Germany under the Old Regime 1600-1790

John G. Gagliardo

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2014
• eBook ISBN: 9781317872207
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: Early Modern History
• Index: History

German history in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries is notoriously inaccessible to non-specialists. When other European countries were well on the way to becoming nation states, Germany remained frozen as a territorially-fragmented, politically and religiously-divided society. The achievement of this major contribution to the new History of Germany is to do justice to the variety and multiplicity of the period without foundering under the wealth of information it conveys.

Chapter One

Germany in 1600: The Land and the People

The difficulty of dealing with the history of Germany in the early modern period begins with even the coarsest facts. The boundaries of Germany are a case in point. Because most modern maps of Europe in this period conveniently outline the borders of the Holy Roman Empire with a heavy line and because the Empire embraced most territories which were unarguably German, it is always tempting to equate the borders of Germany with those of the Empire. In fact, however, even contemporaries did not do that. While most educated Germans in 1600 still cherished images of the vaster medieval Empire and its ‘universal mission’ which were powerful enough to engender a sense of pride in this sprawling political corpus and in its German leadership, they were aware that it was a body which, though German in its core, was multinational at almost every point on its periphery. Partly under the influence of ethnic and linguistic criteria popularized by Italian humanism, Germans (and other Europeans, too) had by well before 1600 learned to speak of a Germany distinct from the Empire.

Even this Germany was defined differently by different people, however. Thus, while linguistic criteria probably provided the steadiest guideline, it was necessary to recognize that largely German-speaking places such as Holstein, (East) Prussia, Livonia and Switzerland were either ruled by non-German regimes or for other reasons could not be spoken of as political constituents of Germany. Linguistically mixed areas such as Schleswig, Alsace and Lorraine, Luxemburg and Bohemia created problems of classification; and when ethnic standards were mixed with linguistic ones, it became possible to include parts of northern Italy and the Netherlands as part of a German Europe. While such borderlands were the marginal and disputed cases, general agreement existed on certain rough frontiers beyond which no Germany could meaningfully be spoken of: the Baltic Sea and Atlantic Ocean to the north, France to the west, Italy to the south and Poland and Hungary to the east. This agreement leaves us with a geographical definition of Germany which, while inexact in detail, is accurate enough to serve us as well as it did those who employed it with comfortable imprecision four centuries ago.

While the boundaries of the Holy Roman Empire are not terribly helpful in defining Germany geographically, they are more useful for describing the formal structure of politics within which the Germans lived. The Empire was an elective monarchy, headed by an emperor to whom, in theory, almost 2500 inferior authorities who exercised actual governmental powers over the German people were directly responsible. Some 2000 of these authorities were Imperial Knights whose tiny, scattered enclaves comprised not much more than 250 square miles of land. The remainder – almost 400 – were divided among some 136 ecclesiastical and 173 secular lords, as well as 85 Free or Imperial Cities.¹ The Imperial Knights were not entitled to representation in the imperial diet, the legislative body of the Empire, but all the others, known as ‘estates’ of the Empire, were entitled; and were placed for voting purposes there in one of three councils. The first, the Council of Electors, was composed of the seven princes who elected the emperor by majority vote: the archbishops of Mainz, Trier and Cologne, the king of Bohemia, the duke of Saxony, the margrave of Brandenburg and the Count Palatine of the Rhine. The second, the Council of Princes, consisted of all the other ecclesiastical and secular lords. The third embraced the Imperial Cities. The three councils deliberated and voted separately on legislation, then resolved their differences, if any, informally; if two of the three agreed, the legislation was presented to the emperor for his approval, after receiving which it became law, binding all members of the Empire to its observance. The Council of Electors was the most prestigious of the three curias and contained the most powerful imperial princes, though the Council of Princes represented more of the total territory and population of the Empire. In any case, the more powerful lords essentially controlled the diet by virtue of the separateness of the Council of Electors and by means of a complex arrangement which denied lesser lords voting rights equal to those of the greater in the Council of Princes. The Council of Cities played an increasingly negligible role in the diet after the mid-sixteenth century. The diet could only be convoked by the emperor and met in various Imperial Cities until the 1660s, when Regensburg became its permanent seat.

The emperor ranked first in dignity in the hierarchy of European royalty; and though the office was elective, the Habsburg House of Austria, as the most powerful single German dynasty, controlled it continuously from 1438 until the end of the Empire in 1806, with but one brief lapse in the mid-eighteenth century. By well before 1600, the powers of the emperor over the individual territories of the Empire (except his own) had been severely restricted, not only by promises extracted by the electors and other princes as a condition of election (the so-called Electoral Capitulation), but also by the persistent refusal of the diet to grant the emperors the money or other means by which the apparatus of an effective central imperial government could be created. Provision for taxes and other contributions existed, but these were voted irregularly and never in anything approaching the quantity required to establish a civil service or an army under the direct and undivided command of the emperor. An Imperial Army (Reichsarmee) did indeed exist – on occasion – but it was only a motley collection of territorial units raised and paid for by the individual princes, theoretically on the basis of a quota system voted by the diet, but in reality, usually, only at the whim of individual rulers. Created only in time of general peril, its existence was always short; the only standing armies were in the territories. And with the exception of the Imperial Cameral Tribunal – a high court established by the princes in 1495 (partly as the result of hostility towards the emperor) and subsequently sustained by them in an often rather insouciant and niggardly fashion – almost no other agencies of a true imperial government existed.

It was of course always possible for the emperor, who was in one sense merely the greatest of the territorial princes, to call upon the resources of the Habsburgs’ own patrimony to support his policies both inside and outside Germany; and so in addition to the so-called Aulic Council – a sort of second imperial supreme court, having a roughly concurrent jurisdiction with the Cameral Tribunal, but staffed by judges more responsive to the emperor than to the princes – the Austrian government included several agencies which handled imperial business either exclusively or in addition to family and territorial affairs. There was also a dynastic army, which contemporary usage carefully distinguished from the Imperial Army referred to above, usually referring to the former as the kaiserliche Armee – the emperor’s own territorial army. The resources of Austria, however, were never adequate by themselves to overawe the rest of the Empire and unless she could make common cause with a significant group of German princes to achieve aims common to both, the goal of resurrecting a true German monarchy would remain forever elusive. Thus, for example, the strong Catholic loyalties of the Habsburgs tempted them to solve the various problems that had arisen with the Reformation by main force with the aid of other Catholic princes in the Empire. But since these princes were no more eager to see their own territorial independence submerged under an imperial despotism than were the Protestants, the kind and amount of such aid would always have limits. Emperor Karl V, to his chagrin, discovered this after his great victory over German Protestantism in 1547 disintegrated into the compromise Peace of Augsburg in 1555, due in large part to the growing reservations and suspicions of his German Catholic allies. This balance of power between emperor and princes was to remain a cardinal fact of German history throughout the early modern period.

As far as population is concerned (and excluding the more dubious borderlands), the Germany of 1600 is estimated to have had some sixteen to seventeen million inhabitants and a population density of 75–80 people per square mile. These numbers represent an upward trend that was to continue until about 1620 and a net increase of perhaps as much as 40 per cent from a century earlier.² Of this population, more than 85 per cent lived in rural areas and the remainder in somewhat over 3000 towns and cities, of which only a very few had as many as 50,000 permanent residents; not many more were even half that size and over nine-tenths had fewer than 1000 inhabitants. Rural Germany was absolutely dominated by a nobility of varying ranks, including territorial princes at the top, which not only exercised lordship over rural inhabitants, but also, together with the church (itself largely a preserve of the nobility), owned virtually all the agricultural land of the country, excepting only the relatively insignificant amounts held by the small number of free peasant proprietors and by various cities, particularly the Imperial Cities. This land also contained the various iron, copper and silver mines, forges and foundries which were important to the German (and European) economy well into the seventeenth century and which provided a significant part of the income of a number of territorial princes, who along with capital-rich merchants from the cities entered the mining and metallurgical fields as entrepreneurs. The vast majority of rural dwellers were peasants whose legal status and rights of land tenure in different parts of the country were so varied as to defy general description. Pending further discussion below (Chapter Twelve), however, it can be remarked that one or another form of serfdom, denying both personal legal freedom and choice of land tenure, was the rule for the great majority of German peasants. Furthermore, the sixteenth century not only witnessed a general increase in peasant obligations to their landlords and to the civil authorities, but also, in much of eastern Germany, greatly intensified a movement begun in the fifteenth century towards the establishment of great noble latifundia, with attendant abolition of individual peasant farms and a marked worsening of the peasant’s status, legally and in every other respect. There seems little doubt that in 1600 the average peasant family in Germany had less to be thankful for than its counterpart of 1500, or even 1550– though, as suggested above, it is not easy to speak meaningfully of an ‘average’ peasant family.

It is just as difficult to speak of ‘average’ cities in the Germany of 1600, given their great diversity in size and character. Two basic types of cities immediately strike the eye, however: the Imperial City and what for lack of a better term might be called the territorial city. The former, like the territorial princes, whether secular or ecclesiastical, and the Imperial Knights possessed what was known as ‘immediacy’, which meant that they were subject only to the authority of the emperor himself In fact, however, they were virtually autonomous and self-governing entities, of greatly varying size and prosperity. The territorial cities, by contrast, were subject to the authority of some territorial lord; and while many of them enjoyed some degree of self-administration, this was a precarious privilege which might be curtailed or abolished according to the will and power of the prince. Belonging to neither of these types was a group of semi-autonomous cities whose size and economic strength was sufficient to sustain a substantial and virtually permanent independence from surrounding territorial authorities, even though no formal right to independence existed. Cities in both latter categories normally had representation in territorial diets, but not, like the Imperial Cities, in the imperial diet. Regardless of their differing relationship to higher or outside authorities, most cities of any size had developed constitutions which, however different, usually drew an important distinction between full citizens (Bürger) and residents (Beisassen), only the first of whom were theoretically entitled to participate in governing the city through eligibility to membership in the city council. In fact, however, by well before 1600 most city councils had fallen more or less permanently into the hands of a small group of wealthy patrician families of varied economic origins and had increasingly taken on the character of authoritarian governing bodies.

Both rural and urban Germany had by 1600 undergone some notable changes as the result of important economic developments in the sixteenth century. Since the chief income-producing activity of Germany as a whole was agriculture and its associated industries, the entire country was affected by a steep rise in agricultural prices from the late fifteenth century onward, caused by a rapidly growing population and the inflationary influence of vast increases in the supply of gold and silver bullion. Such increases came partly from improved silver production in Germany itself, but even more from huge imports from the New World through Portugal and Spain. The price of grain – the most basic and therefore also the most income-inelastic foodstuff – rose throughout central Europe by some 260 per cent between 1470 and 1618. Animal products in the same period rose by around 180 per cent, lesser availability (the result of transferring land from stock-raising to grain cultivation) being somewhat offset by lessened demand due to the higher cost of grain. Prices of manufactured goods also climbed, but substantially less. Wage increases, meanwhile, remained significantly behind the above levels.³ Amidst an almost frantic rush to get all available arable land under cultivation and to open up new lands, especially in the second half of the sixteenth century, different groups of people were affected quite variously by the inflation. Agricultural producers (in this case meaning landlords) did generally very well in this market; but with some exceptions – and these only in areas where he had free disposition of his produce – the peasant failed in almost every respect to benefit. The establishment and expansion of latifundia with their oppressed peasant populations in the eastern areas of Germany was greatly stimulated by these favourable market conditions; and elsewhere, even where landlords’ income from peasant tenants was fixed by statute or custom, devices were quickly found to deny peasants of all or most of the increased income of their labour.

The towns and cities were affected in both positive and negative ways by the inflation. On the one hand, it appears that the creation of more disposable income in some segments of the rural population led to some increase in demand for manufactured goods from the cities, as did the fact of a growing population by itself; and the rapid spread of the domestic system of production (Verlagswesen), introduced by the great wholesale merchants, led to a notable decrease in unit costs of some kinds of production, especially in mining and the metal trades, thus helping to hold down the inflation rate and to moderate decrease in demand. Nevertheless, since the price of foodstuffs rose so substantially faster than that of hard goods, economizing became necessary for much of the urban population except the very wealthy and considerably quickened the pace of social stratification by wealth within cities, which had been proceeding for a long time already. The few rich – especially those who knew how to take advantage of an inflationary cycle – in fact got richer, but the large majority became poorer, some of them much poorer. Other causes contributed to sap the vigour of the urban economy. Greater reliance on seaborne trade from the eastern Mediterranean to western and northwestern Europe caused a fundamental shift in the geography of European commerce which was very hurtful to a number of Rhenish and south German cities, in particular; and while a few other cities such as Frankfurt, Leipzig, Hamburg and Danzig actually rose in economic importance after 1550, their good fortune could not right the overall balance of decline. The dissipation of accumulated capital through loans made to periodically bankrupt governments in Austria, Spain and France by such large commercial and financial houses as the Fuggers and Welsers in Augsburg and by others in Nürnberg and elsewhere, was accelerated by a couple of generations of conspicuous consumption. While their distant posterity can still admire the magnificent public and private edifices which are the most obvious surviving evidence of this consumption, contemporaries might have done better to curb their self-indulgence in the name of prudence.

There is no doubt that the ‘golden age’ of the German renaissance city was drawing slowly to a close by the beginning of the seventeenth century. But while the Germany of 1600 presents an overall economic picture more dominated by prosperity than by poverty and one with a particularly vigorous agrarian sector, it appears obvious not only that the general standard of living of most Germans had slipped, relative to the first half of the sixteenth century, but also that the distance between upper and lower economic strata was growing. This process of social differentiation and urban decline was accompanied, furthermore, by a gradual but quickening reinvigoration of the nobility as a class. Beset by economic and political problems of their own (which to some extent were related to the simultaneous rise of the cities), the lower and middling ranks of German nobility, beginning in the fifteenth century, had experienced a decline of fortunes which approached crisis proportions by the later sixteenth century. Then, however, assisted partly by a newly thriving agriculture, but even more by the increasing opportunities offered them by the rapidly expanding civil and military administrations of the one segment of the nobility – the territorial princes – whose fortunes had prospered throughout the period, the rest of the nobility underwent a revitalization which was to become perhaps the most important single factor in the development of German society for the remainder of the early modern period.

The decline of the cities and of standards of living in general between 1500 and 1600 had a counterpart in the realm of culture as well – though it is hardly possible to ascribe this to economic recession alone. Furthermore, progress in some areas offset regression in others, so that here as in other aspects of German life in 1600 we have no really uniform picture. On the negative side, it is doubtful that any informed German in 1600 could compare favourably the quality of effort of his contemporaries in the area of humane letters with that of the heroic age of early German humanism as represented by such figures as Conrad Celtis, Crotus Rubeanus, Aventinus, Heinrich Bebel, Ulrich von Hutten or Johannes Reuchlin. The same was true of the graphic arts, in which no equally gifted successors to a Matthias Grünewald, an Albrecht Dürer or a Hans Holbein the Younger were to be found. Furthermore, the originally very powerful stimulus to a broad social dissemination of humanistic thought and letters that these and other individuals had given weakened after the mid-century. Partly this was the result of the deepening religious controversy, which increasingly dissolved both the ties of communication and the moral and intellectual consensus that had bound the community of early humanists together and diminished the enthusiasm for the establishment of new and better secular schools and curricula at middle and lower levels which had been vigorously pursued in the first half of the century. It is worth noting, in this connection, that the numbers of readers of books, as well as the literacy rate of the population as a whole – relatively very high in the few decades after 1500 – also began a long decline after the mid-century.

There was a positive side too, of course. The number and quality of printed works, for example, rose steadily throughout the century and a notable increase in the number and size of libraries and art collections occurred, especially at the thriving princely courts. And if painting and sculpture showed less in the way of brilliance than they once had, at least there was enough talent still available to adorn the castles and other public buildings which were either newly built or renovated in quantity in the years around 1600 – strong testimony also to the vitality of late renaissance–style architecture. Further, while the fierce religious disputations of the Reformation era had c...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Table of Contents
• List of maps
• Preface
• Dedication
• 1. Germany in 1600: The Land and the People
• 2. Drifts and Eddies Towards War
• 3. The Nightmare Begins: The Bohemian War
• 4. Habsburg Triumphs, Protestant Defeats
• 5. From One Insecure Peace to Another: 1629–1635
• 6. Eternal War as Lifestyle
• 7. Peace at Last
• 8. The Development of Territorial Autocracy, I
• 9. The Development of Territorial Autocracy, II
• 10. The German Economy, 1650–1800: Population and Agriculture
• 11. The German Economy, 1650–1800: Industry, Commerce and Finance
• 12. The Structure of German Society, 1650–1800
• 13. German Culture after 1648: Religion and Education
• 14. German Culture after 1648: Literature, Architecture and Music
• 15. The Early Enlightenment to 1750
• 16. The Legacies of Westphalia and Beyond (1648–1685/99)
• 17. Germany in the Maelstrom of War, 1685–1721
• 18. Austria and the Larger German States to 1740
• 19. The Northern Sparta: Brandenburg-Prussia, 1640–1740
• 20. The Austro-Prussian Dualism, 1740–1763
• 21. The Development of Prussia and Austria, 1763–1790
• 22. The German Powers, the Empire and the Territories at the End of an Era
• 23. The Later German Enlightenment
• 24. The Revival of German Letters after 1740
• Bibliography
• Maps
• Index