The purely dynastic ambitions of Frederick were reflected in the policy of the strongest princes of the Empire. We have seen how anti-German were the ideals of such great imperial vassals as Charles the Bold of Burgundy, and the Dukes of Bavaria. Equally anti-national was the policy of the elder or Palatine branch of the Wittelsbach House, then represented by the Elector Frederick the Victorious (1449-76). A magnificent and ambitious ruler, who gathered round his Court doctors of Roman law and early exponents of German humanism, Frederick pursued his selfish aims with something of the strength and ability as well as with something of the recklessness and unscrupulousness of the Italian despot. He made friends with the Cech Podiebrad and with the Frenchman Charles of Burgundy. He was not ashamed to lure on the Bohemian with the prospects of the Imperial Crown, and anticipated the Emperor Frederick’s boldest stroke in his scheme to marry his nephew Philip to Mary of Burgundy. Not even Albert IV of Munich was more clearly the enemy of the Empire than his kinsman the “Wicked Fritz.” The dominions of the Elector Palatine were indeed scattered and limited. Yet he was not only the strongest but the most successful of the imperial vassals of his time. The failure of his dearest projects showed that the day of princely autocracy had not yet come.
Two great families had won a prominent position in northern Germany in the early years of the fifteenth century, and had somewhat pushed aside more ancient houses, such as the Guelfs of Brunswick, whose habit of subdividing their territories for a long time grievously weakened their influence. The financial distress of the Emperor Sigismund had forced him to pledge his early acquisition, Brandenburg, to the wealthy and practical Frederick of Hohenzollern, who as Burgrave of Nürnberg was already lord of Kulmbach and of a considerable territory in Upper Franconia. Despairing of redeeming his debt, Sigismund was in 1417 compelled to acquiesce in the permanent establishment of that house in the electorate of Brandenburg. Albert Achilles, Frederick’s younger son, had shown in his long strife against Nürnberg and the Wittels-bachs rare skill as a warrior and shrewd ability as a statesman, even when his material resources were limited to his ancestral Kulmbach possessions. Called to the electoral dignity in Brandenburg after his brother Frederick IPs death in 1471, Albert held a position among the northern princes only paralleled by that of Frederick of the Palatinate among the lords of the Rhine. As long as he lived he made his influence felt through his rare personal gifts, his courage, and his craft, and his fantastic combination of the ideals of the knight-errant with those of the statesman of the Renaissance. The welfare of Germany as a whole appealed to him almost as little as to Frederick the Victorious. All his pride was in the extension of the power of his house, and his most famous act was perhaps that Dispositio Achlllea of 1473 which secured the future indivisibility of the whole Mark of Brandenburg and its transmission to the eldest male heir by right of primogeniture. Yet Albert died half conscious that his ambition had been ill-directed. All projects and all warlike preparations, declared the dying hero, were of no effect so long as Germany as a whole had no sound peace, no good law or law-courts, and no general currency. But with Albert’s death in 1486 the power of Brandenburg, based purely on his individuality, ceased to excite any alarm among the princes of the north.
The House of Wettin, which had long held the margravate of Meissen, acquired with the district of Wittenberg and some other fragments of the ancient Saxon duchy, the electorate and duchy of Saxony (1423). The dignity and territories of the House now made it prominent among the princes of Germany, but the division of its lands, finally consummated in 1485, between Ernest and Albert, the grandsons of the first Wettin Elector, Frederick the Valiant, limited its power. The singular moderation and the conservative instincts of the Saxon line saved it from aspiring to rival Albert Achilles or Frederick the Victorious. The most illustrious representative of the Ernestine House, Frederick the Wise, who became Elector in 1486, was perhaps the only prince of the first rank who, while giving general support to the Emperor, ultimately identified himself with the plans of imperial reform which were now finding spokesmen among the princes of the second class. As a rule, however, the princes of strongest resources and most individual character were precisely those who were most quickly realising the ideals of localised and dynastic sovereignty, which, in the next century, became the common ambition of German rulers of every rank.
Though the power of the strongest of the German princes was thus limited, yet it was in regions under the influence of such great feudatories that the nearest approach to order prevailed. Habsburg rule in the south-east, Burgundian rule in the north-west, were establishing settled States, though rather at the expense of Germany as a whole than by way of contributing to its general peace. In a similar fashion Bavaria and the north-eastern Marchland between Elbe and Oder attained comparative prosperity under Wittelsbachs, Wettins, and Hohenzollerns. But in the other parts of Germany affairs were far worse. Even in the ancient duchy of Saxony the dissipation of the princely power had become extreme: but the Rhineland, Franconia, and Swabia were in an even more unhappy condition. The scattered Estates of the four Rhenish Electors, and powers such as Cleves and Hesse, were in no case strong enough to preserve general order in the Rhineland. The Elector of Mainz, the bishops of Würzburg and Bamberg, and the abbot of Fulda were, save the Kulmbach Hohenzollerns, the only rulers over even relatively considerable territories in Franconia. Würtemberg and Baden alone broke the monotony of infinite subdivision in Swabia. The characteristic powers in all these regions were rather the counts and the knights, mere local lords or squires with full or partial princely authority over their petty Estates. In such regions as these economic prosperity and ordered civil existence depended almost entirely on the number and importance of the free imperial cities.
Neither from the lesser immediate nobility nor from the city communities was any real contribution to be expected towards imperial reform. The counts and knights were too poor, too numerous, and too helpless, to be able to safeguard even their own interests. Their absurd jealousies of each other, their feuds with the princes and the towns, their chronic policy of highway robbery, made them the chief difficulty in the way of that general Landfriede which had been proclaimed so often but never realised. The towns were almost equally incompetent to take up a general national policy. They were indeed wealthy, numerous, and important: but despite their unions with each other they never advanced towards a really national line of action. Their intense local patriotism narrowed their interest to the region immediately around their walls, and their parochial separatism was almost as intense as that of their natural enemies the lesser nobles. While they had thus scanty will to act, their power to do so was perhaps much less than is often imagined. MachiavehTs glowing eulogies of their liberty and capacity of resistance has misled most moderns as to the true position of the German cities. In no way is their position comparable to that of the towns of Italy. The great Italian cities largely owed their political influence to the fact that they ruled without a rival over districts as large as most German principalities. But in Germany the territory of many of the strongest among the free cities, such as Augsburg, was almost confined to the limits of their city walls. There were very few towns which dominated so wide a stretch of the countryside as Nürnberg, but how insignificant was the Nürnberg territory as compared with that of Florence! Even the population and wealth of the German towns have probably been exaggerated. Careful statistical investigation suggests that none of the cities of upper Germany had more than 20,000 inhabitants, and those which may have been of larger size, such as Cologne or Bremen or Lübeck, are of more importance in the commercial than in the political history of Germany. Though the financiers of Augsburg and Frankfort, and the merchants of Nürnberg or Basel or Cologne, were acquiring vast wealth, building palaces for their residence and through their luxurious ways raising the standard of civilisation and comfort for all ranks of Germans, they were not yet in a position so much as to aspire to political direction. Yet it was in the towns only that there could be found any non-noble class with even the faintest interest in politics. The condition of the country population was steadily declining. Feudalism still kept the peasant in its iron grip, and the rise in prices which opened the economic revolution that ushered in modern times was now beginning to destroy his material prosperity. In the upper Khineland the condition of the agricultural population seems to have been very similar to that of the French peasantry before the outbreak of the Revolution. While their Swiss neighbours were free and prosperous, the peasant of Elsass or of the Black Forest was hardly able to make a living through the over-great subdivision of the little holdings. It was in this