The Peasants Grow Angrier as They Rise
In the last half-century before the Reformation, all classes in Germany except the knights were advancing. It was probably this improvement in the peasants' position that sharpened their resentment of the weaknesses and disorders they still endured. A few were slaves, a minority owned land, and a great multitude were tenants who paid the rent for the land to feudal lords in produce, labor or money. The tenants complained of their lords' conduct: of extortions and imposed demands; of the twelve and sometimes sixty days a year they were obliged by custom to work for the lord; of lands where, by tradition, they had been free to fish, to take timber or to graze cattle, but which the lords had taken back; of the destruction done in their fields by the lords' hunters and hounds; of the lords' interference in local courts, which were under the landlords' own control; and finally of the inheritance tax that fell on a tenant family when the head of the house died and the land was left unattended. Peasants who owned their land bore a heavy heart over the high interest on loans taken for the harvest, and over the seizure of their fields by shrewd lenders who lent to peasants who plainly could not repay on time. All the farming classes refused to pay the annual tax the Church laid on their crops and livestock.
Throughout the fifteenth century these discontented men staged scattered revolts for the division of land. In 1431 the peasants around Worms rose in a fruitless rebellion; they chose as their banner a peasant's shoe, a real laced boot reaching from ankle to knee, which they raised on a pole or painted on their flags. From that time the word Bundschuh, the "league of the shoe," became the proper name for the revolutionary peasant bands of Luther's age. In 1476 a cowherd and piper named Hans Böhm declared that the Mother of God had revealed to him in a vision that the kingdom of heaven would soon be set up on earth: there would be no more emperor, pope, king, prince or lord; all men would be brothers and all women sisters; all would share equally in the fruits of the earth; land, forest, water and pasture would be common and free. Thousands of peasants hurried to hear him; a priest joined him; the bishop of Würzburg smiled patiently at his cry. But when Hans told his followers to bring whatever weapons they could find to the next gathering, the bishop ordered his arrest; the bishop's soldiers fired on the crowd that came to rescue him, and the uprising died away.
In 1491 the peasants of an abbot's domain, which the book places at Kempten in Alsace, stormed his monastery, claiming he had forced them into bondage by forged documents; the emperor Frederick III arranged a compromise. Two years later, tenants under the bishop of Strasbourg formed a Bundschuh and demanded an end to feudal rights, to church taxes and to all debts, together with violent measures against Jews. They planned to seize the town of Schlettstadt and spread out from there across Alsace. The authorities learned of the plot, seized the leaders, tortured and hanged them, and frightened the rest into submission. In 1502 the peasants of the bishop of Speyer formed a Bundschuh of seven thousand members, who demanded the complete overthrow of feudalism and violent action against the clergy, and the restoration of what they believed had been their ancestors' communal way of life. A peasant exposed the plan in the confessional; clergy and nobles joined in uncovering the conspiracy, and the chief plotters were tortured and hanged.
In 1512 Joss Fritz secretly formed a similar movement near Freiburg im Breisgau, in which, apart from God, all property and feudal rights, even those of the emperor and pope, were to be abolished. A peasant forced to join revealed the secret to his confessor. The local authorities seized and tortured the leaders and the rising was crushed at birth, though Fritz lived long enough to join the peasant revolt of 1525. In 1517, in Styria and Carinthia, a league of ninety thousand peasants resolved to end feudalism; for three months its bands attacked castles and strongholds and killed lords, until the emperor Maximilian, who sympathized with their movement but was disgusted by their violence, sent a small army and forced them into an unwilling peace. The stage, however, was set for the Peasants' War and for the communism of the German Anabaptists in the age of the Reformation.
Silver, Money and the New Capitalism
Meanwhile a still more vital revolution was taking place in German industry and trade. Most industries remained handicrafts, except that they came more and more under the control of contractors and employers who supplied raw materials and capital and bought and sold the products. Mining advanced rapidly, and silver, copper and gold yielded huge profits. Bars of gold and silver became a convenient means of storing wealth, and the payments made to territorial princes for the right to mine, especially to the Elector of Saxony, who later protected Luther, enabled some of them to resist pope and emperor. Reliable silver coins were minted, money became plentiful, and the passage from a goods economy to a money economy was almost complete. Silver tableware was common in all middle and upper households; some families made their tables and chairs of solid silver; bread dishes and communion cups, reliquaries and even statues, all of gold and silver, filled the churches of Germany and inclined the princes toward a reformation that would let them seize church wealth.
In 1458 Aeneas Sylvius, later Pope Pius II, was astonished to see innkeepers serving drinks in silver vessels. He wrote: what woman is there, not only among the nobles but among the lower classes, who does not glitter with gold ornaments? Need I speak of horses' harness covered with pure gold, and of weapons and helmets heavy with gold?
The House of Fugger
Capitalists now held great political power. The Jewish money-changers of Germany had been replaced by the firms of Christian families such as the Welsers, the Hochstetters and the Fuggers, all of Augsburg, which in the fifteenth century was the financial center of Christendom. Johann Fugger, a weaver's son, himself became a cloth merchant and at his death (1409) left a small fortune of about three thousand florins ($75,000 by the book's conversion). His son Jakob expanded the father's trade and at his death (1469) was the seventh richest man of Augsburg.
Jakob's sons Ulrich, Georg and Jakob II raised the ancestral firm to power and supremacy by advancing money to the princes of Germany, Austria and Hungary in return for the revenue of mines, lands or towns. From these calculated investments the Fuggers drew huge profits, so that by 1500 they were the richest family in Europe. Jakob II, the greatest genius of the house, was a fearless, ruthless and industrious man. By studying every aspect of business, the advances in bookkeeping, production, trade and capital, he trained himself in patience and abstemiousness. He wanted everything except his family sacrificed to the firm, and he wanted every Fugger to bow to the family's interest; he decreed that no one but a Fugger should have power in the firm, and he never allowed his political friendships to affect his loans.
He made agreements with other firms to control the prices and sale of various goods; so in 1498 he and his brothers made a pact with the merchants of Augsburg to squeeze the Venetian market in copper and raise the price. In 1488 the Fuggers lent 150,000 florins to Sigismund, archduke of Austria, and as security obtained the right to work the silver mines of Schwaz until the loan was repaid. In 1492 they made a double marriage alliance with the Thurzo family of Cracow to gain and work the copper and silver mines of Hungary and keep products at "the highest possible price." By 1501 the Fuggers were engaged in vast mining operations in Germany, Austria, Hungary, Bohemia and Spain. They also wove and exported cloth, dealt in silk, velvet, furs, spices, citrus fruit, weapons and jewels, and built a fast shipping business and a private postal line. When Jakob II became sole head of the firm in 1511, its assets stood at 196,791 gulden; in 1527, two years after his death, they were estimated at 2,021,202 gulden ($50,000,000 by the book's conversion), that is, in sixteen years the original capital grew by fifty percent a year, according to the book's own calculation.
Part of these profits came from the Fuggers' relations with emperors and popes. Ulrich Fugger made large loans to Frederick III; Jakob II was the chief broker of Maximilian I and Charles V, and the expansion of Habsburg power in the sixteenth century was made possible by Fugger loans. Although Jakob rejected the conditions the Church laid down for interest and the measures by which churchmen tried to fix the "just price" of goods in common use, he remained a Catholic and lent money to clergymen to pay for their promotions; he and Ulrich took over the papal finances in Germany, Scandinavia, Bohemia and Hungary (1494).
In his last years Jakob Fugger was at once the most respected and the most hated man in Germany. Some Catholics attacked him for usury; some great men because with larger bribes he had taken an office or power from them; some merchants because he had monopolized trade; many workers because he had trampled the medieval rules of business and property; and the Protestant majority because he poured German money into the pockets of the popes. Yet emperors, kings, princes and cardinals sent envoys to him as to a ruler. Dürer, Burgkmair and Holbein's great predecessors painted him as a realistic, plain, stern person, and Maximilian gave him the title of Count of the Empire. Jakob tried to atone for his wealth by building a hundred and six houses for poor Catholics of Augsburg; he laid out a handsome chapel in the church of St. Anne to hold his bones; and he died with a name for piety. Although he left millions of gulden, he left no child; nature had denied him the greatest of gifts.
Monopoly and the Cry Against Capital
The beginning of the age of capitalism, the spread of personal monopolies, and the dominion of moneyed merchants over landed feudal lords may be dated in Germany from his time. German mining and textile industry at the end of the fifteenth century, following Flanders and, a hundred years earlier, Italy in textiles, had been organized on capitalist foundations. In the Middle Ages private property was regarded in part as a kind of public trust, and the owner's rights were limited by the needs of the guilds, whose organization gave him opportunity, means and protection. Perhaps under the influence of Roman law, which now dominated German legal practice, the owner came to think his property absolute and that he might do with it what he pleased. In the eyes of the Fuggers, the Hochstetters and other merchant princes, cornering a commodity and raising its price, conspiring to limit output and control trade, and deceiving small traders through scheming investments did not seem wrong. Merchants often posted agents at the city gates to buy up a particular incoming good entirely and so resell it at any price they liked. Ambrose Hochstetter bought up all the raw silver on the market and raised the selling price by seventy-five percent. A German firm bought a huge quantity of pepper, worth 600,000 gulden, from the king of Portugal at above the usual price, on condition that the king should charge other pepper exporters to Germany a higher price.
Through such deals and monopolies, through growing wealth and demand, and through the growing stock of precious metals mined in central Europe and America, prices between 1480 and 1520 rose at a rate matched only in our own time. Luther complained that, in a short time, through usury and greed, a man who formerly lived on a hundred gulden could not now live on two hundred, and this is as clear as the sun at noon. The Middle Ages had seen great inequalities of political power; the age of the Fuggers added economic inequalities such as Europe had not known since the millionaires and slaves of the Roman Empire. Some capitalist merchants of Augsburg or Nuremberg were each worth about five million francs ($25,000,000, by the book's figure).
Many of them bought their way into the landed nobility, hung coats of arms of courage and family honor on their chests, and made up for lack of noble birth with lavish spending. Joachim Hochstetter and Franz Baumgartner spent 5,000 florins ($125,000) on a single banquet, or won and lost 10,000 florins at one sitting of gambling. The houses of the rich traders, sumptuously decorated and artistically adorned, roused nobles, clergy and proletariat alike to anger and hatred. Preachers, writers, revolutionaries and lawmakers joined in threatening the monopolists. Geiler of Kaisersberg demanded that they be driven out of the city like wolves, for they fear neither God nor man and from them comes nothing but plague, thirst and poverty. Ulrich von Hutten divided thieves into four classes, merchants, judges, priests and knights, and declared that merchants are the greatest thieves of all. The Reichstag of Cologne in 1512 called on all civil authorities to act "with diligence and severity" against the capitalist, usurious and hoarding companies. Other assemblies repeatedly issued such decrees, but none had any effect. Some lawmakers had capital in the great trading firms themselves, enforcers were won over with shares, and many cities prospered through the unchecked growth of trade.
The Free Cities
Strasbourg, Colmar, Metz, Augsburg, Nuremberg, Ulm, Vienna, Regensburg, Mainz, Speyer, Worms, Cologne, Trier, Bremen, Dortmund, Hamburg, Magdeburg, Lübeck and Breslau were thriving centers of industry, commerce, literature and art. These cities and seventy-seven others formed the "free cities": they made their own laws, sent delegates to local diets and to the imperial diet, and in politics obeyed no one but the emperor, who was in his turn indebted to their financial and military help and did not infringe their liberty. Though ruled by guilds that merchants dominated, almost every one was a paternal organization for the common welfare, regulating production and distribution, wages and prices, and the quality of goods, protecting the weak from the strong and providing for the needs of all. By today's standard we should call them towns, since none exceeded about 52,000 inhabitants; yet their population was never smaller than before the middle of the nineteenth century, and they were never more prosperous than before the age of Goethe.
Aeneas Sylvius, that haughty Italian, wrote of them in 1458 with indescribable enthusiasm: Germany has never been richer or more splendid than now. Without exaggeration, none of the countries of Europe has cities as fair as the cities of Germany. They look so new and fresh that they seem to have been built only yesterday, and in no other cities is there such freedom. In all Europe one can find no place more magnificent than Cologne, with its churches, halls, towers, wondrous palaces, dignified citizens, quiet rivers and fertile fields. In wealth there is no city in the world superior to Augsburg. Vienna has palaces and churches that Italy itself envies.
Augsburg was not only Germany's financial center but the main link of trade with the thriving Italy of that time. The Fondaco dei Tedeschi in Venice, whose walls Giorgione and Titian painted, was built chiefly through the efforts of the merchants of Augsburg. Because it was so closely tied to Italy, the Italian Renaissance echoed in it. Its merchants supported scholars and artists, and some of its capitalists became examples to others in culture and manners, though not in morals. Thus Konrad Peutinger, town clerk of Augsburg in 1493, was at once politician, merchant, scholar, jurist, Latinist, Hellenist, antiquarian and dealer.
Nuremberg was more a center of arts and handicrafts than of wealth and industry. Its streets were still winding in the medieval way and shaded by projecting oriel windows; its red tile roofs, high gables and balconied windows against the rural background and the full river Pegnitz made a jumbled but charming scene. Its people were not rich like those of Augsburg and had no extravagance, but they were cheerful and loved to show themselves in festivals and feasts such as carnivals of masks, costumes and dances. Here Hans Sachs and the Meistersingers offered their charming and passionate songs; here Albrecht Dürer raised German painting and engraving to its height; here skilled goldsmiths and silversmiths north of the Alps made costly vases, church vessels and little statues; here metalworkers cast thousands of kinds of flowers, plants, animals and human figures in bronze, or wrought iron into fine railings and grilles; and here printers of cheap sheets were so numerous that we now wonder how they earned a living.
The city churches became storehouses and museums of art, for every guild or company or wealthy family commissioned a beautiful work for the tomb of its patron saint. Regiomontanus chose Nuremberg to live in, because there, without any trouble, he could obtain all the special instruments astronomy requires, and there it was easier for him to meet the scholars of every country, for Nuremberg, thanks to its merchants, who are always traveling, had become the center of Europe. Among its distinctions was that its most famous merchant, Willibald Pirckheimer, was an ardent humanist, a patron of art and Dürer's close friend. Erasmus called Pirckheimer the great glory of Germany.
The Shift of Trade to the North
The voyages of Vasco da Gama and Columbus, Turkish dominion in the Aegean, and Maximilian's wars with Venice disrupted trade between Germany and Italy. German exports and imports flowed more and more along the great rivers toward the North Sea, the Baltic and the Atlantic; power and wealth moved from Augsburg and Nuremberg to Cologne, Hamburg, Bremen and above all Antwerp. The Fuggers and Welsers hastened the shift by placing their operations center in Antwerp. This movement of German money and trade northward economically separated northern Germany from Italy and made it strong enough to protect Luther against emperor and pope. Southern Germany, perhaps for opposite reasons, remained Catholic.