In the history of three of the great countries of Europe, France, England, and Spain, the fifteenth century marks a |Disunion and weakness of Germany.| decisive epoch in the growth both of national unity and of monarchical government. In France the civil strife of Armagnacs and Burgundians and the long struggle against the English prepared the way for the rule of Charles VII. and Louis XI. In England the Wars of the Roses ended with the accession of a powerful Tudor dynasty. In Spain national sentiment was kindled by the anti-Moorish crusades, and the union of the chief kingdoms by the marriage of Ferdinand and Isabella led to the great expansion of Spain under the despotic rule of Charles I. and Philip II. The history of Germany resembles that of its neighbours up to a certain point. Anarchy and disorder were as conspicuous there as they were in France under Charles VI., or under Henry VI. in England. The schism which filled the first decade of the century both illustrated and increased the weakness and the degradation of the once powerful German monarchy. But in Germany no remedy was found for political and social disunion. No ruler arose with the strength and the resolution that were needed to transform a vague suzerainty into a territorial monarchy, as Charles IV. had schemed to do. On the contrary, there was a marked decline of imperial authority, which reached its nadir in the reign of Frederick III. The impulsive Sigismund had striven for a moment to revive the Ghibelline tradition, and he seemed to have made a considerable stride when, in 1415, he humbled the pride of Frederick of Tyrol, and rewarded the loyalty of Frederick of Hohenzollern with the electoral Mark of Brandenburg. But Sigismund’s imperial ambitions were bound up with the cause of the reforming party at Constance, and he was discouraged and disconcerted by its failure. From that time he abandoned the interests of Germany to devote himself to the affairs of Bohemia and Hungary. The party which had rallied round him at Constance, deserted by their natural leader, endeavoured to give to Germany a new central government which should take the place of the decadent monarchy. A series of ignominious defeats by the Hussites enabled them to carry through the diet some tentative reforms in 1427. There was to be a system of imperial taxation, an imperial army, and a standing representative council to wield the executive power which the emperors had allowed to fall from their hands. But the projected reforms ended in failure. The sense of nationality was not strong enough to overcome the selfish independence of states and classes. The two last crusades against the Bohemians were even more humiliating to Germany than their predecessors.
That the disunion of Germany was a source of many evils and of serious dangers was apparent even to the proverbial blindness of contemporaries. The dependence of Italy had become the merest name. Even Milan, which under the Visconti was most closely connected with Germany, was about to pass to the Sforzas, who did not think it worth while even to apply for imperial investiture. North of the Alps, Lyons and Dauphiné had long been absorbed by France. Provence and Lorraine were in the hands of a French dynasty, and before the end of the century the former had been acquired by the French crown. Savoy was more independent of France, but hardly more closely tied to Germany. The Old League of High Germany, as the Swiss confederation was then called, had paraded devotion to the empire as a means of resisting the claims of the Hapsburgs, but the cantons really desired freedom from all external control, and by the end of the century they had practically acquired it. Franche-Comté was ruled by a Valois duke of Burgundy, Philip the Good, who was absorbing one after the other a number of imperial fiefs in the Low Countries. The Scandinavian kingdoms, strengthened for a time by the union of Kalmar, were beginning to recover their previous losses, and the Hanseatic League, the champion of German interests in the Baltic and the North Sea, was no longer at the height of its power. In the north-east, the Teutonic knights had been fatally weakened by the union of Poland and Lithuania, and since the battle of Tannenberg in 1410 were waging what seemed to be a hopeless struggle against the powerful Jagellon kings. The danger of a general Slav revolt against German encroachments had been brought even more nearly home to the princes of Germany by the long Bohemian war. It is true that the extreme Hussites had been defeated in 1434, but it was by their own countrymen; and the sentiment of national independence, which was necessarily anti-German, was almost as strong as ever. And in the south-east a new and far more terrible danger was approaching. The Turks had already established themselves in the Balkan peninsula, and threatened to sweep up the Danube valley. Hungary was the only substantial guard to the German frontier; and if Hungarian resistance failed, it was hardly likely that the German troops, impotent to crush the ill-armed followers of Ziska, would be able to resist the all-conquering Janissaries.
Losses on the extremities were the inevitable result of weakness at the centre. But although this weakness continued, Germany escaped from some of the extreme disasters which seemed almost inevitable. It is possible that a too vigorous attempt to bring about a compulsory union might have broken the state up into its component parts, and Germany, like Italy, might have become a mere geographical expression. That this complete disruption was avoided, and that Germany retained at any rate some symbols of unity, may be attributed, partly to the very looseness of the federal tie, which was so little felt that it was hardly worth while to make an effort for its rupture, and partly to the extraordinary series of events which enabled a single family, the House of Hapsburg, to obtain a sort of hereditary primacy within Germany. In view of the danger threatened by Slavs and Turks, it was of supreme importance that Germany should retain its hold upon the border states of Bohemia and Hungary, which had been gained by Sigismund. But with Sigismund’s death in 1437 the male line of the House of Luxemburg became extinct, and the family was only represented by two women—Sigismund’s own daughter, Elizabeth, who was married to Albert V. of Austria, and his niece, another Elizabeth, the widow of Antony of Brabant.
Although Albert of Austria might claim through his wife the succession to the Luxemburg inheritance, the most |The House of Hapsburg.| sanguine of contemporary observers could hardly have foretold that the Hapsburgs would bring even partial salvation to Germany. Since the first great expansion of the family under Rudolf I. and his immediate successors, its power and prestige had sensibly diminished. This had been caused, partly by defeats at the hands of the Swiss, and partly by the subdivision of Hapsburg territories effected in 1370 between the two brothers, Albert III. and Leopold III. (see p. [137]). Albert had taken the archduchy of Austria, and Leopold the other territories of the House—the Swabian lands, Styria, Carinthia, Carniola, and Tyrol. The Albertine line in Austria had been continued by the successive rulers Albert IV. (d. 1404) and Albert V. The history of the Leopoldine line had been less simple. Leopold himself had fallen in 1386 in the famous battle of Sempach, and had left his dominions to the joint rule of four sons—William, Leopold, Ernest, and Frederick. But the first precedent of subdivision was again followed, and in the end the two surviving sons, Ernest and Frederick, shared the inheritance between them. Ernest, the founder of the Styrian, and ultimately the dominant, branch of the House, was called ‘the Iron’ on account of his physical strength, and his marriage with Cymburga, a niece of the Polish king, is said to have brought the famous Hapsburg lip into the family. On his death in 1424 his two sons, Frederick and Albert, succeeded as joint rulers to Styria, Carinthia, and Carniola. Meanwhile Frederick, who had received Tyrol and the Swabian lands, had played a prominent part in the early stages of the Council of Constance, and his territories had been confiscated by Sigismund in 1415. But the imperial authority was not strong enough to make the penalty permanent, and in 1417 Frederick recovered his dominions with the approval and aid of his subjects. He lived till 1439, when he left a young son, Sigismund, to succeed him.
The death of the Emperor Sigismund gave rise to three problems of considerable magnitude. It extinguished a dynasty which had held the imperial crown for |Succession in Hungary and Bohemia.| nearly a whole century, and it opened the succession in two kingdoms which were of supreme importance to Germany in her relations with the Slavs on one hand and with the Turks on the other. The House of Luxemburg had built up a unique territorial power on the eastern frontier of the empire, and it was very doubtful if it could be retained by any other family. In Hungary little opposition was made to the accession of Albert V. of Austria, who had already won a reputation in the Turkish wars for valour and sagacity. But before his coronation he had to promise to refuse the imperial crown if it should be offered to him, a stipulation which shows how little the Hungarians valued the connection with Germany. In Bohemia, Albert had identified himself with the orthodox party, and could reckon on its support. But the Hussites, still a majority of the population, were resolutely opposed to him, not only on religious grounds, but also because his accession would continue the hated German domination, and his claim ran counter to their contention that the Bohemian crown was elective. The result was a renewal of civil war. Albert was accepted and crowned by his partisans, while the Hussites sought to gain the general support of the Slavs by offering the crown to Casimir, the brother of Ladislas of Poland.
Meanwhile the electors in Germany had to fill the imperial throne. The reforming party, which had been stirred to activity by the disasters of the Hussite war, was still in existence and still headed by Frederick of |Election of Albert II., 1338.| Hohenzollern. If they could control the election, it might be possible to return to the policy which Sigismund had pursued in his early years. Their desire was to choose a prince whose interests lay within Germany and not outside, and who would sacrifice any personal or family considerations for the general welfare. The candidate whom they put forward was Frederick of Hohenzollern himself, who had already given an example within Brandenburg of that reforming activity which was needed to put an end to the selfish and distracting divisions of Germany. But the majority of the German princes were little influenced by patriotic considerations. They valued independence far higher than unity. It was no grievance to them that Sigismund had neglected Germany since 1417, and had busied himself with affairs in Bohemia and Hungary. They turned their eyes to Albert V. of Austria, who seemed to occupy precisely the same position as Sigismund had held in his later years. His immediate objects lay so far outside the empire that he was not likely to interfere with princely independence, while the pursuit of his own interests in the east might indirectly render no small service to Germany. Another and perhaps decisive argument in Albert’s favour was that he had adopted that policy of neutrality in the struggle between Pope and Council which commended itself to most of the German princes. When the Electoral College met in March 1438, it was speedily evident that Albert had a secure majority in his favour, and Frederick of Brandenburg gracefully withdrew his candidature in order to allow the election to be unanimous. The election does not bulk very largely in either contemporary or later narrative, but it was really of quite decisive importance. Until the fall of the Holy Roman Empire in 1806, with the exception of one short interval in the eighteenth century, the Hapsburgs retained practically hereditary possession of the imperial crown. Under them Germany became a loose and ineffective federation, held together by tradition and habit and by the ascendency of a dynasty which showed remarkable astuteness and obstinacy in the pursuit of its own interests. The monarchy of the Ottos and the Hohenstaufen had ceased to exist, and the traditions of Ghibellinism became an anachronism after 1438. The choice in that year lay between a Hapsburg and a Hohenzollern; and it is of more than superficial interest to note that when the empire of the Hapsburgs had come to an end, when the evils of disunion had at last worked their own cure, the first attempt to revive German unity was the election of a Hohenzollern to the throne which the Hapsburgs had failed to fill.
Albert II., as he is called in the list of emperors, only accepted the proffered dignity with considerable reluctance, and was never able to visit Germany, even for the |Death of Albert II.| purpose of being crowned. His first occupation was to enforce his claim in Bohemia against his rival, the Polish prince Casimir. With the aid of a German force, Albert laid siege to Tabor, which was still the great Hussite stronghold. The besiegers were repulsed by a sally headed by a young Bohemian noble, George Podiebrad; and though Albert was more successful in Silesia, where there was a large German element in the population, the fate of Bohemia was still doubtful when he was called away by the news that the Turks had invaded Servia and were threatening Hungary. Leaving his representatives with instructions to patch up a truce with Poland, Albert hurried to meet this new danger. But he wholly failed to relieve Semendria, and his troops were decimated by dysentery contracted in the marshy valley of the Theiss. Albert himself was attacked by the disease, and hurried homeward in the hope of seeing his capital and his wife once more. On the way he learned that his cause in Bohemia was jeopardised by treachery, that the Council of Basel had revived the schism by electing Felix V. as anti-pope, and that the Turks were advancing upon Belgrad, the key of Hungary. At this crisis, when disaster or ruin seemed imminent from every side, Albert succumbed to disease just as he had reached the outskirts of Vienna (October 27, 1439). His death seemed to make the general confusion worse confounded. Not only was the empire again left without a head, but the recently-established connection of Austria with Hungary and Bohemia was dissolved before it had had time to gain any strength, and it was extremely doubtful whether it would ever be restored. The only children born to Albert and Elizabeth were two daughters, but Elizabeth was pregnant at the time of her husband’s death, and until the child was born any question of hereditary right must remain in abeyance. It will perhaps be clearer to consider the imperial election and the general history of Germany before turning to the tangled series of events which ensued in Albert’s personal dominions.
The election of 1438 was too recent for any marked change to have taken place in the balance of parties, and the principles which had then prevailed were re-affirmed |Election of Frederick III.| in 1440 with even greater emphasis. In choosing Albert the electors could argue with some force that they were giving the imperial office to the strongest candidate. Albert was the legitimate successor of the late emperor, and he was a powerful prince. Not only was he archduke of Austria, but he had been crowned king in Hungary and Bohemia, and though he was opposed in the latter country he had a better claim than his opponent. Moreover, his personal character and his past achievements commanded general respect. None of these arguments could be advanced in favour of Frederick of Styria, who was now brought forward by the electors who had supported Albert. In his father’s territories of Styria, Carinthia, and Carniola he was only joint ruler with his brother Albert. He was barely twenty-four years old, so that little was known of his character and abilities, but he had given no proof either of energy or capacity for affairs. But these considerations had no weight with men who desired only a King Log, and Frederick was chosen by five votes to two on February 2, 1440. The rival candidate was Lewis of Hesse, who was put forward and supported by Frederick of Brandenburg. Events had convinced the latter that in face of the jealous hostility of the house of Wettin neither he nor any member of his family had a chance of success.
His vote on this occasion was almost the last public act of the first Hohenzollern elector of Brandenburg, though he received one more proof of the esteem in which |Death of Frederick I. of Brandenburg.| he was held. A council of forty-seven was formed in this year to choose a new king for Bohemia. Ten votes were split among several candidates, while thirty-seven were given for Margrave Frederick. But he was too old and too weary to entertain any new ambitions, and the flattering offer was declined. On September 21, 1440, he died, leaving his territories to the joint rule of his four sons. For nearly fifty years, ever since he saved Sigismund’s life in the battle of Nicopolis, he had played a foremost part in German politics. He had met with failures as well as triumphs, but he had always secured respect, both for distinguished ability and for purity of motive. He was the last champion of the grand imperial traditions, which had really perished at the time of the Great Interregnum, though Henry VII. and, at one time, Sigismund had made an effort for their revival. It was fitting that Frederick should die in the year in which the ideas which he represented met with their final reverse. But he was much more than the champion of the mediæval past. He was the real creator of the modern state of Prussia, which has become the centre of a revived German nationality, and has thus succeeded to some extent in carrying out the schemes in the advancement of which its great founder spent his life.
Frederick III., who held the German crown for fifty-three years, was almost as inefficient a ruler as the drunken Wenzel, but his inaction was due rather to set purpose than |Character of Frederick III.| to incompetence. He is described by a German chronicler as handsome and well built, of quick intelligence but of placid spirit, fond above measure of peace and quiet. Even the labours of the chase were distasteful to him, and his chief delight was in architecture and the collection of precious stones. By many he was considered a coward. His acute contemporary, Philippe de Commines, calls him ‘the most perfectly niggardly man that ever lived.’ In another passage, however, Commines admits that his long experience of men had given him wisdom. This was quite true. Frederick had none of the energy and decision of a statesman who wishes to control the course of events. But he had the merit of self-control, and a cheery confidence that patience and delay would bring improvement, no matter how hopeless might seem the condition of affairs. His reputation for cowardice arose from his habit of evading difficulties when he felt unable to face them. Thus, in 1451, when he was threatened by a simultaneous rising in Austria and Styria, he left the rebels to do their worst, and hurried off to Italy to receive the imperial crown. In 1473 he had his famous interview at Trier with Charles the Bold, who desired to receive the royal title. Unwilling either to grant the request or to exasperate the duke by a direct refusal, the emperor escaped by night to Cologne. Such expedients were not very dignified, nor were they calculated to produce any great triumphs of statesmanship, but they were not ill suited to avoid fatal disasters. In Germany Frederick was threatened with reforms which should annul the royal power, and even with deposition, yet he succeeded in the end in defeating his opponents. In his hereditary dominions he suffered many humiliations; and at one time the greater part of Austria, including the capital, Vienna, had fallen into the hands of the Hungarians. But at the time of his death, Frederick left the house of Hapsburg infinitely more powerful than it had been at the time of his accession. The family territories, which had been subdivided since 1370, were gradually re-united in the hands of the Styrian line. And the marriage of his son Maximilian with Mary of Burgundy raised the Hapsburgs to be one of the great dynasties of Europe, and prepared the way for still greater pre-eminence in the future.