The kings had little influence upon this development in the East. Toward 1400 they began more and more to renounce world dominion and to trouble no longer about Italy and German unity but only about the power of their dynasty. The Hapsburgs led in this respect. If the name of Hapsburg resounds in the world more strongly than that of earlier dynasties, this is solely due to the length of its rule, for the Hapsburgs reigned in Germany or Austria for some six hundred years, until the last one fled Vienna after his defeat. As for the emperors the Hapsburgs supplied to Germany, they were lacking in great men, with the exception of Charles V.
The earliest merit of the Hapsburgs, when they were still counts rather than emperors, remains their greatest. Their oppressions set off the rebellion of the Swiss. Frederic II of Hohenstaufen with his falcon eye must have recognized the strength peculiar to this people of herdsmen and peasants, for he granted and confirmed the sovereignty that was to protect them against the arrogance of the Hapsburg barons.
How quickly the splendor of a dynasty fades in the memory of men unless it is reflected in the countenances of great members! Who out in the world remembers the first Hapsburg king? That he defeated the King of Bohemia in the battle by the River March, thereby acquiring Austria, and that he died in 1291, surrounded by splendor and glory? But many have at least heard of the flat Alpine meadow above Lake Lucerne, the Rütli, where in that same year 1291 a dozen poor herdsmen and peasants met to unite against that feudal dynasty. To this day songs and plays, pictures and legends tell of the deadly courage with which these “cowboys,” as the highborn knights jeeringly called them, together with the ancient Swiss towns of Zurich and Berne, battled the mighty hosts of kings and princes. Why did all this spread through the world so alarmingly, not to be forgotten to this day?
It was because a small nation there battled for its freedom. It was because, better than the Saxons and Frisians who also fought the kings, this little nation knew how to make decisions and how to fight. It was because here first three, then eight, finally thirteen little strips of land, sometimes comprising no more than a single Alpine valley, united. It was because this land, later called Switzerland after one of the three oldest Cantons, was the only one to establish popular government, reviving in a Europe under the heel of the princes for a thousand years the ideal of the Republic of antiquity. It was because Switzerland, one of the smallest of the German countries, was strong enough to maintain its integrity through all the storms, even taking into its federation races with other tongues—setting the world a meaningful example of how a nation can govern itself, even though it has several languages, without being dominated by a single man or race.
Thus German Switzerland set an example to France and America of how to build a democracy. Here was the sole tribe to save the honor of the other Germans, who all put up with the demands of their princes and who, despite two brief revolutions in a thousand years, both of which failed miserably, remained their masters’ servants. And in the end, after a brief period of anxious freedom, they have again thrown themselves into the arms of an all-powerful leader. Yet all the while Switzerland, situated in the middle of Europe, grouped around the central mass of the St. Gotthard Alps, controlling the great passes, of importance even in this age of tunnels and airplanes, undergoes ordeals of patience and silence which come harder to this, the only German stock with a political tradition, than the outside world realizes—for three fourths of its inhabitants speak German. In their chasms and valleys, their towns and villages, German freedom has sought its final refuge, just as it first issued from them.
6
EVERYTHING that toward the end of the Middle Ages signified inner growth, all that even today constitutes German glory, came from the German burghers.
In the history of other great nations too the city-dweller was often at loggerheads with the noblemen and the king; but in those countries the different classes shared culture among themselves, and the great periods of national art coincided with those in which the State flourished generally. In Germany these peaks almost never coincided. Whenever the Reich was strong and united it starved the spirit, and whenever it was weak the spirit thrived. The reasons were rooted in the German character, and the discrepancy had far-reaching consequences. The separation of power and spirit was rooted in the uncultured disposition of the princes and nobles—with the few exceptions we have already named and shall continue to name. But at the same time the citizenry, excluded from political leadership, scattered in the gardens of art and scholarship, after the fashion of women and old men left at home when their menfolk are out at war. This, in turn, forfeited them their political sense, their interest in government. Sensing the contempt of the domineering Junkers, the German burgher shunned responsibility. He threw himself into gainful work, and when he had amassed enough wealth, or when as a son or grandson he had means and leisure, he went in for science or the professions, while the artists rose directly from the ranks of the artisans. A desire for freedom hardly ever emerged.
The evolution that now took form reflects the major and minor traits of the German character. The diligence of the Germans has always matched their vision. Since art and enterprise are markedly divided between northern and southern Germany, the great artists and inventors have for the most part come from the South, while the merchants and colonizers stemmed from the North. In the North wanderlust, curiosity about foreigners, the desire to find and assimilate beauty may have had their share in urging the burghers out to trade overseas. This urge for faraway places aided the Germans in all their aspirations. To the individual mind it did as much good as it did damage to the State as a whole.
It was only in the cities that culture in Germany began to leave its charmed circle. And, curiously, the mind seemed to expand farthest in the smallest space, within the tightest walls. It was the monasteries that had heretofore been the guardians of the spirit. Until the twelfth century it was they that furnished teachers and physicians, miniatures and above all hundreds of documents painstakingly copied by thousands of monks on carefully prepared parchment with conscientiously mixed ink, and adorned in color.
In France and Italy the ruling nobility of the Middle Ages carried culture to the courts, and thence back into the land; in Germany, there were perhaps three or four really cultured kings in the six centuries from 900 to 1500. But while visitors wondered at the low ebb to which conduct among the German nobility had sunk, they marveled at the cities.
The cities in Germany had a harder time developing than in other countries. Ancient Teutonic habits of thought clung to the soil and could not conceive of liberty and civil rights where men did not own acres, perhaps not even a house, yet claimed the rights of free men, traveling about, marrying, building cathedrals and keeping bondsmen. When the merchants began to come into their own, the clergy, among whom there was many a keen business mind reaping rich profits, reviled them as “perfidious drunkards and bandits.” Princes and nobles who lived on their inherited privileges bitterly fought the cities, which claimed and defended similar privileges. Even the kings, who needed the princes to elect their sons and to raise levies for the Roman pilgrimages, at first opposed the cities. All three Estates—knights, clerics and peasants—sensed that a new Estate was entering German history, which had heretofore been the history of the nobility, including the clergy. That entry they resisted.
But money flowed into Germany from the older countries, bringing interest and income from capital and power from its accumulation. In vain St. Thomas Aquinas declared all merchants who earned more than the barest necessities for themselves to be immoral, while another ecclesiastical teacher wrote the memorable sentence “that a merchant could hardly be without sin.” Ships and stagecoaches began to pick up the fragments of the world, torn and tattered since the great migrations. It soon developed that the Germans made excellent merchants.
Later proud commercial houses arose in Frankfort, Mayence and Cologne, importing silk and spices from the East, exporting metals and furs in exchange and growing into powerful centers during the Crusades and Roman expeditions.
And yet the German merchant did not by any means accompany the king to the South. The Fondaco de’ Tedeschi