VII.

History

Germany lacked any clearly defined geographical boundaries until modern times. The idea of a single German people, or Volk, is likewise a relatively recent development, largely invented by 19th- and 20th-century writers and politicians. From ancient times, several ethnic groups have mixed to shape the history of Germany, resulting in a stunning diversity of cultures and dialects. Political definitions of Germany have tended to reflect this ambiguity, at various times including many regions that today are sovereign nations (such as Austria and Switzerland) or parts of other countries (such as France, Poland, Russia, and Hungary). Modern Germany is the product of centuries of social, political, and cultural evolution. This history section provides a brief survey of that evolution.

A.

Early History

The forests of Germany were occupied during the Old Stone Age by bands of wandering hunters and gatherers. They belonged to the earliest forms of Homo sapiens, who lived about 400,000 years ago. Neandertal people, who were similar to modern humans in many ways, first appeared in Europe about 200,000 years ago. (The name Neandertal comes from fossils discovered in 1856 in the Neander Valley near Düsseldorf.) By about 30,000 years ago, the Neandertals had disappeared, but another human group, the Cro-Magnon—known for spectacular cave drawings, such as those at the famous site at Lascaux, France—had appeared in Europe. See also Human Evolution: Late Homo sapiens.

About 7000 bc Homo sapiens societies experienced a crucial transformation, which archaeologists have labeled the Neolithic, or New Stone Age, revolution. During this period, many groups began producing their own food through agriculture and the domestication of animals. Their permanent settlements and more stable food supply in turn triggered a significant increase in population. The indigenous hunters of central Europe encountered farming peoples migrating up the Danube Valley from southwest Asia in about 4500 bc. These populations mixed and settled in villages to raise crops and breed livestock.

A.1.

Bronze Age Peoples

The Bronze Age began in the region of central Germany, Bohemia, and Austria in about 2500 bc with the working of copper and tin deposits by prospectors from the eastern Mediterranean. Around 2300 bc new waves of migrating peoples arrived, probably from southern Russia. These so-called Indo-Europeans were the ancestors of the Germanic peoples who settled in northern and central Germany, of the Celts in the south and west, and of the Baltic and Slavic peoples in the east. Their language was the precursor of all modern languages in those regions, including English, German, and all of the Romance (Latin-based) languages (see Indo-European Languages).

From 1800 to 400 bc, Celtic peoples in southern Germany and Austria developed a succession of advanced metalworking cultures. They introduced the use of iron for tools and weapons. Teutons, Germanic tribes of obscure northern origin, absorbed much of the Celtic culture and eventually displaced the Celts. The various ancient peoples known collectively as Germans represented a diverse assortment of Celtic and Teutonic peoples and cultures. The Latin word Germanus is probably derived from an ancient Celtic word for a neighboring Teutonic tribe. The term was later applied by the Romans to a variety of peoples in western and central Europe.

A.2.

Germans and Romans

From the 2nd century bc to the 5th century ad northern Germanic and Celtic tribes, constantly pressed by new migrations from the north and east, were in contact with the Romans, who controlled southern and western Europe. The writings of Romans Julius Caesar and Cornelius Tacitus describe these encounters and provide almost the only accounts of life among these so-called barbarian peoples. In general, the Romans denounced the Germans for heavy drinking, relentless fighting, and atrocities such as human sacrifice. But Romans also commended the virtue of Germanic women as well as the overall absence of any avarice among the tribes.

In 101 and 102 bc the Cimbri and the Teutons were defeated by Roman general Gaius Marius as they were about to invade Italy. The Suevi and other tribes in Gaul (modern-day France), west of the Rhine, were subdued by Julius Caesar around 50 bc. The Romans tried several times to extend their rule to the Elbe River, but their efforts were halted at the Battle of Teutoburg Forest in ad 9. The Rhine and Danube rivers became the boundaries of Roman territory, connected by a line of fortifications, or limes, that extended from Colonia (Cologne) to Bonna (Bonn) to Augusta Vindelicorum (Augsburg) to Vindobona (Vienna). Most of the peoples within Roman Germany were gradually assimilated as auxiliary Germanic troops by the empire, often employed against Germanic raiders from outside the limes.

In the 2nd century the Romans prevented confederations of Franks, Alamanni, and Burgundians from crossing the Rhine into the empire. By the 4th and 5th centuries, however, the population pressures outside the empire proved too much for the weakened Romans. The Huns, sweeping in from Asia, set off waves of migration, during which the Ostrogoths, Visigoths, Vandals, Franks, Lombards, and other Germanic tribes poured into and eventually overran the empire.

B.

Medieval Germany

Scholars continue to debate at what point it is possible to speak of Germany or a German state. Even though the Romans had often grouped several peoples under the name Germans, it is doubtful that most of these groups viewed themselves as connected in any cultural, linguistic, or political sense. The formation of an eastern Frankish kingdom in the 9th century seems a watershed event in German development (see Holy Roman Empire), although this kingdom featured a diversity of cultures and political allegiances. Most of the medieval “German” rulers actually considered themselves kings of the Romans, and, later, Roman emperors. Not until the 15th century did the emperors officially add “of the German nation” to their title.

On the other hand, it is undeniable that the medieval emperors who called themselves Roman were in fact Germans. During the 10th to 13th centuries, their state, the Holy Roman Empire, was the most powerful in Europe, dominating not only German lands but northern Italian city-states as well. In turn, the decline of the Holy Roman Empire marked a period in which political power was fragmented among many German princes. By the time that the late-15th-century emperor Maximilian attempted to revive imperial authority and institutions, the division of power among German princes had become entrenched. Even his powerful grandson, Charles V, was eventually forced to recognize the political pluralism of Germany, which prevailed until the late 19th century.

B.1.

The Origins of a German State (486-911)

B.1.a.

Frankish Kingdoms

Throughout western Europe and northern Africa, the political and cultural bonds of the Roman Empire were gradually replaced by a multitude of successor states. In 486 the Salian chieftain Clovis defeated the last Roman governor in Gaul and established a Frankish kingdom that included southwestern Germany. Clovis and his successors, known as the Merovingian dynasty, succeeded in uniting many Germanic tribes under one king. Following his conversion to Christianity in about 500, Clovis formed a special relationship with the bishop of Rome (later known as the pope). He forcibly converted his subjects from the Arian form of Christianity to the Roman version (see Arianism). During the following century, many monasteries and churches were built in the Merovingian kingdom, usually sponsored by the king or wealthy nobles.

In 751 the Merovingian dynasty was overthrown by the Frankish noble Pepin the Short. In order to boost his own claims to legitimate rule, Pepin secured the endorsement of the kingdom’s bishops and the pope; this was the beginning of a long tradition of church leaders conferring kingship. The rule of Pepin’s son Charles had a major impact on German and European history. Known as Charlemagne (Charles the Great), the ambitious king expanded the Frankish kingdom to include large parts of modern-day Germany and Italy during his long reign (768-814). He fought the Slavs south of the Danube River, annexed Bavaria, and ferociously subdued and converted the pagan Saxons in the northwest. Charlemagne was received in Rome as the champion of Christianity and restorer of the western empire. Just as importantly, he supported the papacy against Rome’s restive populace. On Christmas Day in 800, he was crowned emperor of the Romans by Pope Leo III, thereby reviving the Roman imperial tradition in the west as well as setting a precedent for dependence of the emperors on papal approval.

B.1.b.

The Carolingians

Charlemagne’s empire, known as the Carolingian Empire, assumed many of the traditions and social distinctions of the late Roman Empire, but it also introduced some key innovations. Charlemagne persuaded Alcuin of York, considered the greatest scholar of the day, to come to his palace at Aachen (Aix-la-Chapelle) and establish a new school to train clerks and scholars in classical Latin. The official language of the court and of the church was Latin, but Franks in Gaul adopted the Latinate vernacular that became French, while Franks and other Germanic tribes in the east spoke various languages that were ancestors of modern German.

Charlemagne granted large landholdings, known as fiefs, to many tribal military leaders, or dukes. In addition, he appointed numerous Frankish aristocrats to the lesser posts of count (the head of a smaller district called a county) and margrave (the count of a border province). These aristocrats were kings in miniature, with all of the administrative, judicial, and military authority of the emperor within their respective districts. Each county had a parallel ecclesiastical, or church, district, called a diocese, that was headed by a bishop with authority in all church matters. Both counts and bishops were vassals of the emperor, and were overseen by traveling representatives of the emperor, known as missi dominici. Every year, both counts and bishops attended a general assembly where they would advise the emperor and hear his directives.

The empire was vulnerable to tribal dissension and did not long survive Charlemagne’s death in 814. In 843 the Treaty of Verdun divided the Carolingian Empire into three parts: East Francia (roughly modern-day Germany), West Francia (roughly modern-day France), and, separating the two, an area running from the North Sea through Lotharingia (modern-day Lorraine) and Burgundy to northern Italy. In 870 the middle kingdom was divided, with Lotharingia going to East Francia and the rest to West Francia. The Carolingian dynasty in East Francia came to an end in 911 when the last of Charlemagne’s descendents died without an heir.

B.1.c.

The Tribal Duchies

By the 10th century, East Francia was being buffeted from the north and east by new waves of pagan invaders. Rival tribes of Vikings, Magyars (Hungarians), and Moravians virtually tore East Francia apart. As royal authority declined, the feudal dukes, counts, and other members of the aristocracy gradually made their fiefs hereditary. Increasingly, they established their own local governments and provided defense for their people. The greatest secular lords in East Francia were the rulers of five stem (tribal) duchies: Franconia, Swabia, Bavaria, Saxony, and Lorraine. Lesser warriors joined noble or princely retinues out of tribal loyalty and in exchange for smaller grants of land and other gifts. Common people worked the fields of warriors and nobles in return for protection and a share of the crops.

B.2.

Growth of the Holy Roman Empire (911-1250)

Following ancient German tradition, the kings of East Francia did not automatically inherit the throne. Instead, they were elected by the wealthiest and most powerful nobles of the realm at the time—a group that was subject to change as fortunes rose and fell. None of these families wanted to be subject to another family or to a strong king so they often chose weak kings who were not a threat to the nobles’ power.

Once elected, medieval German kings had three major concerns. One was checking rebellious nobles; for this they often relied on the support of bishops and abbots. The second was controlling Italy and preserving the imperial coronation by the pope, which they considered an essential part of the Carolingian heritage. The third was territorial expansion to the north and east, especially after 955, when the Viking and Magyar threats subsided.

B.2.a.

Otto I, the Great, and the Saxon Kings

The first strong king of East Francia was Otto I. Elected in 936, Otto combined extraordinary forcefulness, dignity, and military prowess with great diplomatic skill and genuine religious faith. Determined to create a strong centralized monarchy, Otto married his relatives into the families of the duchies in order to gain control over them. This backfired, however, as his family members began to plot against him to usurp his power. After several dangerous uprisings, Otto began to break up the duchies into nonhereditary fiefs granted to bishops and abbots. By bringing these church figures into the court, Otto ensured their loyalty and was able to use their literacy to produce correspondence and legislation. The counts maintained their judicial functions from Carolingian times, but the church leaders were used much as Charlemagne had used the missi dominici—as the king’s representatives throughout the realm. Otto’s successors continued this Ottonian system of making alliances with the church and shifting toward a more formalized state.

Otto also defended his realm from outside pressures. In the west, he strengthened his hold on Lorraine and gained influence over Burgundy. In the north and east, he defeated the Danes and Slavs and permanently broke the power of the Magyars at the Battle of Lechfeld in 955. Wishing to emulate Charlemagne as the divinely sanctioned emperor, Otto established the archbishopric of Magdeburg in 968 and other dioceses as centers of civilization in the conquered lands.

In 951 Otto began the disastrous policy of German entanglement in Italy. He was perhaps tempted by the prosperity of the area and its political vacuum in the wake of feudal disorder and Saracen (Muslim) invasions. During his second Italian campaign in 962, Otto was crowned emperor by Pope John XII, who was grateful for Otto’s help against encroaching Italian nobles from the north and Byzantine Greeks and Saracens from the south. By a treaty called the Ottonian Privilege, Otto guaranteed the pope’s claim to most of central Italy in exchange for the promise that all future papal candidates would swear allegiance and loyalty to the emperor. This treaty effectively united the German monarchy and the Roman Empire until 1806, when the Holy Roman Empire, as it came to be called, was dissolved.

Otto’s successors in the 10th and 11th centuries continued his domestic and Italian policies as best they could. Otto II established the Eastern March (now Austria) as a military outpost; the influx on settlement from within the empire effectively Germanized the local population. He attempted to secure southern Italy, but was defeated by the Saracens. Otto III ruled from Rome. He supported the monastic reform movement originating in Cluny (Burgundy) that encouraged a more austere, disciplined, and prayerful life within monasteries and convents. The childless Henry II, gentle and devout, also encouraged the Cluniac movement and sent out missionaries from his court.

B.2.b.

Salian Kings

From 1024 to 1125 German kings were chosen from the Salian line of Franconia, which was related to the Saxons. The Salians brought the empire to its height, both in terms of power and territorial expansion, but also initiated a period of intense religious and political strife. The rulers often faced difficulties with the German princes both in securing election as king and then in maintaining power.

Powerful rival dynasties developed during this period. These included the Wittelsbachs of Bavaria, the Welfs of Saxony, and the Hohenstaufens (sometimes called Staufers) of Swabia. Rivalry between the last two families led to a long international division between their respective allies in both Germany and Italy. In Italy the Welf allies were known as Guelph and the Hohenstaufen allies as Ghibelline (see Guelphs and Ghibellines).

The first Salian kings consolidated their power in Germany and were able to maintain control over the papacy. Conrad II, who ruled from 1024 to 1039, was clever and ruthless. He asserted royal authority over princely opposition by making the fiefs of lesser nobles hereditary, thus undermining their dependence on the princes, and by appointing ministariales, non-nobles responsible directly to him, as officials and soldiers. He also seized Burgundy, strengthened his hold on northern Italy, and became overlord of Poland.

Conrad’s son (Henry III), who ruled until 1056, was possibly the first undisputed king of Germany. A pious visionary, he tried with little success to introduce to an empire torn by constant civil strife the Truce of God, a weekly respite from warfare lasting from Wednesday night to Monday morning. His ecclesiastical reforms were somewhat more successful, particularly his efforts to end simony, the practice of buying and selling church offices. At the same time, he continued to exercise strong control over the church in Germany, appointing key church figures as his vassals as well as deposing three rival popes and creating four new ones, most notably the reform-minded Leo IX.

In 1056 Henry IV, while still a child, succeeded his father. During his mother’s regency, long-restive princes annexed much royal land in Germany, while the Normans seized control of Italy. Henry IV sought to recover lost imperial power, but his efforts to retrieve crown lands aroused the Saxons, who had always resented the Salian kings. He crushed a Saxon rebellion in 1075 and proceeded to confiscate land, thus intensifying their enmity.

B.2.c.

Investiture Controversy

In addition to his struggle with the German princes, Henry also became involved in a controversy with the papacy over who would appoint clergy in Germany. The ensuing struggle was known as the Investiture Controversy.

Pope Gregory VII wanted to free the church from secular control and forbade lay investiture (the appointment of clergy by nonclerical officials). The German kings, however, wanted to appoint major church officials such as bishops, because they were powerful vassals of the king. Henry retaliated by having the pope deposed by an episcopal synod at Worms in 1076. The pope promptly excommunicated Henry, which denied him the benefits and privileges of church membership, and released all of his subjects from their oath of loyalty to him, a move that pleased the princes. To keep his crown, Henry cleverly sought to see the pope at Canossa in the Apennines in January 1077. He waited outside the palace for three days as a barefoot penitent in the snow. Thinking he had succeeded in humiliating a disobedient emperor, Gregory forgave Henry.

The princes, however, felt betrayed and elected a rival king, Rudolf of Swabia, triggering nearly 20 years of civil war. In 1080 Gregory again excommunicated Henry, who had continued to practice lay investiture, and recognized Rudolf as emperor. When Rudolf died later that year, Henry marched on Rome, free from the threat of Rudolf’s forces. He deposed Gregory by force and installed the rival pope Clement III in his place; Clement crowned Henry emperor in 1084. Henry returned to Germany to continue the civil war against a new rival king. Henry’s son, Henry V, betrayed and imprisoned him and forced him to abdicate in 1106.

The treacherous and greedy Henry V continued his father’s struggle for supremacy, but was ultimately unsuccessful. Suffering military defeats, he lost control of Poland, Hungary, and Bohemia. Despite the support of churchmen, ministeriales, and the towns, he could not suppress the princes, who forced the weary emperor and Pope Callistus II to compromise on investiture. Pope and emperor accepted the Concordat of Worms in 1122, which stipulated that clerical elections in Germany were to take place in the presence of the emperor without simony and that the emperor was to invest the candidate with the symbols of worldly office before a bishop invested him with the spiritual ones. The pope had the better of the bargain, but the struggle was not resolved and the rivalry between empire and papacy contributed in many ways to the decline of the German monarchy.

B.2.d.

The Guelph-Ghibelline Conflict

Throughout the 12th and 13th centuries, the rivalry centered around two princely families: the Hohenstaufen, or Waiblingen, family of Swabia, and the Welfs of Bavaria and Saxony. The rivalry extended to Italy where the Hohenstaufens were known as the Ghibellines and the Welfs as Guelphs. The Hohenstaufens held the German and imperial crowns, while the Welfs were allied with the papacy.

When Henry V died childless in 1125, the princes passed over his nephews, Frederick and Conrad Hohenstaufen, and chose Lothair, Duke of Saxony, as Henry’s successor. When he became allied with the pope, however, and was crowned Emperor Lothair II in 1133, the Hohenstaufen princes and their allies refused to recognize the coronation and rose up in revolt. At Lothair’s death in 1137, the princes chose Conrad Hohenstaufen, rather than Lothair’s powerful Welf son-in-law and heir, Henry the Proud of Bavaria and Saxony. Civil war erupted again, this time between the charming but weak Conrad III and the Welf dukes Henry the Proud and his son, Henry the Lion. Peace was temporarily restored at Conrad’s death by the election of his nephew Frederick, a Hohenstaufen whose mother was a Welf.

B.2.e.

Frederick I, Barbarossa

Intelligent, handsome, warlike, and judicious, Frederick I, known as Frederick Barbarossa, ruled from 1152 to 1190. Regarding himself as the successor of Augustus, Charlemagne, and Otto the Great, he took the title Holy Roman Emperor and spent most of his reign shuttling between Germany and Italy, trying to restore imperial glory to both regions and coming closer than any other medieval ruler to this goal.

In the north, Frederick joined Germany and Burgundy by marrying Beatrice, heiress to Burgundy. He then declared an imperial peace, and to ensure it he placated the Welfs by recognizing Henry the Lion as duke of Saxony and Bavaria. But when Henry refused to contribute troops to a critical Italian campaign, Frederick and jealous princes exiled him as a traitor. Henry’s duchies were split up, with Bavaria going to the Wittelsbach family, who would remain its rulers until the modern unification of Germany.

In the south, Frederick made six expeditions to Italy to assert full imperial authority over the pope and the Lombard city-states, a group of northern Italian cities that had organized to resist Frederick’s imperial claims in Italy. On his first trip in 1155, he was crowned emperor by Pope Adrian IV. During the next 20 years he was successful in defeating a variety of alliances between the popes and the Italian city-states, capturing Rome itself in 1166. During his fifth Italian expedition, though, he was defeated by the Lombard League at the Battle of Legnana in 1176, partly because he lacked the crucial support of Henry the Lion. The subsequent Peace of Constance recognized the autonomy of the Italian cities, which remained only nominally subject to the emperor. Stubbornly, Frederick made one last trip, gaining new support among the quarrelsome cities. He resigned as emperor in 1190 in favor of his son Henry VI and set out to lead the Third Crusade, in which he died.

B.2.f.

The Last Hohenstaufen Kings

More ambitious even than his father, Henry VI wanted to dominate the known world. To secure peace in Germany, he put down a rebellion by the returned exile Henry the Lion and then restored him to power. He forced the northern Italian cities to submit to him, and on the basis of an inheritance claim through his Norman wife, he seized Sicily. Intending to create an empire in the Mediterranean, he exacted tribute from North Africa and the weak Byzantine emperor. However, when Henry died suddenly in 1197 while planning a new crusade, his empire immediately fell apart. The German princes refused to accept his young son, Frederick II, as king and thus initiated a new civil war between backers of the Hohenstaufen Philip of Swabia and those of the Welf Otto of Brunswick. When Otto invaded Italy, Pope Innocent III secured the election of Frederick II in 1211 on the promise that the young king would give up Sicily so as not to surround papal territory.

Outstandingly accomplished in many fields, Frederick II, who reigned from 1212 to 1250, was called Stupor Mundi (Wonder of the World). Determined to keep Sicily as his base of operations, he revised his coronation promise to the pope, giving up Germany rather than Sicily to his young son Henry. In exchange for the German princes’ support of his Italian campaigns, Frederick allowed them to usurp many of his own powers, making them virtually kings in their own territories. On the empire’s eastern frontier, he granted a fief to the Teutonic Knights, a military religious order that eventually created the Prussian and Baltic states, on the condition that they convert the natives to Christianity.

In Sicily, Frederick suppressed the local nobility, reformed the laws, founded the University of Naples, and kept a brilliant court, where he shone as scientist, artist, and poet. He was also an excellent soldier, diplomat, and administrator, and led a successful crusade to Jerusalem in 1228. In his absence, however, Pope Gregory IX invaded Sicily. Frederick quickly returned and made peace with the pope, but by 1237 he was waging battle against a second Lombard League of cities in northern Italy. Once again, their ally, the pope, excommunicated Frederick, but this time Frederick responded by seizing the papal states. Gregory’s successor, Innocent IV, fled to Lyon and declared the emperor deposed.

Frederick died before he could secure his position against the league, however, and under his successor, Conrad IV, the Hohenstaufens were finally ousted from Sicily. The empire then suffered the turmoil of the Great Interregnum (1254-1273), during which two non-Germans—Richard of Cornwall and Alfonso X of Castille—claimed the crown, although neither was ever crowned. The German princes, meanwhile, exploited the absence of an emperor, further solidifying their own political independence. At the very time that French and English kings were centralizing their power, German lands moved ever further into political pluralism and fractured authority. The Great Interregnum marked a decisive turning point in the history of Germany and the empire, beginning the slow decline of real imperial power.

B.3.

Decline of the Empire and Growth of Habsburg Power (1250-1519)

By the end of the 13th century, dynastic realignments resulted in the gradual replacement of the stem duchies by several new principalities. Three of the new dynastic powers in particular—the Habsburg, Wittelsbach, and Luxemburg families—struggled to secure the imperial crown. In 1273 the electors ended the Great Interregnum by choosing Rudolf of Habsburg, a minor Swabian prince who was unable to repossess the lands that the principalities had usurped. Instead, Rudolf I concentrated on aggrandizing his own dynastic holdings. Aided by the Wittelsbachs and others, he defeated the rebellious Ottokar II of Bohemia and took the lands of Austria, Styria, Carinthia, and Carniola (modern Slovenia). The Habsburgs thus became one of the most powerful dynasties in the empire.

Rudolf reigned until 1291, and his two immediate successors were deposed and murdered by the princely electors. Still seeking a weak emperor, in 1308 they chose Henry, count of Luxemburg. Anxious to restore imperial claims to Italy, Henry VII crossed the Alps in 1310 and temporarily subdued Lombardy. He died in 1313 while trying to conquer Naples from the French. His death precipitated a civil war that raged until the Wittelsbach candidate for the throne, Louis the Bavarian, defeated his Habsburg rival at the Battle of Mühldorf in 1322. Louis IV reigned until 1347.

At Rhense in 1338, the electors made the momentous declaration that henceforth the king of the Germans need only be the majority choice of the electors, instead of the unanimous one as was previously the case. This decision averted a civil war. They also declared that he would automatically be emperor without being crowned by the pope. This was reflected in the king’s title, official by the 15th century: Holy Roman Emperor of the German Nation.

The popes, of course, objected to this change. Clement VI immediately opened negotiations with Charles, king of Bohemia and grandson of Henry VII. In 1347 Charles was chosen by five of the seven electors, who had deposed Louis IV. Charles IV diplomatically ignored the question of papal assent. In the Golden Bull of 1356, he specified the seven electors as the archbishops of Mainz, Trier, and Cologne, the count palatine of the Rhine, the duke of Saxony, the margrave of Brandenburg, and the king of Bohemia. Because the bull made their lands indivisible, granted them monopolies on mining and tolls, and secured monetary gifts from all imperial candidates, these seven rulers were now the strongest of all German princes.

Charles then began building a great state in the east by entrenching his own dynasty in Bohemia, buying Brandenburg (which allowed him to become one of the seven electors), and taking Silesia from Poland. To obtain cash, he encouraged the silver, glass, and paper industries of Bohemia. He also oversaw a major cultural revival, adorning his capital Prague with new buildings in the late Gothic style and founding the first German university in Prague in 1348.

Charles’s son, Sigismund, who reigned from 1410 to 1437, was involved in calling the Council of Constance (1414-1418). The council invited the popular religious reformer Jan Hus (John Huss) to come to the assembly under imperial protection to present his views. Huss’s proposals for ecclesiastical reform challenged not only the authority of many church figures but also the political and cultural dominance of Germans in a predominantly Czech region. When he arrived in Constance, Huss was immediately imprisoned, tortured, and burnt at the stake as a heretic. His death was considered a martyrdom by many Czechs in Bohemia and led to a series of confrontations, known as the Hussite Wars, during the 1420s and 1430s. While the more radical branches of the revolt were suppressed, moderates won some concessions from both Sigismund and the church in exchange for reconciliation.

When Sigismund died without an heir, the electors unanimously chose his Habsburg son-in-law Albert of Austria as Emperor Albert II. Albert died shortly thereafter, in 1439, but from that time on the imperial crown became in practice, although not officially, hereditary in the Habsburg line. Albert’s cousin and successor Frederick III successfully reunited different branches of the Habsburg family that had been previously split by inheritance, but he lost Hungary and Bohemia and sold Luxemburg to France. He also continually struggled with the German princes and the ever-encroaching Ottoman Empire on his eastern borders. In 1486 the princes forced him to cede his authority to his son Maximilian, but he retained the title of Holy Roman Emperor until 1493.

Maximilian I, who reigned from 1486 to 1519, was a knight and art patron. He enthusiastically laid many plans for the empire, but these never materialized. His chief success was in arranging marriages to benefit his family. By his own marriage to Mary of Burgundy, he acquired a rich territory that included thriving Dutch and Flemish towns. By marrying his son, Philip the Handsome, to Joanna, daughter of Ferdinand of Aragon and Isabella of Castille, Maximilian ensured for his heirs all of the expanding Spanish empire, including possessions in Italy and the Americas. He betrothed his grandson Ferdinand to the heiress of Hungary and Bohemia, thus adding those states to his inheritance. The office of emperor meanwhile had become an increasingly symbolic position, to be used in the next five centuries to further Habsburg dynastic ambitions.

B.4.

Life in Germany During the Middle Ages

B.4.a.

Feudal Society

With the decline of the Roman Empire and particularly with the onset of Viking and Magyar raids during the 9th and 10th centuries, political authority became increasingly fractured and localized throughout western and central Europe. The model for political authority developed from the Roman and Frankish tradition of seignorialism. In this tradition, large landowners provided farmland and protection to their tenants in return for taxes and labor. This tradition gradually evolved into a variety of forms, collectively known as feudalism.

In general, all types of feudal relations in the Middle Ages shared two features. First, and most importantly, all political relationships were based on personal bonds, or contracts, between two individuals, whether between king and noble or noble and peasant. Such mutual loyalty had been the basis for the comitatus, a group of warriors in ancient German societies. By the time of Charlemagne, the formation of a lord-vassal relationship between two warriors, or nobles, was increasingly formalized, usually involving the exchange of military service and loyalty for land. Land tenure—the key to personal wealth and power—was the second universal element of feudal relations. In most instances, kings were the largest landowners, and they secured the support of other nobles by giving each of them an estate, or fief.

By the beginning of the 11th century, most parts of Germany were dominated by aristocrats. Everywhere nobles monopolized the right to bear arms. They held supreme jurisdiction within their own lands and dispensed all types of justice. Only taxation, which was considered an exceptional and generally temporary practice in medieval Europe, required the approval of the emperor and all of the other nobles. The German nobles and the emperor gathered irregularly and in different locations in an imperial assembly, or diet, eventually called the Reichstag. A similar meeting within a territory, or land, was called a Landtag.

The German nobility ranged from the powerful seven electors and the princes of more than 240 states to the minor imperial knights who held fiefs directly from the emperor. Violent conflicts among noble families were common throughout the Middle Ages and usually aimed at expanding a dynasty’s landholdings. Arranged marriages provided another method of dynastic expansion and consolidation. Beginning in the 11th century, many families constructed castles, both for defense and as a sign of social importance.

About 90 percent of the German population during the Middle Ages lived in small, rural communities and worked on the land. In many regions peasant families entered into an unfree relationship with landowners, commonly known as serfdom. Serfs were required to give part of their labor to the landlord. The majority of those who worked the soil in Germany, though, were free tenant farmers who gave nobles a share of their annual harvest as rent. Peasants—all of those who farmed the land and bred livestock—relied on local secular and ecclesiastical patrons for various kinds of protection, both from invaders and criminals as well as from natural disasters such as famine and flood.

The material conditions of the peasants’ lives were generally harsh. Infant and child mortality was exceptionally high: One out of two babies born did not reach adulthood. Most Germans lived in one-room wooden or mud shacks with all the members of their family and even some domesticated animals. The diet consisted largely of bread, some vegetables, and beer or wine. Meat was expensive and generally reserved for holidays and other special occasions. Whether tenant or serf, peasants relied on the lord for most services—including milling and baking—and were required to provide him with their own labor at certain times. Famine and taxes occasionally drove some individuals to revolt, but the result was always violent suppression. More often peasants negotiated with landlords for better conditions or simply fled to the nearest city.

B.4.b.

Population Growth and Movement

At the end of the Roman Empire in the 5th century, there were probably only about 700,000 people in the area of modern Germany. These numbers rose gradually to about 3 million by the year 1000. As elsewhere in Europe, the population of Germany then boomed for the next three centuries, possibly growing as high as 12 million people by the end of the 13th century. In addition to contributing to the growth of towns, the growing number of people increased the demand for food and arable land. One result was the push to the east, a deliberate policy of German settlement of various areas east of the Oder, Vistula, and Memel rivers. From the 12th century to the 14th century, recruiters, working for German lords, led wagon trains of Germans to settle thinly populated Slavic lands. Monastic orders such as the Cistercians and the Premonstratensians also came to the new frontier. The Teutonic Knights moved their headquarters to Marienburg in eastern Germany and led a crusade against the pagan Prussians. The knights’ defeat in 1242 by Russian prince Alexander Nevsky marked the eastern limit of German expansion, but by then most of modern-day eastern Germany, northern Poland, and the Baltic states had been overrun by German settlers. Tensions between German and Slavic cultures in these areas have endured into modern times.

The later Middle Ages were dominated by the plague, a deadly disease known as the Black Death. Perhaps as many as 5 million Germans—about one-third of the population—died during the first wave of plague from 1348 to 1350, and subsequent outbreaks prevented the population from recovering to preplague levels until 1500. For those peasants and workers who survived, the decrease in the labor supply generally meant more favorable leases and wages. In the eastern lands, however, nobles reacted in the opposite manner. Determined not to lose their privileges, they brutally cracked down on their tenants, introducing what is known as a second serfdom, with even more oppressive feudal demands.

B.4.c.

Commerce and the Growth of Towns

Following the collapse of the Roman Empire, urban centers everywhere in Europe declined dramatically. By the beginning of the 11th century, however, trade revived and towns began a three-century growth spurt. A few, such as Trier and Cologne, were based on Roman settlements, but the majority were new centers, some connected to nearby castles or monasteries. In eastern Germany, cities such as Breslau (modern Wrocław, Poland) and Königsberg (modern Kaliningrad, Russia) developed as part of deliberate colonization. Cologne and Frankfurt prospered greatly because they were on the routes that traders traveled between Germany and the large merchant fairs of Champagne, in what is now northeastern France. Mainz grew because it lay on the trade route across the Alps to Italy. Of the 3,000 German towns established by 1300, almost all were small, with populations under 1,000. Cologne, the largest city in medieval Germany, had a population of 30,000 at its peak in the early 14th century.

As their economic power grew, the cities’ demands for freedom from attack and from feudal tolls often led to war with neighboring nobles. Shrewd town magistrates were able to use the ongoing struggle between German emperors and princes to their own benefit. Beginning with Frederick Barbarossa in 1183, emperors granted some cities complete political autonomy and the right to form alliances in exchange for tax revenues. These were called imperial cities. Most were located in southern Germany and formed defensive unions such as the Swabian League.

Meanwhile, in the north, several German and Scandinavian towns—particularly Lübeck, Hamburg, and Bremen—combined forces to form the powerful trade association of the Hansa, or the Hanseatic League. At its peak in the early 15th century, the league monopolized all trade on the Baltic and throughout northern Europe. The league constructed canals and roads, arranged commercial treaties, and even waged war.

In Switzerland, eight city-states, or cantons, won their independence from the Habsburgs in the 13th century. They were eventually joined by others in the Helvetic (Swiss) Confederation, which has endured to this day. As befitted a decentralized empire, no one city gained undisputed prominence, although Prague served as the imperial capital during the 14th and 15th centuries.

During the later Middle Ages, the cities became increasingly important in an expanding money economy. In the south, the imperial cities of Nürnberg and Augsburg, home of the Fugger Bank, thrived on mining and trade with Italian city-states. The growth of trade was accompanied by a marked increase in production of finished goods beginning in the 12th century. Throughout Germany, skilled artisans organized themselves into guilds devoted to a particular specialty, for example weaving. The guild was a local monopoly that held complete power over production quality and quantity, prices, and admission into its ranks. By the late Middle Ages, guilds had gained for their members the most powerful economic and political positions in the cities.

The medieval city was dominated by a few powerful people, just as the countryside was. The key difference was that in the cities, the various merchant and craft guilds (both virtually hereditary by the 15th century) struggled with one another for political power. Those who were successful dominated the town councils. Beginning in the 12th century, these councils legislated on a variety of matters, including safety, hygiene, and social behavior. The majority of the urban population—artisans, shopkeepers, day laborers, and the destitute—had no say in governing the city.

Many German cities included Jews who in theory were under the special protection of the emperor, but in fact they endured countless organized attacks, or pogroms, throughout the Middle Ages. By the end of the 13th century, most German cities required all Jews to live within an enclosed district (ghetto), supposedly for their own safety, but sporadic persecutions persisted.

B.4.d.

Technological Developments

During the Middle Ages, the productivity of agriculture increased as a result of several technological advances. The proliferation of the heavy-wheeled plow by the 6th century greatly improved production on German lands but also required much animal power—from two to eight oxen per plow. As a result, many farmers gathered in small settlements with common livestock and fields. By the 9th century, the introduction of the collar and harness permitted horses to do the same work as oxen; developments such as the tandem harness (two teams, one behind the other) and the horseshoe improved productivity even more. Undoubtedly the greatest agrarian innovation of the early Middle Ages was the three-field rotation. Common by the 9th century, this method allowed farmers to improve their annual yield and avoid exhausting the soil by rotating crops on three fields—one for a winter wheat, one for a spring crop (such as oats, barley, peas, or beans), and one left unused. An agricultural revolution during the 11th and 12th centuries witnessed the clearing of millions of acres of forests and swamps for cultivation as well as the introduction of the windmill, which harnessed the power of the wind to mill grain or pump water.

The two areas of technological innovation most prominent in late medieval Germany were mining and printing. By the late 15th century, a series of inventions and improved techniques resulted in a fivefold increase in central European mining output. Saxon methods of extracting pure silver from the lead alloy in which it was often found helped expand the money economies of Europe. Increased iron production also meant more and stronger pumps and other machine parts and a related boom in construction work and shipbuilding.

The invention of movable metal type was one of the most significant developments of all human history. Johannes Gutenberg discovered a durable alloy of lead, tin, and antimony that allowed books and other writings to be duplicated in a fraction of the time needed for manuscript copying. Gutenberg’s Bible, completed around 1455, was the first major work to be printed. Within 50 years, more than 250 cities throughout the empire and Europe had one or more printing shops operating full time. The impact of the printing press on society is still being explored, but it is clear that it touched the lives of many more than the 10 percent of the population who could read.

B.4.e.

Religion and the Church

Ancient Germanic peoples worshiped many gods, usually distinguishing between the greater sky gods, such as Wodin and Thor, and the lesser divinities who dwelled in fields, trees, and streams. The first recorded Christian missionary to the Goths was Ulfilas in the 4th century, who preached the Arian version of Christianity. This version was considered heretical because it denied the full divinity of Jesus Christ. Ulfilas and his successors converted almost all of the German peoples within the empire. Clovis and the Franks reconverted them to orthodox (Catholic) Christianity beginning in the 6th century.

The Frankish kingdom established a special relationship with the Roman church that continued under the Carolingians. Charlemagne enthusiastically encouraged missionary work among the Germans, which was largely completed by the end of his reign in 814. The pagan Slavs of eastern Germany, Poland, and the Baltic states were also eventually converted.

By the 10th century, numerous German monasteries and convents were operating under the Benedictine rule. This rule of daily life for monasteries was established by Saint Benedict of Nursia and stressed communal living, physical labor, prayer, and study. However, not all the monasteries adhered strictly to the rule. This prompted a monastery in Cluny, in central France, to lead a reform movement to restore strict adherence to the Benedictine rule. The Cluniac movement was well organized because all the monasteries were responsible to the central abbey in Cluny. The movement attracted support from many kings and bishops who supported monastic reform. The widespread following and strict rule of the Cluniacs made the movement a powerful force for stability in the Catholic Church.

Although this movement had little impact in German lands until the late 11th century, from that time on aristocratic and imperial families established numerous monasteries and convents. Parish churches and grandiose cathedrals also multiplied during this period and with them the number of clerics. The social background and duties of the clergy mirrored the hierarchical nature of the larger society. Positions of power, such as bishop (head of a diocese) and abbot (head of a monastery) tended to be held by members of aristocratic families, while parish priest and other lower positions went to individuals of peasant or worker status.

Converts often blended secular and even pagan ideas and practices with those of Christianity. This intermingling eventually resulted in a great diversity of local religious traditions in medieval Germany. Religious practices were woven into civic and village processions, festivals, and other communal gatherings.

There was no standardized training for parish priests, so sometimes they taught beliefs considered heretical by Rome. In southern Germany, followers of Peter Waldo, who were known as Waldenses, were especially critical of wealthy and powerful clerics during the 12th and 13th centuries. Another major challenge to the church came from Jan Hus (John Huss), who in the early 15th century advocated reducing the clergy’s authority, both in secular and ecclesiastical matters.

Perhaps the most distinctive German contribution to medieval Christianity was in the area of mysticism, the idea that an individual could achieve personal union with the divine. The Benedictine nun Hildegard of Bingen was the most famous mystic of the High Middle Ages and inspired a cult of followers long after her death in 1179. One of the most influential mystics of the later Middle Ages was Meister Eckhart, a Dominican theologian who became a popular preacher in the Rhineland. Eckhart taught that union with God could be achieved through emptying the self and allowing the divine spark to enter. Some of his ideas were declared heretical after his death, but his influence on German spirituality as well as literature was profound. The works of his disciples Heinrich Suso and Johannes Tauler represent some of the greatest German literary achievements of the later Middle Ages.

Beginning in the late 14th century, many of the teachings of the Rhineland mystics were incorporated in a movement called Modern Devotion. Also known as the Brothers and Sisters of the Common Life, this group established several houses in northern Germany and The Netherlands where lay people and clerics could meditate. Most of these houses also maintained small grammar schools where children—most notably Erasmus and Martin Luther—were taught to read and write.

B.4.f.

Intellectual Developments

During the early Middle Ages, the centers of scholarship were the monasteries. In the 9th century, the so-called Carolingian Renaissance did much to revive the literary arts of classical Latin, but the number of individuals who could read and write remained small and for the most part limited to clerics. By the 12th century there were more than 200 small cathedral schools in Europe. By the next century, many of these had expanded or been absorbed into new institutions of learning called universities. The first German university was founded by Charles IV in Prague in 1348, eventually followed by similar institutions in Vienna (1356), Heidelberg (1386), Cologne (1388), Erfurt (1392), Leipzig (1409), Tübingen (1477), and Wittenberg (1502).

C.

The Age of Religious Strife (1519-1648)

Dramatic changes occurred in Germany and other European societies during the next period, which historians call the early modern era. During this time, Christianity was divided by the Reformation and the Americas were explored. Both had profound effects on politics, economies, and society. Another force for change was the new mass medium of the printing press, which carried diverse ideas, news, and entertainment to large audiences.

During the 16th and 17th centuries, territorial rulers and city councils in Germany expanded their authority, often in conjunction with religious changes stemming from the Reformation. At the same time, capitalism expanded and the population grew, resulting in widespread inflation throughout the period and a greater polarization of wealth within German society. On the other hand, many of the basic structures of medieval life—dynastic politics, predominantly agrarian economies, and low standard of living—remained largely constant throughout the period.

C.1.

Charles V

When Charles V succeeded his grandfather Maximilian as Holy Roman emperor in 1519, he was already hereditary lord of a vast assortment of territories. Due to a combination of politically astute dynastic marriages and fortuitous accidents, he had inherited the French Burgundian lands as well as the Netherlands (modern Holland and Belgium), the Habsburg’s Austrian and Bohemian holdings, and the kingdoms of Aragon and Castille (modern-day Spain), including all of the Spanish territories in the newly discovered Americas.

Charles made a concerted effort to consolidate and institutionalize the empire. He expanded the number of imperial districts to facilitate the raising of armies and money for imperial wars against the Ottoman Empire. His 1532 criminal code, known as the Carolina, was widely copied throughout German cities and principalities, providing some limited standardization to the widely diverse laws and customs of Germany.

On the whole, though, German princes and cities resisted what they perceived as imperial encroachments on their prerogatives. Although Charles had ruled more territory than any European leader since Charlemagne, by the time he abdicated in 1556 the Holy Roman Empire was more politically fractured than at any time since the Great Interregnum of the 13th century.

C.2.

Habsburg Conflicts with the French

In 1494 the French had invaded Italy, and Europe’s two most powerful dynasties—the Habsburgs and the Valois, the French ruling family—engaged in a series of military conflicts aimed at dominating the continent. At first, Maximilian and the Habsburgs only joined leagues of Italian cities in fighting the Valois and supplied arms and troops to the Italians. After the battle of Marignano in 1515, though, the Valois ruler Francis I resumed expansionist policies in Italy and in 1519 even presented himself as a candidate for Holy Roman emperor.

When the Habsburg Charles was elected instead, lingering resentment over Burgundian territory now in Charles’s possession led to the first Habsburg-Valois war, from 1521 to 1526. In a decisive battle at Pavia in 1525, Francis was captured and forced to renounce all claims to Milan, Naples, Genoa, and the duchy of Burgundy. Alarmed by Charles’s growing power, Pope Clement VII and Henry VIII of England joined Francis in the League of Cognac, leading to the second Habsburg-Valois war. After two years of disastrous consequences for all participants, little had changed, except that Charles gave up Burgundy. In 1535 the house of Valois once more made a claim on Milan and marched into the duchy of Savoy. Charles counterattacked in southern France, thus initiating the third Habsburg-Valois war, which ended in a stalemate three years later.

Tensions continued during the next 20 years, with further outbreaks of war in 1542, 1551, and 1557. Finally, in 1559, both sides were financially and psychologically exhausted and sued for peace. The resulting Treaty of Cateau-Cambrésis gave the Habsburgs control over Italy, the free county of Burgundy, and most of The Netherlands. The Valois maintained the duchy of Burgundy, most of Piedmont (Piemonte) and Savoy, and parts of the Rhineland.

C.3.

Wars with the Ottoman Empire

Under the ambitious sultan Süleyman I, the Ottoman Empire in the 1520s began to expand into the eastern Habsburg holdings in Austria and Hungary. After Süleyman’s armies defeated imperial forces at Mohács in 1526, they moved on to besiege Vienna. The same year, Charles made concessions to Protestant princes at the imperial diet in Speyer to gain their support for a counteroffensive. The Ottomans were temporarily checked, but by 1532 they once again threatened Vienna, forcing Charles to make another truce with Protestant rulers in return for their military assistance. After three years of fighting, Charles succeeded in capturing Tunis and halting the Ottoman advance for the time being.

Meanwhile, Francis I signed an alliance with the Ottoman Empire and made plans to reopen an offensive while the emperor was occupied in the Mediterranean. A truce was reached in 1545, but for the next 25 years imperial and Ottoman troops skirmished in southern Europe until the imperial troops achieved a smashing defeat of the Ottoman navy at the Battle of Lepanto in 1571. While all European rulers, particularly the Habsburgs, remained concerned about the Ottoman threat for the next century, Ottoman advancement had been halted.

C.4.

The Protestant Reformation

Martin Luther, one of the most important figures in all of German history, was a monk and theology professor at the University of Wittenberg. Through his studies, he gradually developed an alternate interpretation of how Christians obtained salvation. In his interpretation, an individual could be saved only through faith, not through good works, as the Catholic Church taught. His famous posting of the Ninety-five Theses on the door of the Wittenberg cathedral in 1517 was a call for reforming certain abuses within the Catholic Church, such as the selling of indulgences, remissions of sin granted by the Church. By 1520, however, Luther had decided that his interpretation of Christianity was incompatible with that of the existing church. Within six months, he published three significant pamphlets that stated his belief in salvation by faith alone, described how the Roman church had deviated from the Scriptures, and called on the German princes to take a more active role in governing the church within their territories.

Pope Leo X issued a papal bull, an official statement giving Luther until the end of 1520 to recant or face excommunication; the reformer replied by publicly burning the bull and all the books of canon (church) law. The following year Emperor Charles V summoned Luther to defend himself at the imperial diet in Worms. When Luther attended and refused to bend before the assembled heads of Germany, he was outlawed. Fortunately, his powerful patron Frederick the Wise, elector of Saxony, ignored the ban and instead installed Luther at Wartburg castle, where Luther began to translate the New Testament into German.

C.5.

Diversity of the Early Reformation

Luther’s evangelical ideas found fertile soil in diverse parts of German society. The imperial knights Ulrich von Hutten and Franz von Sickingen took up Luther’s appeals to the German nobility to rid their land of Roman Catholic influences. In 1522 they launched an armed offensive against church lands that was crushed within a year.

In 1524 a much larger and more destructive revolt, known as the Peasants’ War, spread from southwestern Germany up the Rhine to the heart of the empire. By 1525 more than 500,000 peasants had taken up arms, making a variety of demands on their feudal lords. These peasants often mingled Luther’s language and ideas with their own complaints about taxation and the loss of traditional feudal rights, such as the use of common lands.

Luther, however, claimed that the rebelling peasants had misunderstood him, and that spiritual equality before God was not the same as social or political equality in the world. He urged the princes to strike down those who upset the social order intended by God. The princes did just that, massacring as many as 100,000 peasants. The largest peasant revolt in German history was crushed, as were the hopes of all those seeking a radical social reformation.

From the mid-1520s on, the German Reformation entered an urban phase, in which city magistrates assumed importance. Throughout the empire, local reformers persuaded the leaders of all but 5 of the 60 imperial cities to embrace Luther’s reforms. The resulting religious reform ordinances varied. Some cities thoroughly revised all church rituals; others stressed reform of morals and public decency. Most allowed priests to marry and transferred control over all church property and offices to the municipal government.

Meanwhile, some Swiss cantons had come under the influence of theologian Huldreich Zwingli, who developed the Reformed Christian movement. Zwingli disagreed with Luther on some important questions of doctrine and favored a more thoroughly integrated theocracy, with almost no division between church and state. This religious tradition continued through the work of Heinrich Bullinger in Zürich and John Calvin in Geneva.

There were many other interpretations of Luther’s evangelical message, and many who disagreed were persecuted by Lutherans and Catholics alike. The Anabaptists were a universal target of persecution. These small groups of believers, who called themselves Brethren or simply Christians, accepted Luther’s emphasis on faith and Scriptures but also believed in the extremely unpopular practice of adult baptism. Because all of the people of the time had already been baptized as infants, baptizing adults was considered double baptism, a capital offense since the late Roman Empire. Most Anabaptists were also pacifists and thus easy prey for persecution. The one major exception was the Anabaptist citizenry of the city of Münster, whose leader, Jan of Leyden, declared a theocratic kingdom in 1534. Few issues so united the Protestant and Catholic princes of Germany, who raised a huge siege against the city, breaking through in 1535 and executing hundreds. From this period on, the Anabaptist movement remained exclusively pacifistic, as is evident in the followers of Menno Simons, founder in the 16th century of the Mennonites, and in the 17th-century Amish.

C.5.a.

Conflict and Compromise

In 1529, at a meeting of the diet in Speyer, Ferdinand, Charles V’s brother, attempted to reinstate the ban on Luther and his followers that Charles V had suspended to gain the princes’ support for a campaign against the Ottomans. Several of the delegates protested, and the term Protestant came to be associated with the movement. The next year, led by Luther’s associate Melanchthon, the Protestant delegation presented a conciliatory statement or creed, which has come to be known as the Augsburg Confession. This concise summary of Lutheran beliefs was rejected by the Catholic princes, leading Protestants to form the defensive Schmalkaldic League in 1531. Eventually the league included seven princes and 16 cities.

During the 1530s and early 1540s Charles was mostly preoccupied with the Ottoman threat. In 1545, however, he turned his attention to the Schmalkaldic League. In 1547 his troops soundly defeated a Saxon army at Mühlberg, and the emperor’s ascendancy was assured. In 1548, at the peak of his power, Charles issued the Augsburg Interim, an attempt to end religious division within the empire by some minor concessions to Lutherans. This interim settlement failed to appease Protestant princes and threatened to provoke a much more destructive civil war within the empire.

A compromise was reached in the Peace of Augsburg, which Charles reluctantly accepted in 1555. This treaty became the foundation for religious coexistence in Germany for the next three centuries. Most importantly, it granted the princes and cities full sovereignty regarding religion. Each ruler could choose either Lutheranism or Catholicism as the official religion of his territory (the Reformed and Calvinist creeds, while not prohibited, were not recognized by the Peace of Augsburg). He was free to treat nonconformist subjects as he wanted, sometimes forcing them to migrate or convert. Religious segregation, rather than toleration, seemed the only solution, and for the rest of the century at least, it seemed to work.

C.5.b.

The Confessional Age

When Charles abdicated in 1556, his vast empire was divided, with the Spanish and Burgundian lands going to his son Philip II and the imperial title and German lands going to his brother Ferdinand I. Within the German cities and territories, however, religious tensions continued to mount as governments attempted to establish confessions of faith among their respective populaces, mostly along Lutheran lines. By the 1540s, several newly converted princes had joined the attempt, simultaneously creating new courts and officials to oversee the process. The Protestant Reformation continued to spread.

Meanwhile, a Catholic reform council met for three extended sessions between 1545 and 1563 in the north Italian city of Trent, assessing which teachings and practices required changes and to what degree (see Counter Reformation). In general, the council reaffirmed almost all Catholic doctrine on salvation and the sacraments, while also laying a blueprint for extensive clerical and lay reform at the diocesan level. When Catholic bishops turned to the task of implementing reforms and even attempting to win back Protestant converts, one of their greatest assets was a new religious order, the Society of Jesus, or Jesuits. The Jesuits relied heavily on education, setting up schools and universities in Germany and throughout Europe. With the backing of rulers such as the Wittelsbachs of Bavaria, the Habsburgs of Austria, and the archbishops of Salzburg, Bamberg, and Würzburg, the Jesuits helped create a Catholic bloc in the southern part of the empire, which has remained predominantly Catholic to this day. In more mixed or predominantly Protestant areas, though, the Jesuits often escalated religious tensions.

Emperor Ferdinand I was more savvy in politics than Charles had been. For most of his reign, Ferdinand attempted to reconcile the two religious camps within the empire; at the same time, he built up the centralized bureaucracy of his Austrian territories. At his death in 1564, his lands were divided equally among his three sons, and Maximilian II assumed the throne. Both Maximilian II and his successor, Rudolf II, were intensely preoccupied with the Ottoman threat. As in other times of increased military spending, the emperors generally deferred to the princes and cities on a variety of issues in exchange for new taxes. Meanwhile, several small and medium-sized Calvinist states that had developed in spite of the Peace of Augsburg formed close political ties with one another.

The combination of weak imperial rule and intense religious differences increased political tensions within the empire. In 1608 Protestant delegates walked out of the imperial diet, protesting that the empire favored Catholics. German Lutheran and Calvinist states then formed the Protestant Union, a defensive league that was answered by the formation of the German Catholic League. During the reign of the exceptionally weak emperor Matthias, from 1612 to 1619, the empire narrowly averted several crises. Finally, in 1618, the anticipated war came, setting into motion a series of conflicts that have come to be known as the Thirty Years’ War.

C.5.c.

The Thirty Years’ War

The trouble began in Protestant Bohemia (in what is now the Czech Republic). In 1619 the Czechs refused to accept the Catholic Ferdinand II as king or future emperor. In 1618 they had set up their own government, supported by several Protestant states. After the death of Matthias, they chose the Protestant elector Frederick V of the Rhineland-Palatinate as their king. Ferdinand, however, crushed the Bohemian forces at the Battle of White Mountain in 1620. Frederick was exiled, and Catholicism was restored by force. The rebelling Bohemian nobles were fined, deprived of their lands, or killed.

The second phase of the Thirty Years’ War began in 1625. After the Battle of White Mountain, Spanish troops under Philip III had occupied part of the Palatinate in support of Ferdinand. German Protestant princes objected to the presence of these Spanish troops on German lands. The princes supported an invasion of Germany by the Protestant king Christian IV of Denmark, who was financed largely by the Dutch and the English. Christian was defeated, and in 1629 the victorious Ferdinand issued the heavy-handed Edict of Restitution, which ordered the return of all Catholic Church property seized by Protestants since 1552.

The third phase of the war began when the Lutheran king Gustav II Adolph of Sweden, who had long wanted to extend Swedish control over the Baltic, invaded Pomerania as the champion of the Protestant princes. The Swedish army won a brilliant victory at Breitenfeld in 1631 and swept down to take Mainz and Prague. Following Gustav’s death on the battlefield in 1632 the war dragged on, accomplishing little but the devastation of the German countryside. In 1635 a truce was declared, and Ferdinand’s unpopular Edict of Restitution was revoked.

In the fourth phase, the Catholic French, who wanted to undermine the Habsburgs, paid subsidies to the Protestant Swedish army to continue fighting. French troops also crossed the Rhine into German territories. After another 13 years of destruction, Emperor Ferdinand III and the princes were ready for peace.

C.5.d.

The Peace of Westphalia

The long war ended in a draw, finalized by the Peace of Westphalia in 1648. By the terms of the treaty, the sovereignty and independence of each of the almost 300 states of the Holy Roman Empire were fully recognized, leaving the emperor virtually powerless. In addition, as in the Peace of Augsburg, the religion of each German state was to be determined by its prince; this time, however, Calvinist Christianity was included with the Lutheran and Catholic faiths as an option. The religious status quo of 1624 was accepted, meaning that the Habsburg lands, the south, and the west remained predominantly Catholic, while Protestants were permitted to retain previously acquired lands.

The war had several devastating effects on Germany. Politically, the Holy Roman Empire continued in name, but it had lost all claim to effective governing power. Economically and socially, Germany lost about one-third of its people to war, famine, and emigration as well as much of its livestock, capital, and trade. Many towns, especially in the north, were destroyed or bankrupt, and manufacturing and middle-class investment were extremely low. Bands of refugees and mercenaries roamed the countryside, seizing what they could. In the midst of poverty and social unrest, many states became even more authoritarian, further weakening what little popular political autonomy remained.

C.6.

Life in Germany During the 16th and 17th Centuries

C.6.a.

Population

In 1500 Germany had a population of about 14 million. This number climbed to about 18 million by 1600. However, over the next 50 years the population dropped dramatically. This drop is usually attributed to the destruction of the Thirty Years’ War, but serious famines, plague outbreaks, and emigration had a large effect as well. Some areas, notably Bohemia and Franconia, lost more than three-fourths of their people. Although the casualties of war and the spread of typhoid and venereal diseases by soldiers certainly affected the population, the war alone cannot account for all of the demographic decline.

There were about 4,000 towns in Germany by 1500, still mostly small. Only Nürnberg, Strasbourg, Augsburg, Vienna, Lübeck, and Magdeburg had more than 30,000 inhabitants. In most German cities, citizenship became even more restricted. Usually ownership of property was required in order to be a citizen, and eligibility to serve on the council was monopolized by a few local wealthy families. Many municipal governments became much more active in their regulation of urban life. Sporadic pogroms against Jews and Roma (Gypsies) continued in German cities.

C.6.b.

Economic Developments

From the late 15th century on, several German cities, particularly Augsburg and Nürnberg, experienced significant economic growth. In addition to various local guild industries and regional trade, some German merchants and bankers became involved with larger, more wide-reaching ventures. The most famous of these family firms was the Fugger company of Augsburg, which had become the largest financial organization in Europe by the early 16th century. The Fuggers’ virtual monopoly on all gold, silver, and copper mining in central Europe endowed its leaders with great political influence. By the time of the Thirty Years’ War, however, these family firms were losing their power, being replaced by even larger royal and international enterprises.

Low crop yields made German farmers susceptible to misfortunes. Large-scale droughts and famines invariably led to widespread disease, migration, and starvation. Urban workers faced rampant price inflation and falling wages. While some peasants and small property holders expanded their real estate during this period, the majority of urban and rural poor moved closer to destitution and homelessness.

C.6.c.

Religion

The introduction of Christian pluralism into German society had profound results. Religious conversions of political rulers were common and had widespread implications for subjects and foreigners alike. Religious segregation, rather than toleration, was the rule until the 19th century. Several regions in the north and east developed almost exclusively Lutheran populations, and many localities in the south became overwhelmingly Catholic. Mixed populations, particularly in imperial cities such as Augsburg, did exist, but they were rigidly segregated by religious affiliation.

Meanwhile, despite the efforts of both Protestant and Catholic reformers, many people continued beliefs and practices with pre-Christian origins. The common belief in magic helped fuel a widespread fear of witches. Throughout Europe, as many as 100,000 individuals were executed as witches, mostly between 1550 and 1650. Of these, perhaps three-quarters of the prosecutions took place within the Holy Roman Empire. Most accusations in Germany quickly developed into local panics and large-scale purges. Prosecutions were common in Protestant and Catholic lands alike. See also Witchcraft: Diabolical Witchcraft.

C.6.d.

Intellectual Developments

Intellectual life in Germany was deeply affected by both the Protestant Reformation and by the Renaissance. Renaissance learning came to Germany from Italy through the writings of Conradus Celtes, Willibald Pirkheimer, Sebastian Brant, Johann Reuchlin, and Ulrich von Hutten. The Renaissance emphasized the importance of classical studies and looked to ancient Greece and Rome as models. Several writers, including von Hutten and Pirkheimer, became important proponents of Luther’s early reforms, as did the poet-shoemaker Hans Sachs. This combination of classical learning and Reformation thinking was also apparent in the arts. Among painters, Lucas Cranach the Elder, Hans Holbein the Younger, and Albrecht Dürer lent their talents to the Reformation, providing extremely effective visual representations of religious and church themes.

The link between German Protestantism and education was especially strong. Almost all of the early leaders of the Reformation had a university education and were strong advocates of education as a tool for moral and social reform. Luther urged parents to send their children to school and established a new genre of religious literature with his catechisms for children. Luther’s colleague Melanchthon aided several German rulers and city councils in establishing public grammar schools and high schools. Melanchthon’s model stressed a humanist curriculum of Greek and Latin combined with religious instruction. Catholic reformers, particularly the Jesuits, also established educational institutions in Germany during the second half of the 16th century.

In the natural sciences, physician Philippus Aureolus Paracelsus challenged the prevailing orthodoxy on the internal origin of all illness, paving the way for pathology. On the death of Danish astronomer Tycho Brahe, Johannes Kepler inherited both his teacher’s astronomical charts and his position as director of Emperor Rudolf II’s observatory in Prague. Using complex mathematical calculations, Kepler developed three laws of planetary motion—most importantly, that the planets orbit the sun in elliptical rather than circular fashion.

D.

Germany During the Baroque Age (1648-1792)

The art historians’ term baroque is often applied to the segment of German history from 1648 to 1792, especially to the institutions, devotional practices, and ornate art forms associated with the declining Habsburg empire. The baroque age in Germany did not witness any dramatic changes in the social, political, or religious order. The period did see, however, the traditional rituals and prerogatives of the old regime increasingly challenged by such developments as the rising state of Prussia, the Enlightenment, neoclassicism, and naturalism. These forces would ultimately transform Germany.

D.1.

Dynastic Wars of Expansion

The Treaty of Westphalia curbed but hardly ended the expansionist ambitions of German dynasties such as the Austrian Habsburgs. Scarcely had they recovered from the Thirty Years’ War when the princes and the emperor plunged into new dynastic struggles. In the west, German princes were involved in several wars as French king Louis XIV strove to extend his territory past the Rhine. In the War of the Devolution (1667-1668), Great Elector Frederick William of Brandenburg accepted a large sum of money from Louis in return for political support. In the Dutch War (1672-1678) Frederick William turned against Louis and the French, who were allied with Sweden. He fought off a Swedish invasion and conquered western Pomerania, but was forced to give up these conquests at the Peace of Saint-Germain-en-Laye in 1679. He later benefited Brandenburg by offering refuge to Huguenots (French Calvinists), whom Louis had exiled. About 20,000 Huguenots migrated east, bringing French culture and skills such as weaving. Louis’s invasion of the Rhineland-Palatinate led to the war of the League of Augsburg (1688-1697), in which he won Strasbourg and Alsace.

The War of the Spanish Succession (1701-1714) was fought over the right of Louis XIV’s grandson, Philip of Anjou (see Philip V), to inherit the Spanish throne. Bavaria sided with France, because Louis promised the Bavarian elector the crown of the Spanish Netherlands (roughly modern-day Belgium). Brandenburg supported the successive emperors Leopold I and Joseph I in return for imperial recognition of Prussia as a kingdom. Other European states also allied with the empire to block unification of France and Spain. Battles waged in Bavaria and western Germany brought havoc and ruin. When both sides were exhausted, they accepted the Peace of Utrecht (1714), in which Austria gained the Spanish Netherlands, Naples, Milan, and Sardinia.

Meanwhile the German princes turned their own expansionist ambitions toward the north and east. In the First Northern War (1655-1660), the emperor and the elector of Brandenburg supported Poland and Denmark against Charles X Gustav of Sweden. In the Great Northern War (1700-1721), which paralleled the War of the Spanish Succession, Saxony, Poland, Brandenburg-Prussia, Hannover, Denmark, and Russia all joined forces against Sweden. At the war’s end, the treaties of Stockholm and Nystadt restored Poland to Augustus II, transferred Stettin and West Pomerania from Sweden to Brandenburg-Prussia, and gave Sweden’s eastern Baltic lands to Russia.

D.2.

Wars with the Ottoman Empire

The Ottoman threat from the east had been effectively checked since the Battle of Lepanto in 1571. By the middle of the 17th century, however, the destruction of the Thirty Years’ War had made the empire’s eastern frontiers again vulnerable. Ottoman forces invaded Hungary in 1663, but imperial troops managed to defeat them and win a 20-year truce. France’s Louis XIV and the Hungarians, both eager to check the Habsburgs, encouraged Ottoman aggression against them. When the truce expired, the Ottomans besieged Vienna in 1683. Imperial troops, combined with those of Jan III Sobieski of Poland, rescued the city, and the Ottomans were driven beyond the Danube. As a result, Austria compelled Hungary to recognize the Habsburg right to inherit the Hungarian crown. The Ottoman wars continued until the brilliant general Prince Eugene of Savoy led imperial troops to victory at Senta in northern Serbia in 1697. By the Treaty of Karlowitz in 1699, the Habsburgs regained most of Hungary from the Ottomans. The country, ravaged and greatly depopulated due to the conflict, was resettled with German veterans, and imperial authority from Vienna was imposed.

D.3.

Austrian-Prussian Rivalry

By 1740 the German states of Austria and Prussia had emerged as the chief rivals for dominance in central Europe. Austria had been the core territory of the Habsburg family since the 13th century. The Habsburgs had built their power and land by acquiring territory through diplomacy and dynastic marriages and had become one of the most powerful states in Europe by the beginning of the Reformation. However, religious and dynastic wars, Ottoman invasions in the 17th century, and growing conflict with Prussia had weakened the state by the early 1700s.

D.3.a.

Growth of Prussia

The Hohenzollern family, which had been granted Brandenburg in the 15th century, also held a number of other territories in the west. Outside the empire to the east, the Hohenzollerns had inherited Prussia as a Polish duchy in 1618 and converted it into an independent kingdom in 1701. Gradually, all the Hohenzollern lands came to be known as the kingdom of Prussia.

Unlike many other European dynasties, the Hohenzollerns enjoyed an unbroken (and therefore uncontested) series of male heirs from 1640 to 1786. These rulers were thus able to focus their efforts on building an efficient centralized state, a task that most of them successfully pushed forward. Frederick William of Prussia, known as the Great Elector, reigned from 1640 to 1688. He was a sturdy, hardheaded soldier determined to unite his disparate possessions into a modern military state. He created an efficient, honest bureaucracy that filled the treasury and ran the country for the benefit of a large standing army. By 1678 he had established a military force of 40,000 that absorbed more than 50 percent of the state’s revenue. His intellectual and artistic son Frederick paid more attention to building palaces and promoting the arts than to the army. He did, however, obtain the title king of Prussia from the emperor.

Frederick’s son, Frederick William I, developed a centralized financial system and a standing army of 90,000 by the time of his death in 1740. Frederick II, the Great, was equally at home on the battlefield and enjoying French literature and music in his palace near Berlin. He refined and reorganized the Prussian government, economy, and army.

D.3.b.

War of the Austrian Succession

Emperor Charles VI, anxious to keep Habsburg lands unified, issued the Pragmatic Sanction in 1713, declaring that his only child, Maria Theresa, should succeed him. When he died in 1740, the electors of Bavaria and Saxony rejected the Pragmatic Sanction on the grounds that they themselves had prior claims through their wives. Frederick II of Prussia offered his support to Maria Theresa in exchange for the rich province of Silesia. When she refused, Frederick promptly invaded Silesia, precipitating the War of the Austrian Succession. The Bavarians, Saxons, and French invaded Austria and Bohemia, while Britain, the Dutch Republic, and Russia came to the aid of Austria. Alarmed by Frederick’s military victories, Maria Theresa made peace with him in 1742, ceding Silesia. Austria and its allies then succeeded in driving the French from Bohemia and conquering Bavaria. By the Treaty of Aix-la-Chapelle (1745), Maria Theresa’s husband, Franz, Duke of Lorraine, was recognized as emperor, although it was she who actually ruled. In exchange, Maria Theresa returned Bavaria to the Wittelsbachs and allowed Prussia to keep Silesia.

D.3.c.

The Seven Years’ War

The emergence of Prussia as a major power led to a radical shift of alliances and to new hostilities. Austria, determined to reconquer Silesia, made an alliance with Russia as well as its old rival France. Prussia, anticipating encirclement, struck first in 1756 by invading Saxony and Bohemia, thus beginning the Seven Years’ War. Despite good leadership, Frederick II found himself pressed by many enemies. He was conveniently rescued by the death of Elizabeth of Russia in 1761 and the succession of Peter III, who admired Frederick and immediately made peace with him. The exhausted French also wanted peace, and hostilities ended in 1763 with all territories restored to prewar status.

Bitterly disappointed, Maria Theresa devoted herself to internal affairs. She gradually reorganized the government and established uniform taxes, a customs union, and state-supported elementary schools. She encouraged commoners as well as nobles to take government and army positions. Pious, warmhearted, and tactful, she was an extremely popular monarch. Her idealistic son, Joseph, with whom she did not always agree, succeeded her in 1780. Joseph II strove impatiently to create an efficient, modern bureaucracy without regard for local customs or prejudices.

Both Prussia and Austria looked to the east for territorial expansion. Prussia had long been anxious to annex the Polish territory separating Brandenburg and Prussia. Austria, ever regretting the lost Silesia, also looked to Poland for compensation. Both countries feared the Russians, who were exercising greater and greater control over Poland, and who had deposed the Polish king in 1764. A weak Poland seemed ample excuse for intervention, and in 1772 Austria, Prussia, and Russia agreed to the first partition of Poland. This partition reduced Poland’s area by about one-quarter. In 1792 the Russians secretly organized a revolt within Poland that gave Russian and Prussian forces an excuse to occupy the country and further reduce Polish territory by about two-thirds. After another Polish attempt to regain territory in 1794, the remainder of the country was divided between Prussia, Austria, and Russia in 1795.

D.4.

Life in Germany During the Baroque Age

D.4.a.

Social Changes

Almost a century passed before Germany’s population recovered to a level near that of before the Thirty Years’ War, reaching about 20 million in 1750. Frequent harvest failures, disease, and unemployment left about a quarter of the population destitute, leading to widespread migration within the empire and the growth of a criminal underclass in many cities. Emigration was another option, and more than 200,000 Germans had left for the Americas by the end of the 18th century. Urban populations continued to grow, most dramatically in the Prussian capital of Berlin, which grew from 6,000 in 1640 to 55,000 in 1700, and to 150,000 in 1800. The much older and more cosmopolitan Austrian capital of Vienna had a population of 210,000 by 1800.

The social order of the Middle Ages remained strikingly unchanged. Serfdom was abolished in 1773 in Prussia but was still widely practiced. In Austria it was abolished in 1781 but restored at Joseph’s death in 1791. West of the Elbe, free peasant farmers continued to constitute the largest social group, with domestic servitude the single largest occupational category (10 to 15 percent of the general population). Landed aristocrats often intermarried with wealthy merchant families. The new political identity of citizen became more common in the mid-18th century but was still often used interchangeably with the designation subject. Some princely states, most notably the archbishoprics of Salzburg and Würzburg, developed elaborate court cultures and patronized the arts. In Prussia, many members of the nobility were drawn into the newly professionalized army.

D.4.b.

Technological and Economic Developments

The period from 1650 to 1800 was one of general economic stagnation in German lands, with most enterprises remaining small. The majority of manufacturing was performed by local guilds and cottage industry. Economically, guilds continued to be powerful, but politically their authority as well as that of the free cities declined precipitously beginning in 1650. Prussia during the 1670s was typical. Its rulers eliminated most self-government in the towns and dominated all secular and ecclesiastical appointments. Prussian rulers also attempted to improve commerce by building new canals and improving roads as well as by introducing standard weights and measures throughout German lands. However, great economic obstacles resulted from the multitude of German states. For example, a voyage on the Rhine from Basel to Rotterdam involved 38 separate tolls.

Agricultural production also remained relatively low. Some high-grade fodder crops were introduced in Prussia, and potatoes from the Americas became a common crop in western German lands, particularly in the Rhineland. The eastern nobility operated large personal estates whose produce provided them with most of their income. German landowners in the west derived most of their agricultural income from the rents paid by tenants.

D.4.c.

Religion and Philosophy

In the late 17th and early 18th centuries Germany experienced a variety of religious and intellectual developments, from Lutheran Pietism and Baroque Catholicism to Enlightenment philosophy and the beginnings of empirical science.

Although official state religions remained largely unchanged in the years following the Peace of Westphalia, cultural expressions of faith by German Protestants and Catholics accelerated at an unprecedented pace. In the predominantly Catholic south, this was evident in a revival of public processions, pilgrimages, shrines, and highly ornate church decoration. Meanwhile, in the largely Lutheran north, Philipp Jakob Spener, the former court chaplain at Saxony, called for a revival of evangelical preaching and lay fervor in his influential work Pia Desideria (1675; Pious Desires, 1964). The resulting movement, known as Pietism, spread rapidly throughout Lutheran Germany.

Religious segregation was the rule, with most states maintaining an official religion. An exception was Prussia, whose rulers were among the first to appreciate the economic benefits of religious toleration. They gladly accepted not only tens of thousands of fellow Calvinists who had been expelled from France and Salzburg, but also welcomed Lutherans, Catholics, and Jews. Joseph II of Austria issued an edict of toleration for all non-Catholic Christians in 1781 and a similar decree for Jews the next year. Assimilation was especially important to the emperor, however, and he attempted to put loyalty to the state above particular religious devotions. He tried to force all Jewish subjects except rabbis to abandon their traditional clothing; he also halted all synagogue construction and required Jews to pay a toleration tax. These Austrian and Prussian examples of toleration were followed reluctantly by Bavaria and Württemberg in 1803, Baden in 1818, Hesse in 1831, and Saxony in 1841.

During the Age of Enlightenment, the writings of the French philosophes were undeniably influential in Germany. The belief in representative government, or government by all people instead of merely the nobility, began to gain popularity. The philosophes also placed great importance on the discovery of truth by the use of individual human reason and through the observation of nature, instead of by the study of authoritative sources such as Aristotle and the Bible.

The spirit of critical and objective inquiry, universal in literate Europe in the 18th century, produced several remarkable German philosophers, including Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz and Immanuel Kant. Educational reforms led to the establishment of mandatory grammar schools for girls and boys. By the end of the century at least half of the population had some formal schooling. The number of German newspapers increased from 57 in 1700 to almost 200 in 1800.

E.

Nationalism and Unification (1792-1871)

In the 18th century, Enlightenment theories of representative government inspired a desire for national unification and liberal reform among some Germans. In the 19th century, France’s expansion after the French Revolution (1789-1799) and especially under Napoleon I had the unintended effect of pushing Austria and Prussia together and arousing a sense of German national identity.

E.1.

The French Revolution and Napoleonic Wars

The success of the French Revolution greatly alarmed Austria and Prussia. Fearing that revolutionary ideas would spread and jeopardize their own governments, the two countries signed the Pillnitz Declaration in 1791, which offered to intervene militarily on behalf of the French king. This declaration only served to anger the French, and in April 1792 France declared war on Austria and Prussia, defeating them soundly at Valmy in September. For the next 20 years, the German states engaged in five wars of defense against the well-trained and unified armies of revolutionary and Napoleonic France. The first war resulted in the French occupying all German territory west of the Rhineland by 1794, an event that would have profound consequences for all Franco-German relations thereafter. A second war from 1799 to 1802 also ended in German defeat.

In 1806, to compensate the western German states for their losses, Napoleon reorganized them into the Confederation of the Rhine, at the same time greatly reducing their number. The 17 members of the confederation broke away from the Austrian Holy Roman Empire, effectively dissolving it. Prussia then declared war on France. On October 14, 1806, a combined Prussian-Austrian army was decisively routed by Napoleon at the Battle of Jena. The next year, Napoleon conquered Prussia, and in the crushing Treaty of Tilsit, he forced it to cede all land west of the Elbe and to pay enormous war indemnities. In 1809 Austria led a fourth German war against France while Napoleon was occupied in Spain, but in the process lost even more land. In all, almost two-thirds of the German population changed rulers during this period.

Finally, Napoleon’s disastrous 1812 retreat from Moscow encouraged the allies to make another effort. Frederick William III of Prussia, joined by Austria and Russia, led the so-called War of Liberation, in which Napoleon was ultimately defeated at Leipzig in 1813. All French territory in Germany was “liberated” and the Confederation of the Rhine was dissolved. After much bloodshed, the allies took Paris in April 1814.

At the Congress of Vienna (1814-1815), the victors redrew the map of Europe. Austria gave up the Austrian Netherlands and its Swabian lands in the west, but was compensated by receiving Salzburg, Tirol, Lombardy, Venice, and Illyria and Dalmatia on the Adriatic Sea. Prussia lost most of its Polish territory but gained much of Saxony and Swedish Pomerania, as well as land in the Rhineland and Westphalia, including the undeveloped iron and coal resources of the Ruhr and Saar areas.

E.2.

Liberalism and Early Nationalism

The Congress of Vienna formally recognized replacement of the Holy Roman Empire and its more than 240 states with the German Confederation of 39 states, including four free cities. The confederation was represented by a powerless assembly. Opinions differed on what the new confederation should be. Many Germans wanted to fashion a liberal, progressive government on British and French models, with a constitution guaranteeing popular representation, trial by jury, and free speech. They also hoped for national unification. Such ideas were especially popular among middle-class professionals and university students. These aims also appealed to the various restive peoples within the Austrian empire.

Liberalism and nationalism were bitterly opposed by the rulers of Prussia and Austria, as well as by the recently crowned kings of Bavaria, Hannover, Württemberg, and Saxony, who begrudgingly granted constitutions and dreaded any encroachment on their individual power. Austria, Prussia, Russia, and Britain formed the Quadruple Alliance to suppress—by force if necessary—any threat to the Vienna settlement. At an 1819 conference of German rulers in Karlsbad, Austrian foreign minister Prince Klemens von Metternich proposed governmental action to prevent any potential revolutionary activity in the German Confederation. This was supported by the German rulers, who pushed it through the confederation’s assembly. Frederick William III of Prussia blocked reforms planned by his ministers.

In 1834 Prussia organized a customs union of 18 German states, which Austria refused to join. While this organization facilitated economic growth throughout Germany, its political significance as an early German union was minor.

E.3.

Revolution and Reaction

The July Revolution in Paris in 1830 set off liberal uprisings in many German states. At Metternich’s urging, the confederation forbade public meetings and banned petitions. Nevertheless, in early 1848, another wave of revolutions, again beginning in Paris, washed over Europe. Nationalist groups revolted in Hungary, Bohemia, Moravia, Galicia, and Lombardy. Metternich resigned under pressure, and Austrian emperor see Ferdinand I resigned in favor of his young nephew Francis Joseph I. Violent uprisings also took place in Bavaria, Prussia, and southwestern Germany. The frightened rulers agreed to send delegates to an assembly in Frankfurt, promising a constitution and improved civil rights.

By October 1848, however, the rebellions were crushed. In Austria, a liberal constitutional assembly was dissolved, and a constitution providing highly centralized, although representative, government was imposed. Hungary, which had declared itself a republic, was forcibly subdued. In Prussia, Frederick William IV imposed an authoritarian constitution.

Meanwhile, the Frankfurt Assembly wrote a liberal constitution for a united Germany under a hereditary emperor. Austria refused to allow its German lands to be included, so the assembly regretfully decided that Germany should consist of the German states without Austria. For lack of an alternative, they offered the crown to Frederick William, who refused it. The assembly dispersed in failure. By 1850 the authoritarian German Confederation was restored and most of the revolutionaries and liberals had been exiled or imprisoned.

E.4.

Prussia and German Unification

After the failure of the Frankfurt Assembly, both Prussia and Austria put forth conflicting plans for German union. William I of Prussia was determined that neither Austria nor a newly aggressive France should thwart Prussian ambitions. He and his chief minister, Prince Otto von Bismarck, decided that Prussia must become unassailable and that unification must occur on Prussian terms.

Bismarck was a Prussian Junker (landless aristocrat) of forceful intellect, overbearing manner, and deep loyalty to the crown. Drawing on three decades of diplomatic experience, he astutely combined shrewd diplomacy with militarism in order to eliminate Austrian influence.

As a preliminary, Bismarck bought the neutrality of Russia, Italy, and France with friendly treaties. He then invited Austria in 1864 to join an invasion of Schleswig-Holstein, two Danish duchies. The Austrians and Prussians quickly defeated the Danes but soon fell out over control of the conquered duchies. On that excuse, Bismarck launched the Seven Weeks’ War against Austria in 1866. Skillfully coordinating three armies, Prussian general Helmuth von Moltke quickly defeated the Austrians at Königgrätz. Bismarck, however, did not want to alienate Austria irrevocably and therefore made an easy peace. Austria gave up Venice to Italian nationalists, while Prussia annexed Schleswig-Holstein, Hannover, and other states. In 1867 Bismarck organized the North German Confederation of 22 states without Austria; that year Austria became the dual monarchy of Austria-Hungary.

Bismarck next maneuvered a war with France, partly to overcome southern German fears of an enlarged Prussia by gaining their support in military action. In 1870 the aggressive French emperor Napoleon III unwisely pressed William I to promise that a Hohenzollern would never take the vacant Spanish throne. Bismarck distorted William’s account of the incident to make it seem as if the French had been insulted and then published the account. The outraged French declared war. Stirred by new national loyalty, the southern German states joined forces behind Prussia in the Franco-Prussian War. Prussia’s seasoned armies conquered the disorganized French at Sedan and, after a long siege, took Paris in 1871. With these events, Bismarck convinced the southern German states that Prussian control was inevitable. At Versailles on January 18, 1871, he persuaded a reluctant William to become head of a restored German Empire, the Second Reich.

E.5.

Life in Germany During the 19th Century

E.5.a.

Society and Population

The population of German lands grew from about 20 million in 1750 to 33 million in 1816, and up to 52 million by 1865. Increased social and geographic mobility contributed to the growth of urban centers. By the end of the century, some cities had exploded in population—for example, Hamburg grew from 132,000 to 768,000 people and Munich went from 45,000 to 422,000. Housing in most of these cities unfortunately lagged far behind population growth, spawning dreadful urban slums. For most of the period, though, almost three-quarters of the population continued to live in communities of under 2,000 people. Infant and child mortality rates remained appallingly high, and illegitimate births rose from 15 percent in the early 19th century to 25 percent by mid-century.

Not until the Napoleonic Wars did the social structure of German states show some sign of change. Prussia had freed its peasantry in 1807, but had then given much of the land to landowners to compensate them for lost labor, leaving many peasants without the means to sustain themselves. Although serfdom was threatened by political liberalism and growing urban centers, it only collapsed fully following the revolutions in 1848. During the 1850s Metternich and rulers in other German states were working to strengthen the politically conservative arrangements of the Congress of Vienna, but their efforts were undermined by an economic boom of massive proportions that was quickly making factory workers the largest occupational category. This boom also increased the influence of middle-class business people and wealthy industrialists and weakened the political and economic authority of nobles and guilds. German aristocrats turned their attention to the government and the military.

E.5.b.

Economic and Technological Developments

This boom was the result in part of the Industrial Revolution, which hit Germany with full force in the 1850s. In the next two decades, economic and technological growth exploded. Coal production in German lands went from 3.8 million metric tons to 21.5 million metric tons and the annual industrial growth rate of 10.2 percent was the highest in the world. By 1862 a massive network of roads and railway lines connected all German cities. The boom in industrial manufacturing was the final death knoll for the guilds. In Austria they were officially abolished in 1859; elsewhere in Germany, they cease