of women and old men left at home when their menfolk are out at war. This, in turn, forfeited them their political sense, their interest in government. Sensing the contempt of the domineering Junkers, the German burgher shunned responsibility. He threw himself into gainful work, and when he had amassed enough wealth, or when as a son or grandson he had means and leisure, he went in for science or the professions, while the artists rose directly from the ranks of the artisans. A desire for freedom hardly ever emerged.
The evolution that now took form reflects the major and minor traits of the German character. The diligence of the Germans has always matched their vision. Since art and enterprise are markedly divided between northern and southern Germany, the great artists and inventors have for the most part come from the South, while the merchants and colonizers stemmed from the North. In the North wanderlust, curiosity about foreigners, the desire to find and assimilate beauty may have had their share in urging the burghers out to trade overseas. This urge for faraway places aided the Germans in all their aspirations. To the individual mind it did as much good as it did damage to the State as a whole.
It was only in the cities that culture in Germany began to leave its charmed circle. And, curiously, the mind seemed to expand farthest in the smallest space, within the tightest walls. It was the monasteries that had heretofore been the guardians of the spirit. Until the twelfth century it was they that furnished teachers and physicians, miniatures and above all hundreds of documents painstakingly copied by thousands of monks on carefully prepared parchment with conscientiously mixed ink, and adorned in color.
In France and Italy the ruling nobility of the Middle Ages carried culture to the courts, and thence back into the land; in Germany, there were perhaps three or four really cultured kings in the six centuries from 900 to 1500. But while visitors wondered at the low ebb to which conduct among the German nobility had sunk, they marveled at the cities.
The cities in Germany had a harder time developing than in other countries. Ancient Teutonic habits of thought clung to the soil and could not conceive of liberty and civil rights where men did not own acres, perhaps not even a house, yet claimed the rights of free men, traveling about, marrying, building cathedrals and keeping bondsmen. When the merchants began to come into their own, the clergy, among whom there was many a keen business mind reaping rich profits, reviled them as “perfidious drunkards and bandits.” Princes and nobles who lived on their inherited privileges bitterly fought the cities, which claimed and defended similar privileges. Even the kings, who needed the princes to elect their sons and to raise levies for the Roman pilgrimages, at first opposed the cities. All three Estates—knights, clerics and peasants—sensed that a new Estate was entering German history, which had heretofore been the history of the nobility, including the clergy. That entry they resisted.
But money flowed into Germany from the older countries, bringing interest and income from capital and power from its accumulation. In vain St. Thomas Aquinas declared all merchants who earned more than the barest necessities for themselves to be immoral, while another ecclesiastical teacher wrote the memorable sentence “that a merchant could hardly be without sin.” Ships and stagecoaches began to pick up the fragments of the world, torn and tattered since the great migrations. It soon developed that the Germans made excellent merchants.
Later proud commercial houses arose in Frankfort, Mayence and Cologne, importing silk and spices from the East, exporting metals and furs in exchange and growing into powerful centers during the Crusades and Roman expeditions.
And yet the German merchant did not by any means accompany the king to the South. The Fondaco de’ Tedeschi in Venice was perhaps his only office. He asked not for world dominion but for money, and the crown he sought needed to be represented only on a coin, as long as it dropped into his purse, which he called Geldkatze, money-cat. The world-historical error of the emperors, who sought fulfillment of their dream of world dominion in the South, is perhaps nowhere more strikingly illustrated than in the turn toward the North and the East which the merchants took. They recognized that the Alps formed a natural barrier, while the North Sea and the Baltic offered ready access to countries that were both markets and sources of goods. Germany’s peculiar geographic situation, stretching from the vineyards of the Rhine and the chestnuts of Baden to the oatfields of the Oder, also explains the lack of a capital. The Berlin of later times was never able to rival the position Rome and London, and, since the tenth century, even Paris held in their respective countries.
The two powers in the Middle Ages that expanded eastward and northward were the Teutonic Order and the Hanseatic League.
The Hanseatic League of German cities required no religious pretexts. It represents one of the finest communal endeavors in German history. Among the non-German cities of the North Sea and the Baltic, including those of Sweden, Denmark and Lithuania, it was above all in London that the countinghouse of the Hanseatic League wielded great power. In England the Germans had once been called “Merchants of the Emperor”; now the German “Hansards” were given special privileges. They had their own courts, and their Guild Hall was granted far-reaching privileges. England was so dependent upon Hanseatic capital that Edward III was for some time compelled to pawn the British crown with the merchants of the City of Dortmund. The League continued to flourish for two hundred years.
It was the first and—until the rise of the modern steamship lines—the only time in German history that the German spirit of enterprise ventured out into the world independently of the State without making any more enemies than is usual with those who meet with success. The League had no patron and its own weapons were used only for defense. It was a trading company that sought to win neither souls nor territory. Yet in the cities of Hamburg, Bremen and Lübeck it had three little republics right in the German Reich—with no solemn statutes, but with a common currency, a common system of weights and measures, and common customs duties. Aside from the Swiss Confederacy, the Hanseatic League has remained the only free association of German citizens that needed neither princes nor crowns to achieve world-wide scope. Both the Swiss and the Hansards proved to the world that the Germans were sufficiently endowed by nature to govern themselves with peace and success.
But the German character could not tolerate any kind of freedom for long. In these two instances there was a response to internationalism that differed markedly from the usual German reaction. But then, the Swiss and the Hansards together made up but a bare tenth of the German people, and they have remained exceptional in Germany to this very day. Even today people from Zurich or Hamburg often marvel at the Prussian tone which has divided all Germany into voices that command and those that obey. They rarely grumble about it any more, but they smile.
7
THE CITY was a Burg, a walled fort, and thus the citizens were called “burghers.” Walls were to the city what armor was to the knight. How could the burghers have slept soundly without walls and towers, arms, pitch and stones! The Emperor had no standing army nor, for the most part, money; the princes had both, and misused them; the high clergy kept to the safety of their own cities and castles; and the highways were infested with knights, in large bands and small, some on forays from their castles, others impoverished bandits and highwaymen. This state of affairs characterized not merely the Interregnum. The German chronicles from every part of the Reich are full of it. Amid such anarchy every merchant traveling on the highway, as well as every city, was constantly exposed to attack. To get a clear picture of conditions in Germany between 1100 and 1300, one needs only to cast a glance at present-day Europe, where highwaymen, armed to the teeth, attack and rob their less well protected and wealthier neighbors without reason or warning.
The German cities became the birthplace of handicraft. Germans must always form groups; and, in Freytag’s words, “the whole nation is composed of many such groups.” These naturally grew strongest where co-operation afforded the greatest protection—among soldiers and craftsmen. Here too, since courage was not of the essence, skill and hard work, vision and persistence
