§ 2. Geographical Discoveries and the beginning of a World Trade.
The fifteenth century from its beginning had seen one geographical discovery after another. Perhaps we may say that the sailors of Genoa had begun the new era by reaching the Azores and Madeira. Then Dom Henrique of Portugal, Governor of Ceuta, organised voyages of trade and discovery down the coast of Africa. Portuguese, Venetian, and Genoese captains commanded his vessels. From 1426, expedition after expedition was sent forth, and at his death in 1460 the coast of Africa as far as Guinea had been explored. His work was carried on by his countrymen. The Guinea trade in slaves, gold, and ivory was established as early as 1480; the Congo was reached in 1484; and Portuguese ships, under Bartholomew Diaz, rounded the Cape of Good Hope in 1486. During these later years a new motive had prompted the voyages of exploration. The growth of the [pg 085] Turkish power in the east of Europe had destroyed the commercial colonies and factories on the Black Sea; the fall of Constantinople had blocked the route along the valley of the Danube; and Venice had a monopoly of the trade with Egypt and Syria, the only remaining channels by which the merchandise from the East reached Europe. The great commercial problem of the times was how to get some hold of the direct trade with the East. It was this that inspired Bristol skippers, familiar with Iceland, with the idea that by following old Norse traditions they might find a path by way of the North Atlantic; that sent Columbus across the Mid-Atlantic to discover the Bahamas and the continent of America; and that drove the more fortunate Portuguese round the Cape of Good Hope. Young Vasco da Gama reached the goal first, when, after doubling the Cape, he sailed up the eastern coast of Africa, reached Mombasa, and then boldly crossed the Indian Ocean to Calicut, the Indian emporium for that rich trade which all the European nations were anxious to share. The possibilities of a world commerce led to the creation of trading companies; for a larger capital was needed than individual merchants possessed, and the formation of these companies overshadowed, discredited, and finally destroyed the gild system of the mediæval trading cities. Trade and industry became capitalised to a degree previously unknown. One great family of capitalists, the Welser, had factories in Rome, Milan, Genoa, and Lyons, and tapped the rich Eastern trade by their houses in Antwerp, Lisbon, and Madeira. They even tried, unsuccessfully, to establish a German colony on the new continent—in Venezuela. Another, the Fuggers of Augsburg, were interested in all kinds of trade, but especially in the mining industry. It is said that the mines of Thuringia, Carinthia, and the Tyrol within Germany, and those of Hungary and Spain outside it, were almost all in their hands. The capital of the family was estimated in 1546 at sixty-three millions of gulden. This increase of wealth does not seem to have [pg 086] been confined to a few favourites of fortune. It belonged to the mass of the members of the great trading companies. Von Bezold instances a “certain native of Augsburg” whose investment of 500 gulden in a merchant company brought him in seven years 24,500 gulden. Merchant princes confronted the princes of the State and those of the Church, and their presence and power dislocated the old social relations. The towns, the abodes of these rich merchants, acquired a new and powerful influence among the complex of national relations, until it is not too much to say, that if the political future of Germany was in the hands of the secular princes, its social condition came to be dominated by the burgher class.
§ 3. Increase in Wealth and luxurious Living.
Culture, which had long abandoned the cloisters, came to settle in the towns. We have already seen that they were the centres of German Humanism and of the New Learning. The artists of the German Renaissance belonged to the towns, and their principal patrons were the wealthy burghers. The rich merchants displayed their civic patriotism in aiding to build great churches; in erecting magnificent chambers of commerce, where merchandise could be stored, with halls for buying and selling, and rooms where the merchants of the town could consult about the interests of the civic trade; in building Artushöfe or assembly rooms, where the patrician burghers had their public dances, dinners, and other kinds of social entertainments; in raising great towers for the honour of the town. They built magnificent private houses. Æneas Sylvius tells us that in Nürnberg he saw many burgher houses that befitted kings, and that the King of Scotland was not as nobly housed as a Nürnberg burgher of the second rank. They filled these dwellings with gold and silver plate, and with costly Venetian glass; their furniture was adorned with delicate wood-carving; costly tapestries, paintings, and engravings [pg 087] decorated the walls; and the reception-room or stube was the place of greatest display. The towns in which all this wealth was accumulated were neither populous nor powerful. They cannot be compared with the city republics of Italy, where the town ruled over a large territory: the lands belonging to the imperial cities of Germany were comparatively of small extent. Nor could they boast of the population of the great cities of the Netherlands. Nürnberg, it is said, had a population of a little over 20,000 in the middle of the fifteenth century. Strassburg, a somewhat smaller one. The population of Frankfurt-on-the-Main was about 10,000 in 1440.[49] The number of inhabitants had probably increased by one-half more in the decades immediately preceding the Reformation. But all the great towns, with their elaborate fortifications, handsome buildings, and massive towers, had a very imposing appearance in the beginning of the sixteenth century.
There was, however, another side to all this. There was very little personal “comfort” and very little personal refinement among the rich burghers and nobles of Germany—much less than among the corresponding classes in Italy, the Netherlands, and France. The towns were badly drained, if drained at all; the streets were seldom paved, and mud and filth accumulated in almost indescribable ways; the garbage was thrown out of the windows; and troops of swine were the ordinary scavengers. The increase of wealth showed itself chiefly in all kinds of sensual living. Preachers, economists, and satirists denounce the luxury and immodesty of the dress both of men and women, the gluttony and the drinking habits of the rich burghers and of the nobility of Germany. We learn from Hans von Schweinichen that noblemen prided themselves on having men among their retainers who could drink all rivals [pg 088] beneath the table, and that noble personages seldom met without such a drinking contest.[50] The wealthy, learned, and artistic city of Nürnberg possessed a public waggon, which every night was led through the streets to pick up and convey to their homes drunken burghers found lying in the filth of the streets. The Chronicle of the Zimmer Family relates that at the castle of Count Andrew of Sonnenberg, at the conclusion of a carnival dance and after the usual “sleeping drink” had been served round, one of the company went to the kennels and carried to the ball-room buckets of scraps and slops gathered to feed the hounds, and that the lords and ladies amused themselves by flinging the contents at each other, “to the great detriment,” the chronicler adds, “of their clothes and of the room.”[51] A like licence pervaded the relations between men and women, of which it will perhaps suffice to say that the public baths, where, be it noted, the bathing was often promiscuous, were such that they served Albert Dürer and other contemporary painters the purpose of a “life school” to make drawings of the nude.[52] The conversation and behaviour of the nobles and wealthy burghers of Germany in the decades before the Reformation displayed a coarseness which would now be held to disgrace the lowest classes of the population in any country.[53]
The gradual capitalising of industry had been sapping the old “gild” organisation within the cities; the extension of commerce, and especially the shifting of the centre of external trade from Venice to Antwerp, in consequence of the discovery of the new route to the Eastern markets, and [pg 089] above all, the growth of the great merchant companies, whose world-trade required enormous capital, overshadowed the “gilds” and destroyed their influence. The rise and power of this capitalist order severed the poor from the rich, and created, in a sense unknown before, a proletariat class within the cities, which was liable to be swollen by the influx of discontented and ruined peasants from the country districts. The corruption of morals, which reached its height in the city life of the first quarter of the sixteenth century, intensified the growing hatred between the rich burgher and the poor workman. The ostentatious display of burgher wealth heightened the natural antipathy between merchant and noble. The universal hatred of the merchant class is a pronounced feature of the times. “They increase prices, make hunger, and slay the poor folk,” was a common saying. Men like Ulrich von Hutten were prepared to justify the robber-knights because they attacked the merchants, who, he said, were ruining Germany. Yet the merchant class increased and flourished, and with them, the towns which they inhabited.
§ 4. The Condition of the Peasantry.
The condition of the peasantry in Germany has also to be described. The folk who practise husbandry usually form the most stable element in any community, but they could not avoid being touched by the economic movements of the time. The seeds of revolution had long been sown among the German peasantry, and peasant risings had taken place in different districts of south-central Europe from the middle of the fourteenth down to the opening years of the sixteenth centuries. It is difficult to describe accurately the state of these German peasants. The social condition of the nobles and the burghers has had many an historian, and their modes of life have left abundant traces in literature and archæology; but peasant houses and implements soon perished, and the chronicles seldom refer to the world to which the [pg 090] “land-folk” belonged, save when some local peasant rising or the tragedy of the Peasants' War thrust them into history. Our main difficulty, however, does not arise so much from lack of descriptive material—for that can be found when diligently sought for—as from the varying, almost contradictory statements that are made. Some contemporary writers condescend to describe the peasant class. A large number of collections of Weisthümer, the consuetudinary laws which regulated the life of the village communities, have been recovered and carefully edited;[54] folk-songs preserve the old life and usages; many of the Fastnachtspiele or rude carnival dramas deal with peasant scenes; and Albert Dürer and other artists of the times have sketched over and over again the peasant, his house and cot-yard, his village and his daily life. We can, in part, reconstruct the old peasant life and its surroundings. Only it must be remembered that the life varied not only in different parts of Germany, but in the same districts and decades under different rural proprietors; for the peasant was so dependent on his over-lord that the character of the proprietor counted for much in the condition of the people.