The Knights Lose Their Place
What was the government of Germany in this critical period? The knights, the lowest rank of the nobility, who in earlier years had ruled villages and countryside as vassals of the feudal lords, had now lost their military, economic and political standing. Mercenary troops, hired by princes or cities and equipped with firearms and artillery, scattered the cavalry of the knights, who in their helplessness still drew the sword. Commercial wealth raised values and prices and diminished landownership as a source of power. The cities were consolidating their independence, and the princes were seeking to concentrate power and law.
The knights took a kind of revenge by plundering the trading goods that passed through their lands, and when merchants and city councils protested, the knights claimed the right to wage private wars. Commynes pictured the Germany of this age as a disorderly cluster of castles from which "robber barons" with their armed retinues poured out to murder and plunder merchants, travelers and farmers. Some of them even made it a custom to cut off the right hand of the merchants they robbed. (The sentence is garbled in the source and is rebuilt here from context.)
Götz and Sickingen
Götz von Berlichingen, though he had himself lost his right hand in the service of his lord, had an iron hand fitted in its place and led bands of knights not only in plundering merchants but in sacking cities such as Nuremberg, Darmstadt, Metz and Mainz (1512). His friend Franz von Sickingen laid a claim against Worms, plundered its dependencies, seized members of the city council and tortured the mayor, resisted all the imperial troops that came to arrest him, and submitted for the time being only when he was given an annual cash grant for service to the emperor. Twenty-two cities of Swabia, chief among them Augsburg, Ulm, Freiburg and Constance, together with some high nobles, agreed to reorganize the Swabian League (1488). This league and others like it put a stop to the knights' robbery and led to private wars being declared illegal; yet on the eve of Luther's appearance Germany was an arena of political and social upheaval and disorder, a "field of the rule of powers."
The Princes
The princes, lay and ecclesiastical, who watched this confusion, fed it through their love of money and meanness, their various coinages and customs duties, their confusing rivalries for wealth and rank, and their twisting of Roman law in their own favor to gain absolute authority, to the detriment of the people, the knights and the emperor. Great houses such as the Hohenzollern in Brandenburg, the Wettin in Saxony, the Wittelsbach in the Palatinate, and the dukes of Württemberg (we leave aside the Habsburgs of Austria here) behaved like absolute and irresponsible rulers. If the power of the Catholic emperor had outweighed the princes and lords of Germany, the Reformation would have either failed or been postponed. The refusal of princes and nobles to obey Rome was another step toward financial and political independence.
Frederick III and Maximilian I
The characters of the emperors of this age show the state of the central government more sharply. Frederick III was an astrologer and an alchemist, and so absorbed in the quiet of his gardens at Graz that he let Bohemia, Schleswig-Holstein, Austria and Hungary slip away from the empire. Yet near the end of his reign of fifty-three years he displayed a great political masterstroke by betrothing his son Maximilian to Mary, heiress of Charles the Bold, duke of Burgundy. When Charles died in battle in 1477, on a bed of ice, the Habsburgs inherited the Netherlands.
Maximilian I, though elected emperor, was never crowned by the pope, and began his rule with every prospect of success. The whole empire was delighted with his good temper, his good looks, his modest sensitivity, his lively cheer, his generosity and chivalry, and his courage and skill in the lance and the hunt; it was as if an Italian of the Renaissance's height had taken the German throne. Even Machiavelli was impressed and described him, in the book's rendering, as a wise, far-sighted and God-fearing prince, a just ruler, a great commander, brave in danger and, like the hardiest soldiers, enduring in fatigue, a model of many royal virtues.
But "Max" was not a great general, and lacked the cynical, pessimistic wit that Machiavelli's Prince required. He fancied restoring the grandeur of the Holy Roman Empire by regaining its former glory, influence and possessions in Italy; again and again he marched into that peninsula in fruitless wars whose cost the German diet refused to meet; he even conceived the plan of deposing Julius II, that bold pope, and raising himself to the papacy as well as the empire. Like his contemporary Charles VIII of France, he excused his own ambitions as necessary preliminaries to a decisive attack on the Turks. But financially and physically he could not undertake any serious enterprise; he could not obtain the means and so could scarcely wish for the end; at times he was so poor that he could not pay for his lunch. He labored hard to reform the administration of the empire, but undid his own reforms, so that all he had sown vanished at his death.
He talked much of Habsburg power. After many disappointments in war he turned to his father's policy of marriage alliances. For his son Philip he chose Joanna, daughter of Ferdinand, who was somewhat mad but brought Spain as her dowry. In 1515 he betrothed his own grandchildren Mary and Ferdinand to Louis and Anne, the son and daughter of Ladislaus, king of Bohemia and Hungary (so far as the power of the Turks allowed), and brought Habsburg power to its farthest extent.
The Patron of Learning and Art
The best side of Maximilian's character was his love and admiration for music, learning, literature and art. He studied history, mathematics and various languages with great eagerness; we are sure he could speak German, Latin, Italian, French, Spanish, Flemish and the tongue of the Walloons, and on one campaign he conversed with seven foreign commanders in their seven different languages. The dialects of southern and northern Germany, partly through his example and efforts, grew into a common speech that later became the official language of the German government, of Luther's Bible and of German literature.
In the midst of his countless wars he labored at writing, and left works on genealogy, artillery, architecture, hunting and an account of his own life. He drew up a broad plan for collecting German antiquities and inscriptions, but lack of money again ruined it. He proposed to the popes a reform of the calendar that took effect eighty years later. He reorganized the University of Vienna, founded chairs of law, mathematics, poetry and rhetoric in it, and for a time made it the most active scholarly center of Europe. He invited Italian humanists to Vienna and enabled Conrad Celtis to open an academy of poetry and mathematics there.
He favored humanists such as Peutinger and Pirckheimer, and made the persecuted Reuchlin a count palatine of the empire. He gave commissions to Peter Vischer, Veit Stoss, Burgkmair, Dürer and the other artists who appeared in his reign. He ordered a richly adorned tomb to be built at Innsbruck as the eternal resting place of his body; at his death it was unfinished, but this gave Peter Vischer the chance to cast beautiful statues of Theodoric and Arthur for it. If Maximilian had been as great as his plans, he would have rivaled Alexander and Charlemagne in grandeur.
The Emperor's Last Portrait
In the last years of the emperor's life Dürer drew a fine portrait of him, a worn man who had tasted reality, broken by the maddening stinginess of his age. That restless spirit, once so cheerful, now said that there was no joy for him on earth, and shed tears, crying: alas, poor Germany! But Maximilian exaggerated in his sense of failure. When he died he left Germany and the Holy Roman Empire, at least in economic progress, stronger than when he came to the throne. The population had grown and education had spread; Vienna had become another Florence; and before long his grandson, inheriting half of western Europe, would become the most powerful ruler in Christendom.