restrictions imposed by feudalism in Church, State and society. It strove after freedom from the narrow bonds of the guild, the court and the judiciary; it strove after the centralization of the State, after the abolition of the numerous seats of idlers, the monasteries; and it demanded their use for practical production. The movement aimed at the abolition of the feudal form of property and production; it aimed at placing in its stead the free property of the capitalist, i. e., in the stead of the existing system of mutual protection in small and disconnected circles, there was to be unchained the free individual struggle of individual efforts in the competition for property.
On the religious field, Luther was the representative of these bourgeois aspirations. When he took a stand for the freedom of marriage, the question could not be simply about civic marriage, which was realized in Germany only in our own age through the civil laws and the legislation therewith connected, – freedom to move, freedom of pursuit, and freedom of domicile. In how far the position of woman was thereby improved will be shown later. Meanwhile things had not matured so far at the time of the Reformation. If, through the regulations of the Reformation many were afforded the possibility to marry, the severe persecutions that followed later hampered the freedom of sexual intercourse. The Roman Catholic clergy having in its time displayed a certain degree of tolerance, and even laxity, towards sexual excesses, now the Protestant clergy, once itself was provided for, raged all the more violently against the practice. War was declared upon the public "houses of women;" they were closed as "Holes of Satan;" the prostitutes were persecuted as "daughters of the devil;" and every woman who slipped was placed on the pillory as a specimen of all sinfulness.
Out of the once hearty small property-holding bourgeois of the Middle Ages, who lived and let live, now became a bigoted, straight-laced, dark-browed maw-worm, who "saved-up," to the end that his large property-holding bourgeois successor might live all the more lustily in the nineteenth century, and might be able to dissipate all the more. The respectable citizen, with his stiff necktie, his narrow horizon and his severe code of morals, was the prototype of society. The legitimate wife, who had not been particularly edified by the sensuality of the Middle Ages, tolerated in Roman Catholic days, was quite at one with the Puritanical spirit of Protestantism. But other circumstances supervened, that, affecting, as they did, unfavorably the general condition of things in Germany, joined in exercising in general an unfavorable influence upon the position of woman.
The revolution – effected in production, money and trade, particularly as regarded Germany, – due to the discovery of America and the sea-route to the East Indies, produced, first of all, a great reaction on the social domain. Germany ceased to be the center of European traffic and commerce. Spain, Portugal, Holland, England, took successively the leadership, the latter keeping it until our own days. German industry and German commerce began to decline. At the same time, the religious Reformation had destroyed the political unity of the nation. The Reformation became the cloak under which the German principalities sought to emancipate themselves from the Imperial power. In their turn, the Princes brought the power of the nobility under their own control, and, in order to reach this end all the more easily, favored the cities, not a few of which, in sight of the ever more troubled times, placed themselves, of their own free will, under the rule of the Princes. The final effect was that the bourgeois or capitalist class, alarmed at the financial decline of its trade, raised ever higher barriers to protect itself against unpleasant competition. The ossification of conditions gained ground; and with it the impoverishment of the masses.
Later, the Reformation had for a consequence the calling forth of the religious wars and persecutions – always, of course, as cloaks for the political and economic purposes of the Princes – that, with short interruptions, raged throughout Germany for over a century, and ended with the country's complete exhaustion, at the close of the Thirty Years' War in 1648. Germany had become an immense field of corpses and ruins; whole territories and provinces lay waste; hundreds of cities, thousands of villages had been partially or wholly burnt down; many of them have since disappeared forever from the face of the earth. In other places the population had sunk to a third, a fourth, a fifth, even to an eighth and tenth part. Such was the case, for instance, with cities like Neurenberg, and with the whole of Franconia. And now, at the hour of extreme need, and with the end in view of providing the depopulated cities and villages as quickly as possible with an increased number of people, the drastic measure was resorted to of "raising the law," and allowing a man two wives. The wars had carried off the men; of women there was an excess. On February 14, 1650, the Congress of Franconia, held in Nuerenberg, adopted the resolution that "men under sixty years of age shall not be admitted to the monasteries;" furthermore, it ordered "the priests and curates, if not ordained, and the canons of religious establishments, shall marry;" "moreover every male shall be allowed to marry two wives; and all and each males are earnestly reminded, and shall be often warned, from the pulpit also, to so comport themselves in this matter; and care shall be taken that he shall fully and with becoming discretion diligently endeavor, so that, as a married man, to whom is granted that he take two wives, he not only take proper care of both wives, but avoid all misunderstanding among them." At that time, we see, matters that are to-day kept under strictest secrecy, were often discussed as of course from the pulpit itself.
But not commerce alone was at a standstill. Traffic and industry had been extensively ruined during this protracted period; they could recover only by little and little. A large part of the population had become wild and demoralized, disused to all orderly occupations. During the wars, it was the robbing, plundering, despoiling and murdering armies of mercenaries, which crossed Germany from one end to the other, that burned and knocked down friend and foe alike; after the wars, it was countless robbers, beggars and swarms of vagabonds that threw the population into fear and terror, and impeded and destroyed commerce and traffic. For the female sex, in particular, a period of deep suffering had broken. Contempt for woman had made great progress during the times of license. The general lack of work weighed heaviest on their shoulders; by the thousands did these women, like the male vagabonds, infest the roads and woods, and filled the poorhouses and prisons of the Princes and the cities. On top of all these sufferings came the forcible ejectment of numerous peasant families by a land-hungry nobility.
Compelled, since the Reformation, ever more to bend before the might of the Princes, and rendered ever more dependent upon these through court offices and military posts, the nobility now sought to recoup itself double and threefold with the robbery of peasant estates for the injury it had sustained at the hand of the Princes. The Reformation offered the Princes the desired pretext to appropriate the rich Church estates, which they swallowed in innumerable acres of land. The Elector August of Saxony, for instance, had turned not less than three hundred clergy estates from their original purpose, up to the close of the sixteenth century.54 Similarly did his brothers and cousins, the other Protestant Princes, and, above all, the Princes of Brandenburg. The nobility only imitated the example by bagging peasant estates, that had lost their owners, by ejecting free as well as serf peasants from house and home, and enriching themselves with the goods of these. To this particular end, the miscarried peasant revolts of the sixteenth century furnished the best pretext. After the first attempts had succeeded, never after were reasons wanting to proceed further in equally violent style. With the aid of all manner of chicaneries, vexations and twistings of the law – whereto the in-the-meantime naturalized Roman law lent a convenient handle – the peasants were bought out at the lowest prices, or they were driven from their property in order to round up the estates of noblemen. Whole villages, the peasant homes of as much as half a province, were in this way wiped out. Thus – so as to give a few illustrations – out of 12,543 peasant homestead appanages of knightly houses, which Mecklenburg still possessed at the time of the Thirty Years' War, there were, in 1848, only 1,213 left. In Pommerania, since 1628, not less than 12,000 peasant homesteads disappeared. The change in peasant economy, that took place in the course of the seventeenth century, was a further incentive for the expropriation of the peasant homesteads, especially to turn the last rests of the commons into the property of the nobility. The system of rotation of crops was introduced. It provided for a rotation in cultivation within given spaces of time. Corn lands were periodically turned into meadows. This favored the raising of cattle, and made possible the reduction of
Johann Janssen. Vol. III.
