A History of the Reformation (Vol. 1 of 2)

by Thomas M. Lindsay

Preface.

This History of the Reformation has been written with the intention of describing a great religious movement amid its social environment. The times were heroic, and produced great men, with striking individualities not easily weighed in modern balances. The age is sufficiently remote to compel us to remember that while the morality of one century can be judged by another, the men who belong to it must be judged by the standard of their contemporaries, and not altogether by ours. The religious revival was set in a framework of political, intellectual, and economic changes, and cannot be disentangled from its surroundings without danger of mutilation. All these things add to the difficulty of description.

My excuse, if excuse be needed, for venturing on the task is that the period is one to which I have devoted special attention for many years, and that I have read and re-read most of the original contemporary sources of information. While full use has been made of the labours of predecessors in the same field, no chapter in the volume, save that on the political condition of Europe, has been written without constant reference to contemporary evidence.

A History of the Reformation, it appears to me, must describe five distinct but related things—the social and religious conditions of the age out of which the great [pg viii] movement came; the Lutheran Reformation down to 1555, when it received legal recognition; the Reformation in countries beyond Germany which did not submit to the guidance of Luther; the issue of certain portions of the religious life of the Middle Ages in Anabaptism, Socinianism, and Anti-Trinitarianism; and, finally, the Counter-Reformation.

The second follows the first in natural succession; but the third was almost contemporary with the second. If the Reformation won its way to legal recognition earlier in Germany than in any other land, its beginnings in France, England, and perhaps the Netherlands, had appeared before Luther had published his Theses. I have not found it possible to describe all the five in chronological order.

This volume describes the eve of the Reformation and the movement itself under the guidance of Luther. In a second volume I hope to deal with the Reformation beyond Germany, with Anabaptism, Socinianism, and kindred matters which had their roots far back in the Middle Ages, and with the Counter-Reformation.

The first part of this volume deals with the intellectual, social, and religious life of the age which gave birth to the Reformation. The intellectual life of the times has been frequently described, and its economic conditions are beginning to attract attention. But few have cared to investigate popular and family religious life in the decades before the great revival. Yet for the history of the Reformation movement nothing can be more important. When it is studied, it can be seen that the evangelical revival was not a unique phenomenon, entirely unconnected with the immediate past. There was a continuity in the religious life of the period. The same hymns were sung in public and in private after the Reformation which had been in [pg ix] use before Luther raised the standard of revolt. Many of the prayers in the Reformation liturgies came from the service-books of the mediæval Church. Much of the family instruction in religious matters received by the Reformers when they were children was in turn taught by them to the succeeding generation. The great Reformation had its roots in the simple evangelical piety which had never entirely disappeared in the mediæval Church. Luther's teaching was recognised by thousands to be no startling novelty, but something which they had always at heart believed, though they might not have been able to formulate it. It is true that Luther and his fellow-Reformers taught their generation that Our Lord, Jesus Christ, filled the whole sphere of God, and that other mediators and intercessors were superfluous, and that they also delivered it from the fear of a priestly caste; but men did not receive that teaching as entirely new; they rather accepted it as something they had always felt, though they had not been able to give their feelings due and complete expression. It is true that this simple piety had been set in a framework of superstition, and that the Church had been generally looked upon as an institution within which priests exercised a secret science of redemption through their power over the sacraments; but the old evangelical piety existed, and its traces can be found when sought for.

A portion of the chapter which describes the family and popular religious life immediately preceding the Reformation has already appeared in the London Quarterly Review for October 1903.

In describing the beginnings of the Lutheran Reformation, I have had to go over the same ground covered by my chapter on “Luther” contributed to the second volume of the Cambridge Modern History, and have found it impossible [pg x] not to repeat myself. This is specially the case with the account given of the theory and practice of Indulgences. It ought to be said, however, that in view of certain strictures on the earlier work by Roman Catholic reviewers, I have gone over again the statements made about Indulgences by the great mediæval theologians of the thirteenth and fifteenth centuries, and have not been able to change the opinions previously expressed.

My thanks are due to my colleague, Dr. Denney, and to another friend for the care they have taken in revising the proof-sheets, and for many valuable suggestions which have been given effect to.

Thomas M. Lindsay.

March, 1906.

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Book I. On The Eve Of The Reformation.

Chapter I. The Papacy.[1]

§ 1. Claim to Universal Supremacy.

The long struggle between the Mediæval Church and the Mediæval Empire, between the priest and the warrior,[2] ended, in the earlier half of the thirteenth century, in the overthrow of the Hohenstaufens, and left the Papacy sole inheritor of the claim of ancient Rome to be sovereign of the civilised world.

Roma caput mundi regit orbis frena rotundi.

Strong and masterful Popes had for centuries insisted on exercising powers which, they asserted, belonged to them as the successors of St. Peter and the representatives of Christ upon earth. Ecclesiastical jurists had translated their assertions into legal language, and had expressed them in principles borrowed from the old imperial law. Precedents, needed by the legal mind to unite the past with the present, had been found in a series of imaginary papal judgments extending over past centuries. The forged decretals of the pseudo-Isidor (used by Pope Nicholas i. in his letter of 866 a.d. to the bishops of Gaul), of the group of canonists who supported the pretensions of Pope Gregory vii. (1073-1085),—Anselm of Lucca, Deusdedit, Cardinal Bonzio, and Gregory of Pavia,—gave to the papal claims the semblance of the sanction of antiquity. The Decretum of Gratian, issued in 1150 from Bologna, then the most famous Law School in Europe, incorporated all these earlier forgeries and added new ones. It displaced the older collections of Canon Law and became the starting-point for succeeding canonists. Its mosaic of facts and falsehoods formed the basis for the theories of the imperial powers and of the universal jurisdiction of the Bishops of Rome.[3]

The picturesque religious background of this conception of the Church of Christ as a great temporal empire had been furnished by St. Augustine, although probably he would have been the first to protest against the use made of his vision of the City of God. His unfinished masterpiece, De Civitate Dei, in which with a devout and glowing imagination he had contrasted the Civitas Terrena, or the secular State founded on conquest and maintained by fraud and violence, with the Kingdom of God, which he identified with the visible ecclesiastical society, had filled the imagination of all Christians in the days immediately preceding the dissolution of the Roman Empire of the West, and had contributed in a remarkable degree to the [pg 003] final overthrow of the last remains of a cultured paganism. It became the sketch outline which the jurists of the Roman Curia gradually filled in with details by their strictly defined and legally expressed claim of the Roman Pontiff to a universal jurisdiction. Its living but poetically indefinite ideas were transformed into clearly defined legal principles found ready-made in the all-embracing jurisprudence of the ancient empire, and were analysed and exhibited in definite claims to rule and to judge in every department of human activity. When poetic thoughts, which from their very nature stretch forward towards and melt in the infinite, are imprisoned within legal formulas and are changed into principles of practical jurisprudence, they lose all their distinctive character, and the creation which embodies them becomes very different from what it was meant to be. The mischievous activity of the Roman canonists actually transformed the Civitas Dei of the glorious vision of St. Augustine into that Civitas Terrena which he reprobated, and the ideal Kingdom of God became a vulgar earthly monarchy, with all the accompaniments of conquest, fraud, and violence which, according to the great theologian of the West, naturally belonged to such a society. But the glamour of the City of God long remained to dazzle the eyes of gifted and pious men during the earlier Middle Ages, when they contemplated the visible ecclesiastical empire ruled by the Bishop of Rome.

The requirements of the practical religion of everyday life were also believed to be in the possession of this ecclesiastical monarchy to give and to withhold. For it was the almost universal belief of mediæval piety that the mediation of a priest was essential to salvation; and the priesthood was an integral part of this monarchy, and did not exist outside its boundaries. “No good Catholic Christian doubted that in spiritual things the clergy were the divinely appointed superiors of the laity, that this power proceeded from the right of the priests to celebrate the sacraments, that the Pope was the real possessor of [pg 004] this power, and was far superior to all secular authority.”[4] In the decades immediately preceding the Reformation, many an educated man might have doubts about this power of the clergy over the spiritual and eternal welfare of men and women; but when it came to the point, almost no one could venture to say that there was nothing in it. And so long as the feeling remained that there might be something in it, the anxieties, to say the least, which Christian men and women could not help having when they looked forward to an unknown future, made kings and peoples hesitate before they offered defiance to the Pope and the clergy. The spiritual powers which were believed to come from the exclusive possession of priesthood and sacraments went for much in increasing the authority of the papal empire and in binding it together in one compact whole.

In the earlier Middle Ages the claims of the Papacy to universal supremacy had been urged and defended by ecclesiastical jurists alone; but in the thirteenth century theology also began to state them from its own point of view. Thomas Aquinas set himself to prove that submission to the Roman Pontiff was necessary for every human being. He declared that, under the law of the New Testament, the king must be subject to the priest to the extent that, if kings proved to be heretics or schismatics, the Bishop of Rome was entitled to deprive them of all kingly authority by releasing subjects from their ordinary obedience.[5]

The fullest expression of this temporal and spiritual supremacy claimed by the Bishops of Rome is to be found in Pope Innocent iv.'s Commentary on the Decretals[6] (1243-1254), and in the Bull, Unam Sanctam, published by Pope Boniface viii. in 1302. But succeeding Bishops of Rome [pg 005] in no way abated their pretensions to universal sovereignty. The same claims were made during the Exile at Avignon and in the days of the Great Schism. They were asserted by Pope Pius ii. in his Bull, Execrabilis et pristinis (1459), and by Pope Leo x. on the very eve of the Reformation, in his Bull, Pastor Æternus (1516); while Pope Alexander vi. (Rodrigo Borgia), acting as the lord of the universe, made over the New World to Isabella of Castile and to Ferdinand of Aragon by legal deed of gift in his Bull, Inter cætera divinæ (May 4th, 1493).[7]

The power claimed in these documents was a twofold supremacy, temporal and spiritual.

§ 2. The Temporal Supremacy.

The former, stated in its widest extent, was the right to depose kings, free their subjects from their allegiance, and bestow their territories on another. It could only be [pg 006] enforced when the Pope found a stronger potentate willing to carry out his orders, and was naturally but rarely exercised. Two instances, however, occurred not long before the Reformation. George Podiebrod, the King of Bohemia, offended the Bishop of Rome by insisting that the Roman See should keep the bargain made with his Hussite subjects at the Council of Basel. He was summoned to Rome to be tried as a heretic by Pope Pius ii. in 1464, and by Pope Paul ii. in 1465, and was declared by the latter to be deposed; his subjects were released from their allegiance, and his kingdom was offered to Matthias Corvinus, the King of Hungary, who gladly accepted the offer, and a protracted and bloody war was the consequence. Later still, in 1511, Pope Julius ii. excommunicated the King of Navarre, and empowered any neighbouring king to seize his dominions—an offer readily accepted by Ferdinand of Aragon.[8]

It was generally, however, in more indirect ways that this claim to temporal supremacy, i.e. to direct the policy, and to be the final arbiter in the actions of temporal sovereigns, made itself felt. A great potentate, placed over the loosely formed kingdoms of the Middle Ages, hesitated to provoke a contest with an authority which was able to give religious sanction to the rebellion of powerful feudal nobles seeking a legitimate pretext for defying him, or which could deprive his subjects of the external consolations of religion by laying the whole or part of his dominions under an interdict. We are not to suppose that the exercise of this claim of temporal supremacy was always an evil thing. Time after time the actions and interference of right-minded Popes proved that the temporal supremacy of the Bishop of Rome meant that moral considerations must have due weight attached to them in the international affairs of Europe; and this fact, [pg 007] recognised and felt, accounted largely for much of the practical acquiescence in the papal claims. But from the time when the Papacy became, on its temporal side, an Italian power, and when its international policy had for its chief motive to increase the political prestige of the Bishop of Rome within the Italian peninsula, the moral standard of the papal court was hopelessly lowered, and it no longer had even the semblance of representing morality in the international affairs of Europe. The change may be roughly dated from the pontificate of Pope Sixtus iv. (1471-1484), or from the birth of Luther (November 10th, 1483). The possession of the Papacy gave this advantage to Sixtus over his contemporaries in Italy, that he “was relieved of all ordinary considerations of decency, consistency, or prudence, because his position as Pope saved him from serious disaster.” The divine authority, assumed by the Popes as the representatives of Christ upon earth, meant for Sixtus and his immediate successors that they were above the requirements of common morality, and had the right for themselves or for their allies to break the most solemn treaties when it suited their shifting policy.

§ 3. The Spiritual Supremacy.

The ecclesiastical supremacy was gradually interpreted to mean that the Bishop of Rome was the one or universal bishop in whom all spiritual and ecclesiastical powers were summed up, and that all other members of the hierarchy were simply delegates selected by him for the purposes of administration. On this interpretation, the Bishop of Rome was the absolute monarch over a kingdom which was called spiritual, but which was as thoroughly material as were those of France, Spain, or England. For, according to mediæval ideas, men were spiritual if they had taken orders, or were under monastic vows; fields, drains, and fences were spiritual things if they were Church property; a house, a barn, or a byre was a spiritual thing, if it stood on land belonging to the Church. This papal [pg 008] kingdom, miscalled spiritual, lay scattered over Europe in diocesan lands, convent estates, and parish glebes—interwoven in the web of the ordinary kingdoms and principalities of Europe. It was part of the Pope's claim to spiritual supremacy that his subjects (the clergy) owed no allegiance to the monarch within whose territories they resided; that they lived outside the sphere of civil legislation and taxation; and that they were under special laws imposed on them by their supreme spiritual ruler, and paid taxes to him and to him alone. The claim to spiritual supremacy therefore involved endless interference with the rights of temporal sovereignty in every country in Europe, and things civil and things sacred were so inextricably mixed that it is quite impossible to speak of the Reformation as a purely religious movement. It was also an endeavour to put an end to the exemption of the Church and its possessions from all secular control, and to her constant encroachment on secular territory.

To show how this claim for spiritual supremacy trespassed continually on the domain of secular authority and created a spirit of unrest all over Europe, we have only to look at its exercise in the matter of patronage to benefices, to the way in which the common law of the Church interfered with the special civil laws of European States, and to the increasing burden of papal requisitions of money.

In the case of bishops, the theory was that the dean and chapter elected, and that the bishop-elect had to be confirmed by the Pope. This procedure provided for the selection locally of a suitable spiritual ruler, and also for the supremacy of the head of the Church. The mediæval bishops, however, were temporal lords of great influence in the civil affairs of the kingdom or principality within which their dioceses were placed, and it was naturally an object of interest to kings and princes to secure men who would be faithful to themselves. Hence the tendency was for the civil authorities to interfere more or less in episcopal appointments. This frequently resulted in making these elections a matter of conflict between the head of [pg 009] the Church in Rome and the head of the State in France, England, or Germany; in which case the rights of the dean and chapter were commonly of small account. The contest was in the nature of things almost inevitable even when the civil and the ecclesiastical powers were actuated by the best motives, and when both sought to appoint men competent to discharge the duties of the position with ability. But the best motives were not always active. Diocesan rents were large, and the incomes of bishops made excellent provision for the favourite followers of kings and of Popes, and if the revenues of one see failed to express royal or papal favour adequately, the favourite could be appointed to several sees at once. Papal nepotism became a byword; but it ought to be remembered that kingly nepotism also existed. Pope Sixtus v. insisted on appointing a retainer of his nephew, Cardinal Giuliano della Rovere, to the see of Modrus in Hungary, and after a contest of three years carried his point in 1483; and Matthias Corvinus, King of Hungary, gave the archbishopric of Gran to Ippolito d'Este, a youth under age, and after a two years' struggle compelled the Pope to confirm the appointment in 1487.

During the fourteenth century the Papacy endeavoured to obtain a more complete control over ecclesiastical appointments by means of the system of Reservations which figures so largely in local ecclesiastical affairs to the discredit of the Papacy during the years before the Reformation. For at least a century earlier, Popes had been accustomed to declare on various pretexts that certain benefices were vacantes apud Sedem Apostolicam, which meant that the Bishop of Rome reserved the appointment for himself. Pope John xxii. (1316-1334), founding on such previous practice, laid down a series of rules stating what benefices were to be reserved for the papal patronage. The ostensible reason for this legislation was to prevent the growing evil of pluralities; but, as in all cases of papal lawmaking, these Constitutiones Johanninæ had the effect of binding ecclesiastically all patrons but the Popes themselves. For [pg 010] the Popes always maintained that they alone were superior to the laws which they made. They were supra legem or legibus absoluti, and their dispensations could always set aside their legislation when it suited their purpose. Under these constitutions of Pope John xxii., when sees were vacant owing to the invalidation of an election they were reserved to the Pope. Thus we find that there was a disputed election to the see of Dunkeld in 1337, and after some years' litigation at Rome the election was quashed, and Richard de Pilmor was appointed bishop auctoritate apostolica. The see of Dunkeld was declared to be reserved to the Pope for the appointment of the two succeeding bishops at least.[9] This system of Reservations was gradually extended under the successors of Pope John xxii., and was applied to benefices of every kind all over Europe, until it would be difficult to say what piece of ecclesiastical preferment escaped the papal net. There exists in the town library in Trier a MS. of the Rules of the Roman Chancery on which someone has sketched the head of a Pope, with the legend issuing from the mouth, Reservamus omnia, which somewhat roughly represents the contents of the book. In the end, the assertion was made that the Holy See owned all benefices, and, in the universal secularisation of the Church which the half century before the Reformation witnessed, the very Rules of the Roman Chancery contained the lists of prices to be charged for various benefices, whether with or without cure of souls; and in completing the bargain the purchaser could always procure a clause setting aside the civil rights of patrons.

On the other hand, ecclesiastical preferments always implied the holders being liferented in lands and in monies, and the right to bestow these temporalities was protected by the laws of most European countries. Thus the ever-extending papal reservations of benefices led to continual conflicts between the laws of the Church—in this case latterly the Rules of the Roman Chancery—and the laws of the European States. Temporal rulers sought to [pg 011] protect themselves and their subjects by statutes of Præmunire and others of a like kind,[10] or else made bargains with the Popes, which took the form of Concordats, like that of Bourges (1438) and that of Vienna (1448). Neither statutes nor bargains were of much avail against the superior diplomacy of the Papacy, and the dread which its supposed possession of spiritual powers inspired in all classes of people. A Concordat was always represented by papal lawyers to be binding only so long as the goodwill of the Pope maintained it; and there was a deep-seated feeling throughout the peoples of Europe that the Church was, to use the language of the peasants of Germany, “the Pope's House,” and that he had a right to deal freely with its property. Pious and patriotic men, like Gascoigne in England, deplored the evil effects of the papal reservations; but they saw no remedy unless the Almighty changed the heart of the Holy Father; and, after the failures of the Conciliar attempts at reform, a sullen hopelessness seemed to have taken possession of the minds of men, until Luther taught them that there was nothing in the indefinable power that the Pope and the clergy claimed to possess over the spiritual and eternal welfare of men and women.

To Pope John xxii. (1316-1334) belongs the credit or discredit of creating for the Papacy a machinery for gathering in money for its support. His situation rendered this almost inevitable. On his accession he found himself with an empty treasury; he had to incur debts in order to live; he had to provide for a costly war with the Visconti; and he had to leave money to enable his successors to carry out his temporal policy. Few Popes lived so plainly; his money-getting was not for personal luxury, but for the supposed requirements of the papal policy. He was the first Pope who systematically made the dispensation of grace, temporal and eternal, a source of revenue. Hitherto the charges made by the papal Chancery had [pg 012] been, ostensibly at least, for actual work done—fees for clerking and registration, and so on. John made the fees proportionate to the grace dispensed, or to the power of the recipient to pay. He and his successors made the Tithes, the Annates, Procurations, Fees for the bestowment of the Pallium, the Medii Fructus, Subsidies, and Dispensations, regular sources of revenue.

The Tithe—a tenth of all ecclesiastical incomes for the service of the Papacy—had been levied occasionally for extraordinary purposes, such as crusades. It was still supposed to be levied for special purposes only, but necessary occasions became almost continuous, and the exactions were fiercely resented. When Alexander vi. levied the Tithe in 1500, he was allowed to do so in England. The French clergy, however, refused to pay; they were excommunicated; the University of Paris declared the excommunication unlawful, and the Pope had to withdraw.

The Annates were an ancient charge. From the beginning of the twelfth century the incoming incumbent of a benefice had to pay over his first year's income for local uses, such as the repairs on ecclesiastical buildings, or as a solatium to the heirs of the deceased incumbent. From the beginning of the thirteenth century prelates and princes were sometimes permitted by the Popes to exact it of entrants into benefices. One of the earliest recorded instances was when the Archbishop of Canterbury was allowed to use the Annates of his province for a period of seven years from 1245, for the purpose of liquidating the debts on his cathedral church. Pope John xxii. began to appropriate them for the purposes of the Papacy. His predecessor Clement v. (1305-1314) had demanded all the Annates of England and Scotland for a period of three years from 1316. In 1316 John made a much wider demand, and in terms which showed that he was prepared to regard the Annates as a permanent tax for the general purposes of the Papacy. It is difficult to trace the stages of the gradual universal enforcement of this tax; but in [pg 013] the decades before the Reformation it was commonly imposed, and averages had been struck as to its amount.[11] “They consisted of a portion, usually computed at one-half, of the estimated revenue of all benefices worth more than 25 florins. Thus the archbishopric of Rouen was taxed at 12,000 florins, and the little see of Grenoble at 300; the great abbacy of St. Denis at 6000, and the little St. Ciprian Poictiers at 33; while all the parish cures in France were uniformly rated at 24 ducats, equivalent to about 30 florins.” Archbishoprics were subject to a special tax as the price of the Pallium, and this was often very large.

The Procurationes were the charges, commuted to money payments, which bishops and archdeacons were authorised to make for their personal expenses while on their tours of visitation throughout their dioceses. The Popes began by demanding a share, and ended by often claiming the whole of these sums.

Pope John xxii. was the first to require that the incomes of vacant benefices (medii fructus) should be paid over to the papal treasury during the vacancies. The earliest instance dates from 1331, when a demand was made for the income of the vacant archbishopric of Gran in Hungary; and it soon became the custom to insist that the stipends of all vacant benefices should be paid into the papal treasury.

Finally, the Popes declared it to be their right to require special subsidies from ecclesiastical provinces, and great pressure was put on the people to pay these so-called free-will offerings.

Besides the sums which poured into the papal treasury from these regular sources of income, irregular sources afforded still larger amounts of money. Countless dispensations were issued on payment of fees for all manner of breaches of canonical and moral law—dispensations for marriages within the prohibited degrees, for holding pluralities, [pg 014] for acquiring unjust gains in trade or otherwise. This demoralising traffic made the Roman treasury the partner in all kinds of iniquitous actions, and Luther, in his address To the Nobility of the German Nation respecting the Reformation of the Christian Estate, could fitly describe the Court of the Roman Curia as a place “where vows were annulled, where the monk gets leave to quit his Order, where priests can enter the married life for money, where bastards can become legitimate, and dishonour and shame may arrive at high honours; all evil repute and disgrace is knighted and ennobled.” “There is,” he adds, “a buying and a selling, a changing, blustering and bargaining, cheating and lying, robbing and stealing, debauchery and villainy, and all kinds of contempt of God that Antichrist could not reign worse.”

The vast sums of money obtained in these ways do not represent the whole of the funds which flowed from all parts of Europe into the papal treasury. The Roman Curia was the highest court of appeal for the whole Church of the West. In any case this involved a large amount of law business, with the inevitable legal expenses; but the Curia managed to attract to itself a large amount of business which might have been easily settled in the episcopal or metropolitan courts. This was done in pursuance of a double policy—an ecclesiastical and a financial one. The half century before the Reformation saw the overthrow of feudalism and the consolidation of kingly absolutism, and something similar was to be seen in the Papacy as well as among the principalities of Europe. Just as the kingly absolutism triumphed when the hereditary feudal magnates lost their power, so papal absolutism could only become an accomplished fact when it could trample upon an episcopate deprived of its ecclesiastical independence and inherent powers of ruling and judging. The Episcopate was weakened in many ways,—by exempting abbacies from episcopal control, by encouraging the mendicant monks to become the rivals of the parish clergy, and so on,—but the most potent method of degrading [pg 015] it was by encouraging people with ecclesiastical complaints to pass by the episcopal courts and to carry their cases directly to the Pope. Nationalities, men were told, had no place within the Catholic Church. Rome was the common fatherland, and the Pope the universal bishop and judge ordinary. His judgment, which was always final, could be had directly. In this way men were enticed to take their pleas straight to the Pope. No doubt this involved sending a messenger to Italy with a statement of the plea and a request for a hearing; but it did not necessarily involve that the trial should take place at Rome. The central power could delegate its authority, and the trial could take place wherever the Pope might appoint. But the conception undoubtedly did increase largely the business of the courts actually held in Rome, and caused a flow of money to the imperial city. The Popes were also ready to lend monies to impoverished litigants, for which, of course, heavy interest was charged.

The immense amount of business which was thus directed into the papal chancery from all parts of Europe required a horde of officials, whose salaries were provided partly from the incomes of reserved benefices all over Europe, and partly from the fees and bribes of the litigants. The papal law-courts were notoriously dilatory, rapacious, and venal. Every document had to pass through an incredible number of hands, and pay a corresponding number of fees; and the costs of suits, heavy enough according to the prescribed rule of the chancery, were increased immensely beyond the regular charges by others which did not appear on the official tables. Cases are on record where the briefs obtained cost from twenty-four to forty-one times the amount of the legitimate official charges. The Roman Church had become a law-court, not of the most reputable kind,—an arena of rival litigants, a chancery of writers, notaries, and tax-gatherers,—where transactions about privileges, dispensations, buying of benefices, etc., were carried on, and where suitors went wandering with their petitions from the door of one office to another.

During the half century which preceded the Reformation, things went from bad to worse. The fears aroused by the attempts at a reform through General Councils had died down, and the Curia had no desire to reform itself. The venality and rapacity increased when Popes began to sell offices in the papal court. Boniface ix. (1389-1404) was the first to raise money by selling these official posts to the highest bidders. “In 1483, when Sixtus iv. (1471-1484) desired to redeem his tiara and jewels, pledged for a loan of 100,000 ducats, he increased his secretaries from six to twenty-four, and required each to pay 2600 florins for the office. In 1503, to raise funds for Cæsar Borgia, Alexander vi. (1492-1503) created eighty new offices, and sold them for 760 ducats apiece. Julius ii. formed a ‘college’ of one hundred and one scriveners of papal briefs, in return for which they paid him 74,000 ducats. Leo x. (1513-1521) appointed sixty chamberlains and a hundred and forty squires, with certain perquisites, for which the former paid him 90,000 ducats and the latter 112,000. Places thus paid for were personal property, transferable on sale. Burchard tells us that in 1483 he bought the mastership of ceremonies from his predecessor Patrizzi for 450 ducats, which covered all expenses; that in 1505 he vainly offered Julius ii. (1503-1513) 2000 ducats for a vacant scrivenership, and that soon after he bought the succession to an abbreviatorship for 2040.”[12] When Adrian vi. (1522-1523) honestly tried to cleanse this Augean stable, he found himself confronted with the fact that he would have to turn men adrift who had spent their capital in buying the places which any reform must suppress.

The papal exactions needed to support this luxurious Roman Court, especially those taken from the clergy of Europe, were so obnoxious that it was often hard to collect them, and devices were used which in the end increased the burdens of those who were required to provide the money. The papal court made bargains with the temporal [pg 017] rulers to share the spoils if they permitted the collection.[13] The Popes agreed that the kings or princes could seize the Tithes or Annates for a prescribed time provided the papal officials had their authority to collect them, as a rule, for Roman use. In the decades before the Reformation it was the common practice to collect these dues by means of agents, often bankers, whose charges were enormous, amounting sometimes to fifty per cent. The collection of such extraordinary sources of revenue as the Indulgences was marked by even worse abuses, such as the employment of pardon-sellers, who overran Europe, and whose lies and extortions were the common theme of the denunciations of the greatest preachers and patriots of the times.

The unreformed Papacy of the closing decades of the fifteenth and of the first quarter of the sixteenth century was the open sore of Europe, and the object of execrations by almost all contemporary writers. Its abuses found no defenders, and its partisans in attacking assailants contented themselves with insisting upon the necessity for the spiritual supremacy of the Bishops of Rome.

“Sant Peters schifflin ist im schwangk

Ich sorge fast den untergangk,

Die wallen schlagen allsit dran,

Es würt vil sturm und plagen han.”[14]

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Chapter II. The Political Situation.[15]

§ 1. The small extent of Christendom.

During the period of the Reformation a small portion of the world belonged to Christendom, and of that only a part was affected, either really or nominally, by the movement. The Christians belonging to the Greek Church were entirely outside its influence.

Christendom had shrunk greatly since the seventh century. The Saracens and their successors in Moslem sovereignty had overrun and conquered many lands which had formerly been inhabited by a Christian population and governed by Christian rulers. Palestine, Syria, Asia Minor, Egypt, and North Africa westwards to the Straits of Gibraltar, had once been Christian, and had been lost to Christendom during the seventh and eighth centuries. The Moslems had invaded Europe in the West, had conquered the Spanish Peninsula, had passed the Pyrenees, and had invaded France. They were met and defeated in a three days' battle at Tours (732) by the Franks under Charles the Hammer, the grandfather of Charles the Great. After they had been thrust back beyond the Pyrenees, the Spanish Peninsula was the scene of a struggle between Moslem and Christian which lasted for more than seven hundred years, and Spain did not become wholly Christian until the last decade of the fifteenth century.

If the tide of Moslem conquest had been early checked in the West, in the East it had flowed steadily if slowly. [pg 019] In 1338, Orchan, Sultan of the Ottoman Turks, seized on Gallipoli, the fortified town which guarded the eastern entrance to the Dardanelles, and the Moslems won a footing on European soil. A few years later the troops of his son Murad i. had seized a portion of the Balkan peninsula, and had cut off Constantinople from the rest of Christendom. A hundred years after, Constantinople (1453) had fallen, the Christian population had been slain or enslaved, the great church of the Holy Wisdom (St. Sophia) had been made a Mohammedan mosque, and the city had become the metropolis of the wide-spreading empire of the Ottoman Turks. Servia, Bosnia, Herzogovina (the Duchy, from Herzog, a Duke), Greece, the Peloponnesus, Roumania, Wallachia, and Moldavia were incorporated in the Moslem Empire. Belgrade and the island of Rhodes, the two bulwarks of Christendom, had fallen. Germany was threatened by Turkish invasions, and for years the bells tolled in hundreds of German parishes calling the people to pray against the coming of the Turk. It was not until the heroic defence of Vienna, in 1529, that the victorious advance of the Moslem was stayed. Only the Adriatic separated Italy from the Ottoman Empire, and the great mountain wall with the strip of Dalmatian coast which lies at its foot was the bulwark between civilisation and barbarism.

§ 2. Consolidation.

In Western Europe, and within the limits affected directly or indirectly by the Reformation, the distinctive political characteristic of the times immediately preceding the movement was consolidation or coalescence. Feudalism, with its liberties and its lawlessness, was disappearing, and compact nations were being formed under monarchies which tended to become absolute. If the Scandinavian North be excluded, five nations included almost the whole field of Western European life, and in all of them the principle of consolidation is to be seen at work. In three, England, France, and Spain, there emerged great united [pg 020] kingdoms; and if in two, Germany and Italy, there was no clustering of the people round one dynasty, the same principle of coalescence showed itself in the formation of permanent States which had all the appearance of modern kingdoms.

It is important for our purpose to glance at each and show the principle at work.

§ 3. England.

By the time that the Duke of Richmond had ascended the English throne and ruled with “politic governance” as Henry vii., the distinctively modern history of England had begun. Feudalism had perished on the field of the battle of Bosworth. The visitations of the Black Death, the gigantic agricultural labour strike under Wat Tylor and priest Ball, and the consequent transformation of peasant serfs into a free people working for wages, had created a new England ready for the changes which were to bridge the chasm between mediæval and modern history. The consolidation of the people was favoured by the English custom that the younger sons of the nobility ranked as commoners, and that the privileges as well as the estates went to the eldest sons. This kept the various classes of the population from becoming stereotyped into castes, as in Germany, France, and Spain. It tended to create an ever-increasing middle class, which was not confined to the towns, but permeated the country districts also. The younger sons of the nobility descended into this middle class, and the transformation of the serfs into a wage-earning class enabled some of them to rise into it. England was the first land to become a compact nationality.

The earlier portion of the reign of Henry vii. was not free from attempts which, if successful, would have thrown the country back into the old condition of disintegration. Although the king claimed to unite the rival lines of York and Lancaster, the Yorkists did not cease to raise difficulties at home which were eagerly fostered from abroad. Ireland [pg 021] was a Yorkist stronghold, and Margaret, the dowager Duchess of Burgundy, the sister of Edward iv., exercised a sufficiently powerful influence in Flanders to make that land a centre of Yorkist intrigue.

Lambert Simnel, a pretender who claimed to be either the son or the nephew of Edward iv. (his account of himself varied), appeared in Ireland, and the whole island gathered round him. He invaded England, drew to his standard many of the old Yorkists, but was defeated at Stoke-on-Trent in 1487. This was really a formidable rebellion. The rising under Perkin Warbeck, a young Burgundian from Tournay, though supported by Margaret of Burgundy and James iv. of Scotland, was more easily suppressed. A popular revolt against severe taxation was subdued in 1497, and it may be said that Henry's home difficulties were all over by the year 1500. England entered the sixteenth century as a compact nation.

The foreign policy of Henry vii. was alliance with Spain and a long-sighted attempt to secure Scotland by peaceful means. It had for consequences two marriages which had far-reaching results. The marriage of Henry's daughter Margaret with James iv. of Scotland led to the union of the two crowns three generations later; and that between Katharine, the third daughter of Ferdinand and Isabella of Spain, and the son of Henry vii. came to be the occasion, if not the cause, of the revolt of England from Rome. Katharine was married to Arthur, Prince of Wales, in 1501 (November 14th). Prince Arthur died on January 14th, 1502. After protracted negotiation, lengthened by the unwillingness of the Pope (Pius iii.) to grant a dispensation, Katharine was contracted to Henry, and the marriage took place in the year of Prince Henry's accession to the crown. Katharine and Henry were crowned together at Westminster on June 28th, 1509.

England had prospered during the reign of the first Tudor sovereign. The steady increase in wool-growing and wool-exporting is in itself testimony to the fact that the period of internal wars had ceased, for sheep speedily [pg 022] become extinct when bands of raiders disturb the country. The growth in the number of artisan capitalists shows that money had become the possession of all classes in the community. The rise of the companies of merchant adventurers proves that England was taking her share in the world-trade of the new era. English scholars like Grocyn and Linacre (tutor in Italy of Pope Leo x. and in England of the Prince of Wales) had imbibed the New Learning in Italy, and had been followed there by John Colet, who caught the spirit of the Renaissance from the Italian Humanists and the fervour of a religious revival from Savonarola's work in Florence. The country had emerged from Mediævalism in almost everything when Henry viii., the hope of the English Humanists and reformers, ascended the throne in 1509.

§ 4. France.

If England entered on the sixteenth century as the most compact kingdom in Europe, in the sense that all classes of its society were welded together more firmly than anywhere else, it may be said of France at the same date that nowhere was the central authority of the sovereign more firmly established. Many things had worked for this state of matters. The Hundred Years' War with England did for France what the wars against the Moors had done for Spain. It had created a sense of nationality. It had also made necessary national armies and the raising of national taxes. During the weary period of anarchy under Charles vi. every local and provincial institution of France had seemed to crumble or to display its inefficiency to help the nation in its sorest need. The one thing which was able to stand the storms and stress of the time was the kingly authority, and this in spite of the incapacity of the man who possessed it. The reign of Charles vii. had made it plain that England was not destined to remain in possession of French territory; and the succeeding reigns had seen the central authority slowly acquiring irresistible strength. Charles vii. by his policy of yielding slightly to [pg 023] pressure and sitting still when he could—by his inactivity, perhaps masterly,—Louis xi. by his restless, unscrupulous craft, Anne of Beaujeu (his daughter) by her clear insight and prompt decision, had not only laid the foundations, but built up and consolidated the edifice of absolute monarchy in France. The kingly power had subdued the great nobles and feudatories; it had to a large extent mastered the Church; it had consolidated the towns and made them props to its power; and it had made itself the direct lord of the peasants.

The work of consolidation had been as rapid as it was complete. In 1464, three years after his succession, Louis xi. was confronted by a formidable association of the great feudatories of France, which called itself the League of Public Weal. Charles of Guyenne, the king's brother, the Count of Charolais (known as Charles the Bold of Burgundy), the Duke of Brittany, the two great families of the Armagnacs, the elder represented by the Count of Armagnac, and the younger by the Duke of Nemours, John of Anjou, Duke of Calabria, and the Duke of Bourbon, were allied in arms against the king. Yet by 1465 Normandy had been wrested from the Duke of Guyenne; Guyenne itself had become the king's in 1472; the Duke of Nemours had been crushed and slain in 1476; the Count of Charolais, become Duke of Burgundy, had been overthrown, his power shattered, and himself slain by the Swiss peasant confederates, and almost all his French fiefs had been incorporated by 1480; and on the death of King René (1480) the provinces of Anjou and Provence had been annexed to the Crown of France. The great feudatories were so thoroughly broken that their attempt to revolt during the earlier years of the reign of Charles viii. was easily frustrated by Anne of Beaujeu acting on behalf of the young king.

The efforts to secure hold on the Church date back from the days of the Council of Basel, when Pope Eugenius was at hopeless issue with the majority of its members. In 1438 a deputation from the Council waited upon the [pg 024] king and laid before him the conciliar plans of reform. Charles vii. summoned an assembly of the French clergy to meet at Bourges. He was present himself with his principal nobles; and the meeting was also attended by members of the Council and by papal delegates. There the celebrated Pragmatic Sanction of Bourges was formally presented and agreed upon.

This Pragmatic Sanction embodied most of the cherished conciliar plans of reform. It asserted the ecclesiastical supremacy of Councils over Popes. It demanded a meeting of a Council every ten years. It declared that the selection of the higher ecclesiastics was to be left to the Chapters and to the Convents. It denied the Pope's general claim to the reservation of benefices, and greatly limited its use in special cases. It did away with the Pope's right to act as Ordinary, and insisted that no ecclesiastical cases should be appealed to Rome without first having exhausted the lower courts of jurisdiction. It abolished the Annates, with some exceptions in favour of the present Pope. It also made some attempts to provide the churches with an educated ministry. All these declarations simply carried out the proposals of the Council of Basel; but they had an important influence on the position of the French clergy towards the king. The Pragmatic Sanction, though issued by an assembly of the French clergy, was nevertheless a royal ordinance, and thereby gave the king indefinite rights over the Church within France. The right to elect bishops and abbots was placed in the hands of Chapters and Convents, but the king and nobles were expressly permitted to bring forward and recommend candidates, and this might easily be extended to enforcing the election of those recommended. Indefinite rights of patronage on the part of the king and of the nobles over benefices in France could not fail to be the result, and the French Church could scarcely avoid assuming the appearance of a national Church controlled by the king as the head of the State. The abolition of the Pragmatic Sanction was always a bait which the French king could dangle [pg 025] before the eyes of the Pope, and the promise to maintain the Pragmatic Sanction was always a bribe to secure the support of the clergy and the Parlements of France.

In 1516, Francis i. and Leo x. agreed on a Concordat, the practical effect of which was that the king received the right to nominate to almost all the higher vacant benefices in France, while the Popes received the Annates. The results were not beneficial to the Church. It left the clergy a prey to papal exactions, and it compelled them to seek for promotion through subserviency to the king and the court; but it had the effect of ranging the monarch on the side of the Papacy when the Reformation came.

It can scarcely be said that France was a compact nation. The nobility were separated from the middle and lower classes by the fact that all younger sons retained the status and privileges of nobles. In ancient times they had paid no share of the taxes raised for war, on the ground that they rendered personal service, and the privilege of being free from taxation was retained long after the services of a feudal militia had disappeared. The nobility in France became a caste, numerous, poor in many instances, and too proud to belittle themselves by entering any of the professions or engaging in commerce.

Louis xi. had done his best to encourage trade, and had introduced the silkworm industry into France. But as the whole weight of taxation fell upon the rural districts, the middle classes took refuge in the towns, and the peasantry, between the dues they had to pay to their lords and the taxation for the king, were in an oppressed condition. Their grievances were set forth in the petition they addressed, in the delusive hope of amelioration, to the States-General which assembled on the accession of Charles viii. “During the past thirty-four years,” they say, “troops have been ever passing through France and living on the poor people. When the poor man has managed, by the sale of the coat on his back, and after hard toil, to pay his taille, and hopes he may live out the [pg 026] year on the little he has left, then come fresh troops to his cottage, eating him up. In Normandy, multitudes have died of hunger. From want of cattle, men and women have to yoke themselves to the carts; and others, fearing that if seen in the daytime they will be seized for not having paid their taille, are compelled to work at night. The king should have pity on his poor people, and relieve them from the said tailles and charges.” This was in 1483, before the Italian wars had further increased the burdens which the poorest class of the community had to pay.

The New Learning had begun to filter into France at a comparatively early date. In 1458 an Italian of Greek descent had been appointed to teach Greek by the University of Paris. But that University had been for long the centre of mediæval scholastic study, and it was not until the Italian campaigns of Charles viii., who was in Italy when the Renaissance was at its height, that France may be said to have welcomed the Humanist movement. A Greek Press was established in Paris in 1507, a group of French Humanists entered upon the study of the authors of classical antiquity, and the new learning gradually displaced the old scholastic disciplines. French Humanists were perhaps the earliest to make a special study of Roman Law, and to win distinction as eminent jurists. Francis, like Henry viii. of England, was welcomed on his accession as a Humanist king. Such was the condition of France in the beginning of the sixteenth century.

§ 5. Spain.

Spain had for centuries been under Mohammedan domination. The Moslems had overrun almost the whole country, and throughout its most fertile provinces the Christian peasantry lived under masters of an alien faith. At the beginning of the tenth century the only independent Christian principalities were small states lying along the southern shore of the Bay of Biscay and the south-western slopes of the Pyrenees. The Gothic and Vandal chiefs slowly [pg 027] recovered the northern districts, while the Moors retained the more fertile provinces of the south. The political conditions of the country at the close of the fifteenth century inevitably reflected this gradual reconquest, which had brought the Christian principalities into existence. In 1474, when Isabella (she had been married in 1469 to Ferdinand, the heir to Aragon) succeeded her brother Henry iv. in the sovereignty of Castile, Spain was divided into five separate principalities: Castile, with Leon, containing 62 per cent.; Aragon, with Valentia and Catalonia, containing 15 per cent.; Portugal, containing 20 per cent.; Navarre, containing 1 per cent.; and Granada, the only remaining Moslem State, containing 2 per cent. of the entire surface of the country.

Castile had grown by almost continuous conquest of lands from the Moslems, and these additions were acquired in many ways. If they had been made in what may be termed a national war, the lands seized became the property of the king, and could be retained by him or granted to his lords spiritual and temporal under varying conditions. In some cases these grants made the possessors almost independent princes. On the other hand, lands might be wrested from the aliens by private adventurers, and in such cases they remained in possession of the conquerors, who formed municipalities which had the right of choosing and of changing their overlords, and really formed independent communities. Then there were, as was natural in a period of continuous warfare, waste lands. These became the property of those who settled on them. Lastly, there were the dangerous frontier lands, which it was the policy of king or great lord who owned them to people with settlers, who could only be induced to undertake the perilous occupation provided they received charters (fueros), which guaranteed their practical independence. In such a condition of things the central authority could not be strong. It was further weakened by the fact that the great feudatories claimed to have both civil administration and military rule over their lands, and assumed an almost [pg 028] regal state. Military religious orders abounded, and were possessed of great wealth. Their Grand Masters, in virtue of their office, were independent military commanders, and had great gifts, in the shape of rich commandries, to bestow on their followers. Their power overshadowed that of the sovereign. The great ecclesiastics, powerful feudal lords in virtue of their lands, claimed the rights of civil administration and military rule like their lay compeers, and, being personally protected by the indefinable sanctity of the priestly character, were even more turbulent. Almost universal anarchy had prevailed during the reigns of the two weak kings who preceded Isabella on the throne of Castile, and the crown lands, the support and special protection of the sovereign, had been alienated by lavish gifts to the great nobles. This was the situation which faced the young queen when she came into her inheritance. It was aggravated by a rebellion on behalf of Juanna, the illegitimate daughter of Henry iv. The rebellion was successfully crushed. The queen and her consort, who was not yet in possession of the throne of Aragon, then tried to give the land security. The previous anarchy had produced its usual results. The country was infested with bands of brigands, and life was not safe outside the walls of the towns. Isabella instituted, or rather revived, the Holy Brotherhood (Hermandad), a force of cavalry raised by the whole country (each group of one hundred houses was bound to provide one horseman). It was an army of mounted police. It had its own judges, who tried criminals on the scene of their crimes, and those convicted were punished by the troops according to the sentences pronounced. Its avowed objects were to put down all crimes of violence committed outside the cities, and to hunt criminals who had fled from the towns' justice. Its judges superseded the justiciary powers of the nobles, who protested in vain. The Brotherhood did its work very effectively, and the towns and the common people rallied round the monarchy which had given them safety for limb and property.

The sovereigns next attacked the position of the nobles, whose mutual feuds rendered them a comparatively easy foe to rulers who had proved their strength of government. The royal domains, which had been alienated during the previous reign, were restored to the sovereign, and many of the most abused privileges of the nobility were curtailed.

One by one the Grand Masterships of the Crusading Orders were centred in the person of the Crown, the Pope acquiescing and granting investiture. The Church was stripped of some of its superfluous wealth, and the civil powers of the higher ecclesiastics were abolished or curtailed. In the end it may be said that the Spanish clergy were made almost as subservient to the sovereign as were those of France.

The pacification and consolidation of Castile was followed by the conquest of Granada. The Holy Brotherhood served the purpose of a standing army, internal feuds among the Moors aided the Christians, and after a protracted struggle (1481-1492) the city of Granada was taken, and the Moorish rule in the Peninsula ceased. All Spain, save Portugal and Navarre (seized by Ferdinand in 1512), was thus united under Ferdinand and Isabella, the Catholic Sovereigns as they came to be called, and the civil unity increased the desire for religious uniformity. The Jews in Spain were numerous, wealthy, and influential. They had intermarried with many noble families, and almost controlled the finance of the country. It was resolved to compel them to become Christians, by force if necessary. In 1478 a Bull was obtained from Pope Sixtus iv. establishing the Inquisition in Spain, it being provided that the inquisitors were to be appointed by the sovereign. The Holy Office in this way became an instrument for establishing a civil despotism, as well as a means for repressing heresy. It did its work with a ruthless severity hitherto unexampled. Sixtus himself and some of his successors, moved by repeated complaints, endeavoured to restrain its savage energy; but the Inquisition [pg 030] was too useful an instrument in the hands of a despotic sovereign, and the Popes were forced to allow its proceedings, and to refuse all appeals to Rome against its sentences. It was put in use against the Moorish subjects of the Catholic kings, notwithstanding the terms of the capitulation of Granada, which provided for the exercise of civil and religious liberty. The result was that, in spite of fierce rebellions, all the Moors, save small groups of families under the special protection of the Crown, had become nominal Christians by 1502, although almost a century had to pass before the Inquisition had rooted out the last traces of the Moslem faith in the Spanish Peninsula.

The death of Isabella in 1504 roughly dates a formidable rising against this process of repression and consolidation. The severities of the Inquisition, the insistence of Ferdinand to govern personally the lands of his deceased wife, and many local causes led to widespread conspiracies and revolts against his rule. The years between 1504 and 1522 were a period of revolutions and of lawlessness which was ended when Charles v., the grandson of Ferdinand and Isabella, overcame all resistance and inaugurated a reign of personal despotism which long distinguished the kingdom of Spain. Spanish troubles had something to do with preventing Charles from putting into execution in Germany, as he wished to do, the ban issued at Worms against Martin Luther.

§ 6. Germany and Italy.

Germany and Italy, in the beginning of the sixteenth century, had made almost no progress in becoming united and compact nations. The process of national consolidation, which was a feature of the times, displayed itself in these lands in the creation of compact principalities rather than in a great and effective national movement under one sovereign power. It is a commonplace of history to say that the main reason for this was the presence within these two lands of the Pope and the Emperor, the twin powers [pg 031] of the earlier mediæval ideal of a dual government, at once civil and ecclesiastical. Machiavelli expressed the common idea in his clear and strenuous fashion. He says that the Italians owe it to Rome that they are divided into factions and not united as were Spain and France. The Pope, he explains, who claimed temporal as well as spiritual jurisdiction, though not strong enough to rule all Italy by himself, was powerful enough to prevent any other Italian dynasty from taking his place. Whenever he saw any Italian power growing strong enough to have a future before it, he invited the aid of some foreign potentate, thus making Italy a prey to continual invasions. The shadowy lordship of the Pope was sufficient, in the opinion of Machiavelli, to prevent any real lordship under a native dynasty within the Italian peninsula. In Germany there was a similar impotency. The German king was the Emperor, the mediæval head of the Holy Roman Empire, the “king of the Romans.” Some idea of what underlay the thought and its expression may be had when one reads across Albert Dürer's portrait of Maximilian, “Imperator Cæsar Divus Maximilianus Pius Felix Augustus,” just as if he had been Trajan or Constantine. The phrase carries us back to the times when the Teutonic tribes swept down on the Roman possessions in Western Europe and took possession of them. They were barbarians with an unalterable reverence for the wider civilisation of the great Empire which they had conquered. They crept into the shell of the great Empire and tried to assimilate its jurisprudence and its religion. Hence it came to pass, in the earlier Middle Ages, as Mr. Freeman says, “The two great powers in Western Europe were the Church and the Empire, and the centre of each, in imagination at least, was Rome. Both of these went on through the settlements of the German nations, and both in a manner drew new powers from the change of things. Men believed more than ever that Rome was the lawful and natural centre of the world. For it was held that there were of divine right two Vicars of God upon earth, the Roman Emperor, [pg 032] His Vicar in temporal things, and the Roman Bishop, His Vicar in spiritual things. This belief did not interfere with the existence either of separate commonwealths, principalities, or of national Churches. But it was held that the Roman Emperor, who was the Lord of the World, was of right the head of all temporal States, and the Roman Bishop, the Pope, was the head of all the Churches.” This idea was a devout imagination, and was never actually and fully expressed in fact. No Eastern nation or Church ever agreed with it; and the temporal lordship of the Emperors was never completely acknowledged even in the West. Still it ruled in men's minds with all the force of an ideal. As the modern nations of Europe came gradually into being, the real headship of the Emperor became more and more shadowy. But both headships could prevent the national consolidation of the countries, Germany and Italy, in which the possessors dwelt. All this is, as has been said, a commonplace of history, and, like all commonplaces, it contains a great deal of truth. Still it may be questioned whether the mediæval idea was solely responsible for the disintegration of either Germany or Italy in the sixteenth century. A careful study of the conditions of things in both countries makes us see that many causes were at work besides the mediæval idea—conditions geographical, social, and historical. Whatever the causes, the disintegration of these two lands was in marked contrast to the consolidation of the three other nations.

§ 7. Italy.

In the end of the fifteenth century, Italy contained a very great number of petty principalities and five States which might be called the great powers of Italy—Venice, Milan, and Florence in the north, Naples in the south, and the States of the Church in the centre. Peace was kept by a delicate and highly artificial balance of powers. Venice was a commercial republic, ruled by an oligarchy of nobles. The city in the lagoons had been founded by [pg 033] trembling fugitives fleeing before Attila's Huns, and was more than a thousand years old. It had large territories on the mainland of Italy, and colonies extending down the east coast of the Adriatic and among the Greek islands. It had the largest revenue of all the Italian States, but its expenses were also much the heaviest. Milan came next in wealth, with its yearly income of over 700,000 ducats. At the close of the century it was in the possession of the Sforza family, whose founder had been born a ploughman, and had risen to be a formidable commander of mercenary soldiers. It was claimed by Maximilian as a fief of the Empire, and by the Kings of France as a heritage of the Dukes of Orleans. The disputed heritage was one of the causes of the invasion of Italy by Charles viii. Florence, the most cultured city in Italy, was, like Venice, a commercial republic; but it was a democratic republic, wherein one family, the Medici, had usurped almost despotic power while preserving all the external marks of republican rule.

Naples was the portion of Italy where the feudal system of the Middle Ages had lingered longest. The old kingdom of the Two Sicilies (Naples and Sicily) had, since 1458, been divided, and Sicily had been politically separated from the mainland. The island belonged to the King of Aragon; while the mainland had for its ruler the illegitimate son of Alphonso of Aragon, Ferdinand, or Ferrante, who proved a despotic and masterful ruler. He had crushed his semi-independent feudal barons, had brought the towns under his despotic rule, and was able to hand over a compact kingdom to his son Alphonso in 1494.

The feature, however, in the political condition of Italy which illustrated best the general tendency of the age towards coalescence, was the growth of the States of the Church. The dominions which were directly under the temporal power of the Pope had been the most disorganised in all Italy. The vassal barons had been turbulently independent, and the Popes had little power even within the [pg 034] city of Rome. The helplessness of the Popes to control their vassals perhaps reached its lowest stage in the days of Innocent viii. His successors Alexander vi. (Rodrigo Borgia, 1492-1503), Julius ii. (Cardinal della Rovere, 1503-1513), and Leo x. (Giovanni de Medici, 1513-1521), strove to create, and partly succeeded in forming, a strong central dominion, the States of the Church. The troubled times of the French invasions, and the continual warfare among the more powerful States of Italy, furnished them with the occasion. They pursued their policy with a craft which brushed aside all moral obligations, and with a ruthlessness which hesitated at no amount of bloodshed. In their hands the Papacy appeared to be a merely temporal power, and was treated as such by contemporary politicians. It was one of the political States of Italy, and the Popes were distinguished from their contemporary Italian rulers only by the facts that their spiritual position enabled them to exercise a European influence which the others could not aspire to, and that their sacred character placed them above the obligations of ordinary morality in the matter of keeping solemn promises and maintaining treaty obligations made binding by the most sacred oaths. In one sense their aim was patriotic. They were Italian princes whose aim was to create a strong Italian central power which might be able to maintain the independence of Italy against the foreigner; and in this they were partially successful, whatever judgment may require to be passed on the means taken to attain their end. But the actions of the Italian prince placed the spiritual Head of the Church outside all those influences, intellectual, artistic, and religious (the revival under Savonarola in Florence), which were working in Italy for the regeneration of European society. The Popes of the Renaissance set the example, only too faithfully followed by almost every prince of the age, of believing that political far outweighed all moral and religious motives.

§ 8. Germany.

Germany, or the Empire, as it was called, included, in the days of the Reformation, the Low Countries in the north-west and most of what are now the Austro-Hungarian lands in the east. It was in a strange condition. On the one hand a strong popular sentiment for unity had arisen in all the German-speaking portions, and on the other the country was cut into sections and slices, and was more hopelessly divided than was Italy itself.

Nominally the Empire was ruled over by one supreme lord, with a great feudal assembly, the Diet, under him.

The Empire was elective, though for generations the rulers chosen had always been the heads of the House of Hapsburg, and since 1356 the election had been in the hands of seven prince-electors—three on the Elbe and four on the Rhine. On the Elbe were the King of Bohemia, the Elector of Saxony, and the Elector of Brandenburg; on the Rhine, the Count Palatine of the Rhine and the Archbishops of Mainz, Trier, and Köln.

This Empire, nominally one, and full of the strongest sentiments of unity, was hopelessly divided, and—for this was the peculiarity of the situation—all the elements making for peaceful government, which in countries like France or England supported the central power, were on the side of disunion.

A glance at the map of Germany in the times of the Reformation shows an astonishing multiplicity of separate principalities, ecclesiastical and secular, all the more bewildering that most of them appeared to be composed of patches lying separate from each other. Almost every ruling prince had to cross some neighbour's land to visit the outlying portions of his dominions. It must also be remembered that the divisions which can be represented on a map but faintly express the real state of things. The territories of the imperial cities—the lands outside the walls ruled by the civic fathers—were for the most part too small to figure on any map, and for the same reason [pg 036] the tiny principalities of the hordes of free nobles are also invisible. So we have to imagine all those little mediæval republics and those infinitesimal kingdoms camped on the territories of the great princes, and taking from them even the small amount of unity which the map shows.

The greater feudal States, Electoral and Ducal Saxony, Brandenburg, Bavaria, the Palatinate, Hesse, and many others, had meetings of their own Estates,—Councils of subservient nobles and lawyers,—their own Supreme Courts of Justice, from which there was no appeal, their own fiscal system, their own finance and coinage, and largely controlled their clergy and their relations to powers outside Germany. Their princes, hampered as they were by the great Churchmen, thwarted continually by the town republics, defied by the free nobles, were nevertheless actual kings, and profited by the centralising tendencies of the times. They alone in Germany represented settled central government, and attracted to themselves the smaller units lying outside and around them.

Yet with all these divisions, having their roots deep down in the past, there was pervading all classes of society, from princes to peasants, the sentiment of a united Germany, and no lack of schemes to convert the feeling into fact. The earliest practical attempts began with the union of German Churchmen at Constance and the scheme for a National Church of Germany; and the dream of ecclesiastical unity brought in its train the aspiration after political oneness.

The practical means proposed to create a German national unity over lands which stretched from the Straits of Dover to the Vistula, and from the Baltic to the Adriatic, were the proclamation of a universal Land's Peace, forbidding all internecine war between Germans; the establishment of a Supreme Court of Justice to decide quarrels within the Empire; a common coinage, and a common Customs Union. To bind all more firmly together there was needed a Common Council or governing body, which, under the Emperor, should determine the Home [pg 037] and Foreign Policy of the Empire. The only authorities which could create a governmental unity of this kind were the Emperor on the one hand and the great princes on the other, and the two needed to be one in mutual confidence and in intention. But that is what never happened, and all through the reign of Maximilian and in the early years of Charles we find two different conceptions of what the central government ought to be—the one oligarchic and the other autocratic. The princes were resolved to keep their independence, and their plans for unity always implied a governing oligarchy with serious restraint placed on the power of the Emperor; while the Emperors, who would never submit to be controlled by an oligarchy of German princes, and who found that they could not carry out their schemes for an autocratic unity, were at least able to wreck any other.

The German princes have been accused of preferring the security and enlargement of their dynastic possessions to the unity of the Empire, but it can be replied that in doing so they only followed the example set them by their Emperors. Frederick iii., Maximilian, and Charles v. invariably neglected imperial interests when they clashed with the welfare of the family possessions of the House of Hapsburg. When Maximilian inherited the imperial Burgundian lands, a fief of the Empire, through his marriage with Mary, the heiress of Charles the Bold, he treated the inheritance as part of the family estates of his House. The Tyrol was absorbed by the House of Hapsburg when the Swabian League prevented Bavaria seizing it (1487). The same fate fell on the Duchy of Austria when Vienna was recovered, and on Hungary and Bohemia; and when Charles v. got hold of Würtemberg on the outlawry of Duke Ulrich, it, too, was detached from the Empire and absorbed into the family possessions of the Hapsburgs. There was, in short, a persistent policy pursued by three successive Emperors, of despoiling the Empire in order to increase the family possessions of the House to which they belonged.

The last attempt to give a constitutional unity to the German Empire was made at the Diet of Worms (1521)—the Diet before which Luther appeared. There the Emperor, Charles V., agreed to accept a Reichsregiment, which was in all essential points, though differing in some details, the same as his grandfather Maximilian had proposed to the Diet of 1495. The Central Council was composed of a President and four members appointed by the Emperor, six Electors (the King of Bohemia being excluded), who might sit in person or by deputies, and twelve members appointed by the rest of the Estates. The cities were not represented. This Reichsregiment was to govern all German lands, including Austria and the Netherlands, but excluding Bohemia. Switzerland, hitherto nominally within the Empire, formally withdrew and ceased to form part of Germany. The central government needed funds to carry on its work, and especially to provide an army to enforce its decisions; and various schemes for raising the money required were discussed at its earlier meetings. It was resolved at last to raise the necessary funds by imposing a tax of four per cent. on all imports and exports, and to establish custom-houses on all the frontiers. The practical effect of this was to lay the whole burden of taxation upon the mercantile classes, or, in other words, to make the cities, who were not represented in the Reichsregiment, pay for the whole of the central government. This Reichsregiment was to be simply a board of advice, without any decisive control so long as the Emperor was in Germany. When he was absent from the country it had an independent power of government. But all important decisions had to be confirmed by the absent Emperor, who, for his part, promised to form no foreign leagues involving Germany without the consent of the Council.

As soon as the Reichsregiment had settled its scheme of taxation, the cities on which it was proposed to lay the whole burden of providing the funds required very naturally objected. They met by representatives at Speyer (1523), and sent delegates to Spain, to Valladolid, where [pg 039] Charles happened to be, to protest against the scheme of taxation. They were supported by the great German capitalists. The Emperor received them graciously, and promised to take the government into his own hands. In this way the last attempt to give a governmental unity to Germany was destroyed by the joint action of the Emperor and of the cities. It is unquestionable that the Reformation under Luther did seriously assist in the disintegration of Germany, but it must be remembered that a movement cannot become national where there is no nation, and that German nationality had been hopelessly destroyed just at the time when it was most needed to unify and moderate the great religious impulses which were throbbing in the hearts of its citizens.

Maximilian had been elected King of the Romans in 1486, and had succeeded to the Empire on the death of his father, Frederick iii., in 1493. His was a strongly fascinating personality—a man full of enthusiasms, never lacking in ideas, but singularly destitute of the patient practical power to make them workable. He may almost be called a type of that Germany over which he was called to rule. No man was fuller of the longing for German unity as an ideal; no man did more to perpetuate the very real divisions of the land.

He was the patron of German learning and of German art, and won the praises of the German Humanists: no ruler was more celebrated in contemporary song. He protected and supported the German towns, encouraged their industries, and fostered their culture. In almost everything ideal he stood for German nationality and unity. He placed himself at the head of all those intellectual and artistic forces from which spread the thought of a united Germany for the Germans. On the other hand, his one persistent practical policy, and the only one in which he was almost uniformly successful, was to unify and consolidate the family possessions of the House of Hapsburg. In this policy he was the leader of those who broke up Germany into an aggregate of separate and independent [pg 040] principalities. The greater German princes followed his example, and did their best to transform themselves into the civilised rulers of modern States.

Maximilian died somewhat unexpectedly on January 12th, 1519, and five months were spent in intrigues by the partisans of Francis of France and young Charles, King of Spain, the grandson of Maximilian. The French party believed that they had secured by bribery a majority of the Electors; and when this was whispered about, the popular feeling in favour of Charles, on account of his German blood, soon began to manifest itself. It was naturally strongest in the Rhine provinces. Papal delegates could not get the Rhine skippers to hire boats to them for their journey, as it was believed that the Pope favoured the French king. The Imperial Cities accused Francis of fomenting internecine war in Germany, and displayed their hatred of his candidature. The very Landsknechten clamoured for the grandson of their “Father” Maximilian. The eyes of all Germany were turned anxiously enough to the venerable town of Frankfurt-on-the-Main, where, according to ancient usage, the Electors met to select the ruler of the Holy Roman Empire. On the 28th of June (1519) the alarm bell of the town gave the signal, and the Electors assembled in their scarlet robes of State in the dim little chapel of St. Bartholomew, where the conclave was always held. The manifestation of popular feeling had done its work. Charles was unanimously chosen, and all Germany rejoiced,—the good burghers of Frankfurt declaring that if the Electors had chosen Francis they would have been “playing with death.”

It was a wave of national excitement, the desire for a German ruler, that had brought about the unanimous election; and never were a people more mistaken and, in the end, disappointed. Charles was the heir of the House of Hapsburg, the grandson of Maximilian, his veins full of German blood. But he was no German. Maximilian was the last of the real German Hapsburgs. History [pg 041] scarcely shows another instance where the mother's blood has so completely changed the character of a race. Charles was his mother's son, and her Spanish characteristics showed themselves in him in greater strength as the years went on. When he abdicated, he retired to end his days in a Spanish convent. It was the Spaniard, not the German, who faced Luther at Worms.

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Chapter III. The Renaissance.[16]

§ 1. The Transition from the Mediæval to the Modern World.

The movement called the Renaissance, in its widest extent, may be described as the transition from the mediæval to the modern world. All our present conceptions of life and thought find their roots within this period.

It saw the beginnings of modern science and the application of true scientific methods to the investigation of nature. It witnessed the astronomical discoveries of Copernicus and Galileo, the foundation of anatomy under [pg 043] Vessalius, and the discovery of the circulation of the blood by Harvey.

It was the age of geographical explorations. The discoveries of the telescope, the mariner's compass, and gunpowder gave men mastery over previously unknown natural forces, and multiplied their powers, their daring, and their capacities for adventure. When these geographical discoveries had made a world-trade a possible thing, there began that change from mediæval to modern methods in trade and commerce which lasted from the close of the fourteenth to the beginning of the seventeenth century, when the modern commercial conditions were thoroughly established. The transition period was marked by the widening area of trade, which was no longer restricted to the Mediterranean, the Black and the North Seas, to the Baltic, and to the east coasts of Africa. The rigid groups of artisans and traders—the guild system of the Middle Ages—began to dissolve, and to leave freer space for individual and new corporate effort. Prices were gradually freed from official regulation, and became subject to the natural effects of bargaining. Adventure companies were started to share in the world-trade, and a beginning was made of dealing on commissions. All these changes belong to the period of transition between the mediæval and the modern world.

In the art of governing men the Renaissance was the age of political concentration. In two realms—Germany and Italy—the mediæval conceptions of Emperor and Pope, world-king and world-priest, were still strong enough to prevent the union of national forces under one political head; but there, also, the principle of coalescence may be found in partial operation,—in Germany in the formation of great independent principalities, and in Italy in the growth of the States of the Church,—and its partial failure subjected both nationalities to foreign oppression. Everywhere there was the attempt to assert the claims of the secular powers to emancipate themselves from clerical tutelage and ecclesiastical usurpation. While, underlying [pg 044] all, there was the beginning of the assertion of the supreme right of individual revolt against every custom, law, or theory which would subordinate the man to the caste or class. The Swiss peasantry began it when they made pikes by tying their scythes to their alpenstocks, and, standing shoulder to shoulder at Morgarten and Sempach, broke the fiercest charges of mediæval knighthood. They proved that man for man the peasant was as good as the noble, and individual manhood asserted in this rude and bodily fashion soon began to express itself mentally and morally.

In jurisprudence the Renaissance may be described as the introduction of historical and scientific methods, the abandonment of legal fictions based upon collections of false decretals, the recovery of the true text of the Roman code, and the substitution of civil for canon law as the basis of legislation and government. There was a complete break with the past. The substitution of civil law based upon the lawbooks of Justinian for the canon law founded upon the Decretum of Gratian, involved such a breach in continuity that it was the most momentous of all the changes of that period of transition. For law enters into every human relation, and a thorough change of legal principles must involve a revolution which is none the less real that it works almost silently. The codes of Justinian and of Theodosius completely reversed the teachings of the canonists, and the civilian lawyers learned to look upon the Church as only a department of the State.

In literature there was the discovery of classical manuscripts, the introduction of the study of Greek, the perception of the beauties of language in the choice and arrangement of words under the guidance of classical models. The literary powers of modern languages were also discovered,—Italian, English, French, and German,—and with the discovery the national literatures of Europe came into being.

In art a complete revolution was effected in architecture, [pg 045] painting, and sculpture by the recovery of ancient models and the study of the principles of their construction.

The manufacture of paper, the discovery of the arts of printing and engraving, multiplied the possession of the treasures of the intelligence and of artistic genius, and combined to make art and literature democratic. What was once confined to a favoured few became common property. New thoughts could act on men in masses, and began to move the multitude. The old mediæval barriers were broken down, and men came to see that there was more in religion than the mediæval Church had taught, more in social life than feudalism had manifested, and that knowledge was a manifold unknown to their fathers.

If the Renaissance be the transition from the mediæval to the modern world,—and it is scarcely possible to regard it otherwise,—then it is one of those great movements of the mind of mankind that almost defy exact description, and there is an elusiveness about it which confounds us when we attempt definition. “It was the emancipation of the reason,” says Symonds, “in a race of men, intolerant of control, ready to criticise canons of conduct, enthusiastic of antique liberty, freshly awakened to the sense of beauty, and anxious above all things to secure for themselves free scope in spheres outside the region of authority. Men so vigorous and independent felt the joy of exploration. There was no problem they feared to face, no formula they were not eager to recast according to their new conceptions.”[17] It was the blossoming and fructifying of the European intellectual life; but perhaps it ought to be added that it contained a new conception of the universe in which religion consisted less in a feeling of dependence on God, and more in a faith on the possibilities lying in mankind.

§ 2. The Revival of Literature and Art.

But the Renaissance has generally a more limited meaning, and one defined by the most potent of the new forces which worked for the general intellectual regeneration. It means the revival of learning and of art consequent on the discovery and study of the literary and artistic masterpieces of antiquity. It is perhaps in this more limited sense that the movement more directly prepared the way for the Reformation and what followed, and deserves more detailed examination. It was the discovery of a lost means of culture and the consequent awakening and diffusion of a literary, artistic, and critical spirit.

A knowledge of ancient Latin literature had not entirely perished during the earlier Middle Ages. The Benedictine monasteries had preserved classical manuscripts—especially the monastery of Monte Cassino for the southern, and that of Fulda for the northern parts of Europe. These monasteries and their sister establishments were schools of learning as well as libraries, and we read of more than one where the study of some of the classical authors was part of the regular training. Virgil, Horace, Terence and Martial, Livy, Suetonius and Sallust, were known and studied. Greek literature had not survived to anything like the same extent, but it had never entirely disappeared from Southern Europe, and especially from Southern Italy. Ever since the days of the Roman Republic in that part of the Italian peninsula once called Magna Græcia, Greek had been the language of many of the common people, as it is to this day, in districts of Calabria and of Sicily; and the teachers and students of the mediæval University of Salerno had never lost their taste for its study.[18] But with all this, the fourteenth century, and notably the age of Petrarch, saw the beginnings [pg 047] of new zeal for the literature of the past, and was really the beginning of a new era.

Italy was the first land to become free from the conditions of mediæval life, and ready to enter on the new life which was awaiting Europe. There was an Italian language, the feeling of distinct nationality, a considerable advance in civilisation, an accumulation of wealth, and, during the age of the despots, a comparative freedom from constant changes in political conditions.

Dante's great poem, interweaving as it does the imagery and mysticism of Giacchino di Fiore, the deepest spiritual and moral teaching of the mediæval Church, and the insight and judgment on men and things of a great poet, was the first sign that Italy had wakened from the sleep of the Middle Ages. Petrarch came next, the passionate student of the lives, the thoughts, and emotions of the great masters of classical Latin literature. They were real men for him, his own Italian ancestors, and they as he had felt the need of Hellenic culture to solace their souls, and serve for the universal education of the human race. Boccaccio, the third leader in the awakening, preached the joy of living, the universal capacity for pleasure, and the sensuous beauty of the world. He too, like Petrarch, felt the need of Hellenic culture. For both there was an awakening to the beauty of literary form, and the conviction that a study of the ancient classics would enable them to achieve it. Both valued the vision of a new conception of life derived from the perusal of the classics, freer, more enlarged and joyous, more rational than the Middle Ages had witnessed. Petrarch and Boccaccio yearned after the life thus disclosed, which gave unfettered scope to the play of the emotions, to the sense of beauty, and to the manifold activity of the human intelligence.

Learned Greeks were induced to settle in Italy—men who were able to interpret the ancient Greek poets and prose writers—Manuel Chrysoloras (at Florence, 1397-1400), George of Trebizond, Theodore Gaza (whose Greek Grammar Erasmus taught from while in England), Gemistos [pg 048] Plethon, a distinguished Platonist, under whom the Christian Platonism received its impulse, and John Argyropoulos, who was the teacher of Reuchlin. The men of the early Renaissance were their pupils.

§ 3. Its earlier relation to Christianity.

There was nothing hostile to Christianity or to the mediæval Church in the earlier stages of this intellectual revival, and very little of the neo-paganism which it developed afterwards. Many of the instincts of mediæval piety remained, only the objects were changed. Petrarch revered the MS. of Homer, which he could not read, as an ancestor of his might have venerated the scapulary of a saint.[19] The men of the early Renaissance made collections of MSS. and inscriptions, of cameos and of coins, and worshipped them as if they had been relics. The Medicean Library was formed about 1450, the Vatican Library in 1453, and the age of passionate collection began.

The age of scholarship succeeded, and Italian students began to interpret the ancient classical authors with a mysticism all their own. They sought a means of reconciling Christian thought with ancient pagan philosophy, and, like Clement of Alexandria and Origen, discovered it in Platonism. Platonic academies were founded, and Cardinal Bessarion, Marsiglio Ficino, and Pico della Mirandola became the Christian Platonists of Italy. Of course, in their enthusiasm they went too far. They appropriated the whole intellectual life of a pagan age, and adopted its ethical as well as its intellectual perceptions, its basis of sensuous pleasures, and its joy in sensuous living. Still their main thought was to show that Hellenism as well as Judaism was a pathway to Christianity, and that the Sibyl as well as David was a witness for Christ.

The Papacy lent its patronage to the revival of literature [pg 049] and art, and put itself at the head of the movement of intellectual life. Pope Nicolas v. (1447-1455) was the first Bishop of Rome who fostered the Renaissance, and he himself may be taken as representing the sincerity, the simplicity, and the lofty intellectual and artistic aims of its earliest period. Sprung from an obscure family belonging to Saranza, a small town near Spezzia, and cast on his own resources before he had fairly quitted boyhood, he had risen by his talents and his character to the highest position in the Church. He had been private tutor, secretary, librarian, and through all a genuine lover of books. They were the only personal luxury he indulged in, and perhaps no one in his days knew more about them. He was the confidential adviser of Lorenzo de Medici when he founded his great library in San Marco. He himself began the Vatican Library. He had agents who ransacked the monasteries of Europe, and he collected the literary relics which had escaped destruction in the sack of Constantinople. Before his death his library in the Vatican contained more than 5000 MSS. He gathered round him a band of illustrious artists and scholars. He filled Rome with skilled and artistic artisans, with decorators, jewellers, workers in painted glass and embroidery. The famous Leo Alberti was one of his architects, and Fra Angelico one of his artists. Laurentius Valla and Poggio Bracciolini, Cardinal Bessarion and George of Trebizond, were among his scholars. He directed and inspired their work. Valla's critical attacks on the Donation of Constantine, and on the tradition that the Twelve had dictated the Apostles' Creed, did not shake his confidence in the scholar. The principal Greek authors were translated into Latin by his orders. Europe saw theology, learning, and art lending each other mutual support under the leadership of the head of the Church. Perhaps Julius ii. (1503-1513) conceived more definitely than even Nicolas had done that one duty of the head of the Church was to assume the leadership of the intellectual and artistic movement which was making wider the thought of Europe,—only his restless energy [pg 050] never permitted him leisure to give effect to his conception. “The instruction which Pope Julius ii. gave to Michelangelo to represent him as Moses can bear but one interpretation: that Julius set himself the mission of leading forth Israel (the Church) from its state of degradation, and showing it—though he could not grant possession—the Promised Land at least from afar, that blessed land which consists in the enjoyment of the highest intellectual benefits, and the training and consecration of all the faculties of man's mind to union with God.”[20]

The classical revival in Italy soon exhausted itself. Its sensuous perceptions degenerated into sensuality, its instinct for the beauty of expression into elegant trifling, and its enthusiasm for antiquity into neo-paganism. It failed almost from the first in real moral earnestness; scarcely saw, and still less understood, how to cure the deep-seated moral evils of the age.

Italy had given birth to the Renaissance, but it soon spread to the more northern lands. Perhaps France first felt the impulse, then Germany and England last of all. In dealing with the Reformation, the movement in Germany is the most important.

The Germans, throughout the Middle Ages, had continuous and intimate relations with the southern peninsula, and in the fifteenth century these were stronger than ever. German merchants had their factories in Venice and Genoa; young German nobles destined for a legal or diplomatic career studied law at Italian universities; students of medicine completed their studies in the famous southern schools; and the German wandering student frequently crossed the Alps to pick up additional knowledge. There was such constant scholarly intercourse between Germany and Italy, that the New Learning could not fail to spread among the men of the north.

§ 4. The Brethren of the Common Lot.

Germany and the Low Countries had been singularly prepared for that revival of letters, art, and science which had come to Italy. One of the greatest gifts bestowed by the Mystics of the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries on their native land had been an excellent system of school education. Gerard Groot, a disciple of the Flemish mystic Jan van Rysbroeck, had, after long consultations with his Master, founded a brotherhood called the Brethren of the Common Life,[21] whose aim was to better the religious condition of their fellow-men by the multiplication of good books and by the careful training of the young. They were to support themselves by copying and selling manuscripts. All the houses of the Brethren had a large room, where a number of scribes sat at tables, a reader repeated slowly the words of the manuscript, and books were multiplied as rapidly as was possible before the invention of printing. They filled their own libraries with the best books of Christian and pagan antiquity. They multiplied small tracts containing the mystical and practical theology of the Friends of God, and sent them into circulation among the people. One of the intimate followers of Groot, Florentius Radewynsohn, proved to be a distinguished educationalist, and the schools of the Order soon became famous. The Brethren, to use the words of their founder, employed education for the purpose of “raising spiritual pillars in the Temple of the Lord.” They insisted on a study of the Vulgate in their classes; they placed German translations of Christian authors in the hands of their pupils; they took pains to give them a good knowledge of Latin, and read with them selections from the best known ancient authors; they even taught a little Greek; and their scholars learned to sing the simpler, more evangelical Latin hymns.

The mother school was at Deventer, a town situated at [pg 052] the south-west corner of the great episcopal territory of Utrecht, now the Dutch province of Ober-Yessel. It lies on the bank of that branch of the Rhine (the Yessel) which flowing northwards glides past Zutphen, Deventer, Zwolle, and loses itself in the Zuyder Zee at Kampen. A large number of the more distinguished leaders of the fifteenth century owed their early training to this great school at Deventer. During the last decades of the fifteenth century the headmaster was Alexander Hegius (1433-1498), who came to Deventer in 1471 and remained there until his death.[22] The school reached its height of fame under this renowned master, who gathered 2000 pupils around him,—among them Erasmus, Conrad Mutti (Mutianus Rufus), Hermann von Busch, Johann Murmellius,—and, rejecting the older methods of grammatical instruction, taught them to know the niceties of the Latin tongue by leading them directly to the study of the great writers of classical antiquity. He was such an indefatigable student that he kept himself awake during the night-watches, it is said, by holding in his hands the candle which lighted him, in order to be wakened by its fall should slumber overtake him. The glory of Deventer perished with this great teacher, who to the last maintained the ancient traditions of the school by his maxim, that learning without piety was rather a curse than a blessing.

Other famous schools of the Brethren in the second half of the fifteenth century were Schlettstadt,[23] in Elsass, some miles from the west bank of the Rhine, and about half-way between Strassburg and Basel; Munster on the Ems, the Monasterium of the earlier Middle Ages; Emmerich, a town on the Rhine near the borders of Holland, and Altmarck, in the north-west. Schlettstadt, under its master Ludwig Dringenberg, almost rivalled the fame of Deventer, and many of the members of the well-known Strassburg circle which gathered round Jacob Wimpheling, Sebastian Brand, [pg 053] and the German Savonarola, John Geiler von Keysersberg, had been pupils in this school. Besides these more famous establishments, the schools of the Brethren spread all over Germany. The teachers were commonly called the Roll-Brueder, and under this name they had a school in Magdeburg to which probably Luther was sent when he spent a year in that town. Their work was so pervading and their teaching so effectual, that we are informed by chroniclers, who had nothing to do with the Brethren, that in many German towns, girls could be heard singing the simpler Latin hymns, and that the children of artisans could converse in Latin.

§ 5. German Universities, Schools, and Scholarship.

The desire for education spread all over Germany in the fifteenth century. Princes and burghers vied with each other in erecting seats of learning. Within one hundred and fifty years no fewer than seventeen new universities were founded. Prag, a Bohemian foundation, came into existence in 1348. Then followed four German foundations, Vienna, in 1365 or 1384; Heidelberg, in 1386; Köln, in 1388; and Erfurt, established by the townspeople, in 1392. In the fifteenth century there were Leipzig, in 1409; Rostock, on the shore of what was called the East Sea, almost opposite the south point of Sweden, in 1419; Cracow, a Polish foundation, in 1420; Greifswald, in 1456; Freiburg and Trier, in 1457; Basel, in 1460; Ingolstadt, founded with the special intention of training students in obedience to the Pope, a task singularly well accomplished, in 1472; Tübingen and Mainz, in 1477; Wittenberg, in 1502; and Frankfurt-on-the-Oder, in 1507. Marburg, the first Reformation University, was founded in 1527.

The craving for education laid hold on the burgher class, and towns vied with each other in providing superior schools, with teachers paid out of the town's revenues. Some German towns had several such foundations. Breslau, “the student's paradise,” had seven. Nor was [pg 054] the education of girls neglected. Frankfurt-on-the-Main founded a high school for girls early in the fifteenth century, and insisted that the teachers were to be learned ladies who were not nuns.[24] Besides the classrooms, the towns usually provided hostels, where the boys got lodging and sometimes firewood (they were expected to obtain food by begging through the streets of the town), and frequently hospitals where the scholars could be tended in illness.[25]

These possibilities of education attracted boys from all parts of the country, and added a new class of vagrants to the tramps of all kinds who infested the roads during the later Middle Ages. The wandering scholar, with his yellow scarf, was a feature of the era, and frequently not a reputable one. He was usually introduced as a character into the Fastnachtspiele, or rude popular carnival comedies, and was almost always a rogue and often a thief. Children of ten and twelve years of age left their villages, in charge of an older student, to join some famous school. But these older students were too often mere vagrants, with just learning enough to impose upon the simple peasantry, to whom they sold charms against toothache and other troubles. The young children entrusted to them by confiding parents were often treated with the greatest cruelty, employed by them to beg or steal food, and sent round to the public-houses with cans to beg for beer. The small unfortunates were the prisoners, the slaves, of their disreputable masters, and many of them died by the roadside. We need not wonder that Luther, with his memory full of these wandering students, in after days denounced the system by which men spent sometimes “twenty and even forty years” in a so-called student life, which was often one of the lowest vagrancy and debauchery, and in the end knew neither German nor Latin, “to say nothing,” he adds with honest indignation, “of the shameful and vicious life by which our worthy youth have been so grievously corrupted.” [pg 055] Two or three of the autobiographies of these wandering students have survived; and two of them, those of Thomas Platter and of Johann Butzbach, belong to Luther's time, and give a vivid picture of their lives.[26]

Germany had no lack of schools and universities, but it can scarcely be said that they did more than serve as a preparation for the entrance of the Renaissance movement. During the fifteenth century all the Universities were under the influence of the Church, and Scholasticism prescribed the methods of study. Very little of the New Learning was allowed to enter. It is true that if Köln and perhaps Ingolstadt be excepted, the Scholastic which was taught represented what were supposed to be the more advanced opinions—those of John Duns Scotus, William of Occam, and Gabriel Biel, rather than the learning of Thomas Aquinas and other great defenders of papal traditions; but it lent itself as thoroughly as did the older Scholastic to the discussion of all kinds of verbal and logical subtleties. Knowledge of every kind was discussed under formulæ and phrases sanctioned by long scholastic use. It is impossible to describe the minute distinctions and the intricate reasoning based upon them without exceeding the space at our disposal. It is enough to say that the prevailing course of study furnished an imposing framework without much solid content, and provided an intellectual gymnastic without much real knowledge. A survival can be seen in the Formal Logic still taught. The quantity of misspent ingenuity called forth to produce the figures and moods, and bestowed on discovering and arranging all possible moods under each figure and in providing all with mnemonic names,—Barbara, Celarent, Darii, Ferioque prioris, etc.,—affords some insight into the scholastic methods in use in these universities of the fifteenth century.

Then it must be remembered that the scholarship [pg 056] took a quasi-ecclesiastical form. The universities were all monastic institutions, where the teachers were professional and the students amateur celibates. The scholars were gathered into hostels in which they lived with their teachers, and were taught to consider themselves very superior persons. The statutes of mediæval Oxford declare that God created “clerks” with gifts of intelligence denied to mere lay persons; that it behoved “clerks” to exhibit this difference by their outward appearance; and that the university tailors, whose duty it was to make men extrinsecus what God had made them intrinsecus, were to be reckoned as members of the University. Those mediæval students sometimes assumed airs which roused the passions of the laity, and frequently led to tremendous riots. Thus in 1513 the townsfolk of Erfurt battered in the gates of the University with cannon, and after the flight of the professors and students destroyed almost all the archives and library. About the same time some citizens of Vienna having jeered at the sacred student dress, there ensued the “Latin war,” which literally devastated the town. This pride of separation between “clerks” and laity culminated in the great annual procession, when the newly capped graduates, clothed in all the glory of new bachelors' and masters' gowns and hoods, marched through the principal streets of the university town, in the midst of the university dignitaries and frequently attended by the magistrates in their robes. Young Luther confessed that when he first saw the procession at Erfurt he thought that no position on earth was more enviable than that of a newly capped graduate.

Mediæval ecclesiastical tradition brooded over all departments of learning; and the philosophy and logic, or what were supposed to be the philosophy and logic, of Aristotle ruled that tradition. The reverence for the name of Aristotle almost took the form of a religious fervour. In a curious mediæval Life of Aristotle the ancient pagan thinker is declared to be a forerunner of Christ. All who refused to accept his guidance were heretics, and his formal scheme of thought was supposed to justify the [pg 057] refined sophisms of mediæval dialectic. His system of thought was the fortified defence which preserved the old and protected it from the inroads of the New Learning. Hence the hatred which almost all the German Humanists seem to have had for the name of Aristotle. The attitudes of the partisans of the old and of the new towards the ancient Greek thinker are represented in two pictures, each instinct with the feeling of the times. In one, in the church of the Dominicans in Pisa, Aristotle is represented standing on the right with Plato on the left of Thomas Aquinas, and rays streaming from their opened books make a halo round the head of the great mediæval theologian and thinker. In the other, a woodcut published by Hans Holbein the younger in 1527, Aristotle with the mediæval doctors is represented descending into the abodes of darkness, while Jesus Christ stands in the foreground and points out the true light to a crowd of people, among whom the artist has figured peasants with their flails.

§ 6. The earlier German Humanists.

When the beginnings of the New Learning made their appearance in Germany, they did not bring with them any widespread revival of culture. There was no outburst, as in Italy, of the artistic spirit, stamping itself upon such arts as painting, sculpture, and architecture, which could appeal to the whole public intelligence. The men who first felt the stirrings of the new intellectual life were, for the most part, students who had been trained in the more famous schools of the Brethren of the Common Life, all of whom had a serious aim in life. The New Learning appealed to them not so much a means of self-culture as an instrument to reform education, to criticise antiquated methods of instruction, and, above all, to effect reforms in the Church and to purify the social life. One of the most conspicuous of such scholars was Cardinal Nicolas Cusanus[27] [pg 058] (1401-1464). He was a man of singularly open mind, who, while he was saturated with the old learning, was able to appreciate the new. He had studied the classics in Italy. He was an expert mathematician and astronomer. Some have even asserted that he anticipated the discoveries of Galileo. The instruments with which he worked, roughly made by a village tinsmith, may still be seen preserved in the Brother-house which he founded at his birthplace, Cues, on the Mosel; and there, too, the sheets, covered with his long calculations for the reform of the calendar, may still be studied.

Another scholar, sent out by the same schools, was John Wessel of Gröningen (1420-1489), who wandered in search of learning from Köln to Paris and from Paris to Italy. He finally settled down as a canon in the Brotherhood of Mount St. Agnes. There he gathered round him a band of young students, whom he encouraged to study Greek and Hebrew. He was a theologian who delighted to criticise the current opinions on theological doctrines. He denied that the fire of Purgatory could be material fire, and he theorised about indulgences in such a way as to be a forerunner of Luther.[28] “If I had read his books before,” said Luther, “my enemies might have thought that Luther had borrowed everything from Wessel, so great is the agreement between our spirits. I feel my joy and my strength increase, I have no doubt that I have taught aright, when I find that one who wrote at a different time, in another clime, and with a different intention, agrees so entirely in my view and expresses it in almost the same words.”

Other like-minded scholars might be mentioned, Rudolph Agricola[29] (1442-1485), Jacob Wimpheling[30] (1450-1528), and Sebastian Brand (1457-1521), who [pg 059] was town-clerk of Strassburg from 1500, and the author of the celebrated Ship of Fools, which was translated into many languages, and was used by his friend Geiler of Keysersberg as the text for one of his courses of popular sermons.

All these men, and others like-minded and similarly gifted, are commonly regarded as the precursors of the German Renaissance, and are classed among the German Humanists. Yet it may be questioned whether they can be taken as the representatives of that kind of Humanism which gathered round Luther in his student days, and of which Ulrich von Hutten, the stormy petrel of the times of the Reformation, was a notable example. Its beginnings must be traced to other and less reputable pioneers. Numbers of young German students, with the talent for wandering and for supporting themselves by begging possessed by so many of them, had tramped down to Italy, where they contrived to exist precariously while they attended, with a genuine thirst for learning, the classes taught by Italian Humanists. There they became infected with the spirit of the Italian Renaissance, and learned also to despise the ordinary restraints of moral living. There they imbibed a contempt for the Church and for all kinds of theology, and acquired the genuine temperament of the later Italian Humanists, which could be irreligious without being anti-religious, simply because religion of any sort was something foreign to their nature.

Such a man was Peter Luders (1415-1474). He began life as an ecclesiastic, wandered down into Italy, where he devoted himself to classical studies, and where he acquired the irreligious disposition and the disregard for ordinary moral living which disgraced a large part of the later Italian Humanists. While living at Padua (1444), where he acted as private tutor to some young Germans from the Palatinate, he was invited by the Elector to teach Latin in the University of Heidelberg. The older professors were jealous of him: they insisted on reading and revising his introductory lecture: they refused him the use [pg 060] of the library; and in general made his life a burden. He struggled on till 1460. Then he spent many years in wandering from place to place, teaching the classics privately to such scholars as he could find. He was not a man of reputable life, was greatly given to drink, a free liver in every way, and thoroughly irreligious, with a strong contempt for all theology. He seems to have contrived when sober to keep his heretical opinions to himself, but to have betrayed himself occasionally in his drinking bouts. When at Basel he was accused of denying the doctrine of Three Persons in the Godhead, and told his accusers that he would willingly confess to four if they would only let him alone. He ended his days as a teacher of medicine in Vienna.

History has preserved the names of several of these wandering scholars who sowed the seeds of classical studies in Germany, and there were, doubtless, many who have been forgotten. Loose living, irreligious, their one gift a genuine desire to know and impart a knowledge of the ancient classical literature, careless how they fared provided only they could study and teach Latin and Greek, they were the disreputable apostles of the New Learning, and in their careless way scattered it over the northern lands.

§ 7. The Humanist Circles in the Cities.

The seed-beds of the German Renaissance were at first not so much the Universities, as associations of intimates in some of the cities. Three were pre-eminent,—Strassburg, Augsburg, and Nürnberg,—all wealthy imperial cities, having intimate relations with the imperial court on the one hand and with Italy on the other.

The Humanist circle at Nürnberg was perhaps the most distinguished, and it stood in closer relations than any other with the coming Reformation. Its best known member was Willibald Pirkheimer[31] (1470-1528), whose training had been more that of a young Florentine patrician [pg 061] than of the son of a German burgher. His father, a wealthy Nürnberg merchant of great intellectual gifts and attainments, a skilled diplomatist, and a confidential friend of the Emperor Maximilian, superintended his son's education. He took the boy with him on the journeys which trade or the diplomatic business of his city compelled him to make, and initiated him into the mysteries of commerce and of German politics. The lad was also trained in the knightly accomplishments of horsemanship and the skilful use of weapons. He was sent, like many a young German patrician, to Padua and Pavia (1490-1497) to study jurisprudence and the science of diplomacy, and was advised not to neglect opportunities to acquire the New Learning. When he returned, in his twenty-seventh year, he was appointed one of the counsellors of the city, and was entrusted with an important share in the management of its business. In this capacity it was necessary for him to make many a journey to the Diet or to the imperial court, and he soon became a favourite with the Emperor Maximilian, who rejoiced in converse with a mind as versatile as his own. No German so nearly approached the many-sided culture of the leading Italian Humanists as did this citizen of Nürnberg. On the other hand, he possessed a fund of earnestness which no Italian seems to have possessed. He was deeply anxious about reformation in Church and State, and after the Leipzig disputation had shown that Luther's quarrel with the Pope was no mere monkish dispute, but went to the roots of things, he was a sedate supporter of the Reformation in its earlier stages. His sisters Charitas and Clara, both learned ladies, were nuns in the Convent of St. Clara at Nürnberg. The elder, who was the abbess of her convent, has left an interesting collection of letters, from which it seems probable that she had great influence over her brother, and prevented him from joining the Lutheran Church after it had finally separated from the Roman obedience.

Pirkheimer gave the time which was not occupied with public affairs to learning and intercourse with scholars. [pg 062] His house was a palace filled with objects of art. His library, well stocked with MSS. and books, was open to every student who came with an introduction to its owner. At his banquets, which were famous, he delighted to assemble round his table the most distinguished men of the day. He was quite at home in Greek, and made translations from the works of Plato, Xenophon, Plutarch, and Lucian into Latin or German. The description which he gives, in his familiar letters to his sisters and intimate friends, of his life on his brother-in-law's country estate is like a picture of the habits of a Roman patrician of the fifth century in Gaul. The morning was spent in study, in reading Plato or Cicero; and in the afternoon, if the gout chanced to keep him indoors, he watched from his windows the country people in the fields, or the sportsman and the fisher at their occupations. He was fond of entertaining visitors from the neighbourhood. Sometimes he gathered round him his upper servants or his tenants, with their wives and families. The evening was usually devoted to the study of history and archæology, in both of which he was greatly interested. He was in the habit of sitting up late at night, and when the sky was clear he followed the motions of the planets with a telescope; for, like many others in that age, he had faith in astrology, and believed that he could read future events and the destinies of nations in the courses of the wandering stars.

In all those civic circles, poets and artists were found as members—Hans Holbein at Augsburg; Albert Dürer, with Hans Sebaldus Beham, at Nürnberg. The contemporary Italian painters, when they ceased to select their subjects from Scripture or from the Lives of the Saints, turned instinctively to depict scenes from the ancient pagan mythology. The German artists strayed elsewhere. They turned for subjects to the common life of the people. But the change was gradual. The Virgin ceased to be the Queen of Heaven and became the purest type of homely human motherhood, and the attendant angels, sportive children plucking flowers, fondling animals, playing with [pg 063] fruit. In Lucas Cranach's “Rest on the Flight to Egypt” two cherubs have climbed a tree to rob a bird's nest, and the parent birds are screaming at them from the branches. In one of Albert Dürer's representations of the Holy Family, the Virgin and Child are seated in the middle of a farmyard, surrounded by all kinds of rural accessories. Then German art plunged boldly into the delineation of the ordinary commonplace life—knights and tournaments, merchant trains, street scenes, pictures of peasant life, and especially of peasant dances, university and school scenes, pictures of the camp and of troops on the march. The coming revolution in religion was already proclaiming that all human life, even the most commonplace, could be sacred; and contemporary art discovered the picturesque in the ordinary life of the people—in the castles of the nobles, in the markets of the cities, and in the villages of the peasants.

§ 8. Humanism in the Universities.

The New Learning made its way gradually into the Universities. Classical scholars were invited to lecture or settle as private teachers in university towns, and the students read Cicero and Virgil, Horace and Propertius, Livy and Sallust, Plautus and Terence. One of the earliest signs of the growing Humanist feeling appeared in changes in one of the favourite diversions of German students. In all the mediæval Universities at carnival time the students got up and performed plays. The subjects were almost invariably taken from the Scriptures or from the Apocrypha. Chaucer says of an Oxford student, that

“Sometimes to shew his lightnesse and his mastereye

He played Herod on a gallows high.”

At the end of the fifteenth century the subjects changed, and students' plays were either reproductions from Plautus or Terence, or original compositions representing the common life of the time.

The legal recognition of Humanism within a University [pg 064] commonly showed itself in the institution of a lectureship of Poetry or Oratory—for the German Humanists were commonly known as the “Poets.” Freiburg established a chair of Poetry in 1471, and Basel in 1474; in Tübingen the stipend for an Orator was legally sanctioned in 1481, and Conrad Celtis was appointed to a chair of Poetry and Eloquence in 1492.

Erfurt, however, was generally regarded as the special nursery of German university Humanism ever since Peter Luders had taught there in 1460. From that date the University never lacked Humanist teachers, and a Humanist circle had gradually grown up among the successive generations of students. The permanent chief of this circle was a German scholar, whose name was Conrad Mut (Mudt, Mutta, and Mutti are variations), who Latinised his name into Mutianus, and added Rufus because he was red-haired. This Mutianus Rufus was in many respects a typical German Humanist. He was born in 1472 at Homburg in Hesse, had studied at Deventer under Alexander Hegius, had attended the University of Erfurt, and had then gone to Italy to study law and the New Learning. He became a Doctor of Laws of Bologna, made friends among many of the distinguished Italian Humanists, and had gained many patrons among the cardinals in Rome. He finally settled in Gotha, where he had received a canonry in the Church. He did not win any distinction as an author, but has left behind him an interesting collection of letters. His great delight was to gather round him promising young students belonging to the University of Erfurt, to superintend their reading, and to advise them in all literary matters. While in Italy he had become acquainted with Pico della Mirandola, and had adopted the conception of combining Platonism and Christianity in an eclectic mysticism, which was to be the esoteric Christianity for thinkers and educated men, while the popular Christianity, with its superstitions, was needed for the common herd. Christianity, he taught, had its beginnings long before the historical advent of our Lord. “The [pg 065] true Christ,” he said, “was not a man, but the Wisdom of God; He was the Son of God, and is equally imparted to the Jews, the Greeks, and the Germans.”[32] “The true Christ is not a man, but spirit and soul, which do not manifest themselves in outward appearance, and are not to be touched or seized by the hands.”[33] “The law of God,” he said in another place, “which enlightens the soul, has two heads: to love God, and to love one's neighbour as one's self. This law makes us partakers of Heaven. It is a natural law; not hewn in stone, as was the law of Moses; not carved in bronze, as was that of the Romans; not written on parchment or paper, but implanted in our hearts by the highest Teacher.” “Whoever has eaten in pious manner this memorable and saving Eucharist, has done something divine. For the true Body of Christ is peace and concord, and there is no holier Host than neighbourly love.”[34] He refused to believe in the miraculous, and held that the Scriptures were full of fables, meant, like those of Æsop, to teach moral truths. He asserted that he had devoted himself to “God, the saints, and the study of all antiquity”; and the result was expressed in the following quotation from a letter to Urban (1505), one of his friends and pupils at Erfurt: “There is but one god and one goddess; but there are many forms and many names—Jupiter, Sol, Apollo, Moses, Christ, Luna, Ceres, Proserpina, Tellus, Mary. But do not spread it abroad; we must keep silence on these Eleusinian mysteries. In religious matters we must employ fables and enigmas as a veil. Thou who hast the grace of Jupiter, the best and greatest God, shouldst in secret despise the little gods. When I say Jupiter, I mean Christ and the true God. But enough of these things, which are too high for us.”[35] Such a man looked with contempt on the Church of his age, and lashed it with his scorn. “I do not revere the coat or the beard of Christ; I revere the true and living God, who has neither beard nor coat.”[36] In private he denounced the fasts of the Church, confession, [pg 066] and masses for the dead, and called the begging friars “cowled monsters.” He says sarcastically of the Christianity of his times: “We mean by faith not the conformity of what we say with fact, but an opinion about divine things founded on credulity and a persuasion which seeks after profit. Such is its power that it is commonly believed that to us were given the keys of the kingdom of heaven. Whoever, therefore, despises our keys, shall feel our nails and our clubs (quisquis claves contemserit clavum et clavam sentiet). We have taken from the breast of Serapis a magical stamp to which Jesus of Galilee has given authority. With that figure we put our foes to flight, we cozen money, we consecrate God, we shake hell, and we work miracles; whether we be heavenly minded or earthly minded makes no matter, provided we sit happily at the banquet of Jupiter.”[37] But he did not wish to revolt from the external authority of the Church of the day. “He is impious who wishes to know more than the Church. We bear on our forehead,” he says, “the seal of the Cross, the standard of our King. Let us not be deserters; let nothing base be found in our camp.”[38] The authority which the Humanists revolted against was merely intellectual, as was the freedom they fought for. It did not belong to their mission to proclaim a spiritual freedom or to free the common man from his slavish fear of the mediæval priesthood; and this made an impassable gulf between their aspirations and those of Luther and the real leaders of the Reformation movement.[39]

The Erfurt circle of Humanists had for members Heinrich Urban, to whom many of the letters of Mutianus were addressed, Petreius Alperbach, who won the title of “mocker of gods and men” (derisor deorum et hominum), Johann Jaeger of Dornheim (Crotus Rubeanus), George Burkhardt from Spalt (Spalatinus), Henry and Peter Eberach. Eoban of Hesse (Helius Eobanus Hessus), the [pg 067] most gifted of them all, and the hardest drinker, joined the circle in 1494.

Similar university circles were formed elsewhere: at Basel, where Heinrich Loriti from Glarus (Glareanus), and afterwards Erasmus, were the attractions; at Tübingen, where Heinrich Bebel, author of the Facetiæ, encouraged his younger friends to study history; and even at Köln, where Hermann von Busch, a pupil of Deventer, and Ortuin Gratius, afterwards the butt of the authors of the Epistolæ obscurorum virorum, were looked upon as leaders full of the New Learning.

As in Italy Popes and cardinals patronised the leaders of the Renaissance, so in Germany the Emperor and some princes gave their protection to Humanism. To German scholars, who were at the head of the new movement, Maximilian seemed to be an ideal ruler. His coffers no doubt were almost always empty, and he had not lucrative posts at his command to bestow upon them; the position of court poet given to Conrad Celtes and afterwards to Ulrich von Hutten brought little except coronation in presence of the imperial court with a tastefully woven laurel crown;[40] but the character of Maximilian attracted peasantry and scholars alike. His romanticism, his abiding youthfulness, his amazing intellectual versatility, his knight-errantry, and his sympathy fascinated them. Maximilian lives in the folk-song of Germany as no other ruler does. The scheme of education sung in the Weisskunig, and illustrated by Hans Burgmaier, entitled him to the name “the Humanist Emperor.”

§ 9. Reuchlin.

The German Humanists, whether belonging to the learned societies of the cities or to the groups in the Universities, were too full of individuality to present the [pg 068] appearance of a body of men leagued together under the impulse of a common aim. The Erfurt band of scholars was called “the Mutianic Host”; but the partisans of the New Learning could scarcely be said to form a solid phalanx. Something served, however, to bring them all together. This was the persecution of Reuchlin.

Johann Reuchlin (1455-1522), like Erasmus after him, was very much a man by himself. He entered history at first dramatically enough. A party of Italian Humanists had met in the house of John Argyropoulos in Rome in 1483. Among them was a young unknown German, who had newly arrived with letters of introduction to the host. He had come, he explained, to study Greek. Argyropoulos gave him a Thucydides and asked him to construe a page or two into Latin. Reuchlin construed with such ease and elegance, that the company exclaimed that Greece had flown across the Alps to settle in Germany. The young German spent some years in Italy, enjoying the friendship of the foremost Italian scholars. He was an ardent student of the New Learning, and on his return was the first to make Greek thoroughly popular in Germany. But he was a still more ardent student of Hebrew, and it may almost be said of him that he introduced that ancient language to the peoples of Europe. His De Rudimentis Hebraicis (1506), a grammar and dictionary in one, was the first book of its kind. His interest in the language was more than that of a student. He believed that Hebrew was not only the most ancient, but the holiest of languages. God had spoken in it. He had revealed Himself to men not merely in the Hebrew writings of the Old Testament, but had also imparted, through angels and other divine messengers, a hidden wisdom which has been preserved in ancient Hebrew writings outside of the Scriptures,—a wisdom known to Adam, to Noah, and to the Patriarchs. He expounded his strange mystical theosophy in a curious little book, De Verbo Mirifico (1494), full of out-of-the-way learning, and finding sublime mysteries in the very points of the Hebrew Scriptures. Perhaps his central [pg 069] thought is expressed in the sentence, “God is love; man is hope; the bond between them is faith.... God and man may be so combined in an indescribable union that the human God and the divine man may be considered as one being.”[41] The book is a Symposium where Sidonius, Baruch, and Capnion (Reuchlin) hold prolonged discourse with each other.

Reuchlin was fifty-four years of age when a controversy began which gradually divided the scholars of Germany into two camps, and banded the Humanists into one party fighting in defence of free inquiry.

John Pfefferkorn (1469-1522), born a Jew and converted to Christianity (1505), animated with the zeal of a convert to bring the Jews wholesale to Christianity, and perhaps stimulated by the Dominicans of Köln (Cologne), with whom he was closely associated, conceived an idea that his former co-religionists might be induced to accept Christianity if all their peculiar books, the Old Testament excepted, were confiscated. During the earlier Middle Ages the Jews had been continually persecuted, and their persecution had always been popular; but the fifteenth century had been a period of comparative rest for them; they had bought the imperial protection, and their services as physicians had been gratefully recognised in Frankfurt and many other cities.[42] Still the popular hatred against them as usurers remained, and manifested itself in every time of social upheaval. It was always easy to arouse the slumbering antipathy.

Pfefferkorn had written four books against the Jews (Judenspiegel, Judenbeichte, Osternbuch, Jeudenfeind) in the years 1507-1509, in which he had suggested that the Jews should be forbidden to practise usury, that they should be compelled to listen to sermons, and that their Hebrew books should be confiscated. He actually got a mandate from the Emperor Maximilian, probably through some corrupt secretary, empowering him to seize upon all [pg 070] such books. He began his work in the Rhineland, and had already confiscated the books of many Jews, when, in the summer of 1509, he came to Reuchlin and requested his aid. The scholar not only refused, but pointed out some irregularities in the imperial mandate. The doubtful legality of the imperial order had also attracted the attention of Uriel, the Archbishop of Mainz, who forbade his clergy from rendering Pfefferkorn any assistance.

Upon this Pfefferkorn and the Dominicans again applied to the Emperor, got a second mandate, then a third, which was the important one. It left the matter in the hands of the Archbishop of Mainz, who was to collect evidence on the subject of Jewish books. He was to ask the opinions of Reuchlin, of Victor von Karben (1422-1515), who had been a Jew but was then a Christian priest, of James Hochstratten (1460-1527), a Dominican and Inquisitor to the diocese of Köln, a strong foe to Humanism, and of the Universities of Heidelberg, Erfurt, Köln, and Mainz. They were to write out their opinions and send them to Pfefferkorn, who was to present them to the Emperor. Reuchlin was accordingly asked by the Archbishop to advise the Emperor “whether it would be praiseworthy and beneficial to our holy religion to destroy such books as the Jews used, excepting only the books of the Ten Commandments of Moses, the Prophets, and the Psalter of the Old Testament?” Reuchlin's answer was ready by November 1510. He went into the matter very thoroughly and impartially. He divided the books of the Jews into several classes, and gave his opinion on each. It was out of the question to destroy the Old Testament. The Talmud was a collection of expositions of the Jewish law at various periods; no one could express an opinion about it unless he had read it through; Reuchlin had only been able to procure portions; judging from these, it was likely that the book did contain many things contrary to Christianity, but that was the nature of the Jewish religion which was protected by law; it did contain many good things, and ought not to be destroyed. The Cabala was, according to [pg 071] Reuchlin, a very precious book, which assured us as no other did of the divinity of Christ, and ought to be carefully preserved. The Jews had various commentaries on the books of the Old Testament which were very useful to enable Christian scholars to understand them rightly, and they ought not to be destroyed. They had also sermons and ceremonial books belonging to their religion which had been guaranteed by imperial law. They had books on arts and sciences which ought to be destroyed only in so far as they taught such forbidden arts as magic. Lastly, there were books of poetry and fables, and some of them might contain insults to Christ, the Virgin, and the Apostles, and might deserve burning, but not without careful and competent examination. He added that the best way to deal with the Jews was not to burn their books, but to engage in reasonable, gentle, and kindly discussion.

Reuchlin's opinion stood alone: all the other authorities suggested the burning of Jewish books, and the University of Mainz would not exempt the Old Testament until it had been shown that it had not been tampered with by Jewish zealots.

The temperate and scholarly answer of Reuchlin was made a charge against him. The controversy which followed, and which lasted for six weary years, was so managed by the Dominicans, that Reuchlin, a Humanist and a layman, was made to appear as defying the theologians of the Church on a point of theology. Like all mediæval controversies, it was conducted with great bitterness and no lack of invective, frequently coarse enough. The Humanists saw, however, that it was the case of a scholar defending genuine scholarship against obscurantists, and, after a fruitless endeavour to get Erasmus to lead them, they joined in a common attack. Artists also lent their aid. In one contemporary engraving, Reuchlin is seated in a car decked with laurels, and is in the act of entering his native town of Pforzheim. The Köln theologians march in chains before the car; Pfefferkorn lies on the ground with an executioner [pg 072] ready to decapitate him; citizens and their wives in gala costume await the hero, and the town's musicians salute him with triumphant melody; while one worthy burgher manifests his sympathy by throwing a monk out of a window. The other side of the controversy is represented by a rough woodcut, in which Pfefferkorn is seen breaking the chair of scholarship in which a double-tongued Reuchlin is sitting.[43] The most notable contribution to the dispute, however, was the publication of the famous Epistolæ Obscurorum Virorum, inseparably connected with the name of Ulrich von Hutten.

§ 10. The “Epistolæ Obscurorum Virorum.”

While the controversy was raging (1514), Reuchlin had collected a series of testimonies to his scholarship, and had published them under the title of Letters from Eminent Men.[44] This suggested to some young Humanist the idea of a collection of letters in which the obscurantists could be seen exposing themselves and their unutterable folly under the parodied title of Epistolæ Obscurorum Virorum. The book bears the same relation to the scholastic disputations of the later fifteenth century that Don Quixote does to the romances of mediæval chivalry. It is a farrago of questions on grammar, etymology, graduation precedence, life in a country parsonage, and scholastic casuistry. Magister Henricus Schaffsmulius writes from Rome that he went one Friday morning to breakfast in the Campo dei Fiori, [pg 073] ordered an egg, which on being opened contained a chicken. “Quick,” said his companion, “swallow it, or the landlord will charge the chicken in the bill.” He obeyed, forgetting that the day was Friday, on which no flesh could be eaten lawfully. In his perplexity he consulted one theologian, who told him to keep his mind at rest, for an embryo chicken within an egg was like the worms or maggots in fruit and cheese, which men can swallow without harm to their souls even in Lent. But another, equally learned, had informed him that maggots in cheese and worms in fruit were to be classed as fish, which everyone could eat lawfully on fast days, but that an embryo chicken was quite another thing—it was flesh. Would the learned Magister Ortuin, who knew everything, decide for him and relieve his burdened conscience? The writers send to their dear Magister Ortuin short Latin poems of which they are modestly proud. They confess that their verses do not scan; but that matters little. The writers of secular verse must be attentive to such things; but their poems, which relate the lives and deeds of the saints, do not need such refinements. The writers confess that at times their lives are not what they ought to be; but Solomon and Samson were not perfect; and they have too much Christian humility to wish to excel such honoured Christian saints. The letters contain a good deal of gossip about the wickedness of the poets (Humanists). These evil men have been speaking very disrespectfully about the Holy Coat at Trier (Treves); they have said that the Blessed Relics of the Three Kings at Köln are the bones of three Westphalian peasants. The correspondents exchange confidences about sermons they dislike. One preacher, who spoke with unseemly earnestness, had delivered a plain sermon without any learned syllogisms or intricate theological reasoning; he had spoken simply about Christ and His salvation, and the strange thing was that the people seemed to listen to him eagerly: such preaching ought to be forbidden. Allusions to Reuchlin and his trial are scattered all through the letters, and the writers reveal artlessly their hopes and [pg 074] fears about the result. It is possible, one laments, that the rascal may get off after all: the writer hears that worthy Inquisitor Hochstratten's money is almost exhausted, and that he has scarcely enough left for the necessary bribery at Rome; it is to be hoped that he will get a further supply. It is quite impossible to translate the epistles and retain the original flavour of the language,—a mixture of ecclesiastical phrases, vernacular idioms and words, and the worst mediæval Latin. Of course, the letters contain much that is very objectionable: they attack the character of men, and even of women; but that was an ordinary feature of the Humanism of the times. They were undoubtedly successful in covering the opponents of Reuchlin with ridicule, more especially when some of the obscurantists failed to see the satire, and looked upon the letters as genuine accounts of the views they sympathised with. Some of the mendicant friars in England welcomed a book against Reuchlin, and a Dominican prior in Brabant bought several copies to send to his superiors.

The authorship of these famous letters is not thoroughly known; probably several Humanist pens were at work. It is generally admitted that they came from the Humanist circle at Erfurt, and that the man who planned the book and wrote most of the letters was John Jaeger of Dornheim (Crotus Rubeanus). They were long ascribed to Ulrich von Hutten; some of the letters may have come from his pen—one did certainly. These Epistolæ Obscurorum Virorum, when compared with the Encomium Moriæ of Erasmus, show how immeasurably inferior the ordinary German Humanist was to the scholar of the Low Countries.[45]

§ 11. Ulrich von Hutten.

Ulrich von Hutten,[46] the stormy petrel of the Reformation period in Germany, was a member of one of the oldest families of the Franconian nobles—a fierce, lawless, turbulent nobility. The old hot family blood coursed through his veins, and accounts for much in his adventurous career. He was the eldest son, but his frail body and sickly disposition marked him out in his father's eyes for a clerical life. He was sent at the age of eleven to the ancient monastery of Fulda, where his precocity in all kinds of intellectual work seemed to presage a distinguished position if he remained true to the calling to which his father had destined him. The boy, however, soon found that he had no vocation for the Church, and that, while he was keenly interested in all manner of studies, he detested the scholastic theology. He appealed to his father, told him how he hated the thought of a clerical life, and asked him to be permitted to look forward to the career of a scholar and a man of letters. The old Franconian knight was as hard as men of his class usually were. He promised Ulrich that he could take as much time as he liked to educate himself, but that in the end he was to enter the Church. Upon this, Ulrich, an obstinate chip of an obstinate block, determined to make his escape from the monastery and follow his own life. How he managed it is unknown. He fell in with John Jaeger of Dornheim, and the two wandered, German student fashion, from University to University; they were at Köln together, then at Erfurt. The elder Hutten refused to assist his son in any way. How the young student maintained himself no one knows. He had wretched health; he was at least twice robbed and half-murdered by ruffians as he tramped along the unsafe highways; but his indomitable purpose to live the life of a literary man or to die sustained him. At last family friends patched up a half-hearted reconciliation between father and [pg 076] son. They pointed out that the young man's abilities might find scope in a diplomatic career since the Church was so distasteful to him, and the father was induced to permit him to go to Italy, provided he applied himself to the study of law. Ulrich went gladly to the land of the New Learning, reached Pavia, struggled on to Bologna, found that he liked law no better than theology, and began to write. It is needless to follow his erratic career. He succeeded frequently in getting patrons; but he was not the man to live comfortably in dependence; he always remembered that he was a Franconian noble; he had an irritable temper,—his wretched health furnishing a very adequate excuse.

It is probable that his sojourn in Italy did as much for him as for Luther, though in a different way. The Reformer turned with loathing from Italian, and especially from Roman wickedness. The Humanist meditated on the greatness of the imperial idea, now, he thought, the birthright of his Germany, which was being robbed of it by the Papacy. Henceforward he was dominated by one persistent thought.

He was a Humanist and a poet, but a man apart, marked out from among his fellows, destined to live in the memories of his nation when their names had been forgotten. They might be better scholars, able to write a finer Latinity, and pen trifles more elegantly; but he was a man with a purpose. His erratic and by no means pure life was ennobled by his sincere, if limited and unpractical, patriotism. He wrought, schemed, fought, flattered, and apostrophised to create a united Germany under a reformed Emperor. Whatever hindered this was to be attacked with what weapons of sarcasm, invective, and scorn were at his command; and the one enemy was the Papacy of the close of the fifteenth century, and all that it implied. It was the Papacy that drained Germany of gold, that kept the Emperor in thraldom, that set one portion of the land against the other, that gave the separatist designs of the princes their promise of success. The Papacy was his Carthage, which must be destroyed.

Hutten was a master of invective, fearless, critically destructive; but he had small constructive faculty. It is not easy to discover what he meant by a reformation of the Empire—something loomed before him vague, grand, a renewal of an imagined past. Germany might be great, it is suggested in the Inspicientes (written in 1520), if the Papacy were defied, if the princes were kept in their proper place of subordination, if a great imperial army were created and paid out of a common imperial fund,—an army where the officers were the knights, and the privates a peasant infantry (landsknechts). It is the passion for a German Imperial Unity which we find in all Hutten's writings, from the early Epistola ad Maximilianum Cæsarem Italiæ fictitia, the Vadiscus, or the Roman Triads, down to the Inspicientes—not the means whereby this is to be created. He was a born foeman, one who loved battle for battle's sake, who could never get enough of fighting,—a man with the blood of his Franconian ancestors coursing hotly through his veins. Like them, he loved freedom in all things—personal, intellectual, and religious. Like them, he scorned ease and luxury, and despised the burghers, with their love of comfort and wealth. He thought much more highly of the robber-knights than of the merchants they plundered. Germany, he believed, would come right if the merchants and the priests could be got rid of. The robbers were even German patriots who intercepted the introduction of foreign merchandise, and protected the German producers in securing the profits due to them for their labour.

Hutten is usually classed as an ally of Luther's, and from the date of the Leipzig Disputation (1519), when Luther first attacked the Roman Primacy, he was an ardent admirer of the Reformer. But he had very little sympathy with the deeper religious side of the Reformation movement. He regarded Luther's protest against Indulgences in very much the same way as did Pope Leo x. It was a contemptible monkish dispute, and all sensible men, he thought, ought to delight to see monks [pg 078] devour one another. “I lately said to a friar, who was telling me about it,” he writes, “ ‘Devour one another, that ye may be consumed one of another.’ It is my desire that our enemies (the monks) may live in as much discord as possible, and may be always quarrelling among themselves.” He attached himself vehemently to Luther (and Hutten was always vehement) only when he found that the monk stood for freedom of conscience (The Liberty of a Christian Man) and for a united Germany against Rome (To the Christian Nobility of the German Nation respecting the Reformation of the Christian Estate). As we study his face in the engravings which have survived, mark his hollow cheeks, high cheek-bones, long nose, heavy moustache, shaven chin, whiskers straggling as if frayed by the helmet, and bold eyes, we can see the rude Franconian noble, who by some strange freak of fortune became a scholar, a Humanist, a patriot, and, in his own way, a reformer.

[pg 079]

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Chapter IV. Social Conditions.[47]

§ 1. Towns and Trade.

It has been already said that the times of the Renaissance were a period of transition in the social as well as in the intellectual condition of the peoples of Europe. The economic changes were so great, that no description of the environment of the Reformation would be complete without some account of the social revolution which was slowly progressing. It must be remembered, however, that there is some danger in making the merely general statements [pg 080] which alone are possible in this chapter. The economic forces at work were modified and changed in countries and in districts, and during decades, by local conditions. Any general description is liable to be qualified by numerous exceptions.

Beneath the whole mediæval system lay the idea that the land was the only economic basis of wealth. During the earlier Middle Ages this was largely true everywhere, and was specially so in Germany. Each little district produced almost all that it needed for its own wants; and the economic value of the town consisted in its being a corporation of artisans exchanging the fruits of their industries for the surplus of farm produce which the peasants brought to their market-place. But the increasing trade of the towns, developed at first along the greater rivers, the arteries of the countries, gradually produced another source of wealth; and this commerce made great strides after the Crusades had opened the Eastern markets to European traders. Trade, commerce, and manufactures were the life of the towns, and were rapidly increasing their importance.

In mediæval times each town was an independent economic centre, and the regulation of industry and of trade was an exclusively municipal affair. This state of matters had changed in some countries before the time of the Reformation, and statesmen had begun to recognise the importance of a national trade, and to take steps to further it; but in Germany, chiefly owing to its hopeless divisions, the old state of matters remained, and the municipalities continued to direct and control all commercial and industrial affairs.

The towns had originally grown up under the protection of the Emperor, or of some great lord of the soil, or of an ecclesiastical prince or foundation, and the early officials were the representatives of these fostering powers. The descendants of this early official class became known as the “patricians” of the city, and they regarded all the official positions as the hereditary privileges of their class. The town population was thoroughly organised in associations [pg 081] of workmen, commonly called “gilds,” which at first concerned themselves simply with the regulation and improvement of the industry carried on, and with the education and recreations of the workers. But these “gilds” soon assumed a political character. The workmen belonging to them formed the fighting force needed for the independence and protection of the city. Each “gild” had its fighting organisation, its war banner, its armoury; and its members were trained to the use of arms, and practised it in their hours of recreation. The “gilds” therefore began to claim some share in the government of the town, and in most German cities, in the decades before the Reformation, the old aristocratic government of the “patricians” had given place to the more democratic rule of the “gilds.” The chief offices connected with the “gilds” insensibly tended to become hereditary in a few leading families, and this created a second “patriciat,” whose control was resented by the great mass of the workmen. Nürnberg was one of the few great German cities where the old “patricians” continued to rule down to the times of the Reformation.

These “gilds” were for the most part full of business energy, which showed itself in the twofold way of making such regulations as they believed would insure good workmanship, and of securing facilities for the sale of their wares. All the workmen, it was believed, were interested in the production of good articles, and the bad workmanship of one artisan was regarded as bringing discredit upon all. Hence, as a rule, every article was tested in private before it was exposed for public sale, and various punishments were devised to check the production of inferior goods. Thus in Bremen every badly made pair of shoes was publicly destroyed at the pillory of the town. Such regulations belonged to the private administration of the towns, and differed in different places. Indeed, the whole municipal government of the German cities presents an endless variety, due to the local history and other conditions affecting the individual towns. While the production was a matter for private regulation in each centre of industry, distribution [pg 082] involved the towns in something like a common policy. It demanded safe means of communication between one town and another, between the towns and the rural districts, and safe outlets to foreign lands. It needed roads, bridges, and security of travel. The towns banded themselves together, and made alliances with powerful feudal nobles to secure these advantages. Such was the origin of the great Hanseatic League, which had its beginnings in Flanders, spread over North Germany, included the Scandinavian countries, and grew to be a European power.[48] The less known leagues among the cities of South Germany did equally good service, and they commonly secured outlets to Venice, Florence, and Genoa, by alliances with the peasantry in whose hands were the chief passes of the Alps. All this meant an opposition between the burghers and the nobles—an opposition which was continuous, which on occasion flamed out into great wars, and which compelled the cities to maintain civic armies, composed partly of their citizens and partly of hired troops. It was reckoned that Strassburg and Augsburg together could send a fighting force of 40,000 men into the field.

The area of trade, though, according to modern ideas, restricted, was fairly extensive. It included all the countries in modern Europe and the adjacent seas. The sea-trade was carried on in the Mediterranean and Black Seas, in the Baltic and North Seas, and down the western coasts of France and Spain. The North Sea was the great fishing ground, and large quantities of dried fish, necessary for the due keeping of Lent, were despatched in coasting vessels, and by the overland routes to the southern countries of Europe. Furs, skins, and corn came from Russia and the northern countries. Spain, some parts of Germany, and above all England, were the wool-exporting countries. The eastern counties of England, many towns in Germany and France, and especially the Low Countries, were the centres of the woollen manufactures. The north of France was [pg 083] the great flax-growing country. In Italy, at Barcelona in Spain, and at Lyons in France, silk was produced and manufactured. The spices and dried fruits of the East, and its silks and costly brocades and feathers, came from the Levant to Venice, and were carried north through the great passes which pierce the range of the Alps.

Civic statesmen did their best, by mutual bargains and the establishment of factories, to protect and extend trading facilities for their townsmen. The German merchant had his magnificent Fondaco dei Tedeschi in Venice, his factories of the Hanseatic League in London, Bruges, Bergen, and even in far-off Novgorod; and Englishmen had also their factories in foreign parts, within which they could buy and sell in peace.

The perils of the German merchant, in spite of all civic leagues, were at home rather than abroad. His country swarmed with Free Nobles, each of whom looked upon himself as a sovereign power, with full right to do as he pleased within his own dominions, whether these were an extensive principality or a few hundred acres surrounding his castle. He could impose what tolls or customs dues he pleased on the merchants whose heavily-laden waggons entered his territories. He had customary rights which made bad roads and the lack of bridges advantages to the lord of the soil. If an axle or wheel broke, if a waggon upset in crossing a dangerous ford, the bales thrown on the path or stranded on the banks of the stream could be claimed by the proprietor of the land. Worse than all were the perils from the robber-knights—men who insisted on their right to make private war even when that took the form of highway robbery, and who largely subsisted on the gains which came, as they said, from making their “horses bite off the purses of travellers.”

In spite of all these hindrances, a capitalist class gradually arose in Germany. Large profits, altogether apart from trade, could be made by managing, collecting, and forwarding the money coming from the universal system of Indulgences. It was in this way that the [pg 084] Fuggers of Augsburg first rose to wealth. Money soon bred money. During the greater part of the Middle Ages there was no such thing as lending out money on interest, save among the Italian merchants of North Italy or among the Jews. The Church had always prohibited what it called usury. But Churchmen were the first to practise the sin they had condemned. The members of ecclesiastical corporations began to make useful advances, charging an interest of from 7 to 12 per cent.—moderate enough for the times. Gradually the custom spread among the wealthy laity, who did not confine themselves to these reasonable profits, and we find Sebastian Brand inveighing against the “Christian Jews,” who had become worse oppressors than the Israelite capitalists whom they copied.

But the great alteration in social conditions, following change in the distribution of wealth, came when the age of geographical discovery had made a world commerce a possible thing.

§ 2. Geographical Discoveries and the beginning of a World Trade.

The fifteenth century from its beginning had seen one geographical discovery after another. Perhaps we may say that the sailors of Genoa had begun the new era by reaching the Azores and Madeira. Then Dom Henrique of Portugal, Governor of Ceuta, organised voyages of trade and discovery down the coast of Africa. Portuguese, Venetian, and Genoese captains commanded his vessels. From 1426, expedition after expedition was sent forth, and at his death in 1460 the coast of Africa as far as Guinea had been explored. His work was carried on by his countrymen. The Guinea trade in slaves, gold, and ivory was established as early as 1480; the Congo was reached in 1484; and Portuguese ships, under Bartholomew Diaz, rounded the Cape of Good Hope in 1486. During these later years a new motive had prompted the voyages of exploration. The growth of the [pg 085] Turkish power in the east of Europe had destroyed the commercial colonies and factories on the Black Sea; the fall of Constantinople had blocked the route along the valley of the Danube; and Venice had a monopoly of the trade with Egypt and Syria, the only remaining channels by which the merchandise from the East reached Europe. The great commercial problem of the times was how to get some hold of the direct trade with the East. It was this that inspired Bristol skippers, familiar with Iceland, with the idea that by following old Norse traditions they might find a path by way of the North Atlantic; that sent Columbus across the Mid-Atlantic to discover the Bahamas and the continent of America; and that drove the more fortunate Portuguese round the Cape of Good Hope. Young Vasco da Gama reached the goal first, when, after doubling the Cape, he sailed up the eastern coast of Africa, reached Mombasa, and then boldly crossed the Indian Ocean to Calicut, the Indian emporium for that rich trade which all the European nations were anxious to share. The possibilities of a world commerce led to the creation of trading companies; for a larger capital was needed than individual merchants possessed, and the formation of these companies overshadowed, discredited, and finally destroyed the gild system of the mediæval trading cities. Trade and industry became capitalised to a degree previously unknown. One great family of capitalists, the Welser, had factories in Rome, Milan, Genoa, and Lyons, and tapped the rich Eastern trade by their houses in Antwerp, Lisbon, and Madeira. They even tried, unsuccessfully, to establish a German colony on the new continent—in Venezuela. Another, the Fuggers of Augsburg, were interested in all kinds of trade, but especially in the mining industry. It is said that the mines of Thuringia, Carinthia, and the Tyrol within Germany, and those of Hungary and Spain outside it, were almost all in their hands. The capital of the family was estimated in 1546 at sixty-three millions of gulden. This increase of wealth does not seem to have [pg 086] been confined to a few favourites of fortune. It belonged to the mass of the members of the great trading companies. Von Bezold instances a “certain native of Augsburg” whose investment of 500 gulden in a merchant company brought him in seven years 24,500 gulden. Merchant princes confronted the princes of the State and those of the Church, and their presence and power dislocated the old social relations. The towns, the abodes of these rich merchants, acquired a new and powerful influence among the complex of national relations, until it is not too much to say, that if the political future of Germany was in the hands of the secular princes, its social condition came to be dominated by the burgher class.

§ 3. Increase in Wealth and luxurious Living.

Culture, which had long abandoned the cloisters, came to settle in the towns. We have already seen that they were the centres of German Humanism and of the New Learning. The artists of the German Renaissance belonged to the towns, and their principal patrons were the wealthy burghers. The rich merchants displayed their civic patriotism in aiding to build great churches; in erecting magnificent chambers of commerce, where merchandise could be stored, with halls for buying and selling, and rooms where the merchants of the town could consult about the interests of the civic trade; in building Artushöfe or assembly rooms, where the patrician burghers had their public dances, dinners, and other kinds of social entertainments; in raising great towers for the honour of the town. They built magnificent private houses. Æneas Sylvius tells us that in Nürnberg he saw many burgher houses that befitted kings, and that the King of Scotland was not as nobly housed as a Nürnberg burgher of the second rank. They filled these dwellings with gold and silver plate, and with costly Venetian glass; their furniture was adorned with delicate wood-carving; costly tapestries, paintings, and engravings [pg 087] decorated the walls; and the reception-room or stube was the place of greatest display. The towns in which all this wealth was accumulated were neither populous nor powerful. They cannot be compared with the city republics of Italy, where the town ruled over a large territory: the lands belonging to the imperial cities of Germany were comparatively of small extent. Nor could they boast of the population of the great cities of the Netherlands. Nürnberg, it is said, had a population of a little over 20,000 in the middle of the fifteenth century. Strassburg, a somewhat smaller one. The population of Frankfurt-on-the-Main was about 10,000 in 1440.[49] The number of inhabitants had probably increased by one-half more in the decades immediately preceding the Reformation. But all the great towns, with their elaborate fortifications, handsome buildings, and massive towers, had a very imposing appearance in the beginning of the sixteenth century.

There was, however, another side to all this. There was very little personal “comfort” and very little personal refinement among the rich burghers and nobles of Germany—much less than among the corresponding classes in Italy, the Netherlands, and France. The towns were badly drained, if drained at all; the streets were seldom paved, and mud and filth accumulated in almost indescribable ways; the garbage was thrown out of the windows; and troops of swine were the ordinary scavengers. The increase of wealth showed itself chiefly in all kinds of sensual living. Preachers, economists, and satirists denounce the luxury and immodesty of the dress both of men and women, the gluttony and the drinking habits of the rich burghers and of the nobility of Germany. We learn from Hans von Schweinichen that noblemen prided themselves on having men among their retainers who could drink all rivals [pg 088] beneath the table, and that noble personages seldom met without such a drinking contest.[50] The wealthy, learned, and artistic city of Nürnberg possessed a public waggon, which every night was led through the streets to pick up and convey to their homes drunken burghers found lying in the filth of the streets. The Chronicle of the Zimmer Family relates that at the castle of Count Andrew of Sonnenberg, at the conclusion of a carnival dance and after the usual “sleeping drink” had been served round, one of the company went to the kennels and carried to the ball-room buckets of scraps and slops gathered to feed the hounds, and that the lords and ladies amused themselves by flinging the contents at each other, “to the great detriment,” the chronicler adds, “of their clothes and of the room.”[51] A like licence pervaded the relations between men and women, of which it will perhaps suffice to say that the public baths, where, be it noted, the bathing was often promiscuous, were such that they served Albert Dürer and other contemporary painters the purpose of a “life school” to make drawings of the nude.[52] The conversation and behaviour of the nobles and wealthy burghers of Germany in the decades before the Reformation displayed a coarseness which would now be held to disgrace the lowest classes of the population in any country.[53]

The gradual capitalising of industry had been sapping the old “gild” organisation within the cities; the extension of commerce, and especially the shifting of the centre of external trade from Venice to Antwerp, in consequence of the discovery of the new route to the Eastern markets, and [pg 089] above all, the growth of the great merchant companies, whose world-trade required enormous capital, overshadowed the “gilds” and destroyed their influence. The rise and power of this capitalist order severed the poor from the rich, and created, in a sense unknown before, a proletariat class within the cities, which was liable to be swollen by the influx of discontented and ruined peasants from the country districts. The corruption of morals, which reached its height in the city life of the first quarter of the sixteenth century, intensified the growing hatred between the rich burgher and the poor workman. The ostentatious display of burgher wealth heightened the natural antipathy between merchant and noble. The universal hatred of the merchant class is a pronounced feature of the times. “They increase prices, make hunger, and slay the poor folk,” was a common saying. Men like Ulrich von Hutten were prepared to justify the robber-knights because they attacked the merchants, who, he said, were ruining Germany. Yet the merchant class increased and flourished, and with them, the towns which they inhabited.

§ 4. The Condition of the Peasantry.

The condition of the peasantry in Germany has also to be described. The folk who practise husbandry usually form the most stable element in any community, but they could not avoid being touched by the economic movements of the time. The seeds of revolution had long been sown among the German peasantry, and peasant risings had taken place in different districts of south-central Europe from the middle of the fourteenth down to the opening years of the sixteenth centuries. It is difficult to describe accurately the state of these German peasants. The social condition of the nobles and the burghers has had many an historian, and their modes of life have left abundant traces in literature and archæology; but peasant houses and implements soon perished, and the chronicles seldom refer to the world to which the [pg 090] “land-folk” belonged, save when some local peasant rising or the tragedy of the Peasants' War thrust them into history. Our main difficulty, however, does not arise so much from lack of descriptive material—for that can be found when diligently sought for—as from the varying, almost contradictory statements that are made. Some contemporary writers condescend to describe the peasant class. A large number of collections of Weisthümer, the consuetudinary laws which regulated the life of the village communities, have been recovered and carefully edited;[54] folk-songs preserve the old life and usages; many of the Fastnachtspiele or rude carnival dramas deal with peasant scenes; and Albert Dürer and other artists of the times have sketched over and over again the peasant, his house and cot-yard, his village and his daily life. We can, in part, reconstruct the old peasant life and its surroundings. Only it must be remembered that the life varied not only in different parts of Germany, but in the same districts and decades under different rural proprietors; for the peasant was so dependent on his over-lord that the character of the proprietor counted for much in the condition of the people.

The village artisan did not exist. The peasants lived by themselves apart from all other classes of the population. That is the universal statement. They carried the produce of their land and their live-stock to the nearest town, sold it in the market-place, and bought there what they needed for their life and work.

They dwelt in villages fortified after a fashion; for the group of houses was surrounded sometimes by a wall, but usually by a stout fence, made with strong stakes and interleaved branches. This was entered by a gate that could be locked. Outside the fence, circling the whole was [pg 091] a deep ditch crossed by a “falling door” or drawbridge. Within the fence among the houses there was usually a small church, a public-house, a house or room (Spielhaus) where the village council met and where justice was dispensed. In front stood a strong wooden stake, to which criminals were tied for punishment, and near it always the stocks, sometimes a gallows, and more rarely the pole and wheel for the barbarous mediæval punishment “breaking on the wheel.”

The houses were wooden frames filled in with sun-dried bricks, and were thatched with straw; the chimneys were of wood protected with clay. The cattle, fuel, fodder, and family were sheltered under the one large roof. The timber for building and repairs was got from the forest under regulations set down in the Weisthümer, and the peasants had leave to collect the fallen branches for firewood, the women gathering and carrying, and the men cutting and stacking under the eaves. All breaches of the forest laws were severely punished (in some of the Weisthümer the felling of a tree without leave was punished by beheading); so was the moving of landmarks; for wood and soil were precious.

Most houses had a small fenced garden attached, in which were grown cabbages, greens, and lettuce; small onions (cibölle, Scotticé syboes), parsley, and peas; poppies, garlic, and hemp; apples, plums, and, in South Germany, grapes; as well as other things whose mediæval German names are not translatable by me. Wooden beehives were placed in the garden, and a pigeon-house usually stood in the yard.

The scanty underclothing of the peasants was of wool and the outer dress of linen—the men's, girt with a belt from which hung a sword, for they always went armed. Their furniture consisted of a table, several three-legged stools, and one or two chests. Rude cooking utensils hung on the walls, and dried pork, fruits, and baskets of grain on the rafters. The drinking-cups were of coarse clay; and we find regulations that the table-cloth or covering ought to be washed at least once a year! Their ordinary [pg 092] food was “some poor bread, oatmeal porridge, and cooked vegetables; and their drink, water and whey.” The live-stock included horses, cows, goats, sheep, pigs, and hens.[55]

The villagers elected from among themselves four men, the Bauernmeister, who were the Fathers of the community. They were the arbiters in disputes, settled quarrels, and arranged for an equitable distribution of the various feudal assessments and services. They had no judicial or administrative powers; these belonged to the over-lord, or a representative appointed by him. This official sat in the justice room, heard cases, issued sentences, and exercised all the mediæval powers of “pit and gallows.” The whole list of mediæval punishments, ludicrous and gruesome, were at his command. It was he who ordered the scolding wife to be carried round the church three times while her neighbours jeered; who set the unfortunate charcoal-burner, who had transgressed some forest law, into the stocks, with his bare feet exposed to a slow fire till his soles were thoroughly burnt; who beheaded men who cut down trees, and ordered murderers to be broken on the wheel. He saw that the rents, paid in kind, were duly gathered. He directed the forced services of ploughing, sowing, and harvesting the over-lord's fields, what wood was to be hewn for the castle, what ditches dug, and what roads repaired. He saw that the peasants drank no wine [pg 093] but what came from the proprietor's vineyards, and that they drank it in sufficient quantity; that they ground their grain at the proprietor's mill, and fired their bread at the estate bakehouse. He exacted the two most valuable of the moveable goods of a dead peasant—the hated “death-tax.” There was no end to his powers. Of course, according to the Weisthümer, these powers were to be exercised in customary ways; and in some parts of Germany the indefinite “forced services” had been commuted to twelve days' service in the year, and in others to the payment of a fixed rate in lieu of service.

This description of the peasant life has been taken entirely from the Weisthümer, and, for reasons to be seen immediately, it perhaps represents rather a “golden past” than the actual state of matters at the beginning of the sixteenth century. It shows the peasants living in a state of rude plenty, but for the endless exactions of their lords and the continual robberies to which they were exposed from bands of sturdy rogues which swarmed through the country, and from companies of soldiers, who thought nothing of carrying off the peasant's cows, slaying his swine, maltreating his womenkind, and even firing his house.

The peasants had their diversions, not always too seemly. On the days of Church festivals, and they were numerous, the peasantry went to church and heard Mass in the morning, talked over the village business under the lime-trees, or in some open space near the village, and spent the afternoon in such amusements as they liked best—eating and drinking at the public-house, and dancing on the village green. In one of his least known poems, Hans Sachs describes the scene—the girls and the pipers waiting at the dancing-place, and the men and lads in the public-house eating calf's head, tripe, liver, black puddings, and roast pork, and drinking whey and the sour country wine, until some sank under the benches; and there was such a jostling, scratching, shoving, bawling, and singing, that not a word could be heard. Then three young men came to the dancing-place, his sweetheart had a garland [pg 094] ready for one of them, and the dancing began; other couples joined, and at last sixteen pairs of feet were in motion. Rough jests, gestures, and caresses went round.

“Nach dem der Messner von Hirschau,

Der tanzet mit des Pfarrhaus Frau

Von Budenheim, die hat er lieb,

Viel Scherzens am Tanz mit ihr trieb.”

The men whirled their partners off their feet and spun them round and round, or seized them by the waist and tossed them as high as they could; while they themselves leaped and threw out their feet in such reckless ways that Hans Sachs thought they would all fall down.

The winter amusements gathered round the spinning house. For it was the custom in most German villages for the young women to resort to a large room in the mill, or to the village tavern, or to a neighbour's house, with their wool and flax, their distaffs and spindles, some of them old heirlooms and richly ornamented, to spin all evening. The lads came also to pick the fluff off the lasses' dresses, they said; to hold the small beaker of water into which they dipped their fingers as they span; and to cheer the spinsters with songs and recitations. After work came the dancing. On festival evenings, and especially at carnival times, the lads treated their sweethearts to a late supper and a dance; and escorted them home, carrying their distaffs and spindles.[56] All the old German love folk-songs are full of allusions to this peasant courtship, and it is not too much to say that from the singing in the spinning house have come most of the oldest folk-songs.

These descriptions apply to the German peasants of Central and South Germany. In the north and north-east, the agricultural population, which was for the most part of Slavonic descent, had been reduced by their conquerors to a serfdom which had no parallel in the more favoured districts.

§ 5. Earlier Social Revolts.

It was among the peasants of German descent that there had been risings, successful and unsuccessful, for more than a century. The train for revolution had been laid not where serfdom was at its worst, but where there was ease enough in life to allow men to think, and where freedom was nearest in sight. It may be well to refer to the earlier peasant revolts, before attempting to investigate the causes of that permanent unrest which was abundantly evident at the beginning of the sixteenth century.

The first great successful peasant rebellion was the fight for freedom made by the people of the four forest cantons in Switzerland. The weapons with which they overthrew the chivalry of Europe, rude pikes made by tying their scythes to their alpenstocks, may still be seen in the historical museums of Basel and Constance. They proved that man for man the peasant was as good as the noble. The free peasant soldier had come into being. These free peasants did not really secede from the Empire till 1499, and were formally connected with it till 1648. The Emperor was still their over-lord. But they were his free peasants, able to form leagues for their mutual defence and for the protection of their rights. Other cantons and some neighbouring cities joined them, and the Swiss Confederacy, with its flag, a white cross on a red ground, and its motto, “Each for all and all for each,” became a new nation in Europe. During the next century (1424-1471) the peasants of the Rhætian Alps also won their freedom, and formed a confederacy similar to the Swiss, though separate from it. It was called the Graubund.

The example of these peasant republics, strong in the protection which their mountains gave them, fired the imagination of the German peasantry of the south and the south-west of the Empire, and the leaders of lost popular causes found a refuge in the Alpine valleys while they meditated on fresh schemes to emancipate their followers. We have evidence of the popularity of the Swiss in the [pg 096] towns and country districts of Germany all through the fifteenth and into the sixteenth century.[57]

But while the social tumults and popular uprisings against authority, which are a feature of the close of the Middle Ages, are usually and rightly enough called peasant insurrections, the name tends to obscure their real character. They were rather the revolts of the poor against the rich, of debtors against creditors, of men who had scanty legal rights or none at all against those who had the protection of the existing laws, and they were joined by the poor of the towns as well as by the peasantry of the country districts. The peasants generally began the revolt and the townsmen followed; but this was not always the case. Sometimes the mob of the cities rose first and the peasants joined afterwards. In many cases, too, the poorer nobles were in secret or open sympathy with the insurrectionary movement. On more than one occasion they led the insurgents and fought at their head. The union of poor nobles and peasants had made the Bohemian revolt successful.

It must also be remembered that from the end of the fourteenth century on to the beginning of the sixteenth, however varied the cries and watchwords of the insurgents may be, one persistent note of detestation of the priests (the pfaffen) is always heard; and, from the way in which Jews and priests are continually linked together in one common denunciation, it may be inferred that the hatred arose more from the intolerable pressure of clerical extortion than from any feeling of irreligion. The tithes, great and small, and the means taken to exact them, were a galling burden. “The priests,” says an English writer, “have their tenth part of all the corn, meadows, pasture, grass, wood, colts, lambs, geese, and chickens. Over and besides the tenth part of every servant's wages, wool, milk, honey, wax, cheese, and butter; yea, and they look so narrowly after their profits that the poor wife must be [pg 097] countable to them for every tenth egg, or else she getteth not her rights at Easter, and shall be taken as a heretic.” As matter of fact, many of these tithes, extorted in the name of the Church, did not go into the pockets of the clergy at all, but were seized by the feudal superior and went to increase his revenues. Popular feeling, however, seldom discriminates, and feudal and clerical dues were regarded as belonging to one system of intolerable oppression. Besides, the rapacity of Churchmen went far beyond the exaction of the tithes. “I see,” said a Spaniard, “that we can scarcely get anything from Christ's ministers but for money; at baptism money, at bishoping money, at marriage money, for confession money—no, not extreme unction without money! They will ring no bells without money, no burial in the church without money; so that it seemeth that Paradise is shut up from them that have no money. The rich is buried in the church, the poor in the churchyard. The rich man may marry with his nearest kin, but the poor not so, albeit he be ready to die for love of her. The rich may eat flesh in Lent, but the poor may not, albeit fish perhaps be much dearer. The rich man may readily get large Indulgences, but the poor none, because he wanteth money to pay for them.”[58]

In spite of this hatred of the priests, it will be found that almost every insurrectionary movement was impregnated by some sentiment of enthusiastic religion, with which was blended some confused dream that the kingdom of God might be set up on earth, if only the priests were driven out of the land. This religious element drew some of its strength from the Lollard movement in England and from the Taborite in Bohemia, but after 1476 it had a distinctly German character. Its connection with what may almost be called the epidemic of pilgrimages, the strongly increased veneration for the Blessed Virgin, and the injunctions laid upon the confederates in some of the revolutionary movements to repeat so many Pater Nosters [pg 098] and Ave Marias, seem to lead to the conclusion that much of that revival of an enthusiastic and superstitious religion which marked the last half of the fifteenth century may be regarded as an attempt to create a popular religion apart from priests and clergy of all kinds.

One of the earliest of these popular uprisings occurred at Gotha in 1391, when the peasantry of the neighbourhood and many of the burghers of the town rose against the exactions of the Jews, and demanded their expulsion. It was an insurrection of debtors against usurers, and was in the end put down by the majority of the citizens. From this date onwards to 1470 similar risings took place in many parts of Germany, prompted by the same or like causes—the exactions of Jews, priests, or nobles. The years 1431-1432 saw a great Hussite propaganda carried on all over Europe. Countries were flooded with Hussite proclamations, and traversed by Hussite emissaries. Paul Crawar was sent to Scotland, and others like him to Spain, to the Netherlands, and to East Prussia. They taught among other things that the Old Testament law about tithes had no place within the Christian Church, and that Christian tithes were originally free-will offerings,—a statement peculiarly acceptable to the German peasantry. All Germany had learnt by this time how Bohemian peasants, trained and led by men belonging to the lesser nobility, had routed in two memorable campaigns the imperial armies led by the Emperor himself, and how they had begun even to invade Germany. The chroniclers speak of the anxiety of the governing classes, civic and rural, when they recognised the strength of the feelings excited by this propaganda. The Hussite doctrine of tithes appears hereafter in most of the peasant programmes.

A still more powerful impulse to revolts was given by the tragic fate of Charles the Bold of Burgundy. Charles was the ideal feudal autocrat. He was looked up to and imitated by the feudal princes of Germany in the fifteenth as was Louis xiv. by their descendants in the end of the seventeenth century. The common people regarded him as [pg 099] the typical feudal tyrant, and the hateful impression which his arrogance, his vindictiveness, and his oppression of the poor made upon them comes out in the folk-songs of the period:

“Er schazt sich künig Alexander gleich;

Er wolt bezwingen alle Reich,

Das wante Got in kurzer stund.”

He even came to be considered by them as one of the Antichrists who were to appear, and for years after his death at Nancy (1477) many believed that he was alive, expiating his sins on a prolonged pilgrimage.

When this great potentate, who was believed to have boasted that there were three rulers—God in heaven, Lucifer in hell, and himself on earth—was defeated at Granson, routed at Morat, routed and slain at Nancy, and that by Swiss peasants, the exultation was immense, and it was believed that the peasantry might inherit the earth.[59]

§ 6. The religious Socialism of Hans Böhm.

During the last years of this memorable Burgundian war a strange movement arose in the very centre of Germany, within the district which may be roughly defined as the triangle whose points were the towns of Aschaffenburg, Würzburg, and Crailsheim, in the secluded valleys of the Spessart and the Taubergrund. A young man, Hans Böhm (Böheim, Böhaim), belonging to the very lowest class of society, below the peasant, who wandered from one country festival or church ale to another, and played on the small drum or on the dudelsack (rude bagpipes), or [pg 100] sang songs for the dancers, was suddenly awakened to a sense of spiritual things by the discourse of a wandering Franciscan. He was utterly uneducated. He did not even know the Creed. He had visions of the Blessed Virgin, who appeared to him in the guise of a lady dressed in white, called him to be a preacher, and promised him further revelations, which he received from time to time. His home was the village of Helmstadt in the Tauber valley; and the most sacred spot he knew was a chapel dedicated to the Virgin at the small village of Niklashausen on the Tauber. The chapel had been granted an indulgence, and was the scene of small pilgrimages. Hans Böhm appeared suddenly on the Sunday in Mid-Lent (March 24th, 1476), solemnly burnt his rude drum and bagpipes before the crowd of people, and declared that he had hitherto ministered to the sins and vanities of the villagers, but that henceforth he was going to be a preacher of grace. He had been a lad of blameless life, and his character gave force to his words. He related his visions, and the people believed him. It was a period when an epidemic of pilgrimage was sweeping over Europe, and the pilgrims spread the news of the prophet far and wide. Crowds came to hear him from the neighbouring valleys. His fame spread to more distant parts, and chroniclers declare that on some days he preached to audiences of from twenty to thirty thousand persons. His pulpit was a barrel set on end, or the window of a farmhouse, or the branch of a tree. He assured his hearers that the holiest spot on earth, holier by far than Rome, was the chapel of Our Lady at Niklashausen, and that true religion consisted in doing honour to the Blessed Virgin. He denounced all priests in unmeasured terms: they were worse than Jews; they might be converted for a while, but as soon as they went back among their fellows they were sure to become backsliders. He railed against the Emperor: he was a miscreant, who supported the whole vile crew of princes, over-lords, tax-gatherers, and other oppressors of the poor. He scoffed at the Pope. He denied the existence of Purgatory: good [pg 101] men went directly to heaven and bad men went to hell. The day was coming, he declared, when every prince, even the Emperor himself, must work for his day's wages like all poor people. He asserted that taxes of all kinds were evil, and should not be paid; that fish, game, and meadow lands were common property; that all men were brethren, and should share alike. When his sermon was finished the crowd of devotees knelt round the “holy youth,” and he, blessing them, pardoned their sins in God's name. Then the crowd surged round him, tearing at his clothes to get some scrap of cloth to take home and worship as a relic; and the Niklashausen chapel became rich with the offerings of the thousands of pilgrims.

The authorities, lay and clerical, paid little attention to him at first. Some princes and some cities (Nürnberg, for example) prohibited their subjects from going to Niklashausen; but the prophet was left untouched. He came to believe that his words ought to be translated into actions. One Sunday he asked his followers to meet him on the next Sunday, bringing their swords and leaving their wives and children at home. The Bishop of Würzburg, hearing this, sent a troop of thirty-four horsemen, who seized the prophet, flung him on a horse, and carried him away to the bishop's fortress of Frauenberg near Würzburg. His followers had permitted his capture, and seemed dazed by it. In a day or two they recovered their courage, and, exhorted by an old peasant who had received a vision, and headed by four Franconian knights, they marched against Frauenberg and surrounded it. They expected its walls to fall like those of Jericho; and when they were disappointed they lingered for some days, and then gradually dispersed. Hans himself, after examination, was condemned to be burnt as a heretic. He died singing a folk-hymn in praise of the Blessed Virgin.

His death did not end the faith of his followers. In spite of severe prohibitions, the pilgrimages went on and the gifts accumulated. A neighbouring knight sacked the chapel and carried away the treasure, which he was forced [pg 102] to share with his neighbours. Still the pilgrimages continued, until at last the ecclesiastical authorities removed the priest and tore down the building, hoping thereby to destroy the movement.

The memory of Hans Böhm lived among the common people, peasants and artisans; for the lower classes of Würzburg and the neighbouring towns had been followers of the movement. A religious social movement, purely German, had come into being, and was not destined to die soon. The effects of Hans Böhm's teaching appear in almost all subsequent peasant and artisan revolts.[60] Even Sebastian Brand takes the Niklashausen pilgrims as his type of those enthusiasts who are not contented with the revelations of the Old and New Testaments, but must seek a special prophet of their own:

“Man weis doch aus der Schrift so viel,

Aus altem und aus neuem Bunde,

Es braucht nicht wieder neuer Kunde.

Dennoch wallfahrten sie zur Klausen

Des Sackpfeifers von Nicklashausen.”[61]

And the Niklashausen pilgrimage was preserved in the memories of the people by a lengthy folk-song which Liliencron has printed in his collection.[62]

From this time onwards there was always some tinge of religious enthusiasm in the social revolts, where peasant and poor burghers stood shoulder to shoulder against the ruling powers in country and in town.

The peasants within the lands of the Abbot of Kempten, north-east of the Lake of Constance, had for two generations protested against the way in which the authorities [pg 103] were treating them (1420-1490). They rose in open revolt in 1491-1492. It was a purely agrarian rising to begin with, caused by demands made on them by their over-lord not sanctioned by the old customs expressed in the Weisthümer; but the lower classes of the town of Kempten made common cause with the insurgents. Yet there are distinct traces of impregnation with religious enthusiasm not unlike that which inspired the Hans Böhm movement. The rising was crushed, and the leaders who escaped took refuge in Switzerland.

§ 7. Bundschuh Revolts.

In the widespread social revolt which broke out in Elsass in 1493, the peasants were supported by the towns; demands were made for the abolition of the imperial and the ecclesiastical courts of justice, for the reduction of ecclesiastical property, for the plundering of Jews who had been fattening upon usury, and for the curbing of the power of the priests. The Germans had a proverb, “The poor man must tie his shoes with string,” and the “tied shoe” (Bundschuh), the poor man's shoe, became the emblem of this and subsequent social revolts, while their motto was, “Only what is just before God.” This rebellion, which was prematurely betrayed, did not lack prominent leaders. One of them was Hans Ulman, the burgomeister of Schlettstadt, who died on the scaffold affirming the justice of the demands which he and his companions had made, and predicting their future triumph.

In 1501 the peasants of Kempten and the neighbouring districts again rose in rebellion, and were again joined by the poorer townspeople. In the year following, 1502, a revolt was planned having for its headquarters the village of Untergrombach, near Speyer; it spread into Elsass, along the Neckar and down the Rhine. The Bundschuh banner was again unfurled. It was made of blue silk, with a white cross, the emblem of Switzerland, in the centre. It was adorned with a picture of the crucified Christ, a Bundschuh [pg 104] on the one side, and a kneeling peasant on the other. The motto was again, “Only what is just before God.” Every associate promised to repeat five times a day the Lord's Prayer and the Ave Maria. The patron saints were declared to be the Blessed Virgin and St. John. The movement was strongly anti-clerical. The leaders taught that there could be no deliverance from oppression until the priests were driven from the land, and until the property of the nobles and the priests was confiscated and their power broken. Tithes, feudal exactions of all kinds, and all social inequalities were denounced; water, forest and pasture lands were declared to be the common property of all. The leaders recognised the rule of the Emperor as over-lord, but denounced all intermediate jurisdictions. The plan was to raise the peasants and the townspeople throughout all Germany, and to call upon the Swiss to aid them in winning their deliverance from oppression. The revolt was put down with savage cruelty; most of the leaders were quartered. Many escaped to Switzerland, and lay hid among the Alpine valleys.

One of these was Joss Fritz, who had been a soldier (landsknecht)—a man with many qualities of leadership. He had tenacity of purpose, great powers of organisation, and gifts of persuasion. He vowed to restore the Bundschuh League. He remained years in hiding in Switzerland, maturing his plans. Then he returned secretly to his own people. He seems to have secured an appointment as forester to a nobleman whose lands lay near the town of Freiburg in the Breisgau; and there, in the small village of Lehen, he began to weave together again the broken threads of the Bundschuh League. He mingled with the poorer people in the taverns, at church ales, on the village greens on festival days. He spoke of the justice of God and the wickedness of the world. He expounded the old principles of the Bundschuh with some few variations. Indiscriminate hatred of priests seems to have been abandoned. Most of the village priests were peasants, and suffered, like them, from overbearing superiors. The [pg 105] parish priest of Lehen became a strong supporter of the Bundschuh, and told his parishioners that all its ideas could be proved from the word of God. Joss Fritz won over to his side the “gilds” of beggars, strolling musicians, all kinds of vagrants who could be useful. They carried his messages, summoned the people to his meetings in quiet spaces in the woods, and were active assistants. At these meetings Joss Fritz and his lieutenant Jerome, a journeyman baker, expounded the Scriptures “under the guidance of the Holy Spirit simply,” and proved all the demands of the Bundschuh from the word of God.

When the country seemed almost ripe for the rising, Joss Fritz resolved to prepare the banner as secretly as possible. It was easy to get the blue silk and sew the white cross on its ground; the difficulty was to find an artist sympathetic enough to paint the emblems, and courageous enough to keep the secret. The banner was at last painted. The crucified Christ in the centre, a peasant kneeling in prayer on the one side and the Bundschuh on the other, the figures of the Virgin Mary and St. John, and the pictures of the Pope and the Emperor. The motto, “O Lord, help the righteous,” was added, and the banner with its striking symbolism was complete. The League had the old programme with some alterations:—no masters but God, the Pope, and the Emperor, no usury, all debts to be cancelled, and the clauses mentioned above. The leaders boasted that their league extended as far as the city of Köln (Cologne), and that the Swiss would march at their head. But the secret leaked out before the date planned for the general rising; and the revolt was mercilessly stamped out (1512-1513). Its leader escaped with the Bundschuh banner wound round his body under his clothes. In four years he was back again at his work (1517). In a very short time his agents, the “gild” of beggars, wandering minstrels, poor priests, pilgrims to local shrines, pardon-sellers, begging friars, and even lepers, had leagued the peasantry and the poorer artisans in the towns in one vast conspiracy which permeated the entire district [pg 106] between the Vosges and the Black Forest, including the whole of Baden and Elsass. The plot was again betrayed before the plans of the leaders were matured, and the partial risings were easily put down; but when the authorities set themselves to make careful investigations, they were aghast at the extent of the movement. The peasants of the country districts and the populace of the towns had been bound together to avenge common wrongs. The means of secret communication had been furnished by country innkeepers, old landsknechts, pedlars, parish priests, as well as by the vagrants above mentioned; and the names of some of the subordinate leaders—“long” John, “crooked” Peter, “old” Kuntz—show the classes from which they were drawn. It was discovered that the populace of Weisenburg had come to an agreement with the people of Hagenau (both towns were in Elsass) to slay the civic councillors and judges and all the inhabitants of noble descent, to refuse payment of all imperial and ecclesiastical dues, and that the Swiss had promised to come to their assistance.

One might almost say that between the years 1503 and 1517 the social revolution was permanently established in the southern districts of the Empire, from Elsass in the west to Carinthia and the Steiermarck in the east. It is needless to describe the risings in detail. They were not purely peasant rebellions, for the townspeople were almost always involved; but they all displayed that mingling of communist ideas and religious enthusiasm of which the Bundschuh banner had become the emblem, and which may be traced back to the movement under Hans Böhm as its German source, and perhaps to the earlier propaganda of the Hussite revolutionaries or Taborites. The later decades of the fifteenth and the earlier years of the sixteenth century were a time of permanent social unrest.

§ 8. The Causes of the continuous Revolts.

If we ask why it was that the peasants, whose lot, according to the information given in the Weisthümer, [pg 107] could not have been such a very hard one, were so ready to rise in rebellion during the last quarter of the fifteenth century, the answer seems to be that there must have been a growing change in their circumstances. Some chroniclers have described the condition of the peasants in the end of the fifteenth and in the beginning of the sixteenth century, and they always dwell upon their misery. John Böhm, who wrote in the beginning of the sixteenth century, says that “their lot was hard and pitiable,” and calls them “slaves.”[63] Sebastian Frank (1534), Sebastian Munster (1546), H. Pantaleone (1570), an Italian who wrote a description of Germany, all agree with Böhm. Frank adds that the peasants hate every kind of cleric, good or bad, and that their speech is full of gibes against priests and monks; while Pantaleone observes that many skilled workmen, artisans, artists, and men of learning have sprung from this despised peasant class. There must have been a great change for the worse in the condition of the poorer dwellers both in town and in country.

So far as the townsmen are concerned, nothing need be added to what has already been said; but the causes of the growing depression of the peasantry were more complicated. The universal testimony of contemporaries is that the gradual introduction of Roman law brought the greatest change, by placing a means of universal oppression in the hands of the over-lords. There is no need to suppose that the lawyers who introduced the new jurisprudence meant to use it to degrade and oppress the peasant class. A slight study of the Weisthümer shows how complicated and varied was this consuetudinary law which regulated the relations between peasant and over-lord. It was natural, when great estates grew to be principalities, whether lay or clerical, that the over-lords should seek for some principle of codification or reduction to uniformity. It had been the custom for centuries to attempt to simplify the ruder and involved German codes by bringing them into harmony with the principles of [pg 108] Roman law, and this idea had received a powerful impetus from the Renaissance movement. But when the bewildering multiplicity of customary usages which had governed the relations of cultivators to over-lords was simplified according to the ideas of Roman law, the result was in the highest degree dangerous to the free peasantry of Germany. The conception of strict individual proprietorship tended to displace the indefinite conception of communal proprietorship, and the peasants could only appear in the guise of tenants on long leases, or serfs who might have some personal rights but no rights of property, or slaves who had no rights at all. The new jurisprudence began by attacking the common lands, pastures, and forests. The passion for the chase, which became the more engrossing as the right to wage private war grew more and more dangerous, led to the nobles insisting on the individual title to all forest lands, and to the publication of such forest laws as we find made in Würtemberg, where anyone found trespassing with gun or cross-bow was liable to lose one eye. The attempt to reduce a free peasantry in possession of communal property to tenants on long lease, then to serfs, and, lastly, to slaves, may be seen in the seventy years' struggle between the Abbots of Kempten and their peasants. These spiritual lords carried on the contest with every kind of force and chicanery they could command. They enlarged illegally the jurisdiction of their spiritual courts; they prevented the poor people who opposed them from coming to the Lord's Table; they actually falsified their title-deeds, inserting provisions which were not originally contained in them.

The case of the Kempten lands was, no doubt, an extreme one, though it could be matched by others. But the point to be noticed is the immense opportunities for oppression which were placed in the hands of the over-lords by the new jurisprudence, and the temptation to make use of them when their interests seemed to require it, or when their peasantry began to grow refractory or became too prosperous. The economic changes which were at [pg 109] work throughout the fifteenth century gave occasion for the use of the powers which the new jurisdiction had placed at the disposal of landlords. The economic revolution from the first impoverished the nobles of Germany; while, in its beginnings and until after the great rise in prices, it rather helped the peasantry. They had a better market for their produce, and they so profited by it that the burghers spoke of denying them the right of free markets, on the ground that they had begun to usurp the place of the merchants and were trafficking in gold by lending money on interest. The competition in luxurious dress and living, which the impoverished nobles carried on with the rich burghers, made the former still poorer and more reckless. We read of a noble lady in Swabia who, rather than be outshone at a tournament, sold a village and all her rights over it in order to buy a blue velvet dress. The nobles, becoming poorer and poorer, saw their own peasants making money to such an extent that they were, comparatively speaking, much better off than themselves, so that in Westphalia it was said that a peasant could get credit more easily than five nobles.

Moreover, the peasants did not appear to be as submissive to their lords as they once had been. Nor was it to be wondered at. The creation of the landsknechts had put new thoughts into their heads. The days of the old fighting chivalry were over, and the strength of armies was measured by the number and discipline of the infantry. The victories of the Swiss over Charles the Bold had made the peasant or artisan soldier a power. Kings and princes raised standing armies, recruited from the country districts or from among the wilder and more restless of the town population. The folk-songs are full of the doings of these plebeian soldiers. When the landsknecht visited his relations in village or in town, swaggered about in his gorgeous parti-coloured clothes, his broad hat adorned with huge feathers, his great gauntlets and his weapons; when he showed a gold chain or his ducats, or a jewel he had won as his share of the booty; when his old neighbours saw his [pg 110] dress and gait imitated by the young burghers,—he became a centre of admiration, and his relations began to hold themselves high on his account. They acquired a new independence of character, a new impatience against all that prevented them from rising in the world. It has scarcely been sufficiently noted how most of the leaders in the plebeian risings were disbanded landsknechts.[64]

The new jurisprudence was a very effectual instrument in the hands of an impoverished landlord class to ease the peasant of his superfluous wealth, and to keep him in his proper place. It was used almost universally, and the peasant rebellions were the natural consequences. But the more determined peasant revolts, which began with the Bundschuh League, arose at a time when life was hard for peasant and artisan alike.

The last decade of the fifteenth century and the first of the sixteenth contained a number of years in which the harvest failed almost entirely over all or in parts of Germany. They began with 1490, and in that year contemporary writers, like Trithemius, declare that the lot of the poor was almost unbearable. The bad harvests of 1491 and 1492 made things worse. In 1493, the year which saw the foundation of the Bundschuh, the state of matters may be guessed from the fact that men came all the way from the Tyrol to the upper reaches of the Main, where the harvest was comparatively good, bought barley [pg 111] there for five times its usual price, carried it on pack-horses by little frequented paths to their own country, and sold it at a profit.

In 1499 the Swiss refused to submit to the imperial proposals for consolidating the Empire. Maximilian or his government in the Tyrol resolved to punish them, and the Swabian League were to be the executioners. The Swiss, highly incensed, had declared that if they were forced into war it would be a war of extermination. They were as bad as their word. An eye-witness saw whole villages in the wasted districts forsaken by the men, and the women gathered in troops, feeding on herbs and roots, and seeing with the apathy of despair their ranks diminish clay by day.[65] The Swiss war was worse than many bad harvests for the Hegau and other districts in South Germany.

In 1500 the harvest failed over all Germany; 1501 and 1502 were years when the crops failed in a number of districts; and in 1503 there was another universally bad harvest. These years of scarcity pressed most heavily on the peasant class. In some districts of Brandenburg, peasants were found in the woods dead of starvation, with the grass which they had been trying to eat still in their mouths. Cities like Augsburg and Strassburg bought grain, stored it in magazines, and kept the poor alive by periodical distributions. This cycle of famine years from 1490 to 1503 was the period when the most determined and desperate social risings took place, and largely explains them.[66]

Our description of the social conditions existing during the period which ushered in the Reformation has been confined to Germany. The great religious movement took its origin in that land, and it is of the utmost importance to study the environment there. But the universal economic [pg 112] changes were producing social disturbances everywhere, modified in appearance and character by the special conditions of the various countries of Europe. The popular risings in England, which began with the gigantic labour strike under Wat Tyler and priest Ball, and ended with the disturbances during the reign of Edward vi., were the counterpart of the social revolt in Germany.

From all that has been said, it will be evident that on the eve of the Reformation the condition of Europe, and of Germany in particular, was one of seething discontent and full of bitter class hatreds,—the trading companies and the great capitalists against the “gilds,” the poorer classes against the wealthier, and the nobles against the towns. This state of things is abundantly reflected in the folk-songs of the period, which best reveal the intimate feelings of the people. For it was an age of song everywhere, and especially in Germany. Nobles and knights, burghers and peasants, landsknechts and Swiss soldiers, priests and clerks, lawyers and merchants—all expressed the feelings of their class when they sang; and the folk-songs give us a wonderful picture of the class hatreds which were rending asunder the old conditions of mediæval life, and preparing the way for a new world.

This social ferment was increased by a sudden and mysterious rise in prices, affecting first the articles of foreign produce, to which the wealthier classes had become greatly addicted, and at last the ordinary necessaries of life. The cause, it is now believed, was not the debasing of the coinage, for that affected a narrow circle only; nor was it the importation of precious metals from America, for that came later; it was rather the increased output of the mines in Europe. Whatever the cause, the thing was to contemporaries an irritating mystery, and each class in society was disposed to blame the others for it. We have thus at the beginning of the sixteenth century a restless social condition in Germany, caused in great measure by economic causes which no one understood, but whose results were painfully manifest in the crowds of sturdy [pg 113] beggars who thronged the roads—the refuse of all classes in society, from the broken noble and the disbanded mercenary soldier to the ruined peasant, the workman out of employment, the begging friar, and the “wandering student.” It was into this mass of seething discontent that the spark of religious protest fell—the one thing needed to fire the train and kindle the social conflagration. This was the society to which Luther spoke, and its discontent was the sounding-board which made his words reverberate.

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Chapter V. Family And Popular Religious Life in the Decades Before the Reformation.[67]

§ 1. Devotion of Germany to the Roman Church.

The real roots of the spiritual life of Luther and of the other Reformers ought to be sought for in the family and in the popular religious life of the times. It is the duty of the historian to discover, if possible, what religious instruction was given by parents to children in the pious homes out of which most of the Reformers came, and what religious influences confronted and surrounded pious lads after they had left the family circle. Few have cared to [pg 115] prosecute the difficult task; and it is only within late years that the requisite material has been accumulated. It has to be sought for in autobiographies, diaries, and private letters; in the books of popular devotion which the patience of ecclesiastical archæologists is exhuming and reprinting; in the references to the pious confraternities of the later Middle Ages, and more especially to the Kalands among the artisans, which appear in town chronicles, and whose constitutions are being slowly unearthed by local historical societies; in the police regulations of towns and country districts which aim at curbing the power of the clergy, and in the edicts of princes attempting to enforce some of the recommendations of the Councils of Constance and Basel; in the more popular hymns of the time, and in the sermons of the more fervent preachers; in the pilgrim songs and the pilgrim guide-books; and in a variety of other sources not commonly studied by Church historians.

On the surface no land seemed more devoted to the mediæval Church and to the Pope, its head, than did Germany in the half century before the Reformation. A cultivated Italian, Aleander, papal nuncio at the Diet of Worms, was astonished at the signs of disaffection he met with in 1520.[68] He had visited Germany frequently, and he was intimately acquainted with many of the northern Humanists; and his opinion was that down to 1510 (the date of his last visit) he had never been among a people so devoted to the Bishop of Rome. No nation had exhibited such signs of delight at the ending of the Schism and the re-establishment of the “Peace of the Church.” The Italian Humanists continually express their wonder at the strength of the religious susceptibilities of the Germans; and the papal Curia looked upon German devotion as a never-failing source of Roman revenue. The Germans displayed an almost feverish anxiety to profit by all the ordinary and extraordinary means of grace. They built innumerable churches; their towns were full of conventual [pg 116] foundations; they bought Indulgences, went on pilgrimages, visited shrines, reverenced relics in a way that no other nation did. The piety of the Germans was proverbial.

The number of churches was enormous for the population. Almost every tiny village had its chapel, and every town of any size had several churches. Church building and decoration was a feature of the age. In the town of Dantzig 8 new churches had been founded or completed during the fifteenth century. The “holy” city of Köln (Cologne) at the close of the fifteenth century contained 11 great churches, 19 parish churches, 22 monasteries, 12 hospitals, and 76 convents; more than a thousand Masses were said at its altars every day. It was exceptionally rich in ecclesiastical buildings, no doubt; but the smaller town of Brunswick had 15 churches, over 20 chapels, 5 monasteries, 6 hospitals, and 12 Beguine-houses, and its great church, dedicated to St. Blasius, had 26 altars served by 60 ecclesiastics. So it was all over Germany.

Besides the large numbers of monks and nuns who peopled the innumerable monasteries and convents, a large part of the population belonged to some semi-ecclesiastical association. Many were tertiaries of St. Francis; many were connected with the Beguines: Köln (Cologne) had 106 Beguine-houses; Strassburg, over 60, and Basel, over 30.

The churches and chapels, monasteries and religious houses, received all kinds of offerings from rich and poor alike. In those days of unexampled burgher prosperity and wealth, the town churches became “museums and treasure-houses.” The windows were filled with painted glass; weapons, armour, jewels, pictures, tapestries were stored in the treasuries or adorned the walls. Ancient inventories have been preserved of some of these ecclesiastical accumulations of wealth. In the cathedral church in Bern, to take one example, the head of St. Vincentius, the patron, was adorned with a great quantity of gold, and with one jewel said to be priceless; the treasury contained 70 gold and 50 silver cups, 2 silver coffers, and 450 costly [pg 117] sacramental robes decked with jewels of great value. The luxury, the artistic fancy, and the wealth which could minister to both, all three were characteristic of the times, were lavished by the Germans on their churches.

§ 2. Preaching.

On the other hand, preaching took a place it had never previously held in the mediæval Church. Some distinguished Churchmen did not hesitate to say that it was the most important duty the priest could perform—more important than saying Mass. It was recognised that when the people began to read the Bible and religious books in the vernacular, it became necessary for the priests to be able to instruct their congregations intelligently and sympathetically in sermons. Attempts were made to provide the preachers with material for their sermon-making. The earliest was the Biblia Pauperum (the Bible for the Pauperes Christi, or the preaching monks), which collects on one page pictures of Bible histories fitted to explain each other, and adds short comments. Thus, on the twenty-fifth leaf there are three pictures—in the centre the Crucifixion; on the left Abraham about to slay Isaac, with the lamb in the foreground; and on the left the Brazen Serpent and the healing of the Plague. More scholarly preachers found a valuable commentary in the Postilla of the learned Franciscan Nicolas de Lyra (Lira or Lire, a village in Normandy), who was the first real exegetical scholar, and to whom Luther was in later days greatly indebted.[69]

Manuals of Pastoral Theology were also written and published for the benefit of the parish priests,—the most famous, under the quaint title, Dormi Secure (sleep in safety). It describes the more important portions of the service, and what makes a good sermon; it gives the Lessons for the Sunday services, the chief articles of the Christian faith, find adds directions for pastoral work and the cure of souls. [pg 118] It is somewhat difficult to describe briefly the character of the preaching. Some of it was very edifying and deservedly popular. The sermons of John Herolt were printed, and attained a very wide circulation. No fewer than forty-one editions appeared. Much of the preaching was the exposition of themes taken from the Scholastic Theology treated in the most technical way. Many of the preachers seem to have profaned their office in the search after popularity, and mingled very questionable stories and coarse jokes with their exhortations. The best known of the preachers who flourished at the close of the fifteenth century was John Geiler of Keysersberg (in Elsass near Colmar), the friend of Sebastian Brand, and a member of the Humanist circle of Strassburg. The position he filled illustrates the eagerness of men of the time to encourage preaching. A burgher of Strassburg, Peter Schott, left a sum of money to endow a preacher, who was to be a doctor of theology, one who had not taken monk's vows, and who was to preach to the people in the vernacular; a special pulpit was erected in the Strassburg Minster for the preacher provided by this foundation, who was John Geiler. His sermons are full of exhortations to piety and correct living. He lashed the vices and superstitions of his time. He denounced relic worship, pilgrimages, buying indulgences, and the corruptions in the monasteries and convents. He spoke against the luxurious living of Popes and prelates, and their trafficking in the sale of benefices. He made sarcastic references to the papal decretals and to the quibblings of Scholastic Theology. He paints the luxuries and vices he denounced so very clearly, that his writings are a valuable mine for the historian of popular morals. He was a stern preacher of morals, but his sermons contain very little of the gospel message. As we read them we can understand Luther's complaint, that while he had listened to many a sermon on the sins of the age, and to many a discourse expounding scholastic themes, he had never heard one which declared the love of God to man in the mission and work of Jesus Christ.

§ 3. Church Festivals.

The Church itself, recognising the fondness of the people for all kinds of scenic display, delighted to gratify the prevailing taste by magnificent processions, by gorgeous church ceremonial, by Passion and Miracle Plays. Such scenes are continually described in contemporary chronicles. The processions were arranged for Corpus Christi Day, for Christmas, for Harvest Thanksgivings, when the civic fathers requested the clergy to pray for rain, or when a great papal official visited the town. We hear of one at Erfurt which began at five o'clock in the morning, and, with its visits to the stations of the Cross and the services at each, did not end till noon. The school children of the town, numbering 948, headed the procession, then came 312 priests, then the whole University,—in all, 2141 persons,—and the monks belonging to the five monasteries followed. The Holy Sacrament carried by the chief ecclesiastics, and preceded by a large number of gigantic candles, occupied the middle of the procession. The town council followed, then all the townsmen, then the women and maidens. The troop of maidens was 2316 strong. They had garlands on their heads, and their hair flowed down over their shoulders; they carried lighted candles in their hands, and they marched modestly looking to the ground. Two beautiful girls walked at their head with banners, followed by four with lanterns. In the centre was the fairest, clad in black and barefoot, carrying a large and splendid cross, and by her side one of the town councillors chosen for his good looks. Everything was arranged with a view to artistic effect.[70]

The Passion and Miracle Plays[71] were of great use in instructing the people in the contents of Scripture, being almost always composed of biblical scenes and histories. [pg 120] They were often very elaborate; sometimes more than one hundred actors were needed to fill the parts; and the plays were frequently so lengthy that they lasted for two or three days. The ecclesiastical managers felt that the continuous presentation of grave and lofty scenes and sentiments might weary their audiences, and they mixed them with lighter ones, which frequently degenerated into buffoonery and worse. The sacred and severe pathos of the Passion was interlarded with coarse jokes about the devil; and the most solemn conceptions were profaned. These Mysteries were generally performed in the great churches, and the buildings dedicated to sacred things witnessed scenes of the coarsest humour, to the detriment of all religious feeling. The more serious Churchmen felt the profanation, and tried to prohibit the performance of plays interlarded with rude and indecent scenes within the churches and churchyards. Their interference came too late; the rough popular taste demanded what it had been accustomed to; sacred histories and customs coming down from a primitive heathenism were mixed together, and the people lost the sense of sacredness which ought to attach itself to the former. The Feast of the Ass, to mention one, was supposed to commemorate the Flight to Egypt. A beautiful girl, holding a child in her lap, was seated on an ass decked with splendid trappings of gold cloth, and was led in procession by the clergy through the principal streets of the town to the parish church. The girl on her ass was conducted into the church and placed near the high altar, and the Mass and other services were each concluded by the whole congregation braying. There is indeed an old MS. extant with a rubric which orders the priest to bray thrice on elevating the Host.[72] At other seasons of popular licence, all the parts of the church service, even the most solemn, were parodied by the profane youth of the towns.[73]

All this, however, tells us little about the intimate religious life and feelings of the people, which is the important matter for the study of the roots of the great ecclesiastical revolt.

When the evidence collected from the sources is sifted, it will be found that the religious life of the people at the close of the fifteenth and beginning of the sixteenth centuries is full of discordant elements, and makes what must appear to us a very incongruous mosaic. If classification be permissible, which it scarcely is (for religious types always refuse to be kept distinct, and always tend to run into each other), one would be disposed to speak of the simple homely piety of the family circle—the religion taught at the mother's knee, the Kinderlehre, as Luther called it; of a certain flamboyant religion which inspired the crowds; of a calm anti-clerical religion which grew and spread silently throughout Germany; of the piety of the praying-circles, the descendants of the fourteenth century Mystics.

§ 4. The Family Religious Life.

The biographies of some of the leaders of the Reformation, when they relate the childish reminiscences of the writers, bear unconscious witness to the kind of religion which was taught to the children in pious burgher and peasant families. We know that Luther learned the Creed, the Ten Commandments, and the Lord's Prayer. He knew such simple evangelical hymns as “Ein kindelein so lobelich,”[74] “Nun bitten wir den heiligen Geist,” and “Crist ist erstanden.” Children were rocked to sleep while the mothers sang:

“Ach lieber Heere Jhesu Christ

Sid Du ein Kind gewesen bist,

So gib ouch disem Kindelin

Din Gnod und ouch den Segen den.

Ach Jhesu, Heere min,

Behüt diz Kindelin.

Nun sloff, nun sloff, min Kindelin,

Jhesus der sol din bülli sin,

Der well, daz dir getroume wol

Und werdest aller Tugent vol.

Ach Jhesus, Heere min,

Behüt diz Kindelin.”[75]

These songs or hymns, common before the Reformation, were sung as frequently after the break with Rome. The continuity in the private devotional life before and after the advent of the Reformation is a thing to be noted. Few hymns were more popular during the last decade of the fifteenth century than the “In dulci Jubilo” in which Latin and German mingled. The first and last verses were:

“In dulci jubilo,

Nun singet und seid froh!

Unsers Herzens Wonne

Leit in præsepio,

Und leuchtet als die Sonne

Matris in gremio.

Alpha es et O,

Alpha es et O!

Ubi sunt gaudia?

Nirgends mehr denn da,

Da die Engel singen

Nova cantica,

Und die Schellen klingen

In regis curia.

Eya, wär'n wir da,

Eya, wär'n wir da!”

This hymn continued to enjoy a wonderful popularity in the German Protestant churches and families until quite recently, and during the times of the Reformation it spread far beyond Germany.[76] In the fifteenth-century version it contained one verse in praise of the Virgin:

“Mater et filia

Du bist, Jungfraw Maria.

Wir weren all verloren

Per nostra crimina,

So hat sy uns erworben

Celorum gaudia.

Eya, wär'n wir da,

Eya, wär'n wir da!”

which was either omitted in the post-Reformation versions, or there was substituted:

“O Patris charitas,

O Nati lenitas!

Wir weren all verloren

Per nostra crimina,

So hat Er uns erworben

Cœlorum gaudia.

Eya, wär'n wir da,

Eya, wär'n wir da.”[77]

Nor was direct simple evangelical instruction lacking. Friedrich Mecum (known better by his Latinised name of Myconius), who was born in 1491, relates how his father, a substantial burgher belonging to Lichtenfels in Upper Franconia, instructed him in religion while he was a child. “My dear father,” he says, “had taught me in my childhood the Ten Commandments, the Lord's Prayer, and the Creed, and constrained me to pray always. For, said he, ‘Everything comes to us from God alone, and that gratis, free of cost, and He will lead us and rule us, if we only diligently pray to Him.’ ” We can trace this simple evangelical family religion away back through the Middle Ages. In the wonderfully interesting Chronicle of Brother Salimbene of the Franciscan Convent of Parma, which comes from the thirteenth century, we are told how many of the better-disposed burghers of the town came to the convent frequently to enjoy the religious conversation of Brother Hugh. On one occasion the conversation turned upon the mystical theology of Abbot Giaocchino di Fiore. The burghers professed to be greatly edified, but said that they hoped that on the next evening Brother Hugh would confine himself to telling them the simple words of Jesus.

The central thought in all evangelical religion is that the believer does not owe his position before God, and his assurance of salvation, to the good deeds which he really can do, but to the grace of God manifested in the mission and the work of Christ; and the more we turn [pg 125] from the thought of what we can do to the thought of what God has done for us, the stronger will be the conviction that simple trust in God is that by which the pardoning grace of God is appropriated. This double conception—God's grace coming down upon us from above, and the believer's trust rising from beneath to meet and appropriate it—was never absent from the simplest religion of the Middle Ages. It did not find articulate expression in mediæval theology, for, owing to its enforced connection with Aristotelian philosophy, that theology was largely artificial; but the thought itself had a continuous and constant existence in the public consciousness of Christian men and women, and appeared in sermons, prayers, and hymns, and in the other ways in which the devotional life manifested itself. It is found in the sermons of the greatest of mediæval preachers, Bernard of Clairvaux, and in the teaching of the most persuasive of religious guides, Francis of Assisi. The one, Bernard, in spite of his theological training, was able to rise above the thought of human merit recommending the sinner to God; and the other, Francis, who had no theological training at all, insisted that he was fitted to lead a life of imitation simply because he had no personal merits whatsoever, and owed everything to the marvellous mercy and grace of God given freely to him in the work of Christ. The thought that all the good we can do comes from the wisdom and mercy of God, and that without these gifts of grace we are sinful and worthless—the feeling that all pardon and all holy living are free gifts of God's grace, was the central thought round which in mediæval, as in all times, the faith of simple and pious people twined itself. It found expression in the simpler mediæval hymns, Latin and German. The utter need for sin-pardoning grace is expressed and taught in the prayer of the Canon of the Mass. It found its way, in spite of the theology, even into the official agenda of the Church, where the dying are told that they must repose their confidence upon Christ and His Passion as the sole ground of confidence in their salvation. If we take the [pg 126] fourth book of Thomas à Kempis' Imitatio Christi, it is impossible to avoid seeing that his ideas about the sacrament of the Supper (in spite of the mistakes in them) kept alive in his mind the thought of a free grace of God, and that he had a clear conception that God's grace was freely given, and not merited by what man can do. For the main thought with pious mediæval Christians, however it might be overlaid with superstitious conceptions, was that they received in the sacrament a gift of overwhelming greatness. Many a modern Christian seems to think that the main idea is that in this sacrament one does something—makes a profession of Christianity. The old view went a long way towards keeping people right in spite of errors, while the modern view does a great deal towards leading them wrong in spite of truth.

All these things combine to show us how there was a simple evangelical faith among pious mediæval Christians, and that their lives were fed upon the same divine truths which lie at the basis of Reformation theology. The truths were all there, as poetic thoughts, as earnest supplication and confession, in fervent preaching or in fireside teaching. When mediæval Christians knelt in prayer, stood to sing their Redeemer's praises, spoke as a dying man to dying men, or as a mother to the children about her knees, the words and thoughts that came were what Luther and Zwingli and Calvin wove into Reformation creeds, and expanded into that experimental theology which was characteristic of the Reformation.

When the printing-press began in the last decades of the fifteenth century to provide little books to aid private and family devotion, it is not surprising, after what has been said, to find how full many of them were of simple evangelical piety. Some contained the Lord's Prayer, the Ten Commandments, the Apostles' Creed, and occasionally a translation or paraphrase of some of the Psalms, notably the 51st Psalm. Popular religious instructions and catechisms for family use were printed. The Catechism of Dietrich Koelde (written in 1470) says: “Man must place [pg 127] his faith and hope and love on God alone, and not in any creature; he must trust in nothing but in the work of Jesus Christ.” The Seelenwurzgartlein, a widely used book of devotion, instructs the penitent: “Thou must place all thy hope and trust on nothing else than on the work and death of Jesus Christ.” The Geistliche Streit of Ulrich Krafft (1503) teaches the dying man to place all his trust on the “mercy and goodness of God, and not on his own good works.” Quotations might be multiplied, all proving the existence of a simple evangelical piety, and showing that the home experience of Friedrich Mecum (Myconius) was shared in by thousands, and that there was a simple evangelical family religion in numberless German homes in the end of the fifteenth century.

§ 5. A superstitious Religion based on Fear.

When sensitive, religiously disposed boys left pious homes, they could not fail to come in contact with a very different kind of religion. Many did not need to quit the family circle in order to meet it. Near Mansfeld, Luther's home, were noted pilgrimage places. Pilgrims, singly or in great bands, passed to make their devotions before the wooden cross at Kyffhäuser, which was supposed to effect miraculous cures. The Bruno Quertfort Chapel and the old chapel at Welfesholz were pilgrimage places. Sick people were carried to spots near the cloister church at Wimmelberg, where they could best hear the sound of the cloister bells, which were believed to have a healing virtue.

The latter half of the fifteenth century witnessed a great and widespreading religious revival, which prolonged itself into the earlier decades of the sixteenth, though the year 1475 may perhaps be taken as its high-water mark. Its most characteristic feature was the impulse to make pilgrimages to favoured shrines; and these pilgrimages were always considered to be something in the nature of satisfactions made to God for sins. With some of the earlier phenomena we have nothing here to do.

The impetus to pilgrimages given after the great Schism by the celebration in 1456 of the first Jubilee “after healing the wounds of the Church”; the relation of these pilgrimages to the doctrines of Indulgences which, formulated by the great Schoolmen of the thirteenth century, had changed the whole penitential system of the mediæval Church, must be passed over; the curious socialist, anti-clerical, and yet deeply superstitious movement led by the cowherd and village piper, Hans Böhm, has been described. But one movement is so characteristic of the times, that it must be noticed. In the years 1455-1459 all the chroniclers describe great gatherings of children from every part of Germany, from town and village, who, with crosses and banners, went on pilgrimage to St. Michael in Normandy. The chronicler of Lübeck compares the spread of the movement to the advance of the plague, and wonders whether the prompting arose from the inspiration of God or from the instigation of the devil. When a band of these child-pilgrims reached a town, carrying aloft crosses and banners blazoned with a rude image of St. Michael, singing their special pilgrim song,[78] the town's children were impelled to join them. How this strange epidemic arose, and what put an end to it, seems altogether doubtful; but the chronicles of almost every important town in Germany attest the facts, and the contemporary records of North France describe the bands of youthful pilgrims who traversed the country to go to St. Michael's Mount.

During these last decades of the fifteenth century, a great fear seems to have brooded over Central Europe. [pg 129] The countries were scourged by incessant visits of the plague; new diseases, never before heard of, came to swell the terror of the people. The alarm of a Turkish invasion was always before their eyes. Bells tolled at midday in hundreds of German parishes, calling the parishioners together for prayer against the incoming of the Turks, and served to keep the dread always present to their minds. Mothers threatened their disobedient children by calling on the Turk to come and take them. It was fear that lay at the basis of this crude revival of religion which marks the closing decades of the fifteenth century. It gave rise to an urgent restlessness. Prophecies of evil were easily believed in. Astrologers assumed a place and wielded a power which was as new as it was strange. The credulous people welcomed all kinds of revelations and proclamations of miraculous signs. At Wilsnack, a village in one of the divisions of Brandenburg (Priegnitz), it had been alleged since 1383 that a consecrated wafer secreted the Blood of Christ. Suddenly, in 1475, people were seized with a desire to make a pilgrimage to this shrine. Swarms of child-pilgrims again filled the roads—boys and girls, from eight to eighteen years of age, bareheaded, clad only in their shirts, shouting, “O Lord, have mercy upon us”—going to Wilsnack. Sometimes schoolmasters headed a crowd of pilgrims; mothers deserted their younger children; country lads and maids left their work in the fields to join the processions. These pilgrims came mostly from Central Germany (1100 from Eisleben alone), but the contagion spread to Austria and Hungary, and great bands of youthful pilgrims appeared from these countries. They travelled without provisions, and depended on the charity of the peasants for food. Large numbers of these child-pilgrims did not know why they had joined the throng; they had never heard of the Bleeding Host towards which they were journeying; when asked why they had set out, they could only answer that they could not help it, that they saw the red cross at the head of their little band, and had to follow it. Many of them could not [pg 130] speak, all went weeping and groaning, shivering as if they had a fit of ague. An unnatural strength supported them. Little boys and girls, some of them not eight years old, from a small village near Bamberg, were said to have marched, on their first setting forth, all day and the first night the incredible distance of not less than eighty miles! Some towns tried to put a stop to these pilgrimages. Erfurt shut its gates against the youthful companies. The pilgrimages ended as suddenly as they had begun.[79]

Succeeding years witnessed similar astonishing pilgrimages—in 1489, to the “black Mother of God” in Altötting; in 1492, to the “Holy Blood” at Sternberg; in the same year, to the “pitiful Bone” at Dornach; in 1499, to the picture of the Blessed Virgin at Grimmenthal; in 1500, to the head of St. Anna at Düren; and in 1519, to the “Beautiful Mary” at Regensburg.

Apart altogether from these sporadic movements, the last decades of the fifteenth century were pre-eminently a time of pilgrimages. German princes and wealthy merchants made pilgrimages to the Holy Land, visited the sacred places there, and returned with numerous relics, which they stored in favourite churches. Frederick the Wise, the Elector of Saxony, to be known afterwards as the protector of Luther, made such a pilgrimage, and placed the relics he had acquired in the Castle Church (the Church of All Saints) in Wittenberg. He became an assiduous collector of relics, and had commissioners on the Rhine, in the Netherlands, and at Venice, with orders to procure him any sacred novelties they met with for sale.[80] He procured from the Pope an Indulgence for all who visited the collection and took part in the services of the church on All Saints' Day; for it is one of the ironies of history that the church on whose door Luther nailed his theses against Indulgences was one of the sacred edifices on which an Indulgence had been bestowed, and that the day selected [pg 131] by Luther was the yearly anniversary, which drew crowds to benefit by it.[81]

A pilgrimage to the Holy Land was too costly and dangerous to be indulged in by many. The richer Germans made pilgrimages to Rome, and the great pilgrimage place for the middle-class or poorer Germans was Compostella in Spain. Einsiedeln, in Switzerland, also attracted yearly swarms of pilgrims.

Guide-books were written for the benefit of these pious travellers, and two of them, the most popular, have recently been reprinted. They are the Mirabilia Romæ for Roman pilgrims, and the Walfart und Strasse zu Sant Jacob for travellers to Compostella. These little books had a wonderful popularity. The Mirabilia Romæ went through nineteen Latin and at least twelve German editions before the year 1500; it was also translated into Italian and Dutch. It describes the various shrines at Rome where pilgrims may win special gifts of grace by visiting and worshipping at them. Who goes to the Lateran Church and worships there has “forgiveness of all sins, both guilt and penalty.” There is “a lovely little chapel” (probably what is now called the Lateran Baptistry) near the Lateran, where the same privileges may be won. The pilgrim who goes with good intention to the High Altar of St. Peter's Church, “even if he has murdered his father or his mother,” is freed from all sin, “guilt as well as penalty,” provided he repents. The virtues of St. Croce seem to have been rated even higher. If a man leaves his house with the intention of going to the shrine, even if he die by the way, all his sins are forgiven him; and if he visits the church he wins a thousand years' relief from Purgatory.[82]

Compostella in Spain was the people's pilgrimage place. Before the invention of printing we find traces of manuscript [pg 132] guides to travellers, which were no doubt circulated among intending pilgrims, and afterwards the services of the printing-press were early called in to assist. In the Spanish archives at Simancas there are two single sheets, one of which states the numerous Indulgences for the benefit of visitors at the shrine of St. James, while the other enumerates the relics which are to be seen and visited there. It mentions thirty-nine great relics—from the bones of St. James, which lay under the great altar of the cathedral, to those of St. Susanna, which were interred in a church outside the walls of the town.[83] These leaflets were sold to the pilgrims, and were carried back by them to Germany, where they stimulated the zeal and devotion of those who intended to make the pilgrimage. Our pilgrim's guide-book, the Walfart und Strasse zu Sant Jacob,[84] deals almost exclusively with the road. The author was a certain Hermann Künig of Vach, who calls himself a Mergen-knecht, or servant of the Virgin Mary. The well-known pilgrim song, “Of Saint James” (Von Sant Jacob), told how those who reached the end of their journey got, through the intercession of St. James, forgiveness from the guilt and penalty (von Pein und Schuldt) of all their sins; it tells the pilgrims to provide themselves with two pairs of shoes, a water-bottle and spoon, a satchel and staff, a broad-brimmed hat and a cloak, both trimmed with leather in the places likeliest to be frayed, and both needed as a protection against wind and rain and snow.[85] It [pg 133] charges them to take permits from their parish priests to dispense with confession, for they were going to foreign lands where they would not find priests who spoke German. It warns them that they might die far from home and find a grave on the pilgrimage route. Our guide-book omits all these things. It is written by a man who has made the pilgrimage on foot; who had observed minutely all the turns of the road, and could warn fellow-pilgrims of the difficulties of the way. He gives the itinerary from town to town; where to turn to the right and where to the left; what conspicuous buildings mark the proper path; where the traveller will find people who are generous to poor pilgrims, and where the inhabitants are uncharitable and food and drink must be paid for; where hostels abound, and those parts of the road on which there are few, and where the pilgrims must buy their provisions beforehand and carry them in their satchels; where sick pilgrims can find hospitals on the way, and what treatment they may expect there;[86] at what hostels they must change their money into French and Spanish coin. In brief, the booklet is a mediæval “Baedeker,” compiled with German accuracy for the [pg 134] benefit of German pilgrims to the renowned shrine of St. James of Compostella. This little book went through several editions between 1495 and 1521, and is of itself a proof of the popularity of this pilgrimage place. In the last decades of the fifteenth century there arose a body of men and women who might be called professional pilgrims, and who were continually on the road between Germany and Spain. A pilgrimage was one of the earliest so-called “satisfactions” which might be done vicariously, and the Brethren of St. James (Jacobs-Brueder) made the pilgrimage regularly, either on behalf of themselves or of others.

Many of these pilgrims were men and women of indifferent character,[87] who had been sent on a pilgrimage as an ecclesiastical punishment for their sins. The Chronicles of the Zimmer Family[88] gives several cases of criminals, who had committed murder or theft or other serious crimes between 1490 and 1520, who were sent to Santiago as a punishment. Even in the last decades of the fifteenth century, when the greater part of the pilgrims were devout in their way, it was known only too well that pilgrimages were not helpful to a moral life. Stern preachers of righteousness like Geiler of Keysersberg and Berchtold of Regensburg denounced pilgrimages, and said that they created more sins than they yielded pardons.[89] Parish priests continually forbade their women penitents, especially if they were unmarried, from going on a pilgrimage. But these warnings and rebukes were in vain. The prevailing terror had possessed the people, and they journeyed from shrine to shrine seeking some relief for their stricken consciences.

A marked characteristic of this revival which found such striking outcome in these pilgrimages was the thought that Jesus was to be looked upon as the Judge who was to come to punish the wicked. His saving and intercessory work was thrust into the background. Men forgot that He was the Saviour and the Intercessor; and [pg 135] as the human heart craves for someone to intercede for it, another intercessor had to be found. This gracious personality was discovered in the Virgin Mother, who was to be entreated to intercede with her Son on behalf of poor sinning human creatures. The last half of the fifteenth century saw a deep-seated and widely-spread craving to cling to the protection of the Virgin Mother with a strength and intensity hitherto unknown in mediæval religion. It witnessed the furthest advance that had yet been made towards what must be called Mariolatry. This devotion expressed itself, as religious emotion continually does, in hymns; a very large proportion of the mediæval hymns in praise of the Virgin were written in the second half of the fifteenth century—the period of this strange revival based upon fear. Dread of the Son as Judge gave rise to the devotion to the Mother as the intercessor. Little books for private and family devotion were printed, bearing such titles as the Pearl of the Passion and the Little Gospel, containing, with long comments, the words of our Lord on the cross to John and to Mary. She became the ideal woman, the ideal mother, the “Mother of God,” the mater dolorosa, with her heart pierced by the sword, the sharer in the redemptive sufferings of her Son, retaining her sensitive woman's heart, ready to listen to the appeals of a suffering, sorrowful humanity. We can see this devotion to the Virgin Mother impregnating the social revolts from Hans Böhm to Joss Fritz. The theology of the schools followed in the wake of the popular sentiment, and the doctrine of the Immaculate Conception was more strictly defined and found its most strenuous supporters during the later decades of this fifteenth century.

The thought of motherly intercession went further; the Virgin herself had to be interceded with to induce her to plead with her Son for men sunk in sin, and her mother (St. Anna) became the object of a cult which may almost be said to be quite new. Hymns were written in her praise.[90] Confraternities, modelled on the confraternities [pg 136] dedicated to the Blessed Virgin, were formed in order to bring the power of the prayers of numbers to bear upon her. These confraternities spread all over Germany and beyond it.[91] It is almost possible to trace the widening area of the cult from the chronicles of the period. The special cult of the Virgin seems to have begun, at least in its extravagant popular form, in North France, and to have spread from France through Germany and Spain; but so far as it can be traced, this cult of St. Anna, “the Grandmother,” had a German origin, and the devotion manifested itself most deeply on German soil. Even the Humanist poets sang her praises with enthusiasm, and such collectors of relics as Frederick of Saxony and the Cardinal Archbishop of Mainz rejoiced when they were able to add a thumb of St. Anna to their store. Luther himself tells us that “St. Anna was his idol”; and Calvin speaks of his mother's devotion to the saint. Her name was graven on many a parish church bell, and every pull at the ropes and clang of the bell was supposed to be a prayer to her to intercede. The Virgin and St. Anna brought in their train other saints who were also believed to be the true intercessors. The three bells of the church in which Luther was baptized bore the following inscriptions carved deeply in the brass:—“God help us; Mary have mercy. 1499.” “Help us Anna, also St. Peter, St. Paul. 1509.” “Help us God, Mary, Anna, St. Peter, Paul, Arnold, Stephan, Simon. 1509.” The popular religion always represented Jesus, Mecum (Myconius) tells us, as the stern Judge who would convict and punish all those who had not secured righteousness by the intercession of the saints or by their own good works.

This revival of religion, crude as it was, and based on fear, had a distinct effect for good on a portion of the clergy, and led to a great reformation of morals among those who came under its influence. The papal Schism, which had lasted till 1449, had for one of its results the [pg 137] weakening of all ecclesiastical discipline, and its consequences were seen in the growing immorality which pervaded all classes of the clergy. So far as one can judge, the revival of religion described above had not very much effect on the secular clergy. Whether we take the evidence from the chronicles of the time or from visitations of the bishops, the morals of the parish priests were extremely low, and the private lives of the higher clergy in Germany notoriously corrupt. The occupants of episcopal sees were for the most part the younger brothers of the great princes, and had been placed in the religious life for the sake of the ecclesiastical revenues. The author of the Chronicles of the Zimmer Family tells us that at the festive gatherings which accompanied the meetings of the Diet, the young nobles, lay and clerical, spent most of their time at dice and cards. As he passed through the halls, picking his way among groups of young nobles lying on the floor (for tables and chairs were rare in these days), he continually heard the young count call out to the young bishop, “Play up, parson; it is your turn.” The same writer describes the retinue of a great prelate, who was always accompanied to the Diet by a concubine dressed in man's clothes. Nor were the older Orders of monks, the Benedictines and their offshoots, greatly influenced by the revival. It was different, however, with those Orders of monks who came into close contact with the people, and caught from them the new fervour. The Dominicans, the great preaching Order, were permeated by reform. The Franciscans, who had degenerated sadly from their earlier lives of self-denial, partook of a new life. Convent after convent reformed itself, and the inmates began to lead again the lives their founder had contemplated. The fire of the revival, however, burnt brightest among the Augustinian Eremites, the Order which Luther joined, and they represented, as none of the others did, all the characteristics of the new movement.

These Augustinian Eremites had a somewhat curious [pg 138] history. They had nothing in common with St. Augustine save the name, and the fact that a Pope had given them the rule of St. Augustine as a basis for their monastic constitution. They had originally been hermits, living solitary lives in mountainous parts of Italy and of Germany. Many Popes had desired to bring them under conventual rule, and this was at last successfully done. They shared as no other Order had done in the revival of the second half of the fifteenth century, and exhibited in their lives all its religious characteristics. No Order of monks contained such devoted servants of the Virgin Mother. She was the patron along with St. Augustine. Her image stood in the chapter-house of every convent. The theologians of the Augustinian Eremites vied with those of the Franciscans in spreading the doctrine of the Immaculate Conception. They did much to spread the cult of the “Blessed Anna.” They were devoted to the Papacy. One of their learned men, John of Palz, one of the two professors of theology in the Erfurt Convent when Luther entered it as a novice, was the most strenuous defender of the doctrine of Attrition and of the religious value of Indulgences. With all this their lives were more self-denying than those of most monks. They cultivated theological learning, and few Universities in Germany were without an Augustinian Eremite who acted as professor of philosophy or of theology. They also paid great attention to the art of preaching, and every large monastery had a special preacher who attracted crowds of the laity to the convent chapel. Their monasteries were usually placed in large towns; and their devout lives, their learning, and the popular gifts of their preachers, made them favourites with the townspeople. They were the most esteemed Order in Germany.

These last decades of the fifteenth century were the days of the resuscitation of the mendicant Orders and the revival of their power over the people. The better disposed among the princes and among the wealthier burghers invariably selected their confessors from the [pg 139] monks of the mendicant Orders, and especially from the Augustinian Eremites. The chapels of the Franciscans and of the Eremites were thronged, and those of the parish clergy were deserted. The common people took for their religious guides men who shared the new revival, and who proved their sincerity by self-denying labours. It was in vain that the Roman Curia published regulations insisting that every parishioner must confess to the priest of the parish at least once a year, and that it explained again and again that the personal character of the ministrant did not affect the efficacy of the sacraments administered by him. So long as poorly clad, emaciated, clean-living Franciscan or Eremite priests could be found to act as confessors, priests, or preachers, the people deserted the parish clergy, flocked to their confessionals, waited on their serving the Mass, and thronged their chapels to listen to their sermons. These decades were the time of the last revival of the mendicant monks, who were the religious guides in this flamboyant popular religion which is so much in evidence during our period.

§ 6. A non-Ecclesiastical Religion.

The third religious movement which belongs to the last decades of the fifteenth and the earlier decades of the sixteenth century was of a kind so different from, and even contrary to, what has just been described, that it is with some surprise that the student finds he must recognise its presence alongside of the other. It was the silent spread of a quiet, sincere, but non-ecclesiastical religion. Historians usually say nothing about this movement, and it is only a minute study of the town chronicles and of the records of provincial and municipal legislation that reveals its power and extent. It has always been recognised that Luther's father was a man of a deeply religious turn of mind, although he commonly despised the clergy, and thought that most monks were rogues or fools; but what is not recognised is that in this he represented thousands of [pg 140] quiet and pious Germans in all classes of society. We find traces of the silent, widespreading movement in the ecclesiastical legislation of German princes, in the police regulations, and in the provisions for the support of the poor among the burghers; in the constitutions and practices of the confraternities among the lower classes, and especially among the artisans in the towns; and in the numerous translations of the Vulgate into the vernacular.

The reforms sketched by the Councils of Constance and of Basel had been utterly neglected by the Roman Curia, and in consequence several German princes, while they felt the hopelessness of insisting on a general purification of the Church, resolved that these reforms should be carried out within their own dominions. As early as 1446, Duke William of Saxony had published decrees which interfered with the pretensions of the Church to be quite independent of the State. His regulations about the observance of the Sunday, his forbidding ecclesiastical courts to interfere with Saxon laymen, his stern refusal to allow any Saxon to appeal to a foreign jurisdiction, were all more or less instances of the interference of the secular power within what had been supposed to be the exclusive province of the ecclesiastical. He went much further, however. He enacted that it belonged to the secular power to see that parish priests and their superiors within his dominions lived lives befitting their vocation—a conception which was entirely at variance with the ecclesiastical pretensions of the Middle Ages. He also declared it to be within the province of the secular power to visit officially and to reform all the convents within his dominions. So far as proofs go, it is probable that these declarations about the rights of the civil authorities to exercise discipline over the parish priests and their superiors remained a dead letter. We hear of no such reformation being carried out. But the visitation of the Saxon monasteries was put in force in spite of the protests of the ecclesiastical powers. Andreas Proles would never have been able to carry out his proposals of reform in the convents of the Augustinian Eremites but [pg 141] for the support he received from the secular princes against his ecclesiastical superiors in Rome. The Dukes Ernest and Albrecht carried out Duke William's conceptions about the relation of the civil to the ecclesiastical authorities in their ordinances of 1483, and the Elector Frederick the Wise was heir to this ecclesiastical policy of his family.

The records of the Electorate of Brandenburg, investigated by Priebatsch and described by him in the Zeitschrift für Kirchengeschichte[92] testify to the same ideas at work there. A pious prince like Frederick ii. of Brandenburg removed unworthy Church dignitaries and reinstituted them, thus taking upon himself the oversight of the Church. Appeals to Rome were forbidden under penalties. Gradually under Frederick and his successors there arose what was practically a national Church of Brandenburg, which was almost completely under the control of the civil power, and almost entirely separated from Roman control.

The towns also interfered in what had hitherto been believed to be within the exclusive domain of the ecclesiastical authorities. They recognised the harm which the numerous Church festivals and saints' days were doing to the people, and passed regulations about their observance, all of them tending to lessen the number of the days on which men were compelled by ecclesiastical law to be idle. When Luther pleaded in his Address to the Nobility of the German Nation for the abolition of the ecclesiastical laws enforcing idleness on the numerous ecclesiastical holy days, he only suggested an extension and wider application of the police regulations which were in force within his native district of Mansfeld.

This non-ecclesiastical feeling appears strongly in the change of view about Christian charity which marks the close of the fifteenth century.

Nothing shows how the Church of the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries had instilled the mind of Jesus into the peoples of Europe like the zeal with which they tried to do their duty by the poor, the sick, and the helpless. [pg 142] Institutions, founded by individuals or by corporations, for the purpose of housing the destitute abounded, and men and women willingly dedicated themselves to the service of the unfortunate.

“The Beguins crowned with flapping hats,

O'er long-drawn bloodless faces blank,

And gowns unwashed to wrap their lank

Lean figures,”[93]

were sisters of mercy in every mediæval town. Unfortunately the lessons of the Church included the thought that begging was a Christian virtue; while the idea that because charity is taught by the law of Christ, its exercise must be everywhere superintended by ecclesiastics, was elevated to a definite principle of action, if not to something directly commanded by the law of God. The Reformation protested against these two ideas, and the silent anticipation of this protest is to be found in the non-ecclesiastical piety of the close of the fifteenth century.

The practice of begging, its toleration and even encouragement, was almost universal. In some of the benevolent institutions the sick and the pensioners were provided from the endowment with all the necessaries of life, but it was generally thought becoming that they should beg them from the charitable. The very fact of begging seemed to raise those who shared in it to the level of members of a religious association. St. Francis, the “imitator of Christ,” had taught his followers to beg, and this great example sanctified the practice. It is true that the begging friars were always the butt of the satirists of the close of the fifteenth century. They delighted to portray the mendicant monk, with his sack, into which he seemed able to stuff everything: honey and spice, nutmegs, pepper, and preserved ginger, cabbage and eggs, poultry, fish, and new clothes, milk, butter, and cheese; cheese especially, and of all kinds—ewe's milk and goat's milk, hard cheese and soft cheese, large cheeses and small cheeses—were greedily [pg 143] demanded by these “cheese hunters,” as they were satirically called. On their heels tramped a host of semi-ecclesiastical beggars, all of them with professional names—men who begged for a church that was building, or for an altar-cloth, or to hansel a young priest at his first Mass; men who carried relics about for the charitable to kiss—some straw from the manger of Bethlehem, or a feather from the wing of the angel Gabriel; the Brethren of St. James, who performed continual and vicarious pilgrimages to Compostella, and sometimes robbed and murdered on the road; the Brethren of St. Anthony, who had the special privilege of wearing a cross and carrying a bell on their begging visits. These were all ecclesiastical beggars. The ordinary beggars did their best to obtain some share of the sanctity which surrounded the profession; they carried with them the picture of some saint, or placed the cockle-shell, the badge of a pilgrim, in their hats, and secured a quasi-ecclesiastical standing.[94] Luther expressed not merely his own opinion on this plague of beggars in his Address to the Nobility of the German Nation, but what had been thought and partially practised by quiet laymen for several decades. Some towns began to make regulations against promiscuous begging by able-bodied persons, provided work for them, seized their children, and taught them trades—all of which sensible doings were against the spirit of the mediæval Church.

The non-ecclesiastical religious feeling, however, appears much more clearly when the history of the charitable foundations is examined. The invariable custom during the earlier Middle Ages was that charitable bequests were left to the management of the Church and the clergy. At the close of the fifteenth century the custom began to alter. The change from clerical to lay management was at first probably due mainly to the degeneracy of the clergy, and to the belief that the funds set apart for the poor were not properly administered. The evidences of this are to be found in numerous instances of the civic [pg 144] authorities attempting, and successfully, to take the management of charitable foundations out of the hands of ecclesiastical authorities, and to vest them in lay management. But this cannot have been the case always. We should rather say that it began to dawn upon men that although charity was part of the law of Christ, this did not necessarily mean that all charities must be placed under the control of the clergy or other ecclesiastical administrators. Hence we find during the later years of the fifteenth century continual instances of bequests for the poor placed in the hands of the town council or of boards of laymen. That this was done without any animus against the Church is proved by the fact that the same testator is found giving benefactions to foundations which are under clerical and to others under lay management. Out of the funds thus accumulated the town councils began a system of caring for the poor of the city, which consisted in giving tokens which could be exchanged for so much bread or woollen cloth, or shoes, or wood for firing, at the shops of dealers who were engaged for the purpose. How far this new and previously unheard of lay management, in what had hitherto been the peculiar possession of the clergy, had spread before the close of the fifteenth century, it is impossible to say. No archæologist has yet made an exhaustive study of the evidence lying buried in archives of the mediæval towns of Germany; but enough has been collected by Kriegk[95] and others to show that it had become very extensive. The laity saw that they were quite able to perform this peculiarly Christian work apart from any clerical direction.

Another interesting series of facts serves also to show the growth of a non-ecclesiastical religious sentiment. The later decades of the fifteenth century saw the rise of innumerable associations, some of them definitely religious, [pg 145] and all of them with a religious side, which are unlike what we meet with earlier. They did not aim to be, like the praying circles of the Mystics or of the Gottesfreunde, ecclesiolæ in ecclesia, strictly non-clerical or even anti-clerical. They had no difficulty in placing themselves under the protection of the Church, in selecting the ordinary ecclesiastical buildings for their special services, and in employing priests to conduct their devotions; but they were distinctively lay associations, and lived a religious life in their own way, without any regard to the conceptions of the higher Christian life which the Church was accustomed to present to its devout disciples. Some were associations for prayer; others for the promotion of the “cult” of a special saint, like the confraternities dedicated to the Virgin Mother or the associations which spread the “cult” of the Blessed Anna; but by far the largest number were combinations of artisans, and resembled the workmen's “gilds” of the Roman Empire.

Perhaps one of the best known of these associations formed for the purpose of encouraging prayer was the “Brotherhood of the Eleven Thousand Virgins,” commonly known under the quaint name of St. Ursula's Little Ship. The association was conceived by a Carthusian monk of Cologne, and it speedily became popular. Frederick the Wise was one of its patrons, his secretary, Dr. Pfeffinger, one of its supporters; it numbered its associates by the thousand; its praises were sung in a quaint old German hymn.[96] No money dues were exacted from its members. The only duty exacted was to pray regularly, and to learn to better one's life through the power of prayer. This was one type of the pious brotherhoods of the fifteenth century. [pg 146] It was the best known of its kind, and there were many others. But among the brotherhoods which bear testimony to the spread of a non-ecclesiastical piety none are more important than the confraternities which went by the names of Kalands or Kalandsgilden in North Germany and Zechen in Austria. These associations were useful in a variety of ways. They were unions for the practice of religion; for mutual aid in times of sickness; for defence in attack; and they also served the purpose of insurance societies and of burial clubs. It is with their religious side that we have here to do. It was part of the bond of association that all the brethren and sisters (for women were commonly admitted) should meet together at stated times for a common religious service. The brotherhood selected the church in which this was held, and so far as we can see the chapels of the Franciscans or of the Augustinian Eremites were generally chosen. Sometimes an altar was relegated to their exclusive use; sometimes, if the church was a large one, a special chapel. The interesting thing to be noticed is that the rules and the modes of conducting the religious services of the association were entirely in the hands of the brotherhood itself, and that these laymen insisted on regulating them in their own way. Luther has a very interesting sermon, entitled Sermon upon the venerable Sacrament of the holy true Body of Christ and of the Brotherhoods, the latter half of which is devoted to a contrast between good brotherhoods and evil ones. Those brotherhoods are evil, says Luther, in which the religion of the brethren is expressed in hearing a Mass on one or two days of the year, while by guzzling and drinking continually at the meetings of the brotherhood, they contrive to serve the devil the greater part of their time. A true brotherhood spreads its table for its poorer members, it aids those who are sick or infirm, it provides marriage portions for worthy young members of the association. He ends with a comparison between the true brotherhood and the Church of Christ. Theodore Kolde remarks that a careful monograph on the [pg 147] brotherhoods of the end of the fifteenth century in the light of this sermon of Luther's would afford great information about the popular religion of the period. Unfortunately, no one has yet attempted the task, but German archæologists are slowly preparing the way by printing, chiefly from MS. sources, accounts of the constitution and practices of many of these Kalands.

From all this it may be seen that there was in these last decades of the fifteenth and in the earlier of the sixteenth centuries the growth of what may be called a non-ecclesiastical piety, which was quietly determined to bring within the sphere of the laity very much that had been supposed to belong exclusively to the clergy. The jus episcopale which Luther claimed for the civil authorities in his tract on the Liberty of the Christian Man, had, in part at least, been claimed and exercised in several of the German principalities and municipalities; the practice of Christian charity and its management were being taken out of the hands of the clergy and entrusted to the laity; and the brotherhoods were making it apparent that men could mark out their religious duties in a way deemed most suitable for themselves without asking any aid from the Church, further than to engage a priest whom they trusted to conduct divine service and say the Masses they had arranged for.

The appearance of numerous translations of the Scriptures into the vernacular, unauthorised by the officials of the mediæval Church, and jealously suspected by them, appears to confirm the growth and spread of this non-ecclesiastical piety. The relation of the Church of the Middle Ages, earlier and later, to vernacular translations of the Vulgate is a complex question. The Scriptures were always declared to be the supreme source and authority for all questions of doctrines and morals, and in the earlier stages of the Reformation controversy the supreme authority of the Holy Scriptures was not supposed to be one of the matters in dispute between the contending parties. This is evident when we remember that the Augsburg [pg 148]Confession, unlike the later confessions of the Reformed Churches, does not contain any article affirming the supreme authority of Scripture. That was not supposed to be a matter of debate. It was reserved for the Council of Trent, for the first time, to place traditiones sine Scripto on the same level of authority with the Scriptures of the Old and New Testaments. Hence, many of the small books, issued from convent presses for the instruction of the people during the decades preceding the Reformation, frequently declare that the whole teaching of the Church is to be found within the books of the Holy Scriptures.

It is, of course, undoubted that the mediæval Church forbade over and over again the reading of the Scriptures in the Vulgate and especially in the vernacular, but it may be asserted that these prohibitions were almost always connected with attempts to suppress heretical or schismatic revolts.[97]

On the other hand, no official encouragement of the reading of the Scriptures in the vernacular by the people can be found during the whole of the Middle Ages, nor any official patronage of vernacular translations. The utmost that was done in the way of tolerating, it can scarcely be said of encouraging, a knowledge of the vernacular Scriptures was the issue of Psalters in the vernacular, of Service-Books, and, in the fifteenth century, of the Plenaria—little books which contained translations of some of the paragraphs of the Gospels and Epistles read in the Church service accompanied with legends and popular tales. Translations of the Scriptures were continually reprobated [pg 149] by Popes and primates for various reasons.[98] It is also unquestionable that a knowledge of the Scriptures in the vernacular, especially by uneducated men and women, was almost always deemed a sign of heretical tendency. “The third cause of heresy,” says an Austrian inquisitor, writing about the end of the thirteenth century, “is that they translate the Old and New Testaments into the vulgar tongue; and so they learn and teach. I have heard and seen a certain country clown who repeated the Book of Job word for word, and several who knew the New Testament perfectly.”[99] A survey of the evidence seems to lead to the conclusion that the rulers of the mediæval Church regarded a knowledge of the vernacular Scriptures with grave suspicion, but that they did not go the length of condemning entirely their possession by persons esteemed trustworthy, whether clergy, monks, nuns, or distinguished laymen.

Yet we have in the later Middle Ages, ever since Wiclif produced his English version, the gradual publication of the Scriptures in the vernaculars of Europe. This was specially so in Germany; and when the invention of printing had made the diffusion of literature easy, it is noteworthy that the earliest presses in Germany printed many more books for family and private devotion, many more Plenaria, and many more editions of the Bible than of the classics. Twenty-two editions of the Psalter in German appeared before 1509, and twenty-five of the Gospels and Epistles before 1518. No less than fourteen (some say seventeen) versions of the whole Bible were printed in High-German and three in Low-German during the last decades of the fifteenth and the earlier decades of the sixteenth century—all translations from the [pg 150] Vulgate. The first was issued by John Metzel in Strassburg in 1466. Then followed another Strassburg edition in 1470, two Augsburg editions in 1473, one in the Swiss dialect in 1474, two in Augsburg in 1477, one in Augsburg in 1480, one in Nürnberg in 1483, one in Strassburg in 1485, and editions in Augsburg in 1487, 1490, 1507, and 1518. A careful comparison of these printed vernacular Bibles proves that the earlier editions were independent productions; but as edition succeeded edition the text became gradually assimilated until there came into existence a German Vulgate, which was used indiscriminately by those who adhered to the mediæval Church and those who were dissenters from it. These German versions were largely, but by no means completely, displaced by Luther's translation. The Anabaptists, for example, retained this German Vulgate long after the publication of Luther's version, and these pre-Reformation German Bibles were to be found in use almost two hundred years after the Reformation.[100]

Whence sprang the demand for these vernacular versions of the Holy Scriptures? That the leaders of the mediæval Church viewed their existence with alarm is evident from the proclamation of the Primate of Germany, Berthold of Mainz, issued in 1486, ordering a censorship of books with special reference to vernacular translations of the Scriptures.[101] On the other hand, there is no evidence that these versions were either wholly or in great part the work of enemies of the mediæval Church. The mediæval Brethren, as they called themselves (Waldenses, Picards, Wiclifites, Hussites, etc., were names given to them very indiscriminately by the ecclesiastical authorities), had translations of the Scriptures both in the Romance and in the Teutonic languages as early as the close of the thirteenth century. The records of inquisitors and of councils prove it. But there is no evidence to connect any of these German versions, save, perhaps, one at Augsburg, [pg 151] and that issued by the Koburgers in Nürnberg, with these earlier translations. The growing spread of education in the fifteenth century, and, above all, the growth of a non-ecclesiastical piety which claimed to examine and to judge for itself, demanded and received these numerous versions of the Holy Scriptures in the vulgar tongue.[102] The “common man” had the word of God in his hands, could read, meditate, and judge for himself. The effect of the presence of these vernacular Scriptures is apt to be exaggerated.[103] The Humanist, Conrad Celtes, might threaten the priests that the Bible would soon be seen in every village tavern; but we know that in these days of early printing a complete Bible must have been too expensive to be purchased by a poor man. Still he could get the Gospels or the Epistles, or the Psalter; and there is evidence, apart from the number of editions, that the people were buying and were studying the Scriptures. Preachers were exhorted to give the meaning of the passages of Scripture read in Church to prevent the people being confused by the different ways in which the text was translated in the Bibles in their possession. Stories were told of peasants, like Hans Werner, who worsted their parish priests in arguments drawn from Scripture. The ecclesiastical authorities were undoubtedly anxious, and their anxiety was shared by many who desired a reformation in life and manners, but dreaded any revolutionary movement. It was right that the children should be fed with the Bread of Life, but Mother Church ought to keep the bread-knife in her hands lest the children cut their fingers. Some publishers of the translations inserted prefaces saying that the contents of the volumes should be understood in the way taught by the Church, as was done in the Book of the Gospels, [pg 152] published at Basel in 1514. But in spite of all a lay religion had come into being, and laymen were beginning to think for themselves in matters where ecclesiastics had hitherto been considered the sole judges.

§ 7. The “Brethren.”

There was another type of religious life and pious association which existed, and which seems in one form or other to have exercised a great influence among the better class of artisans, and more especially among the printers of Augsburg, Nürnberg, and Strassburg.

It is probable that this type of piety had at least three roots.

(a) We can trace as far back as the closing years of the thirteenth century, in many parts of Germany, the existence of nonconformists who, on the testimony of inquisitors, lived pious lives, acted righteously towards their neighbours, and believed in all the articles of the Christian faith, but repudiated the Roman Church and the clergy. Their persecutors gave them a high character. “The heretics are known by their walk and conversation: they live quietly and modestly; they have no pride in dress; their learned men are tailors and weavers; they do not heap up riches, but are content with what is necessary; they live chastely; they are temperate in eating and drinking; they never go to taverns, nor to public dances, nor to any such vanities; they refrain from all foul language, from backbiting, from thoughtless speech, from lying and from swearing.” The list of objections which they had to usages of the mediæval Church are those which would occur to any evangelical Protestant of this century. They professed a simple evangelical creed; they offered a passive resistance to the hierarchical and priestly pretensions of the clergy; they were careful to educate their children in schools which they supported; they had vernacular translations of the Scriptures, and committed large portions to memory; they conducted their religious service in the [pg 153] vernacular, and it was one of the accusations made against them that they alleged that the word of God was as profitable when read in the vernacular as when studied in Latin. It is also interesting to know that they were accused of visiting the leper-houses to pray with the inmates, and that in some towns they had schools for the leper children.[104] They called themselves the Brethren. The societies of the Brethren had never died out. During the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries they were continually subject to local and somewhat spasmodic persecutions, when the ecclesiastical could secure the aid of the secular authorities to their schemes of repression, which was not always possible. They were strongly represented among the artisans in the great cities, and there are instances when the civic authorities gave them one of the churches of the towns for their services. The liability to intermittent persecution led to an organisation whereby the Brethren, who were for the time being living in peace, made arrangements to receive and support those who were able to escape from any district where the persecution raged. These societies were in correspondence with their brethren all over Europe, and were never so active as during the last decades of the fifteenth and the first quarter of the sixteenth century.

(b) As early as the times of Meister Eckhart (d. 1327), of his disciples Tauler (d. 1361) and Suso (d 1366), of the mysterious “Friend of God in the Oberland” and his associates (among them the Strassburg merchant Rulman Merswin (d. 1382)), and of the Brussels curate John Ruysbroeck (d. 1381), the leaders of the mediæval Mystics had been accustomed to gather their followers together into praying circles; and the custom was perpetuated long after their departure. How these pious associations continued to exist in the half century before the Reformation, and what forms their organisation took, it seems impossible to say with any accuracy. The school system of the Brethren [pg 154]of the Common Lot, which always had an intimate connection with the Gottesfreunde, in all probability served to spread the praying circles which had come down from the earlier Mystics. It seems to have been a custom among these Brethren of the Common Lot to invite their neighbours to meet in their schoolrooms or in a hall to listen to religious discourses. There they read and expounded the New Testament in the vernacular. They also read extracts from books written to convey popular religious instruction. They questioned their audience to find out how far their hearers understood their teaching, and endeavoured by question and answer to discover and solve religious difficulties. These schools and teachers had extended all over Germany by the close of the fifteenth century, and their effect in quickening and keeping alive personal religion must have been great.

(c) Then, altogether apart from the social and semi-political propaganda of the Hussites, there is evidence that ever since the circulation of the encyclic letter addressed by the Taborites in November 1431 to all Christians in all lands, and more especially since the foundation of the Unitas Fratrum in 1452, there had been constant communication between Bohemia and the scattered bodies of evangelical dissenters throughout Germany. Probably historians have credited the Hussites with more than their due influence over their German sympathisers. The latter had arrived at the conclusion that tithes ought to be looked upon as free-will offerings, that the cup should be given to the laity, etc., long before the movements under the leadership of Wiclif and of Huss. But the knowledge that they had sympathisers and brethren beyond their own land must have been a source of strength to the German nonconformists.

Our knowledge of the times is still too obscure to warrant us in making very definite statements about the proportionate effect of these three religious sources of influence on the small communities of Brethren or evangelical dissenters from the mediæval Church which [pg 155] maintained a precarious existence at the close of the Middle Ages. There is one curious fact, however, which shows that there must have been an intimate connection between the Waldenses of Savoy and France, the Brethren of Germany, and the Unitas Fratrum of Bohemia. They all used the same catechism for the instruction of their children in divine things. So far as can be ascertained, this small catechism was first printed in 1498, and editions can be traced down to 1530. It exists in French, Italian, German, and Bohemian. The inspiration drawn from the earlier Mystics and Gottesfreunde is shown by the books circulated by the Brethren. They made great use of the newly discovered art of printing to spread abroad small mystical writings on personal religion, and translations of portions of the Holy Scriptures. They printed and circulated books which had been used in manuscript among the Mystics of the fourteenth century, such as the celebrated Masterbook, single sermons by Tauler, Prayers and Rules for holy living extracted from his writings, as well as short tracts taken from the later Mystics, like the Explanation of the Ten Commandments. It is also probable that some of the many translations of the whole or portions of the Bible which were in circulation in Germany before the days of Luther came from these praying circles. The celebrated firm of Nürnberg printers, the Koburgers, who published so many Bibles, were the German printers of the little catechism used by the Brethren; and, as has been said, the Anabaptists, who were the successors of these associations, did not use Luther's version, but a much older one which had come down to them from their ancestors.

The members of these praying circles welcomed the Lutheran Reformation when it came, but they can scarcely be said to have belonged to it. Luther has confessed how much he owed to one of their publications, Die deutsche Theologie; and what helped him must have benefited others. The organisation of a Lutheran Church, based on civil divisions of the Empire, gave the signal for a thorough reorganisation of the members of these old associations [pg 156] who refused to have anything to do with a State Church. They formed the best side of the very mixed and very much misunderstood movement which later was called Anabaptism, and thus remained outside of the two great divisions into which the Church of the Reformation separated. This religious type existed and showed itself more especially among the artisans in the larger towns of Germany.

It must not be supposed that these four classes of religious sentiment which have been found existing during the later decades of the fifteenth and the early decades of the sixteenth centuries can always be clearly distinguished from each other. Religious types cannot be kept distinct, but continually blend with each other in the most unexpected way. Humanism and Anabaptism seem as far apart as they can possibly be; yet some of the most noted Anabaptist leaders were distinguished members of the Erasmus circle at Basel. Humanism and delicate clinging to the simple faith of childhood blended in the exquisite character of Melanchthon. Luther, after his stern wrestle with self-righteousness in the convent at Erfurt, believed that, had his parents been dead, he could have delivered their souls from purgatory by his visits to the shrines of the saints at Rome. The boy Mecum (Myconius) retained only so much of his father's teaching about the free Grace of God that he believed an Indulgence from Tetzel would benefit him if he could obtain it without paying for it. There is everywhere and at all times a blending of separate types of religious faith, until a notable crisis brings men suddenly face to face with the necessity of a choice. Such a crisis occurred during the period we call the Reformation, with the result that the leaders in that great religious revival found that the truest theology after all was what had expressed itself in hymns and prayers, in revivalist sermons and in fireside teaching, and that they felt it to be their duty as theologians to give articulate dogmatic expression to what their fathers had been content to find inarticulately in the devotional rather [pg 157] than in the intellectual sphere of the mediæval religious life.

Such was the religious atmosphere into which Luther was born, and which he breathed from his earliest days. Every element seems to have shared in creating and shaping his religious history, and had similar effects doubtless on his most distinguished and sympathetic followers.

[pg 158]

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Chapter VI. Humanism And Reformation.[105]

§ 1. Savonarola.

When the Italian Humanism seemed about to become a mere revival of ancient Paganism, with its accompaniments of a cynical sensualism on the one hand, and the blindest trust in the occult sciences on the other, a great preacher arose in Florence who recalled men to Christianity and to Christian virtue.

Girolamo Savonarola was an Italian, a countryman of Giaocchino di Fiore, of Arnold of Brescia, of Francis of Assisi, of John of Parma, and, like them, he believed himself to be favoured with visions apocalyptic and other. He belonged to a land over which, all down through the Middle Ages, had swept popular religious revivals, sudden, consuming, and transient as prairie fires. When a boy, he [pg 159] had quivered at seeing the pain in the world around him; he had shuddered as he passed the great grim palaces of the Italian despots, where the banqueting hall was separated from the dungeon by a floor so thin that the groans of the prisoners mingled with the tinkle of the silver dishes and the wanton conversation of the guests. He had been destined by his family for the medical profession, and the lad was set to master the writings of Thomas Aquinas and the Arabian commentaries on Aristotle—the gateway in those days to a knowledge of the art of healing. The Summa of the great Schoolman entranced him, and insensibly drew him towards theology; but outwardly he did not rebel against the lot in life marked out for him. A glimpse of a quiet resting-place in this world of pain and evil had come to him, but it vanished, swallowed up in the universal gloom, when Roberto Strozzi refused to permit him to marry his daughter Laodamia. There remained only rest on God, study of His word, and such slight solace as music and sonnet-writing could bring. His devotion to Thomas Aquinas impelled him to seek within a Dominican convent that refuge which he passionately yearned for, from a corrupt world and a corrupt Church. There he remained buried for long years, reading and re-reading the Scriptures, poring over the Summa, drinking in the New Learning, almost unconsciously creating for himself a philosophy which blended the teachings of Aquinas with the Neo-Platonism of Marsiglio Ficino and of the Academy, and planning how he could best represent the doctrines of the Christian religion in harmony with the natural reason of man.

When at last he became a great preacher, able to sway heart and conscience, it should not be forgotten that he was mediæval to the core. His doctrinal teaching was based firmly on the theology of Thomas Aquinas. His intellectual conception of faith, his strong belief in the divine predestination and his way of expressing it, his view of Scripture as possessing manifold meanings, were all defined for him by the great Dominican Schoolman. [pg 160] He held strongly the mediæval idea that the Church was an external political unity, ruled by the Bishop of Rome, to whom every human soul must be subject, and whom everyone must obey save only when commands were issued contrary to a plain statement of the evangelical law. He expounded the fulness of and the slight limitations to the authority of the Pope exactly as Thomas and the great Schoolmen of the thirteenth century had done, though in terms very different from the canonists of the Roman Curia at the close of the Middle Ages. Even his appreciation of the Neo-Platonist side of Humanism could be traced back to mediæval authorities; for at all times the writings of the pseudo-Dionysius had been a source of inspiration to the greater Schoolmen.

His scholarship brought him into relation with the Humanist leaders in Florence, the earnest tone of his teaching and the saintliness of his character attracted them, his deep personal piety made them feel that he possessed something which they lacked; while no Neo-Platonist could be repelled by his claim to be the recipient of visions from on high.

The celebrated Humanists of Florence became the disciples of the great preacher. Marsiglio Ficino himself, the head of the Florentine Academy, who kept one lamp burning before the bust of Plato and another before an image of the Virgin, was for a time completely under his spell. Young Giovanni Pico della Mirandola's whole inner life was changed through his conversations with the Prior of San Marco. He reformed his earlier careless habits. He burnt five books of wanton love-songs which he had composed before his conversion.[106] He prayed daily at fixed hours, and he wrote earnestly to his nephew on the importance of prayer for a godly life:

“ ‘I stir thee not,’ he says, ‘to that prayer that standeth in many words, but to that prayer which in the secret chamber of the mind, in the privy-closet of the soul, with [pg 161]every affect speaketh to God; which in the most lightsome darkness of contemplation not only presenteth the mind to the Father, but also uniteth it with Him by unspeakable ways which only they know who have assayed. Nor care I how long or how short thy prayer be; but how effectual, how ardent, and rather interrupted and broken between with sighs, than drawn on length with a number of words.... Let no day pass but thou once at the leastwise present thyself to God in prayer.... What thou shalt in thy prayer ask of God, both the Holy Spirit which prayeth for us and also thine own necessity shall every hour put in thy mind.’ ”[107]

He studied the writings of Thomas Aquinas, which contained the favourite theology of Savonarola, and spoke of the great Schoolman as a “pillar of truth.”[108] He handed over the third part of his estates to his nephew, and lived plainly on what remained, that he might give largely in charity.[109] He made Savonarola his almoner, who on his behalf gave alms to destitute people and marriage portions to poor maidens.[110] He had frequent thoughts of entering the Dominican Order, and

“On a time as he walked with his nephew, John Francis, in a garden at Ferrara, talking of the love of Christ, he broke out with these words: ‘Nephew,’ said he, ‘this will I show thee; I warn thee keep it secret; the substance I have left after certain books of mine are finished, I intend to give out to poor folk, and, fencing myself with the crucifix, barefoot, walking about the world, in every town and castle I purpose to preach Christ.’ ”[111]

It is also recorded that he made a practice of scourging himself; especially “on those days which represent unto us the Passion and Death that Christ suffered for our sake, he beat and scourged his own flesh in remembrance of that great benefit, and for cleansing his old offences.”[112] But above all things he devoted himself to a diligent study of [pg 162] the Holy Scriptures, and commended the practice to his nephew:

“ ‘Thou mayest do nothing more pleasing to God, nothing more profitable to thyself, than if thine hand cease not day and night to turn and read the volumes of Holy Scripture. There lieth privily in them a certain heavenly strength, quick and effectual, which, with a marvellous power, transformeth and changeth the readers' mind into the love of God, if they be clean and lowly entreated.’ ”[113]

The great Platonist forsook Plato for St. Paul, whom he called the “glorious Apostle.”[114] When he died he left his lands to one of the hospitals in Florence, and desired to be buried in the hood of the Dominican monks and within the Convent of San Marco.

Another distinguished member of the Florentine Academy, Angelo Poliziano, was also one of Savonarola's converts. We find him exchanging confidences with Pico, both declaring that love and not knowledge is the faculty by which we learn to know God:

“ ‘But now behold, my well-beloved Angelo,’ writes Pico, ‘what madness holdeth us. Love God (while we be in this body) we rather may, than either know Him, or by speech utter Him. In loving Him also we more profit ourselves; we labour less and serve Him more. And yet had we rather always by knowledge never find that thing we seek, than by love possess that thing which also without love were in vain found.’ ”[115]

Poliziano, like Pico, had at one time some thoughts of joining the Dominican Order. He too was buried at his own request in the cowl of the Dominican monk in the Convent of San Marco.

Lorenzo de Medici, who during his life had made many attempts to win the support of Savonarola, and had always been repulsed, could not die without entreating the great preacher to visit him on his deathbed and grant him absolution.

Italian Humanism was for the moment won over to Christianity by the Prior of San Marco. Had the poets and the scholars, the politicians and the ecclesiastics, the State and the Church, not been so hopelessly corrupt, there might have been a great renovation of mankind, under the leadership of men who had no desire to break the political unity of the mediæval Church. For it can scarcely be too strongly insisted that Savonarola was no Reformation leader in the more limited sense of the phrase. The movement he headed has much more affinity with the crude revival of religion in Germany in the end of the fifteenth century, than with the Reformation itself; and the aim of the reorganisation of the Tuscan congregation of the Dominicans under Savonarola has an almost exact parallel in the creation of the congregation of the Augustinian Eremites under Andreas Proles and Johann Staupitz. The whole Italian movement, as might be expected, was conducted by men of greater intelligence and refinement. It had therefore less sympathy than the German with pilgrimages, relics, the niceties of ceremonial worship, and the cult of the vulgarly miraculous; but it was not the less mediæval on these accounts. It was the death rather than the life and lifework of Savonarola that was destined to have direct effect on the Reformation soon to come beyond the Alps; for his martyrdom was a crowning evidence of the impossibility of reforming the Church of the Middle Ages apart from the shock of a great convulsion. “Luther himself,” says Professor Villari, “could scarcely have been so successful in inaugurating his Reform, had not the sacrifice of Savonarola given a final proof that it was hopeless to hope in the purification of Rome.”[116]

§ 2. John Colet.

While Savonarola was at the height of his influence in Florence, there chanced to be in Italy a young Englishman, [pg 164] John Colet, son of a wealthy London merchant who had been several times Lord Mayor. He had gone there, we may presume, like his countrymen Grocyn and Linacre, to make himself acquainted with the New Learning at its fountainhead. There is no proof that he went to Florence or ever saw the great Italian preacher; but no stranger could have visited Northern Italy in 1495 without hearing much of him and of his work. Colet's whole future life in England bears evidence that he did receive a new impulse while he was in Italy, and that of such a kind as could have come only from Savonarola. What Erasmus tells us of his sojourn there amply confirms this. Colet gave himself up to the study of the Holy Scriptures; he read carefully those theologians of the ancient Church specially acceptable to the Neo-Platonist Christian Humanists; he studied the pseudo-Dionysius, Origen, and Jerome. What is more remarkable still in a foreign Humanist come to study in Italy, he read diligently such English classics as he could find in order to prepare himself for the work of preaching when he returned to England. The words of Erasmus imply that the impulse to do all this came to him when he was in Italy, and there was no one to impart it to him but the great Florentine.

When Colet returned to England in 1496, he began to lecture at Oxford on the Epistles of St. Paul. His method of exposition, familiar enough after Calvin had introduced it into the Reformed Church, was then absolutely new, and proves that he was an original and independent thinker. His aim was to find out the personal message which the writer (St. Paul) had sent to the Christians at Rome; and this led him to seek for every trace which revealed the personality of the Apostle to the Gentiles. It was equally imperative to know what were the surroundings of the men to whom the Epistle was addressed, and Colet studied Suetonius to find some indications of the environment of the Roman Christians. He had thus completely freed himself from the Scholastic habit of using the Scriptures as a mere collection of isolated texts to be employed in [pg 165] proving doctrines or moral rules constructed or imposed by the Church, and it is therefore not surprising to find that he never lards his expositions with quotations from the Fathers. It is a still greater proof of his daring that he set aside the allegorising methods of the Schoolmen,—methods abundantly used by Savonarola,—and that he did so in spite of his devotion to the writings of the pseudo-Dionysius. He was the first to apply the critical methods of the New Learning to discover the exact meaning of the books of the Holy Scriptures. His treatment of the Scriptures shows that however he may have been influenced by Savonarola and by the Christian Humanists of Italy, he had advanced far beyond them, and had seen, what no mediæval theologian head been able to perceive, that the Bible is a personal and not a dogmatic revelation. They were mediæval: he belongs to the Reformation circle of thinkers. Luther, Calvin, and Colet, whatever else separates them, have this one deeply important thought in common. Further, Colet discarded the mediæval conception of a mechanical inspiration of the text of Scripture, in this also agreeing with Luther and Calvin. The inspiration of the Holy Scriptures was something mysterious to him. “The Spirit seemed to him by reason of its majesty to have a peculiar method of its own, singularly, absolutely free, blowing where it lists, making prophets of whom it will, yet so that the spirit of the prophets is subject to the prophets.”[117]

Colet saw clearly, and denounced the abounding evils which were ruining the Church of his day. The Convocation of the English Church never listened to a bolder [pg 166] sermon than that preached to them by the Dean of St. Paul's in 1512—the same year that Luther addressed an assembly of clergy at Leitzkau. The two addresses should be compared. The same fundamental thought is contained in both—that every true reformation must begin with the individual man. Colet declared that reform must begin with the bishops, and that once begun it would spread to the clergy and thence to the laity; “for the body follows the soul; and as are the rulers in a State, such will the people be.” He urged that what was wanted was the enforcement of ecclesiastical laws which were already in existence. Ignorant and wicked men were admitted to holy orders, and there were laws prohibiting this. Simony was creeping “like a cancer through the minds of priests, so that most are not ashamed in these days to get for themselves great dignities by petitions and suits at court, rewards and promises”; and yet strict laws against the evil were in existence. He proceeded to enumerate the other flagrant abuses—the non-residence of clergy, the worldly pursuits and indulgences of the clergy; the scandals and vices of the ecclesiastical law-courts; the infrequency of provincial councils to discuss and remedy existing evils; the wasting of the patrimony of the Church on sumptuous buildings, on banquets, on enriching kinsfolk, or on keeping hounds. The Church had laws against all these abuses, but they were not enforced, and could not be until the bishops amended their ways. His scheme of reform was to put in operation the existing regulations of Canon Law. “The diseases which are now in the Church were the same in former ages, and there is no evil for which the holy fathers did not provide excellent remedies; there are no crimes in prohibition of which there are not laws in the body of Canon Law.” Such was his definite idea of reform in this famous Convocation sermon.

But he had wider views. He desired the diffusion of a sound Christian education, and did the best that could be done by one man to promote it, by spending his private fortune in founding St. Paul's school, which he characteristically [pg 167] left in charge of a body of laymen. He longed to see a widespread preaching in the vernacular, and believed that the bishops should show an example in this clerical duty. It is probable that he wished the whole service to be in the vernacular, for it was made a charge against him that he taught his congregation to repeat the Lord's Prayer in English. Besides, he had clearly grasped the thought, too often forgotten by theologians of all schools, that the spiritual facts and forces which lie at the roots of the Christian life are one thing, and the intellectual conceptions which men make to explain these facts and forces are another, and a much less important thing; that men are able to be Christians and to live the Christian life because of the former and not because of the latter. He saw that, while dogma has its place, it is at best the alliance of an immortal with a mortal, the union between that which is unchangeably divine and the fashions of human thought which change from one age to another. For this reason he thought little of the Scholastic Theology of his days, with its forty-three propositions about the nature of God and its forty-five about the nature of man before and after the Fall, each of which had to be assented to at the risk of a charge of heresy. “Why do you extol to me such a man as Aquinas? If he had not been so very arrogant, indeed, he would not surely so rashly and proudly have taken upon himself to define all things. And unless his spirit had been somewhat worldly, he would not surely have corrupted the whole teaching of Christ by mixing it with his profane philosophy.” The Scholastic Theology might have been scientific in the thirteenth century, but the “scientific” is the human and changing element in dogma, and the old theology had become clearly unscientific in the sixteenth. Therefore he was accustomed to advise young theological students to keep to the Bible and the Apostles' Creed, and let divines, if they liked, dispute about the rest; and he taught Erasmus to look askance at Luther's reconstruction of the Augustinian theology.

But no thinking man, however he may flout at philosophy [pg 168] and dogma, can do without either; and Colet was no exception to the general rule. He has placed on record his detestation of Aquinas and his dislike of Augustine, and we may perhaps see in this a lack of sympathy with a prominent characteristic of the theology of Latin Christianity from Tertullian to Aquinas and Occam, to say nothing of developments since the Reformation. The great men who built up the Western Church were almost all trained Roman lawyers. Tertullian, Cyprian, Augustine, Gregory the Great (whose writings form the bridge between the Latin Fathers and the Schoolmen) were all men whose early training had been that of a Roman lawyer,—a training which moulded and shaped all their thinking, whether theological or ecclesiastical. They instinctively regarded all questions as a great Roman lawyer would. They had the lawyer's craving for exact definitions. They had the lawyer's idea that the primary duty laid upon them was to enforce obedience to authority, whether that authority expressed itself in external institutions or in the precise definitions of the correct ways of thinking about spiritual truths. No branch of Western Christendom has been able to free itself from the spell cast upon it by these Roman lawyers of the early centuries of the Christian Church.

If the ideas of Christian Roman lawyers, filtering slowly down through the centuries, had made the Bishops of Rome dream that they were the successors of Augustus, at once Emperor and Pontifex Maximus, master of the bodies and of the souls of mankind, they had also inspired the theologians of the Mediæval Church with the conception of an intellectual imperialism, where a system of Christian thought, expressed with legal precision, could bind into a comprehensive unity the active intelligence of mankind. Dogmas thus expressed can become the instruments of a tyranny much more penetrating than that of an institution, and so Colet found. In his revolt he turned from the Latins to the Greeks, and to that thinker who was furthest removed from the legal precision of statement which was characteristic of Western theology.

It is probable that his intercourse with the Christian Humanists of Italy, and his introduction to Platonists and to Neo-Platonism, made him turn to the writings of the pseudo-Dionysius; but it is certain that he believed at first that the author of these quaint mystical tracts was the Dionysius who was one of the converts of St. Paul at Athens, and that these writings embodied much of the teaching of the Apostle to the Gentiles, and took the reader back to the first generation of the Christian Church. After he had learned from Grocyn that the author of the Celestial and the Terrestrial Hierarchies could not have been the convert of St. Paul, and that the writings could not be earlier than the sixth century, he still regarded them as evidence of the way in which a Christian philosopher could express the thoughts which were current in Christianity one thousand years before Colet's time. The writings could be used as a touchstone to test usages and opinions prevalent at the close of the Middle Ages, when men were still subject to the domination of the Scholastic Theology, and as justification for rejecting them.

They taught him two things which he was very willing to learn: that the human mind, however it may be able to feel after God, can never comprehend Him, nor imprison His character and attributes in propositions—stereotyped aspects of thoughts—which can be fitted into syllogisms; and that such things as hierarchy and sacraments are to be prized not because they are in themselves the active sources and centres of mysterious powers, but because they faintly symbolise the spiritual forces by which God works for the salvation of His people. Colet applied to the study of the writings of the pseudo-Dionysius a mind saturated with simple Christian truth gained from a study of the Holy Scriptures, and especially of the Epistles of St. Paul; and the very luxuriance of imagination and bewildering confusion of symbolism in these writings, their elusiveness as opposed to the precision of Thomas Aquinas or of John Duns the Scot, enabled him the more easily to find in them the germs of his own more definite opinions.

When one studies the abstracts of the Hierarchies[118]—which Colet wrote out from memory—with the actual text of the books themselves, it is scarcely surprising to find how much there is of Colet and how little of Dionysius.[119]

While it is impossible to say how far Colet, and the Christian Humanists who agreed with him, would have welcomed the principles of a Reformation yet to come, it can be affirmed that he held the same views on two very important points. He did not believe in a priesthood in the mediæval nor in the modern Roman sense of the word, and his theory of the efficacy and meaning of the sacraments of the Christian Church was essentially Protestant.

According to Colet, there was no such thing as a mediatorial priesthood whose essential function it was to approach God on men's behalf and present their offerings to Him. The duty of the Christian priesthood was ministerial; it was to declare the love and mercy of God to their fellow-men, and to strive for the purification, illumination, and salvation of mankind by constant preaching of the truth and diffusion of gospel light, even as Christ strove. He did not believe that priests had received from God the power of absolving from sins. “It must be needfully remarked,” he says, “lest bishops be presumptuous, that it is not the part of men to loose the bonds of sins; nor does the power belong to them of loosing or binding anything,”—the truth Luther set forth in his Theses against Indulgences.

Colet is even more decided in his repudiation of the sacramental theories of the mediæval Church. The Eucharist is not a sacrifice, but a commemoration of the death of our Lord, and a symbol of the union and communion which believers have with Him, and with their fellow-men through Him. Baptism is a ceremony which symbolises the believer's change of heart and his vow of service to his Master, and signifies “the more excellent baptism of the inner man”; and the duty of sponsors is to train children in the knowledge and fear of God.[120]

We are told that the Lollards delighted in Colet's preaching; that they advised each other to go to hear him; and that attendance at the Dean's sermons was actually made a charge against them. Colet was no Lollard himself; indeed, he seems to have once sat among ecclesiastical judges who condemned Lollards to death;[121] but the preacher who taught that tithes were voluntary offerings, who denounced the evil lives of the monks and the secular clergy; who hated war, and did not scruple to say so; whose sermons were full of simple Bible instruction, must have recalled many memories of the old Lollard doctrines. For Lollardy had never died out in England: it was active in Colet's days, leavening the country for the Reformation which was to come.

Nor should it be forgotten, in measuring the influence of Colet on the coming Reformation, that Latimer was a friend of his, that William Tyndale was one of his favourite pupils, and that he persuaded Erasmus to turn from purely classical studies to edit the New Testament and the early Christian Fathers.

§ 3. Erasmus.

Erasmus, as has often been said, was a “man by himself;” yet he may be regarded as representing one, and perhaps the most frequent, type of Christian Humanism. His character will always be matter of controversy; and his motives may, without unfairness, be represented in an unfavourable light,—a “great scholar but a petty-minded man,” is a verdict for which there is abundant evidence. Such was the final judgment of his contemporaries, mainly because he refused to take a definite side in the age when the greatest controversy which has convulsed Western Europe since the downfall of the old Empire seemed to call on every man to range himself with one party or other. Our modern judgment must rest on a different basis. In calmer days, when the din of battle has almost died away, it is possible to recognise that to refuse to be a partisan may indicate greatness instead of littleness of soul, a keener vision, and a calmer courage. We cannot judge the man as hastily as his contemporaries did. Still there is evidence enough and to spare to back their verdict. Every biographer has admitted that it is hopeless to look for truth in his voluminous correspondence. His feelings, hopes, intentions, and actual circumstances are described to different correspondents at the same time in utterly different ways. He was always writing for effect, and often for effect of a rather sordid kind. He seldom gave a definite opinion on any important question without attempting to qualify it in such a manner that he might be able, if need arose, to deny that he had given it. No man knew better how to use “if” and “but” so as to shelter himself from all responsibility. He had the ingenuity of the cuttle-fish to conceal himself and his real opinions, and it was commonly used to protect his own skin. All this may be admitted; it can scarcely be denied.

Yet from his first visit to England (1498) down to his practical refusal of a Cardinal's Hat from Pope Adrian vi., on condition that he would reside at Rome and assist in [pg 173] fighting the Reformation, Erasmus had his own conception of what a reformation of Christianity really meant, and what share in it it was possible for him to take. It must be admitted that he held to this idea and kept to the path he had marked out for himself with a tenacity of purpose which did him honour. It was by no means always that of personal safety, still less the road to personal aggrandisement. It led him in the end where he had never expected to stand. It made him a man despised by both sides in the great controversy; it left him absolutely alone, friendless, and without influence. He frequently used very contemptible means to ward off attempts to make him diverge to the right or left; he abandoned many of his earlier principles, or so modified them that they were no longer recognisable. But he was always true to his own idea of a reformation and of his life-work as a reformer.

Erasmus was firmly convinced that Christianity was above all things something practical. It had to do with the ordinary life of mankind. It meant love, humility, purity, reverence,—every virtue which the Saviour had made manifest in His life on earth. This early “Christian philosophy” had been buried out of sight under a Scholastic Theology full of sophistical subtleties, and had been lost in the mingled Judaism and Paganism of the popular religious life, with its weary ceremonies and barbarous usages. A true reformation, he believed, was the moral renovation of mankind, and the one need of the age was to return to that earlier purer religion based on a real inward reverence for and imitation of Christ. The man of letters, like himself, he conceived could play the part of a reformer, and that manfully, in two ways. He could try, by the use of wit and satire, to make contemptible the follies of the Schoolmen and the vulgar travesty of religion which was in vogue among the people. He could also bring before the eyes of all men that earlier and purer religion which was true Christianity. He could edit the New Testament, and enable men to read the very words which Jesus spoke and [pg 174] Paul preached, make them see the deeds of Jesus and hear the apostolic explanations of their meaning. He could say:

“Only be teachable, and you have already made much way in this (the Christian) Philosophy. It supplies a spirit for a teacher, imparted to none more readily than to the simple-minded. Other philosophies, by the very difficulty of their precepts, are removed out of the range of most minds. No age, no sex, no condition of life is excluded from this. The sun itself is not more common and open to all than the teaching of Christ. For I utterly dissent from those who are unwilling that the Sacred Scriptures should be read by the unlearned translated into their vulgar tongue, as though Christ had taught such subtleties that they can scarcely be understood even by a few theologians, or as though the strength of the Christian religion consisted in men's ignorance of it. The mysteries of kings it may be safer to conceal, but Christ wished His mysteries to be published as openly as possible. I wish that even the weakest woman should read the Gospel—should read the Epistles of Paul. And I wish these were translated into all languages, so that they might be read and understood, not only by Scots and Irishmen, but also by Turks and Saracens. To make them understood is surely the first step. It may be that they might be ridiculed by many, but some would take them to heart. I long that the husbandman should sing portions of them to himself as he follows the plough, that the weaver should hum them to the tune of his shuttle, that the traveller should beguile with their stories the tedium of his journey.”[122]

The scholar who became a reformer could further make plain, by editing and publishing the writings of the earlier Christian Fathers, what the oldest Christian Theology had been before the Schoolmen spoiled it.

The conception that a reformation of Christianity was mainly a renovation of morals, enabled the Christian Humanist to keep true to the Renaissance idea that the writers of classical antiquity were to be used to aid the work of ameliorating the lot of mankind. The Florentine circle spoke of the inspiration of Homer, of Plato, and of [pg 175] Cicero, and saw them labouring as our Lord had done to teach men how to live better lives. Pico and Reuchlin had gone further afield, and had found illuminating anticipations of Christianity, in this sense and in others, among the Hebrews, the Egyptians, and perhaps the Brahmins. Erasmus was too clear-sighted to be drawn into any alliance with Oriental mysticism or cabalistic speculations; but he insisted on the aid which would come from the Christian reformer making full use of the ethical teaching of the wise men of Greece and Rome in his attempt to produce a moral renovation in the lives of his fellows. Socrates and Cicero, each in his own day and within his own sphere, had striven for the same moral renovation that Christianity promised, and, in this sense at least, might be called Christians before Christ. So persuaded was Erasmus of their affinity with the true spirit of Christianity, that he declared that Cicero had as much right to a high place in heaven as many a Christian saint, and that when he thought of the Athenian martyr he could scarcely refrain from saying, Sancte Socrates, Ora pro nobis.

It must be remembered also that Erasmus had a genuine and noble horror of war, which was by no means the mere shrinking of a man whose nerves were always quivering. He preached peace as boldly and in as disinterested a fashion as did his friend John Colet. He could not bear the thought of a religious war. This must not be forgotten in any estimate of his conduct and of his relation to the Reformation. No man, not even Luther, scattered the seeds of revolution with a more reckless hand, and yet a thorough and steadfast dislike to all movements which could be called revolutionary was one of the most abiding elements in his character. He hated what he called the “tumult.” He had an honest belief that all public evils in State and Church must be endured until they dissolve away quietly under the influence of sarcasm and common sense, or until they are removed by the action of the responsible authorities. He was clear-sighted enough to see that an open and avowed attack on the [pg 176] papal supremacy, or on any of the more cherished doctrines and usages of the mediæval Church, must end in strife and in bloodshed, and he therefore honestly believed that no such attack ought to be made.

When all these things are kept in view, it is possible to see what conception Erasmus had about his work as a reformer, with its possibilities and its limitations. He adhered to it tenaciously all his life. He held it in the days of his earlier comparative obscurity. He maintained it when he had been enthroned as the prince of the realm of learning. He clung to it in his discredited old age. No one can justify the means he sometimes took to prevent being drawn from the path he had marked out for himself; but there is something to be said for the man who, through good report and evil, stuck resolutely to his view of what a reformation ought to be, and what were the functions of a man of letters who felt himself called to be a reformer. Had Luther been gifted with that keen sense of prevision with which Erasmus was so fatally endowed, would he have stood forward to attack Indulgences in the way he did? It is probable that it would have made no difference in his action; but he did not think so himself. He said once, “No good work comes about by our own wisdom; it begins in dire necessity. I was forced into mine; but had I known then what I know now, ten wild horses would not have drawn me into it.” The man who leads a great movement of reform may see the distant, but has seldom a clear vision of the nearer future. He is one who feels the slow pressure of an imperious spiritual power, who is content with one step at a time, and who does not ask to see the whole path stretching out before him.

Erasmus lost both his parents while he was a child, and never enjoyed the advantages of a home training. He was driven by deceit or by self-deception into a monastery when he was a lad. He escaped from the clutches of the monastic life when he was twenty years of age, broken in health, and having learned to know human nature on its bad side and to trade on that knowledge. He was one of [pg 177] the loneliest of mortals, and trusted in no one but himself. With one great exception, he had no friendship which left an enduring influence on his character. From childhood he taught himself in his own way; when he grew to manhood he planned and schemed for himself; he steadfastly refused to be drawn into any kind of work which he did not like for its own sake; he persistently shunned every entanglement which might have controlled his action or weighted him with any responsibility. He stands almost alone among the Humanists in this. All the others were officials, or professors, or private teachers, or jurists, or ecclesiastics. Erasmus was nothing, and would be nothing, but a simple man of letters.

Holbein has painted him so often that his features are familiar. Every line of the clearly cut face suggests demure sarcasm—the thin lips closely pressed together, the half-closed eyelids, and the keen glance of the scarcely seen blue eyes. The head is intellectual, but there is nothing masculine about the portrait—nothing suggesting the massiveness of the learned burgher Pirkheimer; or the jovial strength of the Humanist landsknecht Eobanus Hessus; or the lean wolf-like tenacity of Hutten, the descendant of robber-knights; or the steadfast homely courage of Martin Luther. The dainty hands, which Holbein drew so often, and the general primness of his appearance, suggest a descent from a long line of maiden aunts. The keen intelligence was enclosed in a sickly body, whose frailty made continuous demands on the soul it imprisoned. It needed warm rooms with stoves that sent forth no smell, the best wines, an easy-going horse, and a deft servant; and to procure all these comforts Erasmus wrote the sturdiest of begging letters and stooped to all kinds of flatteries.

The visit which Erasmus paid to England in 1498 was the turning-point in his life. He found himself, for the first time, among men who were his equals in learning and his superiors in many things. “When I listen to my friend Colet,” he says, “it seems to me like listening to Plato [pg 178] himself. Who does not marvel at the complete mastery of the sciences in Grocyn? What could be keener, more profound, and more searching than the judgment of Linacre? Has Nature ever made a more gentle, a sweeter, or a happier disposition than Thomas More's?” He made the acquaintance of men as full of the New Learning as he was himself, who hated the Scotist theology more bitterly than he did, and who nevertheless believed in a pure, simple Christian philosophy, and were earnest Christians. They urged him to join them in their work, and we can trace in the correspondence of Erasmus the growing influence of Colet. The Dean of St. Paul's made Erasmus the decidedly Christian Humanist he became, and impressed on him that conception of a reformation which, leaving external things very much as they were, undertook a renovation of morals. He never lost the impress of Colet's stamp.

It would appear from one of Erasmus' letters that Colet urged him to write commentaries on some portions of the New Testament; but Erasmus would only work in his own way; and it is probable that his thoughts were soon turned to preparing an edition of the New Testament in Greek. The task was long brooded over; and he had to perfect himself in his knowledge of the language.

This determination to undertake no work for which he was not supremely fitted, together with his powers of application and acquisition, gave Erasmus the reputation of being a strong man. He was seen to be unlike any other Humanist, whether Italian or German. He had no desire merely to reproduce the antique, or to confine himself within the narrow circle in which the “Poets” of the Renaissance worked. He put ancient culture to modern uses. Erasmus was no arm-chair student. He was one of the keenest observers of everything human—the Lucian or the Voltaire of the sixteenth century. From under his half-closed eyelids his quick glance seized and retained the salient characteristics of all sorts and conditions of men and women. He described theologians, jurists and philosophers, monks and parish priests, merchants and soldiers, [pg 179] husbands and wives, women good and bad, dancers and diners, pilgrims, pardon-sellers, and keepers of relics; the peasant in the field, the artisan in the workshop, and the vagrant on the highway. He had studied all, and could describe them with a few deft phrases, as incisive as Dürer's strokes, with an almost perfect style, and with easy sarcasm.

This application of the New Learning to portray the common life, combined with his profound learning, made Erasmus the idol of the young German Humanists. They said that he was more than mortal, that his judgment was infallible, and that his work was perfect. They made pilgrimages to visit him. An interview was an event to be talked about for years; a letter, a precious treasure to be bequeathed as an heirloom. Some men refused to render the universal homage accorded by scholars and statesmen, by princes lay and clerical. Luther scented Pelagian theology in his annotations; he scorned Erasmus' wilful playing with truth; he said that the great Humanist was a mocker who poured ridicule upon everything, even on Christ and religion. There was some ground for the charge. His sarcasm was not confined to his Praise of Folly or to his Colloquies. It appears in almost everything that he wrote—even in his Paraphrases of the New Testament.

That such a man should have felt himself called upon to be a reformer, that this Saul should have appeared among the prophets, is in itself testimony that he lived during a great religious crisis, and that the religious question was the most important one in his days.

The principal literary works of Erasmus meant to serve the reformation he desired to see are:—two small books, Enchiridion militis christiani (A Handbook of the Christian Soldier, or A Pocket Dagger for the Christian Soldier—it may be translated either way), first printed in 1503, and Institutio Principis Christiani (1518); his Encomium Moriæ (Praise of Folly, 1511); his edition of the New Testament, or Novum Instrumentum (1516), with [pg 180] prefaces and paraphrases; and perhaps many of the dialogues in his Colloquia (1519).

Erasmus himself explains that in the Enchiridion he wrote to counteract the vulgar error of those who think that religion consists in ceremonies and in more than Jewish observances, while they neglect what really belongs to piety. The whole aim of the book is to assert the individual responsibility of man to God apart from any intermediate human agency. Erasmus ignores as completely as Luther would have done the whole mediæval thought of the mediatorial function of the Church and its priestly order. In this respect the book is essentially Protestant and thoroughly revolutionary. It asserts in so many words that much of the popular religion is pure paganism:

“One worships a certain Rochus, and why? because he fancies he will drive away the plague from his body. Another mumbles prayers to Barbara or George, lest he fall into the hands of his enemy. This man fasts to Apollonia to prevent the toothache. That one gazes upon an image of the divine Job, that he may be free from the itch.... In short, whatever our fears and our desires, we set so many gods over them, and these are different in different nations.... This is not far removed from the superstition of those who used to vow tithes to Hercules in order to get rich, or a cock to Æsculapius to recover from an illness, or who slew a bull to Neptune for a favourable voyage. The names are changed, but the object is the same.”[123]

In speaking of the monastic life, he says:

“ ‘Love,’ says Paul, ‘is to edify your neighbour,’ ... and if this only were done, nothing could be more joyous or more easy than the life of the ‘religious’; but now this life seems [pg 181]gloomy, full of Jewish superstitions, not in any way free from the vices of laymen and in some ways more corrupt. If Augustine, whom they boast of as the founder of their order, came to life again, he would not recognise them; he would exclaim that he had never approved of this sort of life, but had organised a way of living according to the rule of the Apostles, not according to the superstition of the Jews.”[124]

The more one studies the Praise of Folly, the more evident it becomes that Erasmus did not intend to write a satire on human weakness in general: the book is the most severe attack on the mediæval Church that had, up to that time, been made; and it was meant to be so. The author wanders from his main theme occasionally, but always to return to the insane follies of the religious life sanctioned by the highest authorities of the mediæval Church. Popes, bishops, theologians, monks, and the ordinary lay Christians, are all unmitigated fools in their ordinary religious life. The style is vivid, the author has seen what he describes, and he makes his readers see it also. He writes with a mixture of light mockery and bitter earnestness. He exposes the foolish questions of the theologians; the vices and temporal ambitions of the Popes, bishops, and monks; the stupid trust in festivals, pilgrimages, indulgences, and relics. The theologians, the author says, are rather dangerous people to attack, for they come down on one with their six hundred conclusions and command him to recant, and if he does not they declare him a heretic forthwith. The problems which interest them are:

“Whether there was any instant of time in the divine generation? ... Could God have taken the form of a woman, a devil, an ass, a gourd, or a stone? How the gourd could have preached, wrought miracles, hung on the cross?”[125]

He jeers at the Popes and higher ecclesiastics:

“Those supreme Pontiffs who stand in the place of Christ, if they should try to imitate His life, that is, His [pg 182]poverty, His toil, His teaching, His cross, and His scorn of this world ... what could be more dreadful!... We ought not to forget that such a mass of scribes, copyists, notaries, advocates, secretaries, mule-drivers, grooms, money-changers, procurers, and gayer persons yet I might mention, did I not respect your ears,—that this whole swarm which now burdens—I beg your pardon, honours—the Roman See would be driven to starvation.”[126]

As for the monks:

“The greater part of them have such faith in their ceremonies and human traditions, that they think one heaven is not reward enough for such great doings.... One will show his belly stuffed with every kind of fish; another will pour out a hundred bushels of psalms; another will count up myriads of fasts, and make up for them all again by almost bursting himself at a single dinner. Another will bring forward such a heap of ceremonies that seven ships would hardly hold them; another boast that for sixty years he has never touched a penny except with double gloves on his hands.... But Christ will interrupt their endless bragging, and will demand—‘Whence this new kind of Judaism?’

“They do all things by rule, by a kind of sacred mathematics; as, for instance, how many knots their shoes must be tied with, of what colour everything must be, what variety in their garb, of what material, how many straws'-breadth to their girdle, of what form and of how many bushels' capacity their cowl, how many fingers broad their hair, and how many hours they sleep....”[127]

He ridicules men who go running about to Rome, Compostella, or Jerusalem, wasting on long and dangerous journeys money which might be better spent in feeding the hungry and clothing the naked. He scoffs at those who buy Indulgences, who sweetly flatter themselves with counterfeit pardons, and who have measured off the duration of Purgatory without error, as if by a water-clock, into ages, years, months, and days, like the multiplication table.[128] Is it religion to believe that if any one pays a penny out of [pg 183] what he has stolen, he can have the whole slough of his life cleaned out at once, and all his perjuries, lusts, drunkennesses, all his quarrels, murders, cheats, treacheries, falsehoods, bought off in such a way that he may begin over again with a new circle of crimes? The reverence for relics was perhaps never so cruelly satirised as in the Colloquy, Peregrinatio Religionis Ergo.

It must be remembered that this bitter satire was written some years before Luther began the Reformation by an attack on Indulgences. It may seem surprising how much liberty the satirist allowed himself, and how much was permitted to him. But Erasmus knew very well how to protect himself. He was very careful to make no definite attack, and to make no mention of names. He was always ready to explain that he did not mean to attack the Papacy, but only bad Popes; that he had the highest respect for the monastic life, and only satirised evil-minded monks; or that he reverenced the saints, but thought that reverence ought to be shown by imitating them in their lives of piety. He could say all this with perfect truth. Indeed, it is likely that with all his scorn against the monks, Erasmus, in his heart, believed that a devout Capuchin or Franciscan monk lived the ideal Christian life. He seems to say so in his Colloquy, Militis et Carthusiani. He wrote, moreover, before the dignitaries of the mediæval Church had begun to take alarm. Liberal Churchmen who were the patrons of the New Learning had no objection to see the vices of the times and the Church life of the day satirised by one who wrote such exquisite latinity. In all his more serious work Erasmus was careful to shelter himself under the protection of great ecclesiastics.

Erasmus was not the only scholar who had proposed to publish a correct edition of the Holy Scriptures. The great Spaniard, Cardinal Ximenes, had announced that he meant to bring out an edition of the Holy Scriptures in which the text of the Vulgate would appear in parallel columns along with the Hebrew and the Greek. The [pg 184] prospectus of this Complutensian Polyglot was issued as early as 1502; the work was finished in 1517, and was published in Spain in 1520 and in other lands in 1522. Erasmus was careful to dedicate the first edition of his Novum Instrumentum, (1516) to Pope Leo x., who graciously received it. He sent the second edition to the same Pope in 1519, accompanied by a letter in which he says:

“I have striven with all my might to kindle men from those chilling argumentations in which they had been so long frozen up, to a zeal for theology which should be at once more pure and more serious. And that this labour has so far not been in vain I perceive from this, that certain persons are furious against me, who cannot value anything they are unable to teach and are ashamed to learn. But, trusting to Christ as my witness, whom my writings above all would guard, to the judgment of your Holiness, to my own sense of right and the approval of so many distinguished men, I have always disregarded the yelpings of these people. Whatever little talent I have, it has been, once for all, dedicated to Christ: it shall serve His glory alone; it shall serve the Roman Church, the prince of that Church, but especially your Holiness, to whom I owe more than my whole duty.”

He dedicated the various parts of the Paraphrases of the New Testament to Cardinal Campeggio, to Cardinal Wolsey, to Henry viii., to Charles v., and to Francis i. of France. He deliberately placed himself under the protection of those princes, ecclesiastical and secular, who could not be suspected of having any revolutionary designs against the existing state of things in Church or in State.

In all this he was followed for the time being by the most distinguished Christian Humanists in England, France, and Germany. They were full of the brightest hopes. A Humanist Pope sat on the throne of St. Peter, young Humanist kings ruled France and England, the Emperor Maximilian had long been the patron of German Humanism, and much was expected from his grandson Charles, the young King of Spain. Erasmus, the acknowledged prince of Christian learning, was enthusiastically supported by Colet and More in England, by Buddæus and Lefèvre in [pg 185] France, by Johann Staupitz, Cochlæus, Thomas Murner, Jerome Emser, Conrad Mutianus, and George Spalatin in Germany. They all believed that the golden age was approaching, when the secular princes would forbid wars, and the ecclesiastical lay aside their rapacity, and when both would lead the peoples of Europe in a reformation of morals and in a re-establishment of pure religion. Their hopes were high that all would be effected without the “tumult” which they all dreaded, and when the storm burst, many of them became bitter opponents of Luther and his action. Luther found no deadlier enemies than Thomas Murner and Jerome Emser. Others, like George Spalatin, became his warmest supporters. Erasmus maintained to the end his attitude of cautious neutrality. In a long letter to Marlianus, Bishop of Tuy in Spain, he says that he does not like Luther's writings, that he feared from the first that they would create a “tumult,” but that he dare not altogether oppose the reformer, “because he feared that he might be fighting against God.” The utmost that he could be brought to do after the strongest persuasions, was to attack Luther's Augustinian theology in his De Libero Arbitrio, and to insinuate a defence of the principle of ecclesiastical authority in the interpretation of Scripture, and a proof that Luther had laid too much stress on the element of “grace” in human actions. He turned away from the whole movement as far as he possibly could, protesting that for himself he would ever cling to the Roman See.

The last years of his life were spent in excessive literary work—in editing the earlier Christian Fathers; he completed his edition of Origen in 1536, the year of his death. He settled at Louvain, and found it too hotly theological for his comfort; went to Basel; wandered off to Freiburg; then went back to Basel to die. After his death he was compelled to take the side he had so long shrunk from. Pope Paul iv. classed him as a notorious heretic, and placed on the first papal “Index” “all his commentaries, notes, scholia, dialogues, letters, translations, [pg 186] books, and writings, even when they contain nothing against religion or about religion.”

We look in vain for any indication that those Christian Humanists perceived that they were actually living in a time of revolution, and were really standing on the edge of a crater which was about to change European history by its eruption. Sir Thomas More's instincts of religious life were all mediæval. Colet had persuaded him to abandon his earlier impulse to enter a monastic order, but More wore a hair shirt next his skin till the day of his death. Yet in his sketch of an ideal commonwealth, he expanded St. Paul's thought of the equality of all men before Christ into the conception that no man was to be asked to work more than six hours a day, and showed that religious freedom could only flourish where there was nothing in the form of the mediæval Church. The lovable and pious young Englishman never imagined that his academic dream would be translated into rude practical thoughts and ruder actions by leaders of peasant and artisan insurgents, and that his Utopia (1515), within ten years after its publication, and ten years before his own death (1535), would furnish texts for communist sermons, preached in obscure public-houses or to excited audiences on village greens. The satirical criticisms of the hierarchy, the monastic orders, and the popular religious life, which Erasmus flung broadcast so recklessly in his lighter and more serious writings, furnished the weapons for the leaders in that “tumult” which he had dreaded all his days; and when he complained that few seemed to care for the picture of a truly pious life, given in his Enchiridion, he did not foresee that it would become a wonderfully popular book among those who renounced all connection with the See of Rome to which the author had promised a life-long obedience. The Christian Humanists, one and all, were strangely blind to the signs of the times in which they lived.

No one can fail to appreciate the nobility of the purpose to work for a great moral renovation of mankind [pg 187] which the Christian Humanists ever kept before them, or refuse to see that they were always and everywhere preachers of righteousness. When we remember the century and a half of wars, so largely excited by ecclesiastical motives, which desolated Europe during the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, few can withhold their sympathy from the Christian Humanist idea that the path of reformation lay through a great readjustment of the existing conditions of the religious life, rather than through ecclesiastical revolution to a thorough-going reconstruction; although we may sadly recognise that the dynastic struggles of secular princes, the rapacity and religious impotence of Popes and ecclesiastical authorities, and the imperious pressure of social and industrial discontent, made the path of peace impossible. But what must fill us with surprise is that the Christian Humanists seemed to believe with a childlike innocence that the constituted authorities, secular and ecclesiastical, would lead the way in this peaceful reform, mainly because they were tinged with Humanist culture, and were the patrons of artists and men of learning. Humanism meant to Pope Leo x. and to the young Archbishop of Mainz additional sources of enjoyment, represented by costly pictures, collections of MSS., and rare books, the gratification of their taste for jewels and cameos, to say nothing of less harmless indulgences, and the adulation of the circle of scholars whom they had attracted to their courts; and it meant little more to the younger secular princes.

It is also to be feared that the Christian Humanists had no real sense of what was needed for that renovation of morals, public and private, which they ardently desired to see. Pictures of a Christian life lived according to the principles of reason, sharp polemic against the hierarchy, and biting mockery of the stupidity of the popular religion, did not help the masses of the people. The multitude in those early decades of the sixteenth century were scourged by constant visitations of the plague and other new and strange diseases, and they lived in perpetual dread of a [pg 188] Turkish invasion. The fear of death and the judgment thereafter was always before their eyes. What they wanted was a sense of God's forgiveness for their sins, and they greedily seized on Indulgences, pilgrimages to holy places, and relic-worship to secure the pardon they longed for. The aristocratic and intellectual reform, contemplated by the Christian Humanists, scarcely appealed to them. Their longing for a certainty of salvation could not be satisfied with recommendations to virtuous living according to the rules of Neo-Platonic ethics. It is pathetic to listen to the appeals made to Erasmus for something more than he could ever give:

“ ‘Oh! Erasmus of Rotterdam, where art thou?’ said Albert Dürer. ‘See what the unjust tyranny of earthly power, the power of darkness, can do. Hear, thou knight of Christ! Ride forth by the side of the Lord Christ; defend the truth, gain the martyr's crown! As it is, thou art but an old man. I have heard thee say that thou hast given thyself but a couple more years of active service; spend them, I pray, to the profit of the gospel and the true Christian faith, and believe me the gates of Hell, the See of Rome, as Christ has said, will not prevail against thee.’ ”[129]

The Reformation needed a man who had himself felt that commanding need of pardon which was sending his fellows travelling from shrine to shrine, who could tell them in plain homely words, which the common man could understand, how each one of them could win that pardon for himself, who could deliver them from the fear of the priest, and show them the way to the peace of God. The Reformation needed Luther.

[pg 189]

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