Part 3 (2/2)

Huss, for this offense, came under the displeasure of the bishops.

Charges were brought against him that he had maintained the existence of four G.o.ds, and he was condemned and burnt (1415).

The Hussite war had none of the reforming purpose which led to the martyrdom they wished to avenge. It was a mad strife, beginning over some detail of the Communion Service, and ending in a war between Bohemian and German, in which for nearly twenty years the country ran with blood.

At this period an event occurred of trifling significance then, but of profound importance to future Germany.

In 1411 the Emperor borrowed one hundred thousand florins of Frederick of Hohenzollern, the Burgrave, or ”Count of the Castle,” of Nuremburg, direct descendant from that first Hohenzollern who helped to found the Hapsburg dynasty. For this loan Sigismund gave his creditor a mortgage on the territory of Brandenburg. Frederick at once took up his residence there, and subsequently made an offer of three hundred thousand gold florins more to purchase the territory. The Emperor accepted the terms, so the then small state was thereafter the home of the Hohenzollerns, and was on its way to become Prussia.

Sigismund and his brother Wenceslas belonged to another dynasty, that of Luxemburg. But after the death of the former, in 1440, the Hapsburgs succeeded again to the crown, which they wore until it was taken off at the bidding of Napoleon in 1806.

Just before the issuance of the Golden Bull, there had occurred that most revolutionary event, the discovery of gunpowder. When a man in leathern jacket could do more than a knight in armor, when safety depended upon quickness and lightness, and ponderous iron and steel were fatal--then a momentous change in conditions was at hand! The destruction of feudalism was involved in this discovery of 1344.

Under Frederick III., that Hapsburg who came to the throne in 1440, the Empire seemed to have reached a climax of disorder. Old things were pa.s.sing away, and the new had not yet come to take their place.

On the eastern sh.o.r.e of the Baltic the march of German civilization had received an almost fatal check. The ”German Order,” an organization of knights intended to keep back the Slavonic tide, had failed to do so.

Holland was becoming estranged from the German Empire. France had obtained possession of Flanders. Luxemburg, Lorraine, and Burgundy were becoming practically independent; while it began to seem as if Switzerland were forever lost to Germany.

And now the Hungarians were setting up their new king, the valiant Hunyadi; and the Bohemians theirs, George of Podjebrod. Not only were these kingdoms and princ.i.p.alities slipping away, but the peasants in the cantons of the Alps, and elsewhere in revolt, were some of them led by great n.o.bles.

Still another, and perhaps the gravest of all these dangers, was one which yet darkens our horizon in this closing nineteenth century!

In the year 1250 the Turks had commenced their existence in Asia Minor, with one little clan, led by one obscure chieftain. This clan had grown as if by miracle into a great empire in the East, rivaling in power that of the Saracens, whose successors they were as the head of the Mahomedan Empire. The Turks had been steadily encroaching upon Germany; had made havoc in Hungary; had devastated Austria, and were now insolently pressing on toward their goal, the Imperial palace at Vienna.

While the incompetent and drowsy Emperor Frederick III. was helplessly viewing these stupendous overturnings, there occurred that other event, as important in the empire of thought as the invention of gunpowder had been in that of political inst.i.tutions.

The invention of printing (1450),--that art preservative of all arts,--was the greatest step yet taken in the emanc.i.p.ation of the human mind.

The poor inventor was, after the manner of inventors, badly treated.

John Fust, on account of Gutenberg's inability to pay back the money he had loaned him for his experiment, seized the printing press, and himself proceeded to finish printing the Bible.

The rapidity with which the copies were produced, and their precise resemblance to each other, created such astonishment that a report spread that Fust had sold himself to the devil, with whom he was in league.

This, together with the ident.i.ty of names, led Victor Hugo, Klinger, and other writers to confuse John Fust, the practicer of the Black Art in mediaeval times, with John Fust the printer. And as the original Fust had come to stand for the emanc.i.p.ation of the human intellect through free learning, and as printing was above all else the means for such emanc.i.p.ation, the coincidence, if such it be, was, to say the least, remarkable!

When we approach the time of Isabella of Castile and of Columbus, and when we are confronted with that familiar specter, the Turk, in Southeastern Europe, we feel that we are in sight of the lights on familiar headlands, and are not far from port. We are not very near to that haven, but we are pa.s.sing the line which divides the old from the new.

[1] See chart of Civilization in Six Centuries, ”Who, When, and What.”

CHAPTER VIII.

It was not alone in Germany that the old was vanis.h.i.+ng. The movement in that country was part of a general condition prevailing in England, France, and Spain; all with the same tendency--the pa.s.sing of the power from many small despotisms to one greater one. It was an advance, although a slow one, in the path of progress. Feudalism--that newfangled system which had so tried the soul of Duke Welf in the ninth century--was dissolving.

In England the war with France, and the War of the Roses, by impoveris.h.i.+ng the n.o.bles had broken their remaining authority, and that system which had been gradually peris.h.i.+ng since the Conquest was virtually dead.

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