Chapter II: Preface (2)

The disintegration of the material conditions of mediæval social life was now approaching its completion, forced on by the inventions and discoveries of the previous half-century. But the ideals of the mass of men, learned and simple, were still in the main the ideals that had been prevalent throughout the whole of the later Middle Ages. Men still looked at the world and at social progress through mediæval spectacles. The chief difference was that now ideas which had previously been confined to special localities, or had only had a sporadic existence among the people at large, had become general throughout large portions of the population. The invention of the art of printing was, of course, largely instrumental in effecting this change.

The comparatively sudden popularization of doctrines previously confined to special circles was the distinguishing feature of the intellectual life of the first half of the sixteenth century. Among the many illustrations of the foregoing which might be given, we are specially concerned here to note the sudden popularity during this period of two imaginary constitutions dating from early in the previous century. From the fourteenth century we find traces, perhaps suggested by the Prester John legend, of a deliverer in the shape of an emperor who should come from the East, who should be the last of his name; should right all wrongs; should establish the empire in universal justice and peace; and, in short, should be the forerunner of the kingdom of Christ on earth. This notion or mystical hope took increasing root during the fifteenth century, and is to be found in many respects embodied in the spurious constitutions mentioned, which bore respectively the names of the Emperors Sigismund and Friedrich. It was in this form that the Hussite theories were absorbed by the German mind. The hopes of the Messianists of the "Holy Roman Empire" were centred at one time in the Emperor Sigismund. Later on the rôle of Messiah was carried over to his successor, Friedrich III, upon whom the hopes of the German people were cast.

_The Reformation of Kaiser Sigismund_, originally written about 1438, went through several editions before the end of the century, and was as many times reprinted during the opening years of Luther's movement. Like its successor, that of Friedrich, the scheme attributed to Sigismund proposed the abolition of the recent abuses of feudalism, of the new lawyer class, and of the symptoms already making themselves felt of the change from barter to money payments. It proposed, in short, a return to primitive conditions. It was a scheme of reform on a Biblical basis, embracing many elements of a distinctly communistic character, as communism was then understood. It was pervaded with the idea of equality in the spirit of the Taborite literature of the age, from which it took its origin.

The so-called _Reformation of Kaiser Sigismund_ dealt especially with the peasantry--the serfs and villeins of the time; that attributed to Friedrich was mainly concerned with the rising population of the towns. All towns and communes were to undergo a constitutional transformation. Handicraftsmen should receive just wages; all roads should be free; taxes, dues, and levies should be abolished; trading capital was to be limited to a maximum of 10,000 _gulden_; all surplus capital should fall to the Imperial authorities, who should lend it in case of need to poor handicraftsmen at 5 per cent.; uniformity of coinage and of weights and measures was to be decreed, together with the abolition of the Roman and Canon law. Legists, priests, and princes were to be severely dealt with. But, curiously enough, the middle and lower nobility, especially the knighthood, were more tenderly handled, being treated as themselves victims of their feudal superiors, lay and ecclesiastic, especially the latter. In this connection the secularization of ecclesiastical fiefs was strongly insisted on.

As men found, however, that neither the Emperor Sigismund, nor the Emperor Friedrich III, nor the Emperor Maximilian, upon each of whom successively their hopes had been cast as the possible realization of the German Messiah of earlier dreams, fulfilled their expectations, nay, as each in succession implicitly belied these hopes, showing no disposition whatever to act up to the views promulgated in their names, the tradition of the Imperial deliverer gradually lost its force and popularity. By the opening of the Lutheran Reformation the opinion had become general that a change would not come from above, but that the initiative must rest with the people themselves--with the classes specially oppressed by existing conditions, political, economic, and ecclesiastical--to effect by their own exertions such a transformation as was shadowed forth in the spurious constitutions. These, and similar ideas, were now everywhere taken up and elaborated, often in a still more radical sense than the original; and they everywhere found hearers and adherents.

The "true inwardness" of the change, of which the Protestant Reformation represented the ideological side, meant the transformation of society from a basis mainly corporative and co-operative to one individualistic in its essential character. The whole polity of the Middle Ages industrial, social, political, ecclesiastical, was based on the principle of the group or the community--ranging in hierarchical order from the trade-guild to the town corporation; from the town corporation through the feudal orders to the Imperial throne itself; from the single monastery to the order as a whole; and from the order as a whole to the complete hierarchy of the Church as represented by the papal chair. The principle of this social organization was now breaking down. The modern and bourgeois conception of the autonomy of the individual in all spheres of life was beginning to affirm itself.

The most definite expression of this new principle asserted itself in the religious sphere. The individualism which was inherent in early Christianity, but which was present as a speculative content merely, had not been strong enough to counteract even the remains of corporate tendencies on the material side of things, in the decadent Roman Empire; and infinitely less so the vigorous group-organization and sentiment of the northern nations, with their tribal society and communistic traditions still mainly intact. And these were the elements out of which mediæval society arose. Naturally enough the new religious tendencies in revolt against the mediæval corporate Christianity of the Catholic Church seized upon this individualistic element in Christianity, declaring the chief end of religion to be a personal salvation, for the attainment of which the individual himself was sufficing, apart from Church organization and Church tradition. This served as a valuable destructive weapon for the iconoclasts in their attack on ecclesiastical privilege; consequently, in religion, this doctrine of Individualism rapidly made headway. But in more material matters the old corporative instinct was still too strong and the conditions were as yet too imperfectly ripe for the speedy triumph of Individualism.

The conflict of the two tendencies is curiously exhibited in the popular movements of the Reformation-time. As enemies of the decaying and obstructive forms of Feudalism and Church organization, the peasant and handicraftsman were necessarily on the side of the new Individualism. So far as negation and destruction were concerned, they were working apparently for the new order of things--that new order of things which _longo intervallo_ has finally landed us in the developed capitalistic Individualism of the twentieth century. Yet when we come to consider their constructive programmes we find the positive demands put forward are based either on ideal conceptions derived from reminiscences of primitive communism, or else that they distinctly postulate a return to a state of things--the old mark-organisation--upon which the later feudalism had in various ways encroached, and finally superseded. Hence they were, in these respects, not merely not in the trend of contemporary progress, but in actual opposition to it; and therefore, as Lassalle has justly remarked, they were necessarily and in any case doomed to failure in the long run.

This point should not be lost sight of in considering the various popular movements of the earlier half of the sixteenth century. The world was still essentially mediæval; men were still dominated by mediæval ways of looking at things and still immersed in mediæval conditions of life. It is true that out of this mediæval soil the new individualistic society was beginning to grow, but its manifestations were as yet not so universally apparent as to force a recognition of their real meaning. It was still possible to regard the various symptoms of change, numerous as they were, and far-reaching as we now see them to have been, as sporadic phenomena, as rank but unessential overgrowths on the old society, which it was possible by pruning and the application of other suitable remedies to get rid of, and thereby to restore a state of pristine health in the body political and social.

Biblical phrases and the notion of Divine Justice now took the place in the popular mind formerly occupied by Church and Emperor. All the then oppressed classes of society--the small peasant, half villein, half free-man; the landless journeyman and town-proletarian; the beggar by the wayside; the small master, crushed by usury or tyrannized over by his wealthier colleague in the guild, or by the town-patriciate; even the impoverished knight, or the soldier of fortune defrauded of his pay; in short, all with whom times were bad, found consolation for their wants and troubles, and at the same time an incentive to action, in the notion of a Divine Justice which should restore all things, and the advent of which was approaching. All had Biblical phrases tending in the direction of their immediate aspirations in their mouths.

As bearing on the development and propaganda of the new ideas, the existence of a new intellectual class, rendered possible by the new method of exchange through money (as opposed to that of barter), which for a generation past had been in full swing in the larger towns, must not be forgotten. Formerly land had been the essential condition of livelihood; now it was no longer so. The "universal equivalent," money, conjoined with the printing press, was rendering a literary class proper, for the first time, possible. In the same way the teacher, physician, and the small lawyer were enabled to subsist as followers of independent professions, apart from the special service of the Church or as part of the court-retinue of some feudal potentate. To these we must add a fresh and very important section of the intellectual class which also now for the first time acquired an independent existence--to wit, that of the public official or functionary. This change, although only one of many, is itself specially striking as indicating the transition from the barbaric civilization of the Middle Ages to the beginnings of the civilization of the modern world. We have, in short, before us, as already remarked, a period in which the Middle Ages, whilst still dominant, have their force visibly sapped by the growth of a new life.

To sum up the chief features of this new life: Industrially, we have the decline of the old system of production in the countryside in which each manor or, at least, each district, was for the most part self-sufficing and self-supporting, where production was almost entirely for immediate use, and only the surplus was exchanged, and where such exchange as existed took place exclusively under the form of barter. In place of this, we find now something more than the beginnings of a national-market and distinct traces of that of a world-market. In the towns the change was even still more marked. Here we have a sudden and hothouse-like development of the influence of money. The guild-system, originally designed for associations of craftsmen, for which the chief object was the man and the work, and not the mere acquirement of profit, was changing its character. The guilds were becoming close corporations of privileged capitalists, while a commercial capitalism, as already indicated, was raising its head in all the larger centres. In consequence of this state of things, the rapid development of the towns and of commerce, national and international, and the economic backwardness of the country-side, a landless proletariat was being formed, which meant on the one hand an enormous increase in mendicancy of all kinds, and on the other the creation of a permanent class of only casually-employed persons, whom the towns absorbed indeed, but for the most part with a new form of citizenship involving only the bare right of residence within the walls. Similar social phenomena were, of course, manifesting themselves contemporaneously in other parts of Europe; but in Germany the change was more sudden than elsewhere, and was complicated by special political circumstances.

The political and military functions of that for the mediæval polity of Germany, so important class, the knighthood, or lower nobility, had by this time become practically obsolete, mainly owing to the changed conditions of warfare. But yet the class itself was numerous, and still, nominally at least, possessed of most of its old privileges and authority. The extent of its real power depended, however, upon the absence or weakness of a central power, whether Imperial or State-territorial. The attempt to reconstitute the centralized power of the empire under Maximilian, of which the _Reichsregiment_ was the outcome, had, as we have seen, not proved successful. Its means of carrying into effect its own decisions were hopelessly inadequate. In 1523 it was already weakened, and became little more than a "survival" after the Reichstag held at Nürnberg in 1524. Thus this body, which had been called into existence at the instance of the most powerful estates of the empire, was "shelved" with the practically unanimous consent of those who had been instrumental in creating it.

But if the attempt at Imperial centralization had failed, the force of circumstances tended partly for this very reason to favour State-territorial centralization. The aim of all the territorial magnates, the higher members of the Imperial system, was to consolidate their own princely power within the territories owing them allegiance. This desire played a not unimportant part in the establishment of the Reformation in certain parts of the country--for example, in Würtemberg, and in the northern lands of East Prussia which were subject to the Grand Master of the Teutonic knights. The time was at hand for the transformation of the mediæval feudal territory, with its local jurisdictions and its ties of service, into the modern bureaucratic state, with its centralized administration and organized system of salaried functionaries subject to a central authority.

The religious movement inaugurated by Luther met and was absorbed by all these elements of change. It furnished them with a religious _flag_, under cover of which they could work themselves out. This was necessary in an age when the Christian theology was unquestioningly accepted in one or another form by wellnigh all men, and hence entered as a practical belief into their daily thoughts and lives. The Lutheran Reformation, from its inception in 1517 down to the Peasants' War of 1525, at once absorbed, and was absorbed by, all the revolutionary elements of the time. Up to the last-mentioned date it gathered revolutionary force year by year. But this was the turning point.

With the crushing of the peasants' revolt and the decisively anti-popular attitude taken up by Luther, the religious movement associated with him ceased any longer to have a revolutionary character. It henceforth became definitely subservient to the new interests of the wealthy and privileged classes, and as such completely severed itself from the more extreme popular reforming sects.

Up to this time, though by no means always approved by Luther himself or his immediate followers, and in some cases even combated by them, the latter were nevertheless not looked upon with disfavour by large numbers of the rank and file of those who regarded Martin Luther as their leader.

Nothing could exceed the violence of language with which Luther himself attacked all who stood in his way. Not only the ecclesiastical, but also the secular heads of Christendom came in for the coarsest abuse; "swine" and "water-bladder" are not the strongest epithets employed. But this was not all; in his _Treatise on Temporal Authority and how far it should be Obeyed_ (published in 1523), whilst professedly maintaining the thesis that the secular authority is a Divine ordinance, Luther none the less expressly justifies resistance to all human authority where its mandates are contrary to "the word of God." At the same time, he denounces in his customary energetic language the existing powers generally. "Thou shouldst know," he says, "that since the beginning of the world a wise prince is truly a rare bird, but a pious prince is still more rare." "They" (princes) "are mostly the greatest fools or the greatest rogues on earth; therefore must we at all times expect from them the worst, and little good." Farther on, he proceeds: "The common man begetteth understanding, and the plague of the princes worketh powerfully among the people and the common man. He will not, he cannot, he purposeth not, longer to suffer your tyranny and oppression. Dear princes and lords, know ye what to do, for God will no longer endure it? The world is no more as of old time, when ye hunted and drove the people as your quarry. But think ye to carry on with much drawing of sword, look to it that one do not come who shall bid ye sheath it, and that not in God's name!"

Again, in a pamphlet published the following year, 1524, relative to the Reichstag of that year, Luther proclaims that the judgment of God already awaits "the drunken and mad princes." He quotes the phrase: "Deposuit potentes de sede" (Luke i. 52), and adds "that is your case, dear lords, even now when ye see it not!" After an admonition to subjects to refuse to go forth to war against the Turks, or to pay taxes towards resisting them, who were ten times wiser and more godly than German princes, the pamphlet concludes with the prayer: "May God deliver us from ye all, and of His grace give us other rulers!" Against such utterances as the above, the conventional exhortations to Christian humility, non-resistance, and obedience to those in authority, would naturally not weigh in a time of popular ferment. So, until the momentous year 1525, it was not unnatural that, notwithstanding his quarrel with Münzer and the Zwickau enthusiasts, and with others whom he deemed to be going "too far," Luther should have been regarded as in some sort the central figure of the revolutionary movement, political and social, no less than religious.

But the great literary and agitatory forces during the period referred to were of course either outside the Lutheran movement proper or at most only on the fringe of it. A mass of broadsheets and pamphlets, specimens of some of which have been given in a former volume (_German Society at the Close of the Middle Ages_, pp. 114-28), poured from the press during these years, all with the refrain that things had gone on long enough, that the common man, be he peasant or townsman, could no longer bear it. But even more than the revolutionary literature were the wandering preachers effective in working up the agitation which culminated in the Peasants' War of 1525. The latter comprised men of all classes, from the impoverished knight, the poor priest, the escaped monk, or the travelling scholar, to the peasant, the mercenary soldier out of employment, the poor handicraftsman, of even the beggar. Learned and simple, they wandered about from place to place, in the market place of the town, in the common field of the village, from one territory to another, preaching the gospel of discontent. Their harangues were, as a rule, as much political as religious, and the ground tone of them all was the social or economic misery of the time, and the urgency of immediate action to bring about a change. As in the literature, so in the discourses, Biblical phrases designed to give force to the new teaching abounded. The more thorough-going of these itinerant apostles openly aimed at nothing less than the establishment of a new Christian Commonwealth, or, as they termed it, "the Kingdom of God on Earth."

FOOTNOTES:

[1] We are here, of course, dealing more especially with Germany; but substantially the same course was followed in the development of municipalities in other parts of Europe.

[2] _Einleitung_, pp. 255, 256.

[3] Cf. Von Maurer's _Einleitung zur Geschichte der Mark-Verfassung_; Gomme's _Village Communities_; Laveleye, _La Propriété Primitive_; Stubbs's _Constitutional History_; also Maine's works.

[4] It should be remembered that Germany at this time was cut up into feudal territorial divisions of all sizes, from the principality, or the prince-bishopric, to the knightly manor. Every few miles, and sometimes less, there was a fresh territory, a fresh lord, and a fresh jurisdiction.