Matters were equally unsatisfactory in the heart of Germany. Private war raged unchecked, and the feeble efforts made from time to time to secure the Public Peace (Landfriede) were made fruitless by the absence of any real executive authority. The robber knights waylaid traders, and great princes did not scruple to abet such lawlessness. The very preservation of the Public Peace had long ceased to be the concern of the Emperor and Empire as a whole, and local and voluntary unions (Landfriedensvereme) had sought with but scant result to uphold it within the limits of local and precarious conditions. The lack of imperial justice brought about such grave evils that the Estates sought to provide some sort of substitute for it by private agreements (Austäge) referring disputed matters to arbitration, and by that quaint etiquette which made it a breach of propriety for a prince to prefer the solemn judgment of his suzerain to such arbitration of his neighbours. The beginnings of an economic revolution threatened the ancient rude prosperity of the peasant, and embittered the relations of class and class within the towns.
The need for reform was patent. From what source however was the improvement to come? Little was to be expected from the Emperors. Yet even the careless Wenceslas of Bohemia had prepared the way for better things when he not only renewed once more the publication of a universal Landfriede, but also invested with imperial authority the local assemblies representative of the various Estates that were entrusted with its execution. Things were worse under Sigismund (1410-37), who could find no middle course between fantastic schemes for the regeneration of the universe and selfish plans for the aggrandisement of his own house. When his inheritance passed to his son-in-law Albert II of Austria (1438-9), the union of the rival houses of Habsburg and Luxemburg at least secured for the ruler a strong family position such as was the essential preliminary for the revival of the imperial power. Albert IPs device for securing the general Public Peace of Germany rested upon an extension and development of the local executive authorities, and thus contained the germ of the future system of dividing the Empire into great territorial circumscriptions known as Circles (Kreise), destined ultimately to become one of the most lasting of imperial institutions. But Albert passed away before he was so much as able to visit the Empire, and in the long reign of his kinsman and successor Frederick III (1440-93) the imperial authority sunk down to its lowest point. A cold, phlegmatic, slow and unenterprising prince, Frederick of Austria busied himself with no great plans of reform or aggression, but seemed absorbed in gardening, in alchemy, and in astrology rather than in affairs of State. Under his nerveless rule the Luxemburg claims over Bohemia and Hungary passed utterly away. A large proportion of the Habsburg hereditary lands, including Tyrol and the scattered Swabian estates, were ruled by a rival branch of the ruling house represented by the Archduke Sigismund, while Austria itself fell into the hands of Matthias Corvinus. Yet in his cautious and slow-minded fashion Frederick was by no means lacking in ability and foresight. If he were indifferent to the Empire, he looked beyond the present distress of his house to a time when politic marriages and cunningly devised treaties of eventual succession would make Austria a real ruler of the world. Even for the Empire he did a little by his proclamations of a general Landfriede, while his settlement of the ecclesiastical relations of Germany after the failure of the Conciliar movement at Basel implied, with all its renunciation of high ideals, the establishment of a workable system that kept the peace until the outbreak of the Reformation. The Vienna Concordat of 1448 put an end to that tendency towards the ‘nationalisation of the German Church which had been promoted so powerfully by the attitude of the prelates of the German nation at the Council of Constance, and which had been maintained so long when, under the guidance of Emperor and Electors, the Germans had upheld their neutrality between both the disorderly fathers at Basel and the grasping papal Curia at Rome. In the long run this nationalising tendency must have extended itself from ecclesiastical to political matters. Even in the decline of the Middle Ages the union within the Church might well have prepared the way to the union of the State. In accepting a modus vivendi which gave the Pope greater opportunities than now remained to the Emperor of exercising jurisdiction and levying taxation in Germany, Frederick proved himself a better friend to immediate peace than to the development of a national German State.
Three signal successes gilded the end of Frederick’s long reign. The power of the House of Burgundy threatened to withdraw the richest and most industrial parts of the Empire from the central authority. But the sluggish Emperor and the inert Empire were at last roused to alarm, when Charles the Bold made the attack on their territory that began with the siege of Neuss. It was an omen of real possibilities for the future when a great imperial army gathered together to relieve the burghers of the Rhenish town. The “New League” of the Alsatian cities which was formed to ward off Charles’ southern aggressions was a step in the same direction. And even the “Old League” of the Swiss Highlanders, which finally destroyed the Burgundian power, was not as yet avowedly anti-German in its policy. But, as in Church affairs, Frederick stepped in between the nation and its goal. At the moment of the threatened ruin of his ancient enemy’s plans, he cleverly negotiated the marriage of his son Maximilian with Mary, the heiress of Charles the Bold. Soon after the last Duke of Burgundy had fallen at Nancy, Maximilian obtained with the hand of his daughter the many rich provinces of the Netherlands and the Free County of Burgundy (1477). It was not however for the sake of Germany or the Empire that Frederick sought a new sphere of influence for his son. The Burgundian inheritance remained as particularistic and as anti-German under the Habsburgs as it had ever been under Valois rule. But the future fortunes of Austria were established by an acquisition which more than compensated the dynasty for the loss of Hungary and Bohemia.
The other late successes of Frederick were likewise triumphs of Austria rather than victories of the Empire. The Duke of Bavaria-Munich had profited by the internal dissensions of the House of Habsburg and won the goodwill of the aged Archduke Sigismund of Tyrol. It was arranged that, on Sigismund’s death without legitimate issue, Tyrol and the Swabian and Rhenish Habsburg lands should pass to the lord of Munich. Frederick bitterly resented this treason, but alone he could hardly have prevented its accomplishment. Yet the prospect of such an extraordinary extension of the Wittelsbach power frightened every petty potentate of Bavaria and Swabia. In 1487 the princes and bishops, abbots and counts, knights and cities of Upper Germany united to form the Swabian League, to maintain the authority of the Emperor and to prevent the union of Bavaria and Tyrol. Its action was irresistible. Tyrol passed quietly under Frederick’s direct rule, and an armed Power was set up in the south which enormously strengthened the effective authority of the Emperor. The subsequent expulsion of the Hungarians from Vienna after the death of Matthias (1490), followed as it was by a. renewal of the ancient contracts of eventual succession with Wladislav of Bohemia, who now succeeded Matthias in Hungary, restored the might of Habsburg in the east as effectively as the Burgundian marriage had extended it in the west. It was characteristic of the old Emperor that he grudged his son any real share in his newly won power. The third Habsburg triumph, the election of Maximilian as King of the Romans, was carried through the Diet of 1486 in despite of the opposition of the Emperor. In consequence Maximilian entered upon his