[Sidenote: Nationalism among the German Princes]
Under these circumstances the powerful German princes, in defying the emperor's authority and in promoting disruptive tendencies in the Holy Roman Empire, were enabled to lay the blame at the feet of their unpatriotic sovereign and thereby arouse in their behalf a good deal of German national sentiment. In choosing Charles V to be their emperor, the princely electors in 1519 had demanded that German or Latin should be the official language of the Holy Roman Empire, that imperial offices should be open only to Germans, that the various princes should not be subject to any foreign political jurisdiction, that no foreign troops should serve in imperial wars without the approval of the Diet, and that Charles should confirm the sovereign rights of all the princes and appoint from their number a Council of Regency (Reichsregiment) to share in his government.
[Sidenote: The Council of Regency, 1521-1531]
[Sidenote: Its Failure to Unify Germany]
In accordance with an agreement reached by a Diet held at Worms in 1521, the Council of Regency was created. Most of its twenty-three members were named by, and represented the interests of, the German princes. Here might be the starting-point toward a closer political union of the German-speaking people, if only a certain amount of financial independence could be secured to the Council. The proposal on this score was a most promising one; it was to support the new imperial administration, not, as formerly, by levying more or less voluntary contributions on the various states, but by establishing a kind of customs-union (Zollverein) and imposing on foreign importations a tariff for revenue. This time, however, the German burghers raised angry protests; the merchants and traders of the Hanseatic towns insisted that the proposed financial burden would fall on them and destroy their business; and their protests were potent enough to bring to nought the princes' plan. Thus the government was forced again to resort to the levy of special financial contributions,—an expedient which usually put the emperor and the Council of Regency at the mercy of the most selfish and least patriotic of the German princes.
[Sidenote: Nationalism among the German Knights]
More truly patriotic as a class than German princes or German burghers were the German knights—those gentlemen of the hill-top and of the road, who, usually poor in pocket though stout of heart, looked down from their high-perched castles with badly disguised contempt upon the vulgar tradesmen of the town or beheld with anger and jealousy the encroachments of neighboring princes, lay and ecclesiastical, more wealthy and powerful than themselves. Especially against the princes the knights contended, sometimes under the forms of law, more often by force and violence and all the barbarous accompaniments of private warfare and personal feud. Some of the knights were well educated and some had literary and scholarly abilities; hardly any one of them was a friend of public order. Yet practically all the knights were intensely proud of their German nationality. It was the knights, who, under the leadership of such fiery patriots as Ulrich von Hutten and Franz von Sickingen, had forcefully contributed in 1519 to the imperial election of Charles V, a German Habsburg, in preference to non-German candidates such as Francis I of France or Henry VIII of England. For a brief period Charles V leaned heavily upon the German knights for support in his struggle with princes and burghers; and at one time it looked as if the knights in union with the emperor would succeed in curbing the power of the princes and in laying the foundations of a strongly centralized national German monarchy.
[Sidenote: Rise of Lutheranism Favored by the Knights and Opposed by
Charles V]
But at the critical moment Protestantism arose in Germany, marking a cleavage between the knightly leaders and the emperor. To knights like Ulrich von Hutten and Franz von Sickingen the final break in 1520 between Martin Luther and the pope seemed to assure a separation of Germany from Italy and the erection of a peculiar form of German Christianity about which a truly national state could be builded. As a class the knights applauded Luther and rejoiced at the rapid spread of his teachings throughout Germany. On the other hand, Charles V remained a Roman Catholic. Not only was he loyally attached to the religion of his fathers through personal training and belief, but he felt that the maintenance of what political authority he possessed was dependent largely on the maintenance of the universal authority of the ancient Church, and practically he needed papal assistance for his many foreign projects. The same reasons that led many German princes to accept the Lutheran doctrines as a means of lessening imperial control caused Charles V to reject them. At the same Diet at Worms (1521), at which the Council of Regency had been created, Charles V prevailed upon the Germans present to condemn and outlaw Luther; and this action alienated the knights from the emperor.
[Sidenote: The Knights' War, 1522-1523]
Franz von Sickingen, a Rhenish knight and the ablest of his class, speedily took advantage of the emperor's absence from Germany in 1522 to precipitate a Knights' War. In supreme command of a motley army of fellow-knights, Franz made an energetic attack upon the rich landed estates of the Catholic prince-bishop of Trier. At this point, the German princes, lay as well as ecclesiastical, forgetting their religious predilections and mindful only of their common hatred of the knights, rushed to the defense of the bishop of Trier and drove off Sickingen, who, in April, 1523, died fighting before his own castle of Ebernburg. Ulrich von Hutten fled to Switzerland and perished miserably shortly afterwards. The knights' cause collapsed, and princes and burghers remained triumphant. [Footnote: The Knights' War was soon followed by the Peasants' Revolt, a social rather than a political movement. For an account of the Peasants' Revolt see pp. 133 ff.] It was the end of serious efforts in the sixteenth century to create a national German state.