Upon his father’s death Conrad IV. was acknowledged by many as king in Germany, but in 1251 he went to Italy, where he was fully occupied in fighting against the enemies Conrad IV. of his house until his death in May 1254. The struggle to maintain the position of the Hohenstaufen in Italy was continued after this event; but in October 1268, by the execution of Conrad’s son Conradin, the family became extinct.
After Conrad’s death William of Holland received a certain allegiance, especially in the north of the country, and was recognized by the Rhenish cities which had just formed a league for mutual protection, a league which The interregnum. for a short time gave promise of great strength and usefulness. In January 1256, however, William was killed, and in the following year there was a double election for the German crown, Alphonso X., king of Castile, a grandson of Philip of Swabia, and Richard, earl of Cornwall, brother of the English king Henry III., being each chosen by parties of electors. Richard was crowned in May 1257, but the majority of his subjects were probably ignorant of his very name; Alphonso did not even visit the country over which he claimed to rule.
During the reign of Frederick II. Prussia was conquered for Christianity and civilization by the knights of the Teutonic Order, who here built up the state which was later, in association with Brandenburg, deeply to influence The Teutonic Order in Prussia. the course of history. This work was begun in 1230. Knights eager to win fame by engaging in the war against the heathen Prussians flocked hither from all lands; towns, Königsberg, Thorn, Kulm and others, were founded; and in alliance with the Brothers of the Sword, the order was soon pressing farther eastwards. Courland and Livonia were brought into subjection, and into these lands also Christian institutions were introduced and German settlers brought the arts of peace.
The age of the Hohenstaufen emperors is, in many respects, the most interesting in the medieval history of Germany. It was a period of great men and great ideas, of dramatic contrasts of character and opinion—on the one side Period of Hohenstaufen dynasty. a broad humanitarianism combined with a gay enjoyment of the world, on the other side an almost superhuman spirituality which sought its ideal in the rejection of all that the world could give. It saw the new-birth of poetry and of art; it witnessed the rise of the friars. The contest between Empire and Papacy was more than a mere struggle for supremacy between two world-powers; it was a war to the death between two fundamentally opposite conceptions of life, which in many respects anticipated and prepared the way for the Renaissance and the Reformation. The emperor Frederick II. himself stands out as the type of the one tendency; Innocent III., Francis of Assisi and Dominic, in their various degrees, are types of the other. Frederick himself, of course, was Italian rather than German, akin to the despots of the Renaissance in his many-sided culture, his tolerant scepticism and his policy of “cruelty well applied.” The culture of which he was the supreme representative, that of Italy and of Provence, took a more serious shade when it penetrated into Germany. The German Minnesinger and romance-writers, whose golden age corresponded with that of the Hohenstaufen, were not content only to sing the joy of life or the chivalrous virtues of courage, courtesy and reverence for women; they in some sort anticipated the underlying ideas of the Reformation by championing the claims of the German nation against the papal monarchy and pure religion, as they conceived it, against the arrogance and corruption of the clergy. In them the medieval lay point of view became articulate, finding perhaps its most remarkable expression in the ideas of religious toleration proclaimed by Walther von der Vogelweide and Wolfram von Eschenbach. In Germany, as elsewhere, the victory of the Papacy was the victory of obscurantism. German culture, after a short revival, perished once more amid the smoke of the fires kindled by Conrad of Marburg and his fellow inquisitors.
In architecture, as in literature, this period was also one of great achievement in Germany. Of the noble palaces which it produced the castle of the Wartburg (q.v.) remains a perfect specimen, while the many magnificent churches dating from this time that still survive, prove the taste, wealth and piety of the burghers. For the science of government, too, much was done, partly by the introduction from Italy of the study of Roman law, partly by the collection of native customs in the Sachsenspiegel compiled by Eike von Repgow early in the 13th century, and the less valuable Deutschenspiegel and Schwabenspiegel. Altogether, Germany has seen no more fascinating epoch, none more full of life, movement and colour.
Yet it was in this age that the German nation utterly lost its political strength. Even after Lothair the Saxon, a line of sovereigns rigidly confining themselves to their own kingdom might have mastered the many influences Political character of Germany settled. which were making for disunion. But the Hohenstaufen family, like their Saxon and Franconian predecessors, would be content with nothing short of universal dominion; and thus the crown which had once been significant of power and splendour gradually sank into contempt. Under the strong rule of Frederick Barbarossa and his son this process was temporarily stopped, but only to advance more rapidly when they were gone. During the confusion of the civil war carried on by Otto IV. and Philip, the princes, being subject to hardly any check, freely obtained crown lands and crown rights, and the mischief was too extensive to be undone by Frederick II. In 1220, in order to secure the adhesion of the church to his son Henry, he formally confirmed the spiritual princes in their usurpations; eleven years later at Worms still more extensive advantages were granted to the princes, both spiritual and secular, and these formal concessions formed the lawful basis of the independence of the princely class. Such authority as the emperor reserved for himself he could exercise but feebly from a distant land in which his energies were otherwise occupied. His immediate successors can hardly be said to have exercised any authority whatever; and they lost hold of the border countries which had hitherto been dependent upon or connected with Germany. Thenceforth Denmark and Poland rendered no homage to the German crown, and Burgundy was gradually absorbed by France.
The country was not now divided into a few duchies which, with skilful management, might still in times of emergency have been made to act together. The age of the great duchies was past. As we have seen, Bavaria Classes of the population. was shorn of extensive lands, over which new dukes were placed, and the duchy of Saxony was altogether broken up. Swabia and Franconia ceased to have dukes, and Lorraine gave place to the duchy of Brabant and other smaller states. Thus there were archbishops, bishops, abbots, dukes, margraves, landgraves, counts—forming together a large body—each of whom claimed to have no superior save the emperor, whose authority they and their predecessors had slowly destroyed. All immediate nobles were not princes; but even petty knights or barons, who possessed little more than the rude towers from which they descended upon passing travellers, if their only lord was the emperor, recognized no law save their own will. Another independent element of the state was composed of the imperial cities. So long as the emperor really reigned, they enjoyed only such liberties as they could wring from him, or as he voluntarily conferred. But when the sovereign’s power decayed, the imperial cities were really free republics, governing themselves according to their own ideas of law and justice (see [Commune]). Besides the imperial cities, and the princes and other immediate nobles, there were the mediate nobles, the men who held land in fief of the highest classes of the aristocracy, and who, in virtue of this feudal relation, looked down upon the allodial proprietors or freemen, and upon the burghers. There were also mediate towns, acknowledging the supremacy of some lord other than the sovereign. Beneath all these, forming the mass of the agricultural population, were the peasantry and the serfs, the latter attached to the land, the former ground down by heavy taxes. There was another class, large and increasing in number, which was drawn from various sections of society. This was composed of men who, being without land, attached themselves to the emperor or to some powerful noble; they performed services, generally of a military nature, for their lord, and were called Dienstmannen (ministeriales). They were often transformed into “free knights” by the grant of a fief, and the class ultimately became absorbed in that of the knights.
The period from the death of Conrad IV. to the election of Rudolph of Habsburg in 1273 is generally called the Great Interregnum, and it was used by the princes to extend their territories and to increase their authority. On The electors. several occasions it had seemed as if the German crown would become hereditary, but it had been kept elective by a variety of causes, among them being the jealousy of the Papacy and the growing strength of the aristocracy. In theory the election of each king needed the sanction of the whole of the immediate nobles, but in practice the right to choose the king had passed into the hands of a small but varying number of the leading princes. During the 13th century several attempts were made to enumerate these princes, and at the contested election of 1257 seven of them took part. This was the real beginning of the electoral college whose members at this time were the archbishops of Mainz, Cologne and Trier, the duke of Saxony, the duke of Bavaria, who was also count palatine of the Rhine, the margrave of Brandenburg and the king of Bohemia. After this event the electors became a distinct element in the state. They were important because they could maintain the impotence of the crown to check disorder by imposing conditions upon candidates for the throne, and by taking care that no prince powerful enough to be dangerous to themselves should be elected to this position.
Until the time of the interregnum the territories of a prince were rarely divided among his descendants, the reason being that, although the private fiefs of the nobles were hereditary, their offices—margrave, count and the like—were Divisions of the princely lands. in theory at the disposal of the king. There was now a tendency to set this principle aside. Otto II., duke of Bavaria, a member of the Wittelsbach family, had become by marriage ruler of the Rhenish Palatinate, and after his death these extensive lands were ruled in common by his two sons; but in 1255 a formal division took place and the powerful family of Wittelsbach was divided into two branches. About the same time the small duchy of Saxony was divided into two duchies, those of Wittenberg and Lauenburg, the former to the south and the latter to the north of the great mark of Brandenburg, and there were similar divisions in the less important states. It was thus practically settled that the offices and territories, as well as the private fiefs, of the princes were hereditary, to be disposed of by them at their pleasure. This being thoroughly established it would have been hard, perhaps impossible, even for a sovereign of the greatest genius, to reassert in anything like its full extent the royal authority. The process of division and subdivision which steadily went on broke up Germany into a bewildering multitude of principalities; but as a rule the members of each princely house held together against common enemies, and ultimately they learned to arrange by private treaties that no territory should pass from the family while a single representative survived.
The consolidation of the power of the princes was contemporary with the rise of the cities into new importance. Several of them, especially Mainz, Worms and Spires, had received valuable rights from the kings and other lords; they The cities. were becoming self-governing and to some extent independent communities and an important and growing element in the state. The increase of trade and a system of taxation provided the governing body with funds, which were used to fortify the city and in other ways to make life and property more secure. The destruction of imperial authority compelled them to organize their resources, so as to be at all times prepared against ambitious neighbours. They began to form leagues which the greatest princes and combinations of princes could not afford to despise. Of these leagues the chief at this time was the Rhenish Confederation, which has been already mentioned. Great importance was also acquired by the Hanseatic League, which had originated during the interregnum in a treaty of alliance between Lübeck and Hamburg. It ultimately included more than eighty cities and became one of the greatest commercial powers in Europe (see [Hanseatic League]).