(1526-1598.)
Though the narrative of Sastrow gives us a view of the hard struggle of a rising family, and that of Felix Platter shows to what shifts even a vigorous life may be reduced, yet one must not forget that the intellectual life of Germany was rich and varied in its aims and tendencies. Worldly-minded education, opulence, and the pleasures of social enjoyment were concentrated in the patrician families of the great Imperial cities, who, however, often manifested bad taste in their refinement; but at the same time arts and commerce called forth all their energies, and whatever sense of beauty then existed, was to be found especially in these circles. In the great cities of Switzerland, the Low Countries, and the seaports of the German Hanse Towns, there was a peculiar development of the patrician order; but it was the patrician families of the great commercial cities of South Germany, and amongst these more especially those of Nuremberg, Augsburg, Ulm, Frankfort on the Maine, and Cologne, that exercised the greatest influence on the luxury, industry, and learning of Germany. Members of the old families had once governed the cities with aristocratic rule; they were still the most influential citizens, accustomed to conduct great affairs, and to represent the highest interests; they were generally merchants or large landed proprietors. Most of the Church benefices were possessed by their families; they were the first who used to send their sons into Italy, the land of their mercantile friends, to study law, thus making preparation in Germany for the rising Humanitarian learning. Many of them were heads of mercantile firms, councillors and confidants of German princes; they were united together by family alliances, and not less by community of commercial interests and had extended themselves everywhere; they chiefly determined the German policy of the Imperial cities, and they would have exercised a decisive influence on the newly formed German life, had they been less conservative in their tendencies, and had they not by their self-interest become sometimes un-German.
They represented the moneyed power of Germany; the Emperor and princes obtained loans from them, and they were the medium of the greater; part of the money and exchange transactions, when these were not in the hands of the Jews. The great firms of Fugger and Welser and their partners formed a great trading company, which carried on traffic not only with Italy and the Levant, but also beyond Antwerp and the Atlantic Ocean. Through them, German trade monopolized that of the East and West Indies; they bought a whole year's harvest from the King of Portugal, they united themselves with Spanish houses in unlimited speculations, undertook journeys to Calcutta, and settled on their own account the prices of the sugar and spices of the East, which were then of greater importance in the German cookery than now.
This command over capital was regarded with great dislike by both princes and people. Through these trading companies much ready money passed out of the country, and all objects of luxury rose in price; complaints were general, for the diminution in the worth of money, occasioned by the introduction of the American gold, was mistaken for the raising of prices by the merchants. Not only Hutten, who was deeply imbued with the prejudices of his own class, but even the Imperial Diet was jealous of the power of these great moneyed companies; among the people also, the antipathy to them was general, and the Reformers shared the opinions of their cotemporaries as to the detriment of such domination over capital.
Yet even then, it may be observed that these great merchant princes had not all the same tendencies. The Welsers of Augsburg, for example, in 1512, took an active interest at Rome on behalf of Reuchlin, and that great scholar owed his deliverance from the hands of the Dominicans, more perhaps to their secret influence than to the refined rhetoric of his enthusiastic admirers in Germany. On the other hand, the Fuggers were considered by the people as reckless moneyed men and Romanists; as enemies of Luther and friends of Eck, who was suspected of being in their pay; for they had charge of the money affairs of the Elector Albrecht of Mayence, and of the Romish curie, and one of the Fugger's clerks accompanied the indulgence chest of Tetzel, and controlled the incoming receipts, on which the banking-house of the Archbishop of Mayence had made advances. The Emperor, Charles V., received the most solid support from these powerful firms, as their interests were generally concurrent with his; with the people, however, "Fuggerei" became the common term for usury. We learn the family tendency for outward splendour and intercourse with the great, from the description which Hans von Schweinichen gives of their opulence in the year 1575.
When the dissolute Duke Hemrich von Liegnitz with his majordomo was at Augsburg, the splendour of this house appeared to the Silesian noblemen as quite fabulous. Schweinichen, who was more accurate in specifying the sums of money and prices than was necessary considering the endless debts of his master, gives the following narrative.[[55]]
"Herr Max Fugger once invited his Princely Highness to dinner. Such a banquet have I never beheld, the Roman Emperor himself could not have been entertained better: there was superabundant splendour; the repast was spread in a hall where more gold than colour was to be seen; the floor was of marble, and as smooth as if one was walking on ice; there was a sideboard placed along the whole length of the hall, which was set out with drinking-vessels and notably beautiful Venetian glasses; there must have been, as one says, the value of more than a ton of gold. I waited on his Princely Highness when the drinking began. Now Herr Fugger gave to his Princely Highness for a drinking-cup, an artistically formed ship of the most beautiful Venetian glass; when I took it from the sideboard and was going across the hall, having on my new shoes, I slipped up, and fell upon my back in the middle of the hall; the wine poured about my neck, the new red brocade dress which I had on was quite spoilt, and the beautiful ship was broken into a thousand pieces. Though this created great laughter amongst all, yet I was told that Herr Fugger said privately he would rather have lost a hundred gulden than that ship; it happened, however, without any fault on my part, for I had neither eaten nor drunk; but when later I became intoxicated I stood firmer, and did not fall a single time even in the dance. Meanwhile the lords and all others were very merry. Herr Fugger took his Princely Highness a walk through the house, a prodigious great house, so great that the Roman Emperor at the Imperial Diet found room in it for himself and his whole court. Herr Fugger showed his Princely Highness, in a turret, a treasure of chains, jewels, and precious stones, and of curious coins and pieces of gold the size of a head, and he himself said that they were worth more than a million of gold. Afterwards he opened a chest that was full of nothing but ducats and crowns up to the brim; these he estimated at two hundred thousand gulden, which had been remitted to him in exchange by the King of Spain. Then he led his Princely Highness up to the turret, which was paved half way down from the top with good thalers; he said there were about seventeen thousand. He showed his Princely Highness great honour, but also his own power and possessions: it is said that Herr Fugger had enough to buy an empire. He gave me, on account of my fall, a beautiful new groschen which weighed about nine grains. His Princely Highness expected also a good present, but got nothing but a good drinking bout. At that time Fugger bestowed the hand of his daughter on a count, and gave two hundred thousand thalers, besides jewels, as her dowry.
"As his Princely Highness had very little ready money he sent me to Herr Fugger to borrow four thousand thalers; but he decidedly declined doing this, excusing himself quite politely; however the following day he sent his steward to me to be introduced to my lord, through whom he presented to his Princely Highness two hundred crowns, a beautiful goblet worth eighty dollars, and besides that a splendid horse with black velvet housings."
Together with this taste for display we find in other patrician families at the beginning of this century far higher aims in life. The firms of Pentinger at Augsburg, and Perkheimer at Nuremberg were the focus of the noblest interests of the nation; the heads of these houses were men of princely opulence, landed proprietors and merchant princes, statesmen and warriors, and at the same time men of learning and research. It was for families like these that Albert Dürer painted his best pictures; to them the travelling Humanitarians resorted; every elegant verse, every manly sentiment or word of genius, were there first heartily appreciated. As councillors and patrons in worldly concerns, as liberal proprietors of valuable libraries and of first-rate cabinets of antiquities, as hospitable masters of rich households, they knew how to do honour to all who brought to their houses intellect, knowledge, and refinement.[[56]]
In these families, the women also frequently received an education which went further than the knowledge of cooking, spinning, and the prayer-book; the daughters of these households gained what was seldom to be found in the castles of the princes or in the mansions of the landed nobility,--a heartfelt interest in the sciences and arts with which the friends of the family were occupied. There is a peculiar charm for us in the contemplation of the first female characters who were ennobled by the dawn of a new civilization. Constance Peutinger, who twined the laurel wreaths for Hutten; Caritas Perkheimer, the suffering abbess of Clarenklosters at Nuremberg, and later Philippine Welser, the wife of the Emperor's son, all belonged to the class of German patricians; they were sensitive natures often oppressed and wounded in this rough and thorny period.