Produced by Al Haines
A SHORT
HISTORY OF GERMANY
BY
MARY PLATT PARMELE
NEW YORK
CHARLES SCRIBNER'S SONS
1898
COPYRIGHT, 1897, BY
MARY PLATT PARMELE
COPYRIGHT, 1898, BY
CHARLES SCRIBNER'S SONS
_BY THE SAME AUTHOR_
A SHORT HISTORY OF THE UNITED STATES
A SHORT HISTORY OF ENGLAND
A SHORT HISTORY OF FRANCE
A SHORT HISTORY OF GERMANY
A SHORT HISTORY OF SPAIN
PREFACE.
It is more important to comprehend the forces which have created a
great nation, and the progressive steps by which it has unfolded, than
to know the multitudinous events and incidents which have attended such
unfolding.
In order to forestall criticism for the absence of some events in this
History of Germany the author desires to say, that there has been an
effort to keep strictly to the main line of development and to resist
the temptation of introducing details which do not bear directly upon
such line.
The bypaths of history are fascinating, but they are of secondary
importance, and may better be explored after the main road has been
traveled and is thoroughly known.
Such is the ideal which has been very imperfectly followed in this book.
M. P. P.
NEW YORK, _June_ 21, 1897.
CONTENTS.
CHAPTER I.
Indo-European Migrations--Divisions of the Aryan Family into European
Races--The Teutonic Race
CHAPTER II.
Hermann--Defeat of Varus--Characteristics of the Ancient Germans
CHAPTER III.
Social Conditions--Form of Government--The Goth in Rome--A Gothic
Kingdom in Spain--The Teuton Race Covering the European Surface--The
Angles and Saxons in Britain
CHAPTER IV.
Ulfilas--The Hunnish Invasion--The Roman Empire Perishing--Its
Conversion--An Eastern Empire--Increasing Power of the
Church--Charlemagne--France and Germany Separated--Feudal System
CHAPTER V.
Early Conditions--Hungarian Invasions--Creation of
Burgs--Knighthood--Pope and Emperor Become Rivals--Henry
IV.--Canossa--First Hohenstaufen--Welf and Waiblingen--The
Crusaders--Conrad--Frederick Barbarossa
CHAPTER VI.
Source of Weakness in the Empire--The Great Interregnum--The Nibelungen
Lied--The Hanseatic League--The Guilds--Meistersingers
CHAPTER VII.
Conditions--First Hapsburg and First Hohenzollern--Swiss
Freedom--Intellectual Awakening--The Golden Bull--Hussite War--A
Hohenzollern Receives a Mortgage on the Territory of
Brandenburg--Discovery of Gunpowder--Conditions Existing under
Frederick III.--Invention of Printing--The Passing of the Old and
Coming of the New
CHAPTER VIII.
General European Conditions--Centralizing Tendencies at
Work--Maximilian I.--A New World--The Rise of Spain--Isabella--Charles
IV.
CHAPTER IX.
Triple Game between Francis I., Henry VIII., and Charles IV.--Leo
X.--Luther--The Diet of Worms--Protestantism Born--Margrave of
Brandenburg Usurps Sovereignty over Prussia--The Peasants War--The
Augsburg Confession--Charles V. Thwarted--Protestantism a Dominant
Power in his Empire--Schisms in the New
Faith--Calvinism--Reformers--Lutherans--The Schmalkaldian
League--Anabaptists--Abdication of Charles V.--Philip II.--Death of
Charles--Ferdinand I.--Council of Trent--Society of Jesus
CHAPTER X.
A Protestant Germany--A Divided Protestantism--True Meaning of the
Struggle--Unfruitful Waiting--The Renaissance--Music, Art, Letters,
Born Anew--Thought Awakened--Copernicus--Galileo--Kepler--Impending
Calamity--Protestant Union and Catholic League--Thirty Years' War
Commenced--Wallenstein--Gustavus Adolphus--His Triumph and
Death--Richelieu--Death of Wallenstein--Peace of Westphalia--Division
of Territory
CHAPTER XI.
Romano-Germanic Empire Perishing--European Conditions--Louis
XIV.--Decay of National Spirit--Rise of Brandenburg--Combination
against Louis XIV.--Spanish Succession--Under Frederick I. Brandenburg
Becomes Prussia--Alliance with England--Marlborough and Prince
Eugene--Blenheim--Peace of Utrecht--Territorial Changes--Charles XII.
and Peter the Great--Pragmatic Sanction--Frederick William
I.--Stirrings of Thought in this Time of Chaos--Birth of German
Speculative Philosophy--Spinoza--Soul Awakening
CHAPTER XII.
Frederick the Great--His Childhood--Von Katte's Execution--Frederick at
Potsdam--Frederick II., King of Prussia--Maria Theresa, Empress--War of
Austrian Succession--Silesia--Personal Traits of the Two
Sovereigns--Frederick Joins France against Austria--Peace of
Dresden--Frederick Becomes "The Great"--Healing the Wounds Left by Two
Wars--Voltaire's Influence--Frederick a Reformer and a Despot--Growth
in Thought and Birth of a Native Literature--Voltaire at Frederick's
Court--Change Wrought by a Nearer View of King and Poet
CHAPTER XIII.
War over American Boundary between England and France--Maria Theresa
Joins France--Her Policy--A Combination against Frederick II.--Seven
Years' War--Peace of Hubertsburg--Silesia Forever Abandoned by
Austria--Prussia One of the "Five Great Powers"--Healing Wounds
Again--Conditions External and Internal
CHAPTER XIV.
Marie Antoinette Married to the French Dauphin Louis--Unsuspected
Conditions--Joseph II.--Reforms by a Progressive Hapsburg are a
Failure--Romanticism Replaces Sentimentalism in Literature--_Sturm und
Drang_ Period--Luther's Influence upon Letters--Frederick Succeeded by
his Nephew--Effect of Prussia's Ascendancy in the German Empire--Its
Coming Dissolution--Why Patriotism Could Not Exist--The Calm before the
Hurricane
CHAPTER XV.
The Beginnings of the Storm--The United States of America and
France--The Thought-Currents Which Moved toward a Vortex--Execution of
King and Queen--France a Ruin but Free--A Republic--First
Coalition--Poland and its Partition--Austria Fighting Alone for the
Empire--Napoleon Bonaparte in Italy--His Methods and Their
Result--Treaty of Campo Formio--Three New Republics--Napoleon in
Egypt--His Return--Second Coalition--Dominions of Ecclesiastical Rulers
Given Away--Napoleon the Instrument of Fate
CHAPTER XVI.
Napoleon Emperor of the French--Third Coalition--Prussian
Neutrality--The Rheinbund--Dissolution of the Empire and Abdication of
Francis II.--Retribution for Prussia--Battle of Jena--Peace of
Tilsit--A Continental Blockade--Marriage with Marie Louise
CHAPTER XVII.
Revolt of Bavarian Peasants--The "League of Virtue"--Invasion of
Russia--Burning of Moscow--Retreat--General York Leads a Popular
Movement--Prussia at War with Napoleon--The Battle of Leipzig--The
Allies in Paris--Napoleon Deposed--Louis XVIII. King--Return of
Napoleon--Waterloo and St. Helena
CHAPTER XVIII.
Reconstruction--The Act of Union--Sentiment of the
People--Concessions--Francis II. Died--A Republic in France--Blaze of
Revolutionary Fires in Europe--A National Parliament Granted--Its
Failure--Napoleon III. in France--Magenta and Solferino--Revolution in
Italy--Victor Emmanuel King--William I. King of Prussia
CHAPTER XIX.
King William and Bismarck--Schleswig-Holstein--Proposed Division--War
against Austria--Koeniggraetz--The North German Union
CHAPTER XX.
Napoleon III. Plans the Overthrow of Prussian Dominion--Vacant Throne
in Spain--A Hohenzollern Candidate--Benedetti and King William--War
Declared by France--Metz--Sedan--King William at Versailles--Crowned
Hereditary Emperor of the German Empire--Death of Emperor William
I.--Emperor Frederick--His Unfulfilled Dreams and his Death--William
II. Emperor
A SHORT HISTORY OF GERMANY.
CHAPTER I.
Foundation building is neither picturesque nor especially interesting,
but it is indispensable. However fair the structure is to be, one must
first lay the rough-hewn stones upon which it is to rest. It would be
much pleasanter in this sketch to display at once the minarets and
towers and stained-glass windows; but that can only be done when one's
castle is in Spain.
Would we comprehend the Germany of to-day, we must hold firmly in our
minds an epitome of what it has been, and see vividly the devious path
of its development through the ages.
The German nation is of ancient lineage, and indeed belongs to the
royal line of human descent, the Aryan; its ancestral roots running
back until lost in the heart of Asia, in the mists of antiquity.
The home of the Aryan race is shrouded in mystery, as are the impelling
causes which sent those successive tides of humanity into Europe. But
we know with certainty that when the last great wave spread over
Eastern Europe, or Russia, about one thousand years before Christ, the
submergence of that continent was complete.
Before the coming of the Aryan, the Rhine flowed as now; the Alps
pierced the sky with their glistening peaks as they do to-day; the
Danube, the Rhone, hurried on, as now, toward the sea. Was it all a
beautiful, unpeopled solitude, waiting in silence for the richly
endowed Asiatic to come and possess it? Far from it! It was teeming
with humanity--if, indeed, we may call such the race which modern
research and discovery have revealed to us. It is only within the last
thirty years that anything whatever has been known of prehistoric man;
but now we are able to reconstruct him with probable accuracy. A
creature bestial in appearance and in life; dwelling in caves, which,
however, a dawning sense of a higher humanity led him to decorate with
carvings of birds and fishes; but certain it is, the brain which
inhabited that skull was incapable of performing the mental processes
necessary to the simplest form of civilization; and life must have been
to him simply a thing of fierce appetites and brutal instincts. Such
was the being encountered by the Aryan, when he penetrated the
mysterious land beyond the confines of Greece and Italy.
The extermination, and perhaps, to some extent, assimilation, of this
terrible race must have required centuries of brutalizing conflict,
and, it is easy to imagine, would have produced just such men as were
the northern barbarians who, for five hundred years, terrorized Europe;
men insensible to fear, terrible, fierce, but with fine instincts for
civilization--dormant Aryan germs, which quickly developed when brought
into contact with a superior race.
The earliest Indo-European migration is supposed to have been into
Greece and Italy, where was laid the basis for the civilization of the
world. The second was probably into Western Europe and the British
Isles; then, after many centuries, the central and last, and at a time
comparatively recent, into the Eastern portion of the continent.
So, by the fourth century B.C., three great divisions of the Aryan race
occupied Europe north of Greece and Italy: the Keltic, the western; the
Teutonic, the central; the Slavonic the eastern; and these, in turn,
had ramified into new subdivisions or tribes.
To state it as in the pedigree of the individual, the Aryan was the
founder, the father of the family; Slav, Teuton, and Kelt the three
sons. Gaul and Briton were sons of the Kelt; Saxon, Angle, Helvetian,
etc., sons of the Teuton; and all alike grandchildren of the Aryan;
whom--to carry the illustration farther--we may imagine to have had
older children, who long ago had left the paternal home and settled
about the Caspian and Mediterranean seas: Mede, Persian, Greek, Roman;
apparently bearing few marks of kinship to these uncouth younger
brothers whom we have found in Europe in the fourth century B.C., but
with nevertheless the same cradle and the same ancestral roots.
It is the Teutonic branch of the Aryan family with which we have to do
now, between whom and their Keltic brothers there flowed the River
Rhine.
Greece and Rome were unaware of the existence of the Teuton until about
the year 330 B.C., when Pythias, a Greek navigator, came home from a
voyage to the Baltic with terrible tales of the Goths whom he had met.
Nearly one century before Christ the inhabitants of Italy were enabled
to judge for themselves of the accuracy of the description. Driven
from their homes by the inroads of the sea, the Goths poured in a
hungry torrent down into the tempting vineyards of Northern Italy.
Gigantic in stature, with long yellow hair, eyes blue but fierce--what
wonder that the people thought they were scarcely human, and fled
affrighted, leaving them to enjoy the vineyards at their leisure!
Accounts of this uncanny host reached Rome, which soon knew of their
breastplates of iron, their helmets crowned with heads of wild beasts,
their white shields glistening in the sun, and, more terrible than all,
of their priestesses, clad in white linen, who prophesied and offered
human sacrifices to their gods.
But the sacrifices did not avail against the legions which the great
Consul Marius led against them. The ponderous Goth was not yet a match
for the finer skill of the Roman, and the invaders were exterminated on
the plain near Aix, 102 B.C. The women, in despair, slew first their
children, then themselves, a few only surviving to be paraded in chains
at the triumph accorded to Marius on his return to Rome. Such was the
first appearance of the Teuton in the Eternal City, and the last until
five hundred years later, when the conditions were changed.