German Culture Past and Present | Page 2

township that was "free of the Empire," that is, that held nominally
from the Emperor himself (Reichstadt), and secondly, there was the
township that was under the domination of an intermediate lord. The
economic basis of the whole was still land; the status of a man or of a
corporation was determined by the mode in which they held their land.

"No land without a lord" was the principle of mediæval polity; just as
"money has no master" is the basis of the modern world with its
self-made men. Every distinction of rank in the feudal system was still
denoted for the most part by a special costume. It was a world of
knights in armour, of ecclesiastics in vestments and stoles, of lawyers
in robes, of princes in silk and velvet and cloth of gold, and of peasants
in laced shoe, brown cloak, and cloth hat.
But although the whole feudal organization was outwardly intact, the
thinker who was watching the signs of the times would not have been
long in arriving at the conclusion that feudalism was "played out," that
the whole fabric of mediæval civilization was becoming dry and
withered, and had either already begun to disintegrate or was on the eve
of doing so. Causes of change had within the past half-century been
working underneath the surface of social life, and were rapidly
undermining the whole structure. The growing use of firearms in war;
the rapid multiplication of printed books; the spread of the new
learning after the taking of Constantinople in 1453, and the subsequent
diffusion of Greek teachers throughout Europe; the surely and steadily
increasing communication with the new world, and the consequent
increase of the precious metals; and, last but not least, Vasco da Gama's
discovery of the new trade route from the East by way of the Cape--all
these were indications of the fact that the death-knell of the old order of
things had struck.
Notwithstanding the apparent outward integrity of the system based on
land tenures, land was ceasing to be the only form of productive wealth.
Hence it was losing the exclusive importance attaching to it in the
earlier period of the Middle Ages. The first form of modern capitalism
had already arisen. Large aggregations of capital in the hands of trading
companies were becoming common. The Roman law was establishing
itself in the place of the old customary tribal law which had hitherto
prevailed in the manorial courts, serving in some sort as a bulwark
against the caprice of the territorial lord; and this change facilitated the
development of the bourgeois principle of private, as opposed to
communal, property. In intellectual matters, though theology still
maintained its supremacy as the chief subject of human interest, other

interests were rapidly growing up alongside of it, the most prominent
being the study of classical literature.
Besides these things, there was the dawning interest in nature, which
took on, as a matter of course, a magical form in accordance with
traditional and contemporary modes of thought. In fact, like the flicker
of a dying candle in its socket, the Middle Ages seemed at the
beginning of the sixteenth century to exhibit all their own salient
characteristics in an exaggerated and distorted form. The old feudal
relations had degenerated into a blood-sucking oppression; the old
rough brutality, into excogitated and elaborated cruelty (aptly
illustrated in the collection of ingenious instruments preserved in the
Torture-tower at Nürnberg); the old crude superstition, into a
systematized magical theory of natural causes and effects; the old love
of pageantry, into a lavish luxury and magnificence of which we have
in the "field of the cloth of gold" the stock historical example; the old
chivalry, into the mercenary bravery of the soldier, whose trade it was
to fight, and who recognized only one virtue--to wit, animal courage.
Again, all these exaggerated characteristics were mixed with new
elements, which distorted them further, and which foreshadowed a
coming change, the ultimate issue of which would be their extinction
and that of the life of which they were the signs.
The growing tendency towards centralization and the consequent
suppression or curtailment of the local autonomies of the Middle Ages
in the interests of some kind of national government, of which the
political careers of Louis XI in France, of Edward IV in England, and
of Ferdinand and Isabella in Spain were such conspicuous instances,
did not fail to affect in a lesser degree that loosely connected political
system of German States known as the Holy Roman Empire.
Maximilian's first Reichstag in 1495 caused to be issued an Imperial
edict suppressing the right of private warfare claimed and exercised by
the whole noble class from the princes of the empire down to the
meanest knight. In the same year the Imperial Chamber (Reichskammer)
was