Geography and the Unity Beneath It
Because human beings live by the permission of natural conditions, natural forces rule their fate. Mountains, rivers and seas divide them into countless groups, which develop different languages and religions, and whose appearance, dress and customs, born of climate, drift further apart. Insecurity makes them suspicious of strangers and inclined to reject foreign ways. The varied land of Europe, with its mountains and valleys, tributaries and straits, gulfs and streams, divides this small continent into dozens of peoples who cherish their differences and lock themselves in a prison of inherited hatred. There is a charm in this variety, and a world whose people all shared the same legends and jokes would be wearisome.
Yet beneath these differences nature and need have pushed the peoples toward economic unity, which grows clearer with each invention and each advance in knowledge that breaks down barriers. A historian with clear, unprejudiced eyes sees people, from Norway to Sicily and from Russia to Spain, not by their dress and dialect but by the occupations that shape character in the same way: they plow and sow, dig the earth for metals, weave cloth, build houses, temples and schools, raise children, trade their surplus, and build social order, humanity's strongest organ of defense and survival. For a moment we must look at central Europe with this unity in mind.
Forest, Sea, Mountain and Plague
Man's great task was to overcome the cold in Scandinavia, the sea in Holland, the forest in Germany and the mountains in Austria. Farming and settlement depended on these victories. By 1300 the rotation of fields had become common in Europe and raised the fertility and yield of the soil. But between 1347 and 1381 the Black Death killed, according to the book, half the population of central Europe, and the loss of people stopped the land's productivity. In a single year Strasbourg lost 14,000, Kraków 20,000 and Breslau 30,000, the book says. For a century the mines of the Harz lay unused. With extraordinary patience, people resumed the old work of plowing and turning the soil.
Mines, Metal and Trade
Sweden and Germany expanded their iron and copper mining. Coal came from Aachen and Dortmund, tin from Saxony, lead from the Harz, silver from Sweden and the Tyrol, and gold from Carinthia and Transylvania. A flood of metal poured into growing industries, and with industry, commerce spread.
Germany, first among European countries in mining, naturally led in metalworking too. Blast furnaces first appeared there in the fourteenth century, and hammers and machines driven by water changed how metal was worked. Nuremberg became the center of ironwork and famous for its fine cannon and bells. Industry and trade gave cities such as Nuremberg, Augsburg, Mainz, Speyer and Cologne independence and turned them into city-states. The Rhine, Main, Lech and Danube made the southern German cities, linked with Italy and the East, the leaders among all. Along these lines grew great financial and commercial houses with markets and agents in far-off places, and in the fifteenth century their power and wealth surpassed that of the Hanseatic League.
The Hanseatic League Declines
In the fourteenth century the League was still strong and held the trade of the North Sea and the Baltic. But in 1397 the Scandinavian states allied to break its monopoly, and soon the Dutch and English began to carry their own goods. Even the herring conspired against the League: from 1417 they spawned in the North Sea rather than the Baltic. (The book's Persian word is easily misread as salmon; the herring fishery is what is meant.) As a result Lübeck, the League's pillar, lost the herring trade and declined, while Amsterdam took it up and rose.
Serfdom and Class War
Beneath this growing economy a war was burning between village and town, serfs and lords, aristocrats and merchants, merchant guilds and craft guilds, capitalists and proletarians, clergy and laity, Church and state. In Sweden, Norway and Switzerland serfdom had fallen or was falling, but elsewhere in central Europe it was gaining strength anew. In Denmark, Prussia, Silesia, Pomerania and Brandenburg, where peasants had won freedom by clearing forests, the military rule of the nobility restored serfdom in the fifteenth century. How harshly the German nobles treated their peasants can be judged from a Brandenburg peasants' proverb: they wished long life to the lord's horses, lest he ride on his serfs' backs.
In the Baltic lands the Teutonic barons and knights, short of labor because of the Black Death and Poland's war of 1409, tried to enslave the Slavs there and had to seize "every idler who passed through town or on the roads," and they made treaties with neighboring states for the return of fugitives.
The merchant bourgeoisie, the barons' opposite and so favored by the emperors, dominated the town councils, so that in many cases the council and the chamber of commerce were one. The craft guilds were forced to submit, accepted wages set by the town government, and lost the unity of action. As in England and France, craftsmen whose pride was broken became defenseless proletarians. Workers now and then rebelled. In 1348 the craftsmen of Nuremberg arrested the town council and ruled the city for a year, until the emperor's troops restored the great merchants. In Prussia, an ordinance of 1358, the book says, ordered strikers' ears cut off.
The fires of peasant revolt blazed in Denmark (1340 and 1441), in Saxony, Silesia, Brandenburg and the Rhineland (1432), and in Norway and Sweden (1434), but these revolts were too weak and unsteady to achieve anything. Revolutionary ideas spread in towns and villages. In 1438 an anonymous radical wrote a tract interpreting an imaginary "reformation of Emperor Sigismund" on socialist principles. The stage was slowly being set for the Peasants' War of 1525.
Kings and the Making of Order
Our order lies in civilization and liberty, and disorder faces tyranny and dictatorship, so history may at times speak well of kings. The task of medieval kings was to free the individual gradually from the yoke of local rule and put legislation, justice, punishment, coinage and war in the hands of one central power. Feudal barons lamented the loss of local government, but ordinary townspeople preferred one commander, one currency and one law, and saw what was happening with approval. In an age when half the people were illiterate, hardly anyone wished kings to vanish entirely and leave the world to the weak laws and devices people had thought up themselves.
Scandinavia and Queen Margaret
In the fourteenth century Scandinavia had remarkable kings. Magnus II of Sweden turned the conflicting laws of his realm into one national code (1347). In Denmark Eric IV brought the proud barons under control and strengthened central power; Christopher II undermined it, and Valdemar IV again worked to strengthen it and made his country one of the chief forces in European politics. But the greatest of Scandinavian rulers was Margaret, Valdemar's daughter.
At ten (1363) she married Haakon VI, King of Norway and son of Magnus II of Sweden. By blood and marriage it seemed her destiny to unite these two crowns. When her father died (1375), she hurried to Copenhagen with her five-year-old son Olaf and persuaded the clergy and barons of the electoral council to elect Olaf king and herself regent. When her husband died (1380), her son also inherited the crown of Norway, but at ten he needed a regent, and Margaret held that office there too. Her prudence, ability and courage amazed contemporaries, who knew the incompetence or tyranny of men, and the feudal lords of Denmark and Norway, after dominating many kings, proudly accepted this wise and benevolent queen and supported her.
When Olaf came of age (1385), his mother's skilled policy made him heir to the Swedish throne as well. Two years later Olaf died, and it seemed that Margaret's far-sighted plan to unite the Scandinavian kingdoms had come to nothing. But the Danish royal council, seeing no male heir who could compare with Margaret in keeping order, set aside the Scandinavian law against female rule and made her regent (1387).
The Kalmar Union
Margaret went to Oslo and was elected regent of Norway for life (1388). A year later the Swedish nobles, who had deposed an incompetent king, elected her their queen. She persuaded all three countries to accept her sister's grandson Eric as king. In 1397 she summoned the royal councils of the three countries to Kalmar in Sweden. There Sweden, Norway and Denmark declared that they were united forever under one crown while keeping their own customs and laws. Eric was chosen king, but since he was fifteen, Margaret remained regent until her death (1412). No ruler of her time in Europe held so vast a realm or governed one so successfully.
Union's Decline and Sweden's Revolt
Eric had none of her wisdom. Under him the united kingdoms became a Danish empire with a council in Copenhagen ruling all three. Norway declined in it and lost the literary leadership it had held from the tenth to the thirteenth century. Engelbrekt Engelbrektsson rose in Sweden against Danish domination (the book dates it 1443, but the events fall in the 1430s). He called an assembly of nobles, bishops, small landowners and townsmen at Arboga (1435), which, after five hundred years, became the Swedish national parliament, today's Riksdag. Engelbrektsson and Karl Knutsson were elected regents. A year later the hero of the revolt was killed, and Knutsson governed Sweden as regent and then, intermittently, as king until his death (1470).
Meanwhile Christian I began the Oldenburg dynasty, which ruled Denmark until 1863 and Norway until 1814. Iceland came under Danish rule during Margaret's regency. Its great age of history and literature had passed, but it still offered a disordered, confused Europe a forgotten lesson in orderly and capable government.
Switzerland: The Strongest Democracy of Its Day
At this time Switzerland had the world's strongest democratic government, and its heroes are the cantons. First the German-speaking forest cantons of Uri, Schwyz and Unterwalden joined for mutual protection and formed a confederation (the book dates this 1219, but the usual date is later in the thirteenth century). After the historic victory of the Swiss peasants over the Habsburg army at Morgarten (1315), the Confederation, though nominally subject to the Holy Roman Empire, was in practice independent. New cantons joined: Lucerne in 1332, Zurich in 1351, Glarus and Zug in 1352, Bern in 1353. In 1352 the name of Schwyz came to cover all the cantons.
Natural barriers, independence and local government shaped the cantons, and, depending on how their valleys sloped and their rivers ran, they adopted French, German or Italian language and custom. Each had its own law, passed by assemblies whose delegates the citizens elected. The range of individual rights differed from canton to canton and over time, but all had one foreign policy and referred internal disputes to a federal diet. Though the cantons sometimes quarreled, the Confederation's constitution became an inspiring model of federal government: independent local governments under common laws and conditions.
To defend its freedom the Confederation made military training compulsory for all males and service, when called, for all men from ten to sixty. The Swiss infantry, harshly trained and armed with pikes, were the most fearsome and costly fighting force in Europe. To raise revenue the cantons hired out their regiments to foreign governments, and for a time "the courage of Swiss soldiers was bought and sold like a commodity."
Austrian rulers still claimed feudal rights in Switzerland and once or twice used force to win them. But they were defeated at Sempach (1386) and Näfels (1388), battles worthy of being remembered as the first documents of liberty and democracy. In 1446 the treaty of Constance, as the book has it, again confirmed Switzerland's nominal subjection to the Empire and its practical freedom.