It is probable that if Mainz, his country, had not been a free city, this young gentleman would have been unable to conceive or to carry into execution his invention. Despotism and superstition equally insist upon silence; they would have stifled the universal and resistless echo which genius was about to create for written words. Printing and liberty were both to spring from the same soil and the same climate.
Mainz, Strasburg, Worms, and other municipal towns on the Rhine, then governed themselves, under the suzerainty of the empire, as small federal republics, like Florence, Genoa, Venice, and the other states of Italy. The nobility warlike, the burgesses increasing in importance, and the laboring population vacillating between these two classes, who alternately oppressed and courted it, from time to time, here as everywhere, fought for supremacy. Outbursts of civil war, excited by vanity or interest, and in which the victory remained sometimes with the patricians, sometimes with the burgesses, and at others with the artisans, made them alternately victors, conquered, and proscribed. This is the history of all cities, of all republics, and of all empires. Mainz, was a miniature of Rome or Athens, only the proscribed party had not the sea to cross to escape from their country; they went outside the walls, and crossed the Rhine; those of Strasburg going to Mainz, and those of Mainz to Strasburg, to wait until their party recovered power, or until they were recalled by their fellow-citizens.
In these intestine struggles of Mainz, the young Gutenberg, himself a gentleman, and naturally fighting for the cause most holy in a son's eyes—that of his father—was defeated by the burgesses, and banished, with all the knights of his family, from the territory of Mainz. His mother and sisters alone remained there in possession of their property, as innocent victims on whom the faults of the nobility should not be visited. His first banishment was short, and peace was ratified by the return of the refugees. A vain quarrel about precedence in the public ceremonies on the occasion of the solemn entry of the Emperor Robert, accompanied by the Archbishop Conrad, into Mainz, refreshed the animosity of the two classes in 1420, and young Gutenberg, at the age of nineteen, under went his second exile.
The free city of Frankfort now offered itself as a mediator between the nobles and plebeians of Mainz, and procured their recall on condition of the governing magistracy being equally shared between the high classes and the burgesses. But Gutenberg, whether his valor in the civil war had rendered him more obnoxious and more hostile to the burgesses; whether his pride, fostered by the traditions of his race, could not submit patiently to an equality with plebeians; or whether, more probably, ten years of exile and study at Strasburg had already turned the bent of his thoughts to a nobler subject than the vain honors of a free city, refused to return to his country. His mother, who watched over her son's interest at Mainz, petitioned the republic to allow him to receive as a pension a small portion of the revenues of his confiscated possessions. The republic replied that the young patrician's refusal to return to his country was a declaration of war, and that the republic did not pay its enemies. Gutenberg, persisting in his voluntary exile and in his disdain, lived on the secret remittances of his mother.
But at Strasburg he already enjoyed so great a popularity for his disposition and his acquirements, that one day, when the chief magistrate of Mainz was passing the territory of Strasburg, he was arrested by the friends of Gutenberg, shut up in a castle, and did not recover his liberty until the city of Mainz had signed a treaty which restored the exile his patrimony. Thus this youth, the great tribune of the human mind, whose invention was destined to destroy forever the prejudices of race, and to restore, in after-times, liberty and civil equality to all the plebeians of the world, began his life, as yet unrecognized, at the head of the patrician party of his country, in these struggles between the privileged castes and the people. Fortune seemed to delight in the contrast. But Gutenberg's wisdom, increasing with his age, was afterward destined to reunite the people and nobility, who looked on each other as enemies.
The restoration of his goods allowed young Gutenberg to satisfy his literary, religious, and artistic tastes, by travelling from town to town to study monuments, and visit men of all conditions celebrated for their science, their art, or even their trade. The artisans of Germany then held nearly the same rank as the artists. It was at the time when the trades, scarcely known, were confused with the arts, and when the most humble professions produced their earliest masterpieces, which, on account of their novelty, were looked upon as prodigies. Gutenberg travelled alone, on foot, carrying a knapsack containing books and clothes, like a mere student visiting the schools, or a journeyman looking for a master. He thus went through the Rhenish provinces, Italy, Switzerland, Germany, and lastly, Holland, not without an object, like a man who lets his imagination wander at the caprice of his footsteps, but carrying everywhere with him a fixed idea, an unchanging will led by a presentiment. This guiding star was the thought of spreading the word of God and the Bible among a vaster number of souls.
Thus it was religion which, in this young wandering apostle, was seeking the soil wherein to sow a single seed, of which the fruit hereafter was to be a thousand various grains. It is the glory of printing that it was given to the world by religion, not by industry. Religious enthusiasm was alone worthy to give birth to the instrument of truth.
What mechanical processes Gutenberg may until then have revolved in his mind, remains unknown. Whatever they were, chance effaced them all, and brought him at once upon his great discovery. One day, at Haarlem, in Holland, the verger of the cathedral, named Lawrence Koster, with whom he had established friendly relations, showed him in the sacristy a Latin grammar, curiously wrought in engraved letters on a wooden board, for the instruction of the seminarists. Chance, that gratuitous teacher, had produced this approach to printing.