The Cambridge Modern History. R. Nisbet Bain
neighbours. Before the end of the fourteenth century the Imperial Knights had formed a number of clubs or unions, each with its captain, and regular assemblies, to which King Sigismund had given a formal legitimation. Of these the most important were the Knights of St George, an organisation of the chivalry of Swabia which took conspicuous part in creating the Swabian League. Even earlier were the associations of the towns. Of the unions of the thirteenth century, the Hanse League alone remained, and this was now steadily on the decline. But the southern and western cities formed local leagues with periodical deliberative assemblies. In course of time other general Diets of town representatives were established. Even after the cities had definitively won their right to a limited representation in the Diets these meetings continued, being held often, for the saving of expense and trouble, side by side with the imperial assemblies. It was well for the princes that the antagonism of knights and cities was as a rule too strong to enable them to work together. The strength of the Swabian League was in no small measure due to the fact that towns and knights had both cooperated with the princes in its formation. Neither Emperors, nor Diets, nor the voluntary associations of classes and districts sufficed to give peace and prosperity to the Empire. The unwieldy fabric had outgrown its ancient organisation and no new system had arisen capable of supplying its needs. Every aspect of fifteenth century history shows how overwhelming and immediate a need existed for thoroughgoing and organic reform. The area of imperial influence was steadily diminishing. Italy no longer saw in the Emperor any one but a foreigner, who could sometimes serve the turn of an ambitious upstart by selling him a lawful title of honour that raised him in the social scale of European rulers. Even the Hundred Years’ War did not prevent the spread of French influence over the Middle Kingdom, and the Arelate was now no more an integral part of the Empire than was Italy. But parts of the old German kingdom were falling away. The outposts of Teutonic civilisation in the east were losing all connexion with the Power which had established them. Imperfect as the union established between the Scandinavian kingdoms at Calmar proved to be, it had dealt a mighty blow to the power of the Hansa, while the choice of the Danish king as Duke of Schleswig and Count of Holstein had practically extended the Scandinavian Power to the banks of the Elbe. In the north-east the Teutonic Knights had been forced by the Treaty of Thorn to surrender West Prussia to the Polish kings outright, and to hold as a fief of the Slavonic kingdom such part of Prussia as the Poles still allowed them to rule. Bohemia under George Podiebrad had become an almost purely Slavonic State, whose unfriendliness to German nationality and orthodox Catholicism might well threaten the renewal of those devastating Hussite invasions from which Germany had been saved by the Council of Basel. In Hungary German influence had disappeared with the extinction of the House of Luxemburg; the Magyar King Matthias Corvinus conquered the Duchy of Austria from the Habsburg Emperor, and died master of Vienna. The Swiss Confederacy was gradually drifting into hostility to the Empire; and the House of Burgundy was building up a great separatist State in the Low Dutch and Walloon provinces of the Netherlands. The utter defencelessness of Germany was seen by the devastations of the Armagnacs in Elsass. No prince of the Empire arrested their progress. The stubborn heroism of the Swiss League alone stayed the plague. And beyond all these dangers loomed the terrible spectre of Ottoman aggression.
Matters were equally unsatisfactory in the heart of Germany. Private war raged unchecked, and the feeble efforts made from time to time to secure the Public Peace (Landfriede) were made fruitless by the absence of any real executive authority. The robber knights waylaid traders, and great princes did not scruple to abet such lawlessness. The very preservation of the Public Peace had long ceased to be the concern of the Emperor and Empire as a whole, and local and voluntary unions (Landfriedensvereme) had sought with but scant result to uphold it within the limits of local and precarious conditions. The lack of imperial justice brought about such grave evils that the Estates sought to provide some sort of substitute for it by private agreements (Austäge) referring disputed matters to arbitration, and by that quaint etiquette which made it a breach of propriety for a prince to prefer the solemn judgment of his suzerain to such arbitration of his neighbours. The beginnings of an economic revolution threatened the ancient rude prosperity of the peasant, and embittered the relations of class and class within the towns.
The need for reform was patent. From what source however was the improvement to come? Little was to be expected from the Emperors. Yet even the careless Wenceslas of Bohemia had prepared the way for better things when he not only renewed once more the publication of a universal Landfriede, but also invested with imperial authority the local assemblies representative of the various Estates that were entrusted with its execution. Things were worse under Sigismund (1410-37), who could find no middle course between fantastic schemes for the regeneration of the universe and selfish plans for the aggrandisement of his own house. When his inheritance passed to his son-in-law Albert II of Austria (1438-9), the union of the rival houses of Habsburg and Luxemburg at least secured for the ruler a strong family position such as was the essential preliminary for the revival of the imperial power. Albert IPs device for securing the general Public Peace of Germany rested upon an extension and development of the local executive authorities, and thus contained the germ of the future system of dividing the Empire into great territorial circumscriptions known as Circles (Kreise), destined ultimately to become one of the most lasting of imperial institutions. But Albert passed away before he was so much as able to visit the Empire, and in the long reign of his kinsman and successor Frederick III (1440-93) the imperial authority sunk down to its lowest point. A cold, phlegmatic, slow and unenterprising prince, Frederick of Austria busied himself with no great plans of reform or aggression, but seemed absorbed in gardening, in alchemy, and in astrology rather than in affairs of State. Under his nerveless rule the Luxemburg claims over Bohemia and Hungary passed utterly away. A large proportion of the Habsburg hereditary lands, including Tyrol and the scattered Swabian estates, were ruled by a rival branch of the ruling house represented by the Archduke Sigismund, while Austria itself fell into the hands of Matthias Corvinus. Yet in his cautious and slow-minded fashion Frederick was by no means lacking in ability and foresight. If he were indifferent to the Empire, he looked beyond the present distress of his house to a time when politic marriages and cunningly devised treaties of eventual succession would make Austria a real ruler of the world. Even for the Empire he did a little by his proclamations of a general Landfriede, while his settlement of the ecclesiastical relations of Germany after the failure of the Conciliar movement at Basel implied, with all its renunciation of high ideals, the establishment of a workable system that kept the peace until the outbreak of the Reformation. The Vienna Concordat of 1448 put an end to that tendency towards the ‘nationalisation of the German Church which had been promoted so powerfully by the attitude of the prelates of the German nation at the Council of Constance, and which had been maintained so long when, under the guidance of Emperor and Electors, the Germans had upheld their neutrality between both the disorderly fathers at Basel and the grasping papal Curia at Rome. In the long run this nationalising tendency must have extended itself from ecclesiastical to political matters. Even in the decline of the Middle Ages the union within the Church might well have prepared the way to the union of the State. In accepting a modus vivendi which gave the Pope greater opportunities than now remained to the Emperor of exercising jurisdiction and levying taxation in Germany, Frederick proved himself a better friend to immediate peace than to the development of a national German State.
Three signal successes gilded the end of Frederick’s long reign. The power of the House of Burgundy threatened to withdraw the richest and most industrial parts of the Empire from the central authority. But the sluggish Emperor and the inert Empire were at last roused to alarm, when Charles the Bold made the attack on their territory that began with the siege of Neuss. It was an omen of real possibilities for the future when a great imperial army gathered together to relieve the burghers of the Rhenish town. The “New League” of the Alsatian cities which was formed to ward off Charles’ southern aggressions was a step in the same direction. And even the “Old League” of the Swiss Highlanders, which finally destroyed the Burgundian power, was not as yet avowedly anti-German in its policy. But, as in Church affairs, Frederick stepped in between the nation and its goal. At the moment of the threatened ruin of his ancient enemy’s plans, he cleverly negotiated the marriage of his son Maximilian with Mary, the heiress of Charles the Bold. Soon after the last Duke of Burgundy had fallen at Nancy, Maximilian obtained with the hand of his daughter the many rich provinces of the Netherlands and the Free County of Burgundy (1477). It was not however for the sake