A Short History of Germany

by Mary Platt Parmele

This, together with the identity of names, led Victor Hugo, Klinger, and other writers to confuse John Fust, the practicer of the Black Art in mediæval times, with John Fust the printer. And as the original Fust had come to stand for the emancipation of the human intellect through free learning, and as printing was above all else the means for such emancipation, the coincidence, if such it be, was, to say the least, remarkable!

When we approach the time of Isabella of Castile and of Columbus, and when we are confronted with that familiar specter, the Turk, in Southeastern Europe, we feel that we are in sight of the lights on familiar headlands, and are not far from port. We are not very near to that haven, but we are passing the line which divides the old from the new.

[[1]] See chart of Civilization in Six Centuries, "Who, When, and What."

CHAPTER VIII.

It was not alone in Germany that the old was vanishing. The movement in that country was part of a general condition prevailing in England, France, and Spain; all with the same tendency—the passing of the power from many small despotisms to one greater one. It was an advance, although a slow one, in the path of progress. Feudalism—that newfangled system which had so tried the soul of Duke Welf in the ninth century—was dissolving.

In England the war with France, and the War of the Roses, by impoverishing the nobles had broken their remaining authority, and that system which had been gradually perishing since the Conquest was virtually dead.

In France Louis XI. had cunningly conceived the idea of recovering the power of the throne by an apparent friendship with the people; and a combination was thus formed against which a decrepit feudalism could not long stand.

In Spain the smaller kingdoms had at last been merged into two larger ones, and by the union of Castile and Aragon under Ferdinand and Isabella, and the expulsion of the Moors which quickly followed that event, that country was at last consolidated into one kingdom—in which feudalism no longer existed as a disturbing power.

In northern Italy also, among that brilliant group of small republics, there was this same centralizing tendency at work. Florence had passed into the strong keeping of the Medici (1434), while Genoa and most of the Lombard republics were gravitating toward the control of Milan.