A History of the Reformation (Vol. 1 of 2)

by Thomas M. Lindsay

Germany, or the Empire, as it was called, included, in the days of the Reformation, the Low Countries in the north-west and most of what are now the Austro-Hungarian lands in the east. It was in a strange condition. On the one hand a strong popular sentiment for unity had arisen in all the German-speaking portions, and on the other the country was cut into sections and slices, and was more hopelessly divided than was Italy itself.

Nominally the Empire was ruled over by one supreme lord, with a great feudal assembly, the Diet, under him.

The Empire was elective, though for generations the rulers chosen had always been the heads of the House of Hapsburg, and since 1356 the election had been in the hands of seven prince-electors—three on the Elbe and four on the Rhine. On the Elbe were the King of Bohemia, the Elector of Saxony, and the Elector of Brandenburg; on the Rhine, the Count Palatine of the Rhine and the Archbishops of Mainz, Trier, and Köln.

This Empire, nominally one, and full of the strongest sentiments of unity, was hopelessly divided, and—for this was the peculiarity of the situation—all the elements making for peaceful government, which in countries like France or England supported the central power, were on the side of disunion.

A glance at the map of Germany in the times of the Reformation shows an astonishing multiplicity of separate principalities, ecclesiastical and secular, all the more bewildering that most of them appeared to be composed of patches lying separate from each other. Almost every ruling prince had to cross some neighbour's land to visit the outlying portions of his dominions. It must also be remembered that the divisions which can be represented on a map but faintly express the real state of things. The territories of the imperial cities—the lands outside the walls ruled by the civic fathers—were for the most part too small to figure on any map, and for the same reason [pg 036] the tiny principalities of the hordes of free nobles are also invisible. So we have to imagine all those little mediæval republics and those infinitesimal kingdoms camped on the territories of the great princes, and taking from them even the small amount of unity which the map shows.

The greater feudal States, Electoral and Ducal Saxony, Brandenburg, Bavaria, the Palatinate, Hesse, and many others, had meetings of their own Estates,—Councils of subservient nobles and lawyers,—their own Supreme Courts of Justice, from which there was no appeal, their own fiscal system, their own finance and coinage, and largely controlled their clergy and their relations to powers outside Germany. Their princes, hampered as they were by the great Churchmen, thwarted continually by the town republics, defied by the free nobles, were nevertheless actual kings, and profited by the centralising tendencies of the times. They alone in Germany represented settled central government, and attracted to themselves the smaller units lying outside and around them.

Yet with all these divisions, having their roots deep down in the past, there was pervading all classes of society, from princes to peasants, the sentiment of a united Germany, and no lack of schemes to convert the feeling into fact. The earliest practical attempts began with the union of German Churchmen at Constance and the scheme for a National Church of Germany; and the dream of ecclesiastical unity brought in its train the aspiration after political oneness.

The practical means proposed to create a German national unity over lands which stretched from the Straits of Dover to the Vistula, and from the Baltic to the Adriatic, were the proclamation of a universal Land's Peace, forbidding all internecine war between Germans; the establishment of a Supreme Court of Justice to decide quarrels within the Empire; a common coinage, and a common Customs Union. To bind all more firmly together there was needed a Common Council or governing body, which, under the Emperor, should determine the Home [pg 037] and Foreign Policy of the Empire. The only authorities which could create a governmental unity of this kind were the Emperor on the one hand and the great princes on the other, and the two needed to be one in mutual confidence and in intention. But that is what never happened, and all through the reign of Maximilian and in the early years of Charles we find two different conceptions of what the central government ought to be—the one oligarchic and the other autocratic. The princes were resolved to keep their independence, and their plans for unity always implied a governing oligarchy with serious restraint placed on the power of the Emperor; while the Emperors, who would never submit to be controlled by an oligarchy of German princes, and who found that they could not carry out their schemes for an autocratic unity, were at least able to wreck any other.

The German princes have been accused of preferring the security and enlargement of their dynastic possessions to the unity of the Empire, but it can be replied that in doing so they only followed the example set them by their Emperors. Frederick iii., Maximilian, and Charles v. invariably neglected imperial interests when they clashed with the welfare of the family possessions of the House of Hapsburg. When Maximilian inherited the imperial Burgundian lands, a fief of the Empire, through his marriage with Mary, the heiress of Charles the Bold, he treated the inheritance as part of the family estates of his House. The Tyrol was absorbed by the House of Hapsburg when the Swabian League prevented Bavaria seizing it (1487). The same fate fell on the Duchy of Austria when Vienna was recovered, and on Hungary and Bohemia; and when Charles v. got hold of Würtemberg on the outlawry of Duke Ulrich, it, too, was detached from the Empire and absorbed into the family possessions of the Hapsburgs. There was, in short, a persistent policy pursued by three successive Emperors, of despoiling the Empire in order to increase the family possessions of the House to which they belonged.

The last attempt to give a constitutional unity to the German Empire was made at the Diet of Worms (1521)—the Diet before which Luther appeared. There the Emperor, Charles V., agreed to accept a Reichsregiment, which was in all essential points, though differing in some details, the same as his grandfather Maximilian had proposed to the Diet of 1495. The Central Council was composed of a President and four members appointed by the Emperor, six Electors (the King of Bohemia being excluded), who might sit in person or by deputies, and twelve members appointed by the rest of the Estates. The cities were not represented. This Reichsregiment was to govern all German lands, including Austria and the Netherlands, but excluding Bohemia. Switzerland, hitherto nominally within the Empire, formally withdrew and ceased to form part of Germany. The central government needed funds to carry on its work, and especially to provide an army to enforce its decisions; and various schemes for raising the money required were discussed at its earlier meetings. It was resolved at last to raise the necessary funds by imposing a tax of four per cent. on all imports and exports, and to establish custom-houses on all the frontiers. The practical effect of this was to lay the whole burden of taxation upon the mercantile classes, or, in other words, to make the cities, who were not represented in the Reichsregiment, pay for the whole of the central government. This Reichsregiment was to be simply a board of advice, without any decisive control so long as the Emperor was in Germany. When he was absent from the country it had an independent power of government. But all important decisions had to be confirmed by the absent Emperor, who, for his part, promised to form no foreign leagues involving Germany without the consent of the Council.