Part 32 (1/2)

Not your modern way of affecting conversion! Too illiberal, you think; and what would Mr. J. S. Mill say?

But if Triglaph _had_ been verily ”three whales' cubs combined by boiling,” you would yourself have promoted attack upon him for the sake of his oil, would not you? The Teutsch Ritters, fighting him for charity, are they so much inferior to you?

They built, and burnt, innumerable stockades for and against; built wooden forts which are now stone towns. They fought much and prevalently; galloped desperately to and fro, ever on the alert. In peaceabler ulterior times, they fenced in the Nogat and the Weichsel with dams, whereby unlimited quagmire might become gra.s.sy meadow--as it continues to this day. Marienburg (Mary's Burg), with its grand stone Schloss still visible and even habitable: this was at length their headquarter. But how many Burgs of wood and stone they built, in different parts; what revolts, surprisals, furious fights in woody, boggy places they had, no man has counted.

But always some preaching by zealous monks, accompanied the chivalrous fighting. And colonists came in from Germany; trickling in, or at times streaming. Victorious Ritterdom offers terms to the beaten heathen: terms not of tolerant nature, but which _will be punctually kept by Ritterdom_. When the flame of revolt or general conspiracy burnt up again too extensively, high personages came on crusade to them. Ottocar, King of Bohemia, with his extensive far-s.h.i.+ning chivalry, ”conquered Samland in a month;” tore up the Romova where Adalbert had been ma.s.sacred, and burned it from the face of the earth. A certain fortress was founded at that time, in Ottocar's presence; and in honor of him they named it King's Fortress, ”Konigsberg.” Among King Ottocar's esquires, or subaltern junior officials, on this occasion, is one Rudolf, heir of a poor Swiss lords.h.i.+p and gray hill castle, called Hapsburg, rather in reduced circ.u.mstances, whom Ottocar likes for his prudent, hardy ways; a stout, modest, wise young man, who may chance to redeem Hapsburg a little, if he lives.

Conversion, and complete conquest once come, there was a happy time for Prussia; ploughshare instead of sword: busy sea-havens, German towns, getting built; churches everywhere rising; gra.s.s growing, and peaceable cows, where formerly had been quagmire and snakes, and for the Order a happy time. On the whole, this Teutsch Ritterdom, for the first century and more, was a grand phenomenon, and flamed like a bright blessed beacon through the night of things, in those Northern countries. For above a century, we perceive, it was the rallying place of all brave men who had a career to seek on terms other than vulgar. The n.o.ble soul, aiming beyond money, and sensible to more than hunger in this world, had a beacon burning (as we say), if the night chanced to overtake it, and the earth to grow too intricate, as is not uncommon. Better than the career of stump-oratory, I should fancy, and its Hesperides apples, golden, and of gilt horse-dung. Better than puddling away one's poor spiritual gift of G.o.d (loan, not gift), such as it may be, in building the lofty rhyme, the lofty review article, for a discerning public that has sixpence to spare! Times alter greatly.[143]

We must pause here again for a moment to think where we are, and who is _with us_. The Teutsch Ritters have been fighting, independently of all states, for their own hand, or St. Adalbert's; partly for mere love of fight, partly for love of order, partly for love of G.o.d. Meantime, other Riders have been fighting wholly for what they could get by it; and other persons, not Riders, have not been fighting at all, but in their own towns peacefully manufacturing and selling.

Of Henry the Fowler's Marches, Austria has become a military power, Flanders a mercantile one, pious only in the degree consistent with their several occupations. Prussia is now a practical and farming country, more Christian than its longer-converted neighbors.

Towns are built, Konigsberg (King Ottocar's town), Th.o.r.en (Thorn, City of the Gates), with many others; so that the wild population and the tame now lived tolerably together, under Gospel and Lubeck law; and all was ploughing and trading.

But Brandenburg itself, what of it?

The Ascanien Markgraves rule it on the whole prosperously down to 1320, when their line expires, and it falls into the power of Imperial Austria.

IX.

1320-1415.--_Brandenburg under the Austrians._

A century--the fourteenth--of miserable anarchy and decline for Brandenburg, its Kurfursts, in deadly succession, making what they can out of it for their own pockets. The city itself and its territory utterly helpless. Read pp. 180, 181 (129, 130). ”The towns suffered much, any trade they might have had going to wreck. Robber castles flourished, all else decayed, no highway safe. What are Hamburg pedlars made for but to be robbed?”

X.

1415-1440.--_Brandenburg under Friedrich of Nuremberg._

This is the fourth of the men whom you are to remember as creators of the Prussian monarchy, Henry the Fowler, St. Adalbert, Albert the Bear, of Ascanien, and Friedrich of Nuremberg; (of Hohenzollern, by name, and by country, of the Black Forest, north of the Lake of Constance).

Brandenburg is sold to him at Constance, during the great Council, for about 200,000_l._ of our money, worth perhaps a million in that day; still, with its capabilities, ”dog cheap.” Admitting, what no one at the time denied, the general marketableness of states as private property, this is the one practical result, thinks Carlyle (not likely to think wrong), of that oec.u.menical deliberation, four years long, of the ”elixir of the intellect and dignity of Europe. And that one thing was not its doing; but a p.a.w.nbroking job, intercalated,” putting, however, at last, Brandenburg again under the will of one strong man. On St.

John's day, 1412, he first set foot in his town, ”and Brandenburg, under its wise Kurfurst, begins to be cosmic again.” The story of Heavy Peg, pages 195-198 (138, 140), is one of the most brilliant and important pa.s.sages of the first volume; page 199, specially to our purpose, must be given entire:--

The offer to be Kaiser was made him in his old days; but he wisely declined that too. It was in Brandenburg, by what he silently founded there, that he did his chief benefit to Germany and mankind. He understood the n.o.ble art of governing men; had in him the justness, clearness, valor, and patience needed for that. A man of sterling probity, for one thing. _Which indeed is the first requisite in said art_:--if you will have your laws obeyed without mutiny, see well that they be pieces of G.o.d Almighty's law; otherwise all the artillery in the world will not keep down mutiny.

Friedrich ”travelled much over Brandenburg;” looking into everything with his own eyes; making, I can well fancy, innumerable crooked things straight; reducing more and more that famis.h.i.+ng dog-kennel of a Brandenburg into a fruitful arable field. His portraits represent a square-headed, mild-looking, solid gentleman, with a certain twinkle of mirth in the serious eyes of him. Except in those Hussite wars for Kaiser Sigismund and the Reich, in which no man could prosper, he may be defined as constantly prosperous.

To Brandenburg he was, very literally, the blessing of blessings; redemption out of death into life. In the ruins of that old Friesack Castle, battered down by Heavy Peg, antiquarian science (if it had any eyes) might look for the taproot of the Prussian nation, and the beginning of all that Brandenburg has since grown to under the sun.

Which growth is now traced by Carlyle in its various budding and withering, under the succession of the twelve Electors, of whom Friedrich, with his heavy Peg, is first, and Friedrich, first King of Prussia, grandfather of Friedrich the Great, the twelfth.