For seven hundred years, from the treaty of Verdun (843), to Charles V.
(1520), Germany had held the leading position in Europe as the head of
the "Holy Roman Empire." The reality had been gradually departing from
that alluring title; and now, with the Peace of Westphalia, it was gone.
With a large body of its people accorded full rights, while they were
engaged in open war upon the Roman Church, the last link binding
Germany to Rome was broken. The Holy Roman Empire was now the German
Empire.
And, in very fact, it was no empire at all, but a loose confederacy of
miniature kingdoms, administered without any regard to each other, and
in great measure independent of Imperial authority.
Great changes had taken place throughout Europe. Louis XIV. was King
of France. In England Charles I. had lost his throne and his head, and
Cromwell was laying the foundations of a power more enduring than that
of Tudor or Stuart. Spain was rapidly declining, and the new Republic
of Holland ascending in the scale. Sweden was supreme in the North,
and Russia just beginning to be recognized as a power in Europe.
Venice and the Italian republics were crumbling to pieces; while across
the sea, on the coast of America, a few English, Dutch, and Swedish
colonies were struggling into existence.
Richelieu was dead, but the fortunes of France were in the keeping of
one quite as ambitious for her as was the Great Minister. There was a
new aspirant for headship in Europe. When Ferdinand III. died, Louis
XIV. tried hard to be elected his successor. He spent money freely
among the Electors, and was only defeated by the sturdy opposition of
Brandenburg and Saxony.
Of the people of Germany there is really nothing to tell in the years
which followed the Peace of Westphalia. Spiritless and disheartened in
their ruined cities, they seemed to have lost all national spirit and
even religious enthusiasm. They languidly saw the Catholic Hapsburgs
becoming absolute in the land, while the Court at Vienna and the
smaller German Courts were absorbed in establishing servile imitations
of the Court at Versailles. Churches and schoolhouses were in ruins,
but palaces were being built in which the fashions of the French Court
were closely imitated, and princes were trying to unlearn their native
language and to install that of a cormorant French King, who was
planning to devour their demoralized empire!
The one exception among the German rulers of this time was Frederick
William of Brandenburg, the "Great Elector." This incorruptible German
lost no time in learning French. As soon as peace was declared he set
about restoring his wasted territory. He organized a standing army and
built a fleet, and he used them, too, to recover Pomerania from Sweden
and to circumvent the French King, and so enlarged his boundaries and
strengthened his authority that Brandenburg, now next in size to
Austria, was treated with the respect of an independent power, and the
name of Hohenzollern began to shine bright even beside that of Hapsburg.
From the year 1667 until 1704 Germany was the center of the Grand
Monarch's ambitious designs. In 1687, while Prince Eugene was leading
a German army against the Turks, and while German princes, excepting
the Great Elector, were engaged in copying French fashions, two
powerful French armies suddenly appeared upon the Rhine, and the great
war which was to involve all Europe had commenced.
It was not love for Germany which brought Holland, England, Spain, and
Sweden into this war with France, but fear of the advancing power of a
King who aspired to be supreme in Europe.
In the year 1700, an event occurred which intensified the situation.
Charles II., the last of the half Castilian and half Hapsburg kings of
Spain descended from Charles V., died without children, and that
country was looking for the next nearest heir in foreign lands from
which to choose a new king. Of the two it found, one was son of the
Emperor of Germany and the other grandson of Louis XIV. It was a
choice of evils for Europe; as in one case the German Empire with Spain
annexed would be a preponderating power, as in the time of Charles V.;
and in the other, the grasping Louis would be far on the road to the
very end which Europe had combined to defeat!
Inflammable oil, poured on fire, does not make a fiercer blaze than did
this question of the _Spanish Succession_ at that time. The
embarrassing thing for Louis was that, when he had married the Infanta,
he had solemnly renounced the throne of Spain for her heirs! But the
Pope, with whom the ultimate decision lay, had more need of the rising
house of Bourbon than of the waning Hapsburg, so, after "prayerful
deliberation," he concluded that the King might be absolved from that
little promise, and that Philip V. was rightful King of Spain.
There was rage in Vienna. The Emperor Leopold I. and his disappointed
son the Archduke Karl declared they would wrest the throne from Philip
and have vengeance upon Louis, who with swelling pride was declaring
that "the Pyrenees had ceased to exist."
When Leopold called upon the German states to arm, the Great Elector of
Brandenburg was dead. But his son Frederick took advantage of the
opportunity. He would assist the Emperor on one condition, that he be
permitted to assume the title of King! An embarrassment arose in the
fact that traditional custom permitted only one King among the Electors
(King of Bohemia), and therefore the Elector of Brandenburg could not
be also King of Brandenburg.
The difficulty was overcome by adopting for the new kingdom the name of
his detached duchy of Prussia, that province which had been snatched
from Russia by the Teutonic knights long before, and had then been
appropriated by that masterful Hohenzollern who was then head of the
Order, as his own kingdom. It was this high-handed proceeding which
thereafter inseparably linked the name of Hohenzollern with that of
Prussia.
So, in 1701, the Elector and his wife traveled in midwinter to
Koenigsberg, almost in the confines of Russia, where he was crowned
Frederick I. of Prussia, and then returned to Berlin in Brandenburg,
which thereafter remained his capital. And so it was that Prussia--the
name of a small Slavonic people on the frontier--became that of the
entire kingdom of which Berlin was the capital.
England and Holland were in alliance with Leopold--not for the sake of
setting up the Hapsburg, but rather to put down the great Bourbon who
began to wear the prestige of invincibility. England entered the
alliance languidly at first, but when the French king threw down the
glove by recognizing the exiled Stuart (son of James II.) as the heir
to her throne, she needed no urging and sent the best of her army into
Germany under the command of the man who was going to destroy that
prestige of invincibility, and to hold in check the arrogant king.
Marlborough and Prince Eugene formed a combination too strong for
Louis. Marlborough's great victory at Blenheim in 1704 virtually
decided the contest, although it continued for many years longer. He
was created Duke of Marlborough and received the estate of Blenheim as
his reward.
But the long war outlived the enthusiasm it had created. England grew
tired of fighting for the Hapsburgs; there were court intrigues for
Marlborough's downfall, and finally he was recalled, and cast aside
like a rusty sword. Louis, too, had grown old and weary, and so in
1713 the Peace of Utrecht terminated the long struggle. Philip V. was
left upon the throne of Spain, with the condition that the crowns of
Spain and France should never be united.
The disappointed Archduke Karl had now succeeded to the Imperial throne
as Karl VI. If the life of a nation be in its people, there was really
no Germany at this time. There was nothing but a wearisome succession
of wars and diplomatic intrigues, and new divisions and apportionments
of territory. Prussia was expanding and Poland declining, while
Hungary and Naples, and Milan and Mantua, were fast in the grasp of
Austria. Indeed, to tell of the territorial changes occurring at this
period is like painting a picture of dissolving elements, which form
new combinations even as you look at them.
At the North, too, there were these same changing combinations, where
had arisen two new ambitious kings. Charles XII. of Sweden and Peter
the Great of Russia were at war; and Denmark and Poland were lending a
hand to defeat the Swedish King. Peter the Great was extending his
Baltic provinces and preparing to build his new capital of St.
Petersburg (1709); but Charles XII. was defeated by Prussia and
Hanover, in his attempt to make of Sweden one of the great powers of
Europe. His death in 1718 ended that dream.
Not since the infamous Irene's deposition at Byzantium had there been a
woman on the throne of the Caesars. When Karl VI. issued the decree
called the "Pragmatic Sanction," providing that the crown should
descend to female heirs in the absence of male, he forged one of the
most important links in the chain of events. This secured the
succession to his little daughter Maria Theresa, who was born in 1717.
The link had need to be a strong one, for there were to be twenty years
of effort to break it. But it held.
At about this same time there was another important link forging in
Prussia, where Frederick William I. had succeeded his father Frederick
I. as king. By these two events the long spell was to be broken.
Volumes have been written about this fierce, miserly King Frederick
William and his coarse brutalities. But his reign was the rough,
strong bridge which led to a Frederick the Great, and the reign of the
Great Frederick was that other bridge which led to a powerful and
dominating kingdom of Prussia,--from which was to spring a new German
Empire!
If Frederick William was a tyrant of the most savage sort, on the other
hand he organized industry, finance, and an army. If he was a miser in
his family, he brought wealth and prosperity to his people. If he beat
and cudgeled his own son for playing the flute, he left that son a
kingdom and an army which were the foundation of his greatness.
His hatred for all that was French, for art, for the formalities and
even the decencies of life, was an enraged protest against the
prevailing affectations and artificiality of his time.
We can imagine how the polished and refined Court at Vienna must have
regarded this Prussian King. Austria, entirely Catholic, in a state of
moral and intellectual decline, sat looking backward and sighing for
the return of the spirit of the Middle Ages. Prussia, altogether
Protestant, had set her face toward a future which was to be greater
than she dreamed.
In 1736 Maria Theresa was married to Francis of Lorraine. In 1740 she
succeeded her father Karl VI., on the Imperial throne; and that very
same year Frederick William of Prussia died, and was succeeded by his
son, who was to be known as Frederick the Great.
Through the barren period succeeding the Thirty Years' War some vital
processes were going on; indeed that most vital of all processes,
thought, was active. Broken into fragments as by an earthquake, the
people had been left without one healing touch from the hands of their
infatuated rulers. It was a sorry spectacle to see those German
princes gayly arraying themselves in French finery while their country
was a ruin. Did they not know that a wound might better not heal at
all, than to begin by forming new tissue at the top!
Whatever capacity Germany had for being, was in those neglected
fragments. If she ever developed into greatness it must be along the
line of their elemental tendencies, and by being German, not French.
So a nation, helpless, broken, disorganized, out of harmony with itself
and with others, could not act, but it could think. And in this time
of chaos and confusion there commenced mighty stirrings in the thought
of Germany. Slumbering in that chaos were the germs of wonderful music
and a wondrous literature.
The gloomy and despondent Spinoza had found peace in discovering that
the reality of things was not in political overturnings, nor in the
disappointing facts and phenomena which we call life, but in the
_Eternal Order_, of which we are all a part.
He might have discovered the same sustaining truth in religion; but
Spinoza's mind led him to seek it instead in a philosophical system
which should harmonize the discordant facts of existence. This was the
foundation of German speculative philosophy, which took possession of
the German mind and which by progressive steps was to lead to a union
with a science, _founded_ upon the despised facts of life--and finally,
whether they wished it or not--a harmonizing of both with RELIGION.
With deeply philosophical mind the great German, Leibniz, was
investigating the truths of the natural world; and Handel also belongs
to this time of soul-awakening during a period of national neglect and
depression, while at this very time there was also borne in a
stimulating wave from England, where Newton had revealed the
fundamental law and the "ETERNAL _order_" of the _physical_ universe.
It would seem like a dim twilight to us if we should go back to it now;
but then these new lights were very dazzling, almost blinding people
with their splendor.