A Short History of Germany

by Mary Platt Parmele

[[1]] For a comprehensive understanding of this period see Chart of Civilization in Six Centuries, "Who, When, and What."

CHAPTER XI.

For seven hundred years, from the treaty of Verdun (843), to Charles V. (1520), Germany had held the leading position in Europe as the head of the "Holy Roman Empire." The reality had been gradually departing from that alluring title; and now, with the Peace of Westphalia, it was gone.

With a large body of its people accorded full rights, while they were engaged in open war upon the Roman Church, the last link binding Germany to Rome was broken. The Holy Roman Empire was now the German Empire.

And, in very fact, it was no empire at all, but a loose confederacy of miniature kingdoms, administered without any regard to each other, and in great measure independent of Imperial authority.

Great changes had taken place throughout Europe. Louis XIV. was King of France. In England Charles I. had lost his throne and his head, and Cromwell was laying the foundations of a power more enduring than that of Tudor or Stuart. Spain was rapidly declining, and the new Republic of Holland ascending in the scale. Sweden was supreme in the North, and Russia just beginning to be recognized as a power in Europe. Venice and the Italian republics were crumbling to pieces; while across the sea, on the coast of America, a few English, Dutch, and Swedish colonies were struggling into existence.

Richelieu was dead, but the fortunes of France were in the keeping of one quite as ambitious for her as was the Great Minister. There was a new aspirant for headship in Europe. When Ferdinand III. died, Louis XIV. tried hard to be elected his successor. He spent money freely among the Electors, and was only defeated by the sturdy opposition of Brandenburg and Saxony.

Of the people of Germany there is really nothing to tell in the years which followed the Peace of Westphalia. Spiritless and disheartened in their ruined cities, they seemed to have lost all national spirit and even religious enthusiasm. They languidly saw the Catholic Hapsburgs becoming absolute in the land, while the Court at Vienna and the smaller German Courts were absorbed in establishing servile imitations of the Court at Versailles. Churches and schoolhouses were in ruins, but palaces were being built in which the fashions of the French Court were closely imitated, and princes were trying to unlearn their native language and to install that of a cormorant French King, who was planning to devour their demoralized empire!

The one exception among the German rulers of this time was Frederick William of Brandenburg, the "Great Elector." This incorruptible German lost no time in learning French. As soon as peace was declared he set about restoring his wasted territory. He organized a standing army and built a fleet, and he used them, too, to recover Pomerania from Sweden and to circumvent the French King, and so enlarged his boundaries and strengthened his authority that Brandenburg, now next in size to Austria, was treated with the respect of an independent power, and the name of Hohenzollern began to shine bright even beside that of Hapsburg.