three mountain cantons—Uri, Schweitz, and Unterwalden—cherished the spirit of freedom. The counts of Hapsburg, after the beginning of the thirteenth century, exercised a certain indefinite jurisdiction in the land. They endeavored to transform this into an actual sovereignty. Two of the cantons received charters placing them in an immediate relation to the empire. After the death of Rudolph I., the three cantons above named united in a league. Out of this the Swiss Confederacy gradually grew up. There were struggles to cast off foreign control; but the story of William Tell, and other legends of the sort, are certainly fabulous. Albert of Austria left to his successor in the duchy the task of subduing the rebellion. The Austrians were completely defeated at Morgarten, "the Marathon of Switzerland" (1315). The Swiss Confederacy was enlarged by the addition of Lucerne (1332), Zürich and Glarus (1351), Zug (1352), and of the city of Berne in 1353. The battle of Sempach (1386) brought another great defeat upon the Austrians. There, if we may believe an ancient song, a Swiss hero, Arnold of Winkelried, grasped as many of the spear-points as he could reach, as a sheaf in his arms, and devoted himself to death, opening thus a path in which his followers rushed to victory. Once more the Swiss triumphed at Näfels (1388). From that time they were left to the enjoyment of their freedom.