German Culture Past and Present | Page 9

and ecclesiastic, with the
Electoral College, or the seven Electoral Princes, forming their head.
These constituted the feudal "estates" of the empire. Then came the
"King of the Romans"; and, as the apex of the whole, the Pope in one
function and the Emperor in another, crowned the edifice. The
supremacy, not merely of the Pope but of the complementary temporal
head of the mediæval polity, the Emperor, was acknowledged in a
shadowy way, even in countries such as France and England, which
had no direct practical connection with the empire. For, as the spiritual
power was also temporal, so the temporal political power had, like
everything else in the Middle Ages, a quasi-religious significance.
The minds of men in speculative matters, in theology, in philosophy,
and in jurisprudence, were outgrowing the old doctrines, at least in
their old forms. In theology the notion of salvation by the faith of the
individual, and not through the fact of belonging to a corporate
organization, which was the mediæval conception, was latent in the
minds of multitudes of religious persons before expression was given to
it by Luther. The aversion to scholasticism, bred by the revived
knowledge of the older Greek philosophies in the original, produced a
curious amalgam; but scholastic habits of thought were still dominant
through it all. The new theories of nature amounted to little more than
old superstitions, systematized and reduced to rule, though here and
there the later physical science, based on observation and experiment,

peeped through. In jurisprudence the epoch is marked by the final
conquest of the Roman civil law, in its spirit, where not in its forms,
over the old customs, pre-feudal and feudal.
The subject of Germany during that closing period of the Middle Ages,
characterized by what is known as the revival of learning and the
Reformation, is so important for an understanding of later German
history and the especial characteristics of the German culture of later
times, that we propose, even at the risk of wearying some readers, to
recapitulate in as short a space as possible, compatible with clearness,
the leading conditions of the times--conditions which, directly or
indirectly, have moulded the whole subsequent course of German
development.
Owing to the geographical situation of Germany and to the political
configuration of its peoples and other causes, mediæval conditions of
life as we find them in the early sixteenth century left more abiding
traces on the German mind and on German culture than was the case
with some other nations. The time was out of joint in a very literal
sense of that somewhat hackneyed phrase. At the opening of the
sixteenth century every established institution--political, social, and
religious--was shaken and showed the rents and fissures caused by time
and by the growth of a new life underneath it. The empire--the Holy
Roman--was in a parlous way as regarded its cohesion. The power of
the princes, the representatives of local centralized authority, was
proving itself too strong for the power of the Emperor, the recognized
representative of centralized authority for the whole German-speaking
world. This meant the undermining and eventual disruption of the
smaller social and political unities,[4] the knightly manors with the
privileges attached to the knightly class generally. The knighthood, or
lower nobility, had acted as a sort of buffer between the princes of the
empire and the Imperial power, to which they often looked for
protection against their immediate overlord or their powerful
neighbour--the prince. The Imperial power, in consequence, found the
lower nobility a bulwark against its princely vassals. Economic changes,
the suddenly increased demand for money owing to the rise of the
"world-market," new inventions in the art of war, new methods of

fighting, the rapidly growing importance of artillery, and the increase
of the mercenary soldier, had rendered the lower nobility, as an
institution, a factor in the political situation which was fast becoming
negligible. The abortive campaign of Franz von Sickingen in 1523 only
showed its hopeless weakness. The Reichsregiment, or Imperial
governing council, a body instituted by Maximilian, had lamentably
failed to effect anything towards cementing together the various parts
of the unwieldy fabric. Finally, at the Reichstag held in Nürnberg, in
December 1522, at which all the estates were represented, the
Reichsregiment, to all intents and purposes, collapsed.
The Reichstag in question was summoned ostensibly for the purpose of
raising a subsidy for the Hungarians in their struggle against the
advancing power of the Turks. The Turkish movement westward was,
of course, throughout this period, the most important question of what
in modern phraseology would be called "foreign politics." The princes
voted the proposal of the subsidy without consulting the representatives
of the cities, who knew the heaviest part of the burden was to fall upon
themselves. The urgency of the situation, however, weighed