A Vigorous People
The Germans of this time were probably the healthiest, strongest, liveliest and most fruitful people in Europe. As the works of Wolgemut, Dürer, Cranach and Holbein show, their men were stout and thick-necked, with big heads and stout hearts, ready to swallow the world at a gulp and wash it down with beer. They were rough but cheerful; they balanced their devotion to God with indulgence of the self. They could be cruel, as the dreadful instruments of torture used on criminals bear witness, but they could also be compassionate and generous, and they seldom gave physical expression to their religious fury. In Germany they resisted the Inquisition like men and usually overcame it.
Their robust spirit, made more for drunken jokes than for dry wit, dulled their sense of logic and beauty and denied them the delicacy and refinement of the French and Italian mind. Their feeble Renaissance was lost in their worship of the Gospel. But in the German mind there was a durable quality, a methodical industry and precision, and a wild, ruthless courage that enabled them to break the power of Rome and already promised to raise them to the rank of the greatest scholars in their history.
Baths and Morals
Compared with other nations the Germans were clean. Bathing was a general habit. Every well-built house, even in rural districts, had its own bath. In the countless public baths, as in ancient Rome, other things besides bathing went on: men could be shaved and women could have their hair dressed; massage was common, drinking and gambling were allowed, and one could find some relief from the boredom of solitude. Men and women usually bathed together, modestly covered, but no law existed against flirtation and love-making, and an Italian scholar who visited Baden-Baden in 1417 remarked, with a jest I leave unrepeated here, that the baths there were unusually well suited to romance. (The book gives his remark in full; it is only paraphrased.)
The Germans of this period cannot be called strict in moral and religious principles. It is true that their conversation, letters, literature and jokes sometimes seem coarse by our standard, but this coarseness suited their strong bodies and spirits. Old and young drank too much and in youth indulged too freely in sex. In 1501 pious and God-fearing Erfurt seemed to Luther little more than a brothel and a tavern. German rulers, lay and ecclesiastical, agreed with St. Augustine and St. Thomas Aquinas that prostitution must be tolerated to protect women from violation. Houses of prostitution were licensed and paid taxes. We read that the bishops of Strasbourg and Mainz drew income from them, and that the bishop of Würzburg gave the city's brothel as a lucrative fief to the count of Henneberg.
The same tolerance extended to hospitality: it was sometimes a courtesy to guests to put such a house at their disposal, and King Sigismund was so well entertained at Bern (1414) and Ulm (1434) that he thanked his hosts in public. The licensed women of Nuremberg complained to the mayor in 1492 about unfair competition from unlicensed houses, and in 1508 were allowed to raid and close them, which they did. In the late Middle Ages the moral codes treated the inclination to prostitution as a small, ordinary sin, to be forgiven and overlooked; perhaps the spread of syphilis in 1492 made it something worthy of death. (Details of this section are summarized and softened.)
Marriage and the Family
Marriage, as elsewhere, was a means of uniting fortunes and property. Love was regarded as the natural result, not the reasonable cause, of marriage. Mere betrothal imposed the same restrictions as the bonds of a wedding. Weddings in all classes were accompanied by ceremony, display and extravagance, and a wedding feast might last a week or two. To get a husband was as costly as to keep a wife. In theory the husband's authority was absolute and unquestioned, but in practice the reality showed itself more than the words. We see that Dürer's wife claimed rights for herself. The women of Nuremberg were so bold that they dragged the emperor Maximilian half-naked from his bed, threw a shawl about his waist and led him into a joyful night dance in the street.
According to an old legend, some upper-class German men of the fourteenth century, when they went on a long journey, locked an iron "girdle of chastity" about their wives' waists and thighs and took the key with them. Traces of the custom may be seen in medieval Venice and sixteenth-century France; but in the few cases that seem reliable the wife or mistress put on the girdle of her own will and handed the key to her husband or lover to assure him of her faithfulness.
Family life flourished. A chronicler of Erfurt calculated that each married couple ordinarily had eight or ten children, and families with fifteen were not rare. Illegitimate children were counted among them, since such children, who were numerous, joined the father's house after his marriage. In the fifteenth century the use of surnames became general. The name often indicated an ancestral trade or birthplace and occasionally was a short joke that took shape in the heart of a harsh, strict age. Strict discipline reigned at home and at school. Even Knox, the future emperor, is said in the book to have taken many beatings, but if that was painful it was painful only to the father and the teacher. (The reference to "Knox" is garbled in the source, which seems to mean Maximilian or another future ruler.)
German houses of this time (about 1500), with their broad staircases, strong railings, bulky furniture, cushioned chairs, carved chests, stained-glass windows, canopied beds, walls hung with tapestry, floors covered with carpet, shelves full of books or flowers or musical instruments or silver vessels, and kitchens gleaming with the tools needed for German feasts, were the most comfortable houses in Europe. Their fronts were mostly of wood, hence frequent fires. Projecting gables and windowed balconies kept the light from the streets. Only a few streets, in the large cities, were paved. Except on nights of festival there were no lamps in the streets. Outside the houses at night there was no safety. Petty criminals, like the pigs and cattle that wandered the streets, were numerous. There was no police, and harsh punishments were used to prevent crime.
Harsh Punishments
The penalty for theft was death, and for petty theft the cutting off of both ears. The tongues of blasphemers and those who insulted sacred things were torn out, and in Nuremberg exiles who returned to the city without permission were blinded. Women who killed their husbands were buried alive or burned with hot irons and then hanged. Among the instruments of torture formerly exhibited in the castle of Nuremberg were devices that crushed, stretched and tore the body, burned the soles of the feet, and prevented the prisoner from sitting, lying or sleeping, and finally a machine called the "iron maiden," which the book describes at length. (The book's detailed account of these devices is summarized here and not reproduced.)
Public Morals, Charity and Drink
Political morals matched the loose morals in general. Bribery was common, and worse in the upper classes. Fraud in goods, though two men were buried alive at Nuremberg for adulterating wine (1456), was widespread. The worship of business, the sacrifice of morals for money, was as intense as in any other century; money was the measure of all things, not man. Yet the same citizens made large gifts to charity in haste. Luther writes that in the time of the popes people gave alms gladly and in great purity with both hands, built pious foundations and left bequests; our forefathers, great men and kings, princes and other people, out of compassion and with open hands helped parishes, schools of learning and clergy up to the very brim. As a sign of this age freeing itself from priests and Church, most charitable gifts for the poor were now placed in the hands of city councils and not of Church officials.
When power over economic affairs outweighed aristocracy of birth, manners grew rougher and coarser; it was so in France and England as in Germany. Drunkenness was a general sin; Luther and Hutten both condemned it, though Hutten thought it better than the cunning of the Italians, the crookedness of the Spaniards and the pride of the French. Some of the drunkenness may have come from the sharp spices used in cooking. Table manners were rough and easy. The fork had reached Germany in the fourteenth century, but people still preferred to eat with their hands; even in the sixteenth century a preacher forbade the use of the fork as against God's will, saying that if God had wanted us to use forks he would never have given us fingers.
Dress and Fashion
Dress was splendid and showy. Working people were content with felt hats, short jackets and trousers tucked into or hanging over high-topped shoes or boots. The middle classes added vests and open-fronted lined gowns, trimmed with fur. But nobles and men of lineage competed fiercely with the wealthy in the adornment and luxury of their clothes. In both classes the men's hats were costly cloth, twisted in folds and trimmed with feathers, braid, pearls or gold. Outer gowns, in brilliant colors, had fur borders or silver embroidery. Wealthy women wore golden crowns or gold-woven kerchiefs, or braided their hair with gold ribbons, while modest women threw a cloth of fine fabric over the head and tied it under the chin. Geiler of Kaisersberg claims that the dress of some fashionable women was worth more than 4,000 florins ($100,000 by the book's conversion). Men shaved their beards but kept their hair long; their locks were carefully trained and dressed; look at the proud curls of Dürer's hair and the fanciful ringlets of Maximilian's.
The ring, as now, was a sign of class distinction or display. Conrad Celtis said that fashion in dress changes more quickly in Germany than elsewhere, for men and women alike. On festival days men sometimes outdid the women in finery and luxury.
Festivals, Travel and a National Spirit
Feasts and festivals were many, and in them the spirit of the entertainments and merry shows of the Middle Ages continued; they were a fitting chance to rest from toil and to break religious rules. Christmas, despite its pagan color, was still a Christian feast; the Christmas tree had not yet appeared, for it is an invention of the seventeenth century. Every town celebrated a Kermis, from the German Kerk, "church," and mis, "mass," the feast of its patron saint. At this feast men and women danced together in the streets, gaiety ruled everywhere, and no preaching saint could calm the unbridled spirit of pleasure-seeking. The dancing sometimes became a contagious madness, as at Metz, Cologne and Aix in 1374, or at Strasbourg in 1412. In some cases the afflicted, thinking themselves bewitched and possessed, resorted to the dance of St. Vitus for healing and, like some mad youths of our own age, danced themselves to death. For other talents men turned to hunting or the dangerous sport of jousting.
Thousands of men and women went on journeys, making a pilgrimage to a holy shrine their excuse for travel. With a painful joy they rode horses or mules, or went in carriages or litters, and put up with the discomfort of rough roads and filthy inns. More sensible people, when they could, traveled by boat down the Rhine, the Danube or the other splendid rivers of central Europe. In 1500 a postal line open to all joined the principal cities. All of this shows a people too strong, lively and prosperous to bear any longer the shackles of feudal lords on their hands and the burden of exploitation on their backs. Despite all political fragmentation, the strong German national feeling lived on and held back emperors who thought themselves above nationalities and popes who thought themselves above nature; the Reformation would break both the Holy Roman Empire and the papal monarchy. In the fifteen-hundred-year struggle between Teutons and Romans, victory, as in the fifth century, again smiled on Germany.