Federal Republic of Germany

D

2

Society and Culture in the High Middle Ages

By the late 13th century the empire had lost Poland and Hungary and effective control of Burgundy and Italy. Within its borders the principalities were virtually autonomous. The ancient right of royal election was limited to seven princes, who purposely chose weak men unlikely to thwart their own dynastic ambitions.

The Church continued to be a dominant force in society. Cistercian monks and Premonstratensian canons settled new lands in the east, and friars of the Dominicans and Franciscans preached and taught in the towns. The Teutonic Knights moved their headquarters to Marienburg in eastern Germany, where they led a crusade against the pagan Prussians. The knights opened the Baltic coast to the German Church and to German merchants.

The struggle between emperors and princes benefited the towns, who paid taxes to the emperors in exchange for freedom from feudal obligations. Trade greatly increased. Cologne and Frankfurt gave access to the fairs of Champagne. Mainz lay on the route across the Alps to Italy. Lübeck and Hamburg dominated North Sea and Baltic trade, and Leipzig was in contact with Russia. Rhine towns and, later, north German towns began to form trade associations, the most powerful of which was the Hanseatic League. This trade association arranged advantageous commercial treaties, created new centres of trade and civilization, contributed to the development of agriculture and industrial arts, built canals and roads, and even declared war. Disintegration of the league began towards the end of the 15th century, and was complete in 1669.

At the height of the league, the rich burghers built city walls, cathedrals, and elaborate town halls and guildhalls as expressions of civic pride. By the mid-13th century, French Gothic influences were affecting German architecture. The lofty cathedrals of Bamberg, Strasbourg, Naumburg, and Cologne were richly decorated with sculpture, and they were filled with light from the stained glass in their large, pointed-arched windows.

French culture also affected German literature. Wandering nobles and knights, called minnesinger, wrote and recited courtly love poems in the tradition of Provençal troubadours and French trouvères. Foremost among them were Reinmar von Hagenau and Walther von der Vogelweide. Other poets, called Spielleute, composed epics. Gottfried von Strassburg and Wolfram von Eschenbach dealt with Christian themes from the French Arthurian cycle. Nonetheless, the two most important epics—the Niebelungenlied and the Gudrunlied—were based on pagan Germanic traditions.

E

Late Middle Ages and Early Renaissance

By the late Middle Ages, the great stem duchies had been broken up and new principalities created. Three princely families—Habsburg, Wittelsbach, and Luxembourg—struggled for dynastic rights to the imperial crown.

E

1

Princely Rivalry

In 1273 the electors ended the Great Interregnum by choosing Rudolf of Habsburg, a minor Swabian prince unable to repossess the lands they had usurped. Rudolf I concentrated on aggrandizing his family. Aided by the Wittelsbachs and others, he defeated the rebellious Ottokar II of Bohemia and took the lands Ottokar had usurped—Austria, Styria, Carinthia, and Carniola—for his two sons, thus making the Habsburgs one of the great powers in the empire.

On Rudolf’s death the electors chose Adolf of Nassau but deposed him when he asserted his authority. They next chose Rudolf’s son, Albert of Austria, but when he displayed an appetite for additional territory, he was murdered. Still seeking a weak emperor, the electors voted for Henry, Count of Luxembourg. Anxious to restore imperial claims to Italy, Henry VII crossed the Alps in 1310 and temporarily subdued Lombardy; he was crowned by the Roman people, because the popes had left Rome and were then living in Avignon, France—the so-called Babylonian Captivity. He died trying to conquer Naples from the French.

Civil war then raged until the Wittelsbach candidate for the throne, Louis the Bavarian, defeated his Habsburg rival at the Battle of Mühldorf in 1322. Louis IV obtained a secular coronation in Italy, but Pope John XXII, objecting to his interference in Italian politics, declared his title invalid and excommunicated him. Louis then called for a Church council and installed an antipope in Rome. At Rhense in 1338 the electors made the momentous declaration that henceforth the King of the Germans would be the majority electoral choice, thus avoiding civil war, and that he would automatically be Emperor without being crowned by the pope. This was reflected in the title, official in the 15th century, Holy Roman Emperor of the German Nation.

E

2

The Luxembourg Line

The popes, of course, objected. Clement VI opened negotiations with Charles, King of Bohemia, grandson of Henry VII. In 1347 he was chosen by five of the seven electors, who had previously deposed Louis. Charles IV diplomatically ignored the question of papal assent. In the Golden Bull (1356) he specified the seven electors as the archbishops of Mainz, Trier, and Cologne, the Count Palatine of the Rhine, the Duke of Saxony (an old title for a new state in the east), 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 them “gifts” from candidates, they were the strongest of all the princes.

Having ensured the power of the princes, the astute Charles entrenched his own dynasty in Bohemia. He bought Brandenburg and took Silesia from Poland to build a great state to the east. To obtain cash, he encouraged the silver, glass, and paper industries of Bohemia. He adorned Prague, his capital, with new buildings in the late Gothic style, founded a noted university, and kept a brilliant court.

Charles’s son, Sigismund, forced Pope John XXIII to call the Council of Constance (1414-1418), which ended the Great Schism in the papacy. But as the King of Bohemia he was chiefly concerned with his own dynastic lands. Bohemia was convulsed by the Hussite movement, which combined traditional Czech national feeling with desire for much-needed Church reform. Sigismund invited the reformer John Huss (also spelled Jan Hus) to state his views, under imperial protection, at the Council of Constance, but failed to prevent the council from subsequently burning him as a heretic. This led to the Hussite Wars by which the moderate Calixtine Hussites won some concessions from the Church and Sigismund in exchange for their reconciliation.

E

3

The Habsburg Line

When Sigismund died without an heir, the electors unanimously chose his Habsburg son-in-law Albert of Austria, who became Emperor as Albert II. From that time on, the imperial crown became in practice, although not in theory, hereditary in the Habsburg line. Albert II died in the midst of civil war in Bohemia and an Ottoman invasion of Hungary. His cousin and successor, Frederick III, lost Hungary and Bohemia and sold Luxembourg to France, while he struggled with the German princes and the Turks on his borders. In 1486 the princes forced him to cede his authority to his son but he retained the title of Holy Roman Emperor until 1493.

Maximilian I, knight and art patron, enthusiastically laid many plans, which 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 the thriving Flemish towns. French-speaking Burgundy was the initial cause of the Habsburg-Valois feud that lasted for the next three centuries. By marrying his son, Philip the Handsome, to the heiress of Spain, Maximilian acquired Spain and its possessions in Italy and the New World. By betrothing his grandson Ferdinand to the heiress of Hungary and Bohemia, he added those states to the inheritance.