It would not have been strange if so shadowy an Empire had been brought altogether to an end. Some slight bond of connexion was, however, necessary for defence against common dangers; and the Empire had existed so long, Continuance of the empire. and so many great associations were connected with it, that it seemed to all parties preferable to any other form of union. Moreover, Sweden, and other states which were now members of the Empire, warmly supported it; and the house of Habsburg, on which it reflected a certain splendour, would not willingly have let it die. An Austrian ruler, even when he spoke only in the name of Austria, derived authority from the fact that as emperor he represented many of the greatest memories of European history.
The effect of the Thirty Years’ War on the national life was disastrous. It had not been carried on by disciplined armies, but by hordes of adventurers whose sole object was plunder. The cruelties they inflicted on their victims National life. are almost beyond conception. Before the war the population was nearly twenty millions; after it the number was probably about six millions. Whole towns and villages were laid in ashes, and vast districts turned into deserts. Churches and schools were closed by hundreds, and to such straits were the people often reduced that cannibalism is said to have been not uncommon. Industry and trade were so completely paralysed that in 1635 the Hanseatic League was virtually broken up, because the members, once so wealthy, could not meet the necessary expenditure. The population was not only impoverished and reduced in numbers but broken in spirit. It lost confidence in itself, and for a time effected in politics, literature, art and science little that is worthy of serious study.
The princes knew well how to profit by the national prostration. The local diets, which, as we have seen, formed a real check on petty tyranny, and kept up an intimate relation between the princes and their subjects, were nearly The princes. all destroyed. Those which remained were injurious rather than beneficial, since they often gave an appearance of lawfulness to the caprices of arbitrary sovereigns. After the Thirty Years’ War it became fashionable for the heirs of principalities to travel, and especially to spend some time at the court of France. Here they readily imbibed the ideas of Louis XIV., and in a short time nearly every petty court in Germany was a feeble imitation of Versailles. Before the Reformation, and even for some time after it, the princes were thorough Germans in sympathies and habits; they now began to be separated by a wide gulf from their people. Instead of studying the general welfare, they wrung from exhausted states the largest possible revenue to support a lavish and ridiculous expenditure. The pettiest princeling had his army, his palaces, his multitudes of household officers; and most of them pampered every vulgar appetite without respect either to morality or to decency. Many nobles, whose lands had been wasted during the war, flocked to the little capitals to make their way by contemptible court services. Beneath an outward gloss of refinement these nobles were, as a class, coarse and selfish, and they made it their chief object to promote their own interests by fostering absolutist tendencies. Among the people there was no public opinion to discourage despotism; the majority accepted their lot as inevitable, and tried rather to reproduce than to restrain the vices of their rulers. Even the churches offered little opposition to the excesses of persons in authority, and in many instances the clergy, both Protestant and Catholic, acquired an unenviable notoriety for their readiness to overlook or condone actions The cities. which outraged the higher sentiments of humanity. In the free imperial cities there was more manliness of tone than elsewhere, but there was little of the generous rivalry among the different classes which had once raised them to a high level of prosperity. Most of them resigned their liberties into the hands of oligarchies, and others allowed themselves to be annexed by ambitious princes.
(A. W. H.*)
Ferdinand III. succeeded to the throne when the fortunes of his house were at a low ebb, and he continued the Thirty Years’ War, not in the hope of re-establishing the Roman Catholic religion or of restoring the imperial Ferdinand III.
Leopold I. authority, but of remedying as far as he could the havoc caused by his father’s recklessness. After the conclusion of peace nothing happened to make his reign memorable. His son Leopold I. was a man of narrow intellect and feeble will; yet Germany seldom so keenly felt the need of a strong emperor, for she had during two generations to contend with a watchful and grasping rival. For more than a century it had been the policy of France to strengthen herself by fostering the internal dissensions of Germany. This was now easy, and Louis XIV. made unscrupulous use of the advantages his predecessors had helped to gain for Louis XIV. of France. him. Germany, as a whole, could not for a long time be induced to resist him. His schemes directly threatened the independence of the princes; but they were too indolent to unite against his ambition. They grudged even the contributions necessary for the maintenance of the frontier fortresses, and many of them stooped to accept the bribes he offered them on condition that they should remain quiet. In his war with the United Provinces and Spain, begun in 1672, he was opposed by the emperor as ruler of Austria, and by Frederick William, the elector of Brandenburg; and in 1675 the latter gained a splendid victory at Fehrbellin over his allies, the Swedes. At the end of the war, in 1678, by the peace of Nijmwegen, Louis took care that Frederick William should be deprived of the fruits of his victory, and Austria had to resign Freiburg im Breisgau to the French. Under the pretence that when France gained the Austrian lands in Alsace she also acquired a right to all places that had ever been united to them, Louis began a series of systematic robberies of German towns and territories. “Chambers of Reunion” were appointed to give an appearance of legality to these proceedings, which culminated, in 1681, in the seizure of Strassburg. Germans of all states and ranks were indignant at so gross a humiliation, but even the loss of Strassburg did not suffice to move the diet. The emperor himself might probably have interfered, but Louis had provided him with ample employment by stirring up against him the Hungarians and the Turks. So complete was his hold over the majority of the princes that when the Turks, in 1683, surrounded Vienna, and appeared not unlikely to advance into the heart of Germany, they looked on indifferently, and allowed the emperor to be saved by the promptitude and courage of John Sobieski, king of Poland. At last, when, in 1689, on the most frivolous pretext, Louis poured into southern Germany armies which were guilty of shameful outrages, a number of princes came forward and aided the emperor. This time France was sternly opposed by the league of which William III. of England was the moving spirit; and although at the end of the war he kept Strassburg, he had to give up Freiburg, Philipsburg, Breisach, and the places he War of Spanish Succession. had seized because of their former connexion with Alsace. In the War of the Spanish Succession two powerful princes, the elector of Bavaria and the elector of Cologne, joined Louis; but as the states of the Empire declared war against him in 1702, the other princes, more or less loyally, supported the emperor and his allies. Leopold died during the progress of this war, but it was vigorously continued by his son Joseph I.
Joseph’s brother and successor, Charles VI., also went on with it; and such were the blows inflicted on France by the victories of Blenheim, Ramillies and Malplaquet that the war was generally expected to end in her utter discomfiture. Charles VI. But the conclusion of the treaty of Utrecht by England, in 1713, so limited the military power of Charles VI. that he was obliged to resign the claims of Austria to the Spanish throne, and to content himself with the Spanish Netherlands, Milan, Naples and Sardinia. He cared so little for Germany, as distinguished from Austria, that he allowed Louis to compel the diet to cede the imperial fortress of Landau. At a later stage in his reign he was guilty of an act of even grosser selfishness; for after the War of the Polish Succession, in which he supported the claims of Augustus III., elector of Saxony, he yielded Lorraine to Stanislaus Leszczynski, whose claims had been defended by France, and through whom France ultimately secured this beautiful German Pragmatic sanction. province. Having no son, Charles drew up in 1713 the pragmatic sanction, which ordained that, in the event of an Austrian ruler being without male heirs, his hereditary lands and titles should pass to his nearest female relative. The aim of his whole policy was to secure for this measure, which was proclaimed as a fundamental law in 1724, the approval of Europe; and by promises and threats he did at last obtain the guarantee of the states of the Empire and the leading European powers.
Germany was now about to be aroused from the torpor into which she had been cast by the Thirty Years’ War; but her awakening was due, not to the action of the Empire, which was more and more seen to be practically dead, Growth of Prussia. but to the rivalry of two great German states, Austria and Prussia. The latter had long been laying the foundations of her power. Brandenburg, the centre of the Prussian kingdom, was, as we have seen, granted in the 15th century by the emperor Sigismund to Frederick, count of Hohenzollern. In his hands, and in those of his prudent successors, it became one of the most flourishing of the North-German principalities. At the time of the Reformation Albert, a member of a subordinate branch of the house of Hohenzollern, happened to be grand master of the Teutonic Order. He became a Protestant, dissolved the order, and received in fief of the king of Poland the duchy of Prussia. In 1611 this duchy fell by inheritance to the elector of Brandenburg, and by the treaty of Wehlau, in 1657, in the time of Frederick William, the Great Elector, it was declared independent of Poland. By skill, foresight and courage Frederick William managed to add largely to his territories; and in an age of degenerate sovereigns he was looked upon as an almost model ruler. His son, Frederick, aspired to royal dignity, and in 1701, having obtained the emperor’s assent, was crowned king of Prussia. The extravagance of Frederick drained the resources of his state, but this was amply atoned for by the rigid economy of Frederick William I., who not only paid off the debts accumulated by his father, but amassed an enormous treasure. He so Maria Theresa. organized all branches of the public service that they were brought to a point of high efficiency, and his army was one of the largest, best appointed and best trained in Europe (see [Prussia]: History). He died in 1740, and within six months, when Frederick II. was on the Prussian throne, Maria Theresa claimed, in virtue of the pragmatic sanction, the lands and hereditary titles of her father Charles VI.
Frederick II., a young, ambitious and energetic sovereign, longed not only to add to his dominions but to play a great part in European politics. His father had guaranteed the pragmatic sanction, but as the conditions on which the guarantee had Frederick the Great.
First Silesian War. been granted had not been fulfilled by Charles VI., Frederick did not feel bound by it, and revived some old claims of his family on certain Silesian duchies. Maria Theresa would not abate her rights, but before she could assert them Frederick had entered Silesia and made himself master of it. Meanwhile, the elector of Bavaria had come forward and disputed Maria Theresa’s right to the succession, and the elector of Saxony had also put in a claim to the Austrian lands. Taking advantage of these disputes, France formed an alliance with the two electors and with the king of Prussia against Austria; and in the war which followed the allies were at first so successful that the elector of Bavaria, through the influence of France, was crowned emperor as Charles VII. (1742-1745). Maria Theresa, a woman of a noble and undaunted spirit, appealed, with her infant son, afterwards Joseph II., Charles VII.
Second Silesian War. in her arms, to the Hungarian diet, and the enthusiastic Magyars responded chivalrously to her call. To be more at freedom she concluded peace with Frederick, and ceded Silesia to him, although greatly against her will. Saxony also was pacified and retired from the struggle. After this Maria Theresa, supported by England, made way so rapidly and so triumphantly that Frederick became alarmed for his new possessions; and in 1742 he once more proclaimed war against her, nominally in aid of the emperor, Charles VII. Ultimately, in 1748, she was able to conclude an honourable peace at Aix-la-Chapelle; but she had been forced, as before, to rid herself of Frederick by confirming him in the sovereignty of the territory he had seized.
After the death of Charles VII., Francis, grand duke of Tuscany, Maria Theresa’s husband, was elected emperor. Francis I. (1745-1765), an amiable nonentity, with the instincts of a shopkeeper, made no pretence of discharging Francis I. important imperial duties, and the task of ruling the hereditary possessions of the house of Habsburg fell wholly to the empress-queen. She executed it with discretion and vigour, so that Austria in her hands was known to be one of the most formidable powers in the world. Her rival, Frederick II., was, if possible, still more active. It did not occur to him, any more than to the other German sovereigns of the 18th century, to associate his people with him in the government of the country; he was in every respect a thoroughly absolute sovereign. But he shared the highest ideas of the age respecting the responsibilities of a king, and throughout his long reign acted in the main faithfully as “the first servant of the state.” The army he always kept in readiness for war; but he also encouraged peaceful arts, and diffused throughout his kingdom so much of his own alert and aggressive spirit that the Prussians became more intelligent and more wealthy than they had ever before been. He excited the admiration of the youth of Germany, and it was soon the fashion among the petty princes to imitate his methods of government. As a rule, they succeeded only in raising far larger armies than the taxpayers could afford to maintain.
Maria Theresa never gave up the hope of winning back Silesia, and, in order to secure this object, she laid aside the jealousies of her house, and offered to conclude an alliance with France. Frederick had excited the envy of surrounding sovereigns, and had embittered them against him by stinging sarcasms. Not only France, therefore, but Russia, Saxony and ultimately Sweden, willingly came to terms with Austria, and the aim of their union was nothing short of the partition of Prussia. The Seven Years’ War, 1756-1763. Frederick, gaining knowledge of the plot, turned to England, which had in the previous war helped Austria. At the close of 1755 his offer of an alliance was acceded to; and in the following year, hoping by vigorously taking the initiative to prevent his enemies from united action, he invaded Saxony, and began the Seven Years’ War (q.v.), the result of which was to confirm Prussia in the possession of Silesia.