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CHAPTER XXIII

THE PROGRESS OF GERMANY TOWARDS NATIONAL UNITY

XXIII.

IN A.D. 1806 the Holy Empire died and was buried and CHAP. to all appearance soon forgotten. No outworn shape of the past could have seemed less likely to be ever recalled to life, for the forces which had so long assailed and had at last destroyed it were stronger than ever, and threatened with extinction even that feeble shadow which, under the name of the Germanic Confederation, affected in some fashion to represent the unity of the German nation. Fifty years passed away; new questions arose; Europe ranged itself into new parties; men's minds began to be swayed by new feelings. Time drove fast onwards, and the Holy Roman Empire seemed left so far behind among the mists of the past, that it was hard to believe that living men had seen it and borne part in its government. Then suddenly there arises from these cold ashes a new, vigorous, self-confident German Empire, a State which, although most different, as well in its inner character as in its form and legal aspect, from its venerable predecessor, is nevertheless in a real sense that predecessor's representative. An account of this new creation of our own days, perhaps the most striking and fertile epoch in European annals, is therefore a fitting, if not a necessary, pendant to the history of the elder Empire; it is, in fact, the latest act of a long drama, which gives a new and more cheerful meaning to all that has gone before. For not only does the new Empire hold that central place among Continental States

CHAP.
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which the old Empire once filled: it is, in a moral and intellectual sense, the offspring of the old Empire, and, but for the pre-existence of the other, could never have itself come into being.

It has been shewn in the earlier chapters of this treatise, how from the days of the Emperor Henry III, when the Holy Empire reached the maximum of its power, every succeeding change tended to sap its vitality, loosen its cohesion, diminish its material resources, weaken its hold on the love and faith of its subjects. The first crisis was marked by the death of Frederick II, when Italy was lost beyond hope of recovery; the second by the Reformation, and particularly by the Treaty of A.D. 1555; the third by the Peace of Westphalia, when Germany was legally reconstituted as a sort of federation of mutually suspicious and unfriendly states; the fourth, one may perhaps say, by the Seven Years' War, when one vigorous member successfully resisted the whole force of Austria and some minor German powers, backed by the armies of France and Russia. It is easy for us now to see, that as after the first of these crises the Empire had no longer any chance of making good its claim to be a world-monarchy, co-extensive with Christianity, so after the second its prospects as a national State, claiming to unite all Germany under a single effective administration, were practically hopeless. The Germans, however, as was natural, did not see this until in 1648 the admission of the substantial independence of the princes had turned the imperial dignity into a mask under which the harsh features of the Hapsburg sovereigns tried in vain to conceal themselves. Over the sentiment of the people its name still retained some power, for it was associated with the glories of their earlier history, with heroic memories enshrined in song, with claims of worldsupremacy which they could not bring themselves to forget.

But it was no longer a rallying-point for national feeling, CHAP. a centre to which the country looked for inspiration and XXIII. guidance. There was indeed but little national feeling in the Germany of that age, little political hope or ardour, little interest in the welfare of the State as a whole, for there was nothing to stir men's feelings as Germans or citizens, no struggles for great common objects against foreign powers, no play of political life at home, no assemblies, no free press, no local self-government. But, even if a national feeling had been awake, it would hardly have attached itself to the old Empire, which was not only cumbrous and antiquated, but seemed strange and in a way un-German, just because it was more than German; and which found the support of Rome now almost as injurious as her enmity had been in times gone by, since the friendship of Rome meant the hatred and jealousy of the Protestants. It can hardly be said that the Empire was so utterly dead but that it might have been vivified by a really great man, just as such an one might perhaps make the English or the Spanish monarchy a power even to-day. But had this come to pass, it would have been because the genius gave life to the office, not, as of old, because the office inspired its holder. And it was not so to be. The imperial throne did not find a man of the first order to fill it; and continued to stand rather because nobody appeared to overthrow it, than because any good reason remained for it in the changed order of things.

The denationalization of Germany had indeed gone beyond politics. As after the establishment of foreign rule in Italy, Italian art and letters had become frigid and affected, so with that extinction of any free or united public life in Germany which followed the Thirty Years' War, the blossoms of literature which had put themselves forth in the age of the Reformation were nipped and withered

СНАР.
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The Margraviate of Branden

Hohenzollern.

away. In Lewis the Fourteenth's time, French influence became dominant in Germany, no less in poetry and criticism, than in matters of dress, furniture, and etiquette; and the ambition of German men of letters was to put off what they were hardly ashamed to call their native barbarism, and imitate the sparkling elegance of their Western neighbours and enemies. French was the fashionable language; French ideas and modes of thought were no less supreme than Greek ideas had been at Rome in the last half century of the Republic; French men of letters and science were imported, as apostles of enlightenment, by the best of the German princes, just as Germans have in later times been drawn into Russia by the Tsars.

Just when this reign of foreign taste was most undisputed, just when the political life and national sentiment of Germany seemed bound in a frozen sleep, a change began; and it began, like many other great changes, from an unpromising quarter and in an unconscious way.

From the time of the Swabian Emperors, the Margrave of Brandenburg was one of the most considerable princes of burg and the the Empire, and before the reign of Rudolf the First he house of had become definitely recognized as an Elector with the office of Archchamberlain. His dominions consisted of the Mark proper, or Old Mark, to which were added the New and the Middle Mark, a flat, sandy territory of heaths and woods lying along the Elbe and the Havel, which had been conquered from the Wends in the days of Henry the Fowler, and gradually filled by a Teutonic population, together with a more or less vague authority, or claim of authority, over the Slavonic tribes to the north and east. In A.D. 1411 this territory was delivered over to Frederick, sixth Burggrave of Nürnberg, by the Emperor Sigismund,

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Burggrave was the title of the Count, representing the Emperor, who held the castle which guarded the city.

b

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whom he had served faithfully, and to whom he had CHAP. advanced moneys, which the latter in this way repaid, giving Brandenburg as a sort of pledge which was not likely to be redeemed: and in 1415 Sigismund formally conferred the Mark and the electoral dignity upon Frederick and his heirs, still, however, reserving (but on the occasion of the formal investiture of 1417 omitting this reservation) the right of redeeming his grant by the payment of 400,000 Hungarian gold gulden, and retaining to himself and his male heirs the reversion in the Electorate, expectant on the extinction of Frederick's line, an event which has not yet happened. This Burggrave Frederick was the lineal descendant of a certain Conrad of Hohenzollern (first Burggrave in the days of Frederick Barbarossa), scion of an old Swabian family whose ancestral castle stands in the high limestone plateau of the Rauhe Alp, not very far from Hohenstaufen and from Altorf, the original seat of the Welfs; and this Conrad is the twenty-fifth lineal ancestor of the present Emperor William the Second. From the time of Elector Frederick the house of Hohenzollern held Brandenburg, adding to it by slow degrees various other scattered territories, with claims, which for a time could not be made good, to other territories, and in particular acquiring, in 1605 and 1618, the district known as East Prussia, lying along the Baltic beyond the Vistula, as the heritage of Albert the last Grandmaster of the Teutonic knights. The Hohen

b Much as the king of Denmark and Norway gave the Orkney and Shetland isles to the king of Scotland (A.D. 1468) as a pledge for the payment of the dowry of his daughter, a payment which has not yet been made.

• The Duchy of East Prussia was established by the Treaty of Krakow in 1525, under Polish suzerainty. The electors of Brandenburg, from the time of Joachim II onwards, obtained from Poland the co-investiture of it, but did not get the actual government into their hands till 1605, nor the full legal

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