Wenceslaus proved himself the most cruel and vicious of mankind. He is said to have walked the streets with an executioner, to put to death such persons as incurred his dislike, to have drowned in the Moldau a monk who refused to reveal the confessions of his wife, the Queen of Bohemia, and even to have, in an hour of intoxication, ordered his cook to be roasted alive. The tyrant was, in consequence of his gross incapacity, deprived of the Imperial crown, which was given to Robert, the Count Palatine; and he, in his turn, was succeeded by Sigismund, brother of Wenceslaus, and King of Hungary.
Christendom was at that period scandalized by the great schism of the West, produced by the cardinals having elected three rival popes—each considering himself endowed with all the attributes which Hildebrand had claimed for the Vicar of Christ; and Sigismund, eager to settle the controversy, visited England to consult Henry V. But finding that hero wholly occupied with French wars, the Emperor returned, and in 1418 summoned the Council of Constance, which settled the dispute by degrading the three rivals and electing Martin V.
The new pontiff was installed by an imposing ceremony. Arrayed in pontifical vestments, he mounted a richly-caparisoned mule, which was led by the reins, with due solemnity, by the Emperor and the Elector of Brandenburg. A magnificent canopy was held over the Pope’s head by four Counts; several princes walked around; and forty thousand equestrians took part in the procession. The Council then went to more serious work, and summoned John Huss, a disciple of Wicliffe. Huss, after defending the articles of his faith, was declared a heretic, stripped of his sacerdotal habit, crowned with a mitre of paper, on which were painted three devils, and condemned to be burned with his writings. The victim died praising God, and was followed to the stake by Jerome of Prague.
When Sigismund went down to his tomb in 1436, his son-in-law, Albert of Austria, who inherited the crowns of Hungary and Bohemia, was raised to the Imperial throne; and after dividing Germany into six circles, each regulated by a Diet, he was succeeded by his cousin, Frederick III. At the beginning of this long and languid reign, while war was raging between the Turks and Hungarians, John Guttenberg invented at Strasburg the art of printing, which brought into operation the power of the pen; and that potent weapon being, on the revival of learning, directed first against spiritual, and then against temporal despotism, materially influenced those revolutions which have gradually removed ancient landmarks, and changed the face of Continental Europe.
Maximilian I succeeded his brother Frederick in 1493, and, to terminate the calamities created by private feuds, instituted, at the stately city of Frankfort, the Imperial Chamber, consisting of a president appointed by the Emperor, and sixteen judges, chosen by him and the States; and he prevailed on the Diet to consent to the Aulic Council as the Emperor’s Court, and without appeal. After wearing the crown with honor, and exhibiting much enthusiasm for science and literature, Maximilian, in 1519, disappeared from the stage of affairs on the eve of great events; and his grandson Charles, the juvenile King of Spain, who inherited Austria, became a candidate for the Imperial dignity. In this he was opposed by Francis I, whose ambassadors impressed upon the Electors the necessity of showing that the empire was not an heir-loom in the house of Austria; and the Electors, with whom it was a rule not to select any prince already occupying an important position, caring little for either candidate, laid the diadem at the feet of Frederick of Saxony, a man of great prudence and popularity. Frederick, however, declined the distinction, and recommended them to choose the King of Spain, who was accordingly elected on 28th June, 1520, and crowned at Aix-la-Chapelle in the following October.
Thirty-seven years before that important event, the wife of a miner, named Luther, (a worthy, studious, and stubborn man), had, in the little town of Eisleben, become the mother of a boy, who was named Martin, from having been born on St. Martin’s Eve. Removed in infancy to Mansfeld, on the banks of the Vipper, young Luther, while standing by his father’s forge, or accompanying his mother to gather fagots in the forest, indulged in the anticipation of becoming a scholar, and being sent, after some preparatory training, to Erfurt, he excited by his intellectual powers the admiration of the whole university. One day, while reading keenly in the library, he came upon a Latin copy of the Bible, the pages of which he perused with breathless interest; and resolving upon a monastic life, he entered the Convent of St. Augustine at the age of twenty-one. After spending three years in the cloister, Luther accepted a professorship in the University of Wittemberg, which Frederick, the Elector of Saxony, had founded. And in 1512 being sent as envoy to Rome, where Pope Julius then reigned, and his monastic illusions vanishing into air, he commenced his career as a Reformer, and was excommunicated by Leo X, who did not like his hunting, shooting, and fishing to be disturbed by heretics. Luther retaliated by publishing the ‘Babylonish Captivity;’ and the book being burned, he, in 1520, publicly committed to the flames the Pope’s bull and decretals.
The popular spirit in Germany was in Luther’s favor; for though, from the days of Louis of Bavaria, the Emperors had acknowledged the ascendancy of the Popes, the people had exhibited an increasing dislike to the yoke of Rome, and in 1512 the populace of the Rhenish provinces had displayed their discontent by forming the League of Shoes. Maximilian, it appears, had not manifested any dislike to the new faith; but Charles V had inherited enough of Spanish bigotry to decide his opinions, and in 1521 he summoned Luther to appear before the Diet of Worms, and answer for his doctrines. The bold Reformer soon arrived from Wittemberg in a wagon, defended himself with great spirit, and afterward escaped into Saxony, where, secured by his friend the Elector in the fortress of Wartberg, while branded by the Pope as ‘a viper of hell,’ he commenced his translation of the Bible. And matters did not rest here, for the mind of Europe was in agitation.
While, in England, Henry was attacking alike the Catholics and Protestants; while, in Scotland, Cardinal Beaton was feasting his eyes with the burning of heretics; while, in France, the brave and glory-loving Francis was sullying his fame by consenting to the villages of the Vaudois being converted into a desert waste; the Emperor Charles was by no means indifferent to the interest of the Romish Church within the Imperial dominions. And when freed by the death of his impetuous rival from apprehensions of war, he gained, at Muhlberg, a victory over the Confederates at Smalcalde, which placed the venerable Frederick of Saxony in his power. Strangely, at that crisis, the Lutherans turned for aid to Henry II of France, who, though bent on persecution at home, on certain conditions proclaimed himself their champion. But ere his services could be rendered, Maurice of Saxony, to whom Charles had given the Electorate, preferring to be a chief of the Protestants to figuring as the Emperor’s creature, after much dissimulation marched on Inspruck, and almost succeeded in capturing Charles, who, after escaping over the Alps in a litter, sick and solitary, signed the Convention of Passau, which was converted into a definitive peace in 1552—the era of religious liberty in Germany.
At the close of this war, weary of the world, the great Emperor, having previously abdicated the Spanish throne in favor of his son Philip, resigned the Imperial crown to his brother Ferdinand, king of the Romans. After a reign of eight years, that prince was succeeded by his son, Maximilian II, who died in 1596, while preparing to support his election as King of Poland.
Rodolph II, son of Maximilian, was so entirely devoted to the study of astronomy and astrology that he saw with indifference his dominions usurped by his brother Matthias, who, succeeding to the Empire in 1612, procured the election of his cousin Ferdinand to the thrones of Hungary and Bohemia. Both nations revolted, and the Hungarians were appeased; but Ferdinand was a pupil of the Jesuits, and the Bohemian Protestants, to whom he was obnoxious, advanced in arms to the gates of Vienna; and, while Matthias was on his dying bed, commenced that terrible conflict known in history as the Thirty Years’ War.