The accession of Rudolf of Habsburg38 as King of the Romans in 1273 is a turning-point in the history of mediaeval Germany. Hitherto private or imperial ambitions had prevented even well-intentioned emperors from exerting their full strength against anarchy at home; while a few like Frederick II had deliberately ignored German interests. The result had been a steady process of disintegration, perpetuating racial and class feuds; but now at last the tradition was broken and an Emperor chosen who was willing to forgo the glory of dominating Rome and Lombardy in order to build up a nation north of the Alps.

The election itself was somewhat of a surprise; for Rudolf belonged to an obscure and far from wealthy family, owning territory in Alsace and amongst the Swiss mountains. What is interesting to the modern world is that the man who did most to influence the Electors in their choice, and thus helped to plant a Habsburg with his feet on the ladder of greatness, was a Hohenzollern.

Count Rudolf at the time of his election was a middle-aged man of considerable military experience, kindly, simple, and resolute. He had won the affection of his own vassals by helping them in their struggles against the unjust demands of local tyrants, such as feudal bishops or the barons who built castles amongst the crags and sent out armed retainers to waylay merchants and travellers. One tale records how, with an apparently small force, he advanced boldly against a robber fastness, thus encouraging the garrison to issue out and attack him. When the robbers approached, however, they found to their horror that each of their mounted opponents had another armed man seated behind him, and so, hopelessly outnumbered as well as outwitted, they were forced to surrender or fly.

Rudolf needed all his military ability when he was chosen Emperor; for the most powerful ruler in central Europe at that time, King Ottocar of Bohemia, refused to recognize him, being furious that he himself had not received a single vote, while an obscure count from the Swiss mountains had been elected his master. The truth was that Ottocar was well known to be arrogant and bad-tempered, so that all the Electors were afraid of him; and there was general rejoicing when, in a battle against King Rudolf near Vienna, he was killed and the throne of Bohemia passed to his son, a boy of twelve.

This victory was the real beginning of the Habsburg fortunes; for Rudolf by the confiscation of the Austrian provinces of Carinthia, Styria, and Carniola, that had belonged to his rival, established his family as one of the great territorial powers of the Empire. Unfortunately his character seemed to deteriorate with success, and his greed for lands and power to increase with acquisition.

Instead of finding Rudolf the protector of their liberties, his sturdy Swiss vassals now had to defend themselves against his encroachments; and in the year 1291 some of them in self-defence formed what they called a ‘Perpetual League’, whose covenant, drawn up a few years later in a simplified form, is just as sacred a charter of liberty to the Swiss as Magna Charta to the English.

‘Know, all men,’ it began, ‘that we, the people of the Valley of Uri, the Community of the Valley of Schwyz, and the mountaineers of the Lower Valley, seeing the malice of the times, have solemnly agreed and bound ourselves by oath to aid and defend each other with all our might and main, with our lives and property, both within and without our boundaries, each at his own expense, against every enemy whatever who shall attempt to molest us, whether singly or collectively.’

This was the first ‘Confederation of the Swiss’, the union of the three provinces of Uri, Schwyz, and the ‘Lower Valley’, or ‘Unterwalden’; but Rudolf died in the same year 1291, so that the Swiss struggle for liberty really began against his son, Albert of Austria.

Rudolf, in spite of the Concordat he had made with the Pope renouncing his claims over papal territory, had never been to Italy to be crowned Emperor, so that he died merely ‘King of the Romans’; and the Electors of Germany made this one of their excuses for not immediately choosing his son to succeed him.

Like Ottocar, Albert was overbearing and ambitious; and had at once on his father’s death obtained possession of the entire family estates, without allowing any of them to pass to Count John of Habsburg, a son of his elder brother who had died some years before. Albert was a persistent man when he wished for anything very ardently, and, having failed to be elected Emperor a first time, he set himself to win friends and allies amongst the powerful families all over Germany. So successful was he that when a fresh imperial vacancy occurred in 1298 the choice of the Electors fell on him.

This realization of his ambitions spurred Albert’s energies to fresh efforts. He was now overlord of the Empire, but on his own estates amongst the Swiss mountains his will was often disputed by citizens and peasants, who claimed to have imperial permission for their independence. As Emperor, Rudolf could withdraw privileges light-heartedly granted by predecessors who were not Habsburgs; and with this in view he sent bailiffs and stewards to govern in his name, with orders to enforce complete submission to his demands.

Concerning the events that followed, fiction has built round fact a wonderful tale, that, whether true or false in its main incidents, is characteristic of mediaeval Swiss daring, and a fit introduction to a great national struggle for liberty.

Gessler, legend tells us, was the most hated of all Albert’s Austrian governors. So narrow-minded was he that he hated to see the peasants building themselves stone houses instead of living in mud hovels, and would take every opportunity of humbling and oppressing them.

Once he set up a hat on a pole in the market-place of one of the principal towns, and ordered every one who passed to salute it. A certain William Tell, either through obstinacy or carelessness, failed to do so, on which Gessler, who had found out that he was an archer, ordered him as a punishment to shoot at long range an apple placed on his son’s head. In vain the father begged for any other sentence: Gessler only laughed. Seeing that entreaty was useless, Tell took two shafts, and with one he pierced straight through the apple. Gessler was annoyed at his success and, looking at him suspiciously, asked, ‘What, then, is the meaning of thy second arrow?’ The archer hesitated; and not until he had been promised his life if he would answer the truth would he speak. Then he said bluntly, ‘Had I injured my child my second shaft should not have missed thy heart.’ There was a murmur of applause from the townsmen, but the governor was enraged at such a bold answer. ‘Truly,’ he shouted, ‘I have promised thee life; but I will throw thee into a dungeon, where never more shall sun nor moon let fall their rays on thee.’ The legend goes on to relate how, though bound and closely guarded, the gallant archer made his escape, and hiding in the bushes not far from the road where Gessler must pass to his castle, he shot him and fled. ‘It is Tell’s shaft,’ said the dying man, as he fell from his horse. By his daring struggle against the tyrant William Tell became one of Switzerland’s national heroes.

Fortunately for the Swiss, Albert was so busy as ruler of all Germany that he could not give the full attention to subduing his rebellious vassals that he would have liked; and when at last he found time to visit his own estates, just as he was almost within sight of the family castle of the Habsburgs, he was murdered, not by a peasant, but by his nephew Count John, who considered that he had been unjustly robbed of his inheritance.

The task of attempting to reduce the Swiss to submission fell on a younger son of King Albert, Duke Leopold, a youth who despised the peasants of his native valleys quite as heartily as the French their ‘Jacques Bonhomme’. His army, as it wandered carelessly up the Swiss mountains, without order or pickets, resembled a hunting-party seeking a day’s amusement; and on their saddles his horsemen carried bundles of rope to hang the rebels and bind together the cattle they expected to capture as spoils.

Meeting with no opposition, Duke Leopold began to ascend the frozen side of the Morgarten; and here, as he advanced between high ridges, discovered himself in a death-trap. From the heights above, the Swiss of the Forest Cantons rained a deadly fire of stones and missiles that threw the horses below into confusion, slipping and falling on the smooth surface of the track. Then there descended from all sides small bodies of peasants armed with halberds, so sure-footed amid the snow and ice that they cut down the greater part of the Duke’s forces before they could extricate themselves and find safe ground.

Leopold escaped, but he rode from the carnage, according to his chronicler, ‘distracted and with a face like death’. Swiss independence had been vindicated by his defeat; and round the nucleus of the forest republics there soon gathered others, bound together in a federal union that, while securing the safety of all, guaranteed to each their liberties.

Other campaigns still remained to be fought on behalf of complete Swiss independence; and one of the most important of these occurred towards the end of the fifteenth century, and was waged against a military leader of Europe, Charles, Duke of Burgundy, son and successor of that Philip ‘the Good’ who had played so great a part in the latter half of the Hundred Years’ War.39

This Charles ‘the Bold’, sometimes called also ‘the Rash’ or ‘the Terrible’, was in many ways a typical mediaeval soldier. From his boyhood he had loved jousting—not the magnificent tourneys, in which as heir to the dukedom he could count on making a safe as well as a spectacular display of knightly courage, but real contests in which, disguised in plain armour, his strength and skill could alone win him laurels and avoid death. Strong and healthy, brave and impetuous, he loved the atmosphere of war with all its hazards and hardships. ‘I never heard him complain of weariness,’ wrote Philip de Commines, a French historian who was at one time in his service, ‘and I never saw in him a sign of fear.’

To qualities like courage and endurance Charles added failings that were often his undoing—a hot temper, impatience, and a tendency to under-estimate the wits of his opponents. His clever, ambitious brain was always weaving plans, but he did not realize that he had neither the skill nor the political vision to keep many irons in the fire without letting one get too hot or another over-cold.

Like all mediaeval rulers of Burgundy, he was faced by the problem of his middle kingdom, with its large commercial population, whose trade interests must be considered alongside his own territorial ambitions. To the rulers of both France and the Empire he was tenant-in-chief for different provinces, and either of these potentates could cause him discomfort by stirring up trouble amongst his subjects, or else unite with him to his great advantage in order to defy the authority of the other.

At first Charles tried to increase his territory in the west at the expense of Louis XI of France, and even gained some showy triumphs, but gradually he found that he was no match in diplomacy for that astute king, ‘the universal spider’, as a contemporary christened him; and so he turned his attention to his eastern border.

Here he discovered that a Habsburg, Sigismund of the Tyrol, had become involved in a quarrel with the Swiss Cantons, and had been forced to promise them a large sum of money that he was quite unable to pay. When Charles offered to lend him the sum required if he would hand over as security his provinces of Alsace and Breisgau, Sigismund, seeing no other alternative, reluctantly agreed. So remote was the prospect of repayment that the Duke of Burgundy at once began to rule the territories that he held in pawn as though they were his own, and might indeed have absorbed them quietly amongst his possessions had not the French ‘Spider’ chosen to take a hand in the game. Louis XI had never forgiven Charles for his clumsy attempts to rob him of French territory, and now, weaving a web that was to entangle the Burgundian to his ultimate ruin, he secretly pointed out to the Swiss how much more dangerous a neighbour was Charles ‘the Bold’ than Sigismund ‘the Penniless’. Let Sigismund, he suggested, agree to withdraw all Habsburg claims to towns and lands belonging to the Cantons, and let the Cantons in return pledge themselves to pay for the restoration of the lost provinces.

This compromise was finally arranged, and the exasperated Charles called upon to hand back the lands he already considered his own. Instead of complying he made overtures to both Louis and the Emperor, with such success that when the Swiss troops invaded Alsace in order to gain possession of that province for Sigismund, they found themselves without the powerful allies on whose support they had counted.

Charles, ever too prone to over-estimate his importance, now believed that he was in a position to crush these presumptuous burghers once and for all. With a splendidly equipped army of some fifty thousand men, and some of the new heavy artillery that had already begun to turn battle-fields into an inferno, he crossed the Jura mountains and marched towards the town of Granson, that had been occupied by the Swiss. This he speedily reduced, hanging the entire garrison on the trees without the gates as an indication of how he intended to deal with rebels, and then continued on his way, since he heard that the army of the Cantons, some eighteen thousand men in all, had gathered in the neighbourhood.

On the slopes of a vineyard he could soon see their vanguard, kneeling with arms outstretched. ‘These cowards are ours,’ he exclaimed contemptuously, and at once ordered his artillery to fire; for he thought that the peasants begged for mercy, whereas, believing God was on their side, they really knelt in prayer. Mown down in scores, the Swiss maintained their ground; and Charles, to tempt them from their strong position, ordered a part of his army to fall back as if in rout. This ruse his own Burgundians misunderstood, the more that at the moment they received the command they could see the main Swiss forces advancing rapidly across the opposite heights and blowing their famous war-horns. Confusion ensued, and soon, in the words of an old Swiss chronicler, ‘the Burgundians took to their heels and disappeared from sight as though a whirlwind had swept them from the earth.’

Such was the unexpected victory of Granson, that delivered into Swiss hands the silken tents and baggage-wagons of the richest and most luxurious ruler in Europe. Carpets and Flemish lace, fine linen and jewellery, embroidered banners, beautifully chased and engraved weapons: these were some of the treasures, of which specimens are still to be found in the museums of the Cantons.

Charles was defeated, ‘overcome by rustics whom there would have been no honour in conquering,’ as the King of Hungary expressed the situation in the knightly language of the day. Such a disgrace intensified Burgundian determination to continue the war; while the Swiss on their part found their resolution hardened by the sight of the garrison of Granson hanging from the trees.

‘There are three times as many of the foe as at Granson, but let no one be dismayed. With God’s help we will kill them all.’ Thus spoke a Swiss leader on the eve of the battle of Morat, where savage hand-to-hand fighting reduced the Burgundian infantry to a fragment and drove the Duke with a few horsemen in headlong flight from the field.

Twice defeated, a wise prince might have done well to consider terms of peace with those who, though rustics, had proved more than his equals; but Charles, a brave soldier, would not recognize that his own bad generalship had largely contributed to his disasters. He chose to believe instead in that convenient but somewhat thin excuse for failure, ‘bad luck’, and prophesied that his fortune would turn if he persevered.

More dubious of their ruler’s ability than his fortune, the Flemings, as they grudgingly voted money for a fresh campaign, besought their Duke to make peace. His former allies, once dazzled by his name and riches, were planning to desert him: but Charles was deaf alike to hints of prudence or tales of treachery.

Near the town of Nanci he met the Swiss for a third time, and once more the famous horns, ‘the bull’ of Uri and ‘the cow’ of Unterwalden, bellowed forth their calls to victory, and the Burgundians, inspired by treachery or forebodings of defeat, turned and fled. None knew what had happened to the Duke, until a captured page reported that he had seen him cut down as he fought stubbornly against great numbers. Later his body was discovered, stripped for the sake of its rich armour, and half-embedded in a frozen lake.

Thus fittingly died Charles ‘the Rash’, leaving the reputation as a warrior that he would gladly have earned to his enemies the Swiss, now regarded as amongst the invincible veterans of Europe.

The voice of freedom had spoken so loudly through the Forest Cantons that mediaeval Europe had been forced to acknowledge her claim, and elsewhere also democratic forces were openly at work. We have spoken in previous chapters of the ‘Communes’ of northern France and Italy, precocious in their civilization, modern in their demands for self-government. In Italy, at least, they had been strong enough to form Leagues and defeat Emperors; but commercial jealousy and class feuds had always prevented these Unions from developing into a federation.

This is true also of southern Germany, where towns like Augsburg and Nuremburg become, as the central mart for trade between Eastern and Western Europe and also between Venice, Genoa, and the lands north of the Alps, rivals in wealth and luxury of Mediterranean ports. During periods like the ‘Great Interregnum’, when German kingship was of no avail to preserve peace or order, it was associations of these towns that sent out young burghers to fight the robber knights that were the pest of the countryside, and to protect the merchandise on which their joint fortunes depended.

Union for obvious purposes of defence was thus a political weapon forged early in town annals; but, on the other hand, it was only slowly that burghers and citizens came to realize the advantages of permanent combination for other ends, such as commercial expansion, or in order to secure stable government.

This limited outlook arose partly from the very different stages of development at which mediaeval towns were to be found at the same moment. Some would be just struggling out of dependence on a local bishop or count by the payment of huge tolls, at the same time that others, though enjoying a good deal of commercial freedom, were still forced to accept magistrates appointed by their neighbouring overlord. Yet again, a privileged few would be ‘free’ towns, entirely self-governed, and owning allegiance only to the Emperor. Perhaps a master mind could have dovetailed all these conflicting systems of government into a federation that would have helped and safeguarded the interests of all, but unfortunately the mediaeval mind was a slave to the fallacy that commercial gain can only be made at the expense of some one else.

The men of one town hated and feared the prosperity of another and were convinced that the utmost limit of duty to a neighbour was their own city walls. Nothing, for instance, is more opposed to modern codes of brotherhood than the early mediaeval opinion on the subjects of wrecks. Men and women of those days saw no incongruity in piously petitioning God in public prayer for a good wreckage, or in regarding the shipwrecked sailor or merchant cast on their rocks as prey to be knocked on the head and plucked.

The towns of North Germany shared to the full this primitive savagery, but they learned the secret of co-operation that their wealthy southern neighbours utterly missed, and in so doing became for a time a political force of world-wide fame.

Such was the commercial league of ‘the Hansa’, formed first of all by a few principal ports, Lübeck, Danzig, Bremen, and Hamburg, lying on the Baltic or North Sea, but afterwards increased to a union of eighty or more towns as the value of mutual support and obligations was realized.

Law in the Middle Ages was personal rather than territorial—that is to say, a man when he travelled abroad would not be judged or protected by the law of the country to which he went, but would carry his own law with him. If this law was practically non-existent, as for a German during years of anarchy when the Holy Roman Empire was thoroughly discredited in the eyes of Europe, the merchant stood a small chance of safeguarding himself and his wares.

It was here, when emperors and kings of the Romans failed, that the Hanseatic League stepped in, maintaining centres in foreign towns where the merchants of those cities included in the League could lodge and store their goods, and where permanent representatives of the League could make suit to the government of the country on behalf of fellow merchants who had suffered from robbery or violence.

As early as the tenth century German traders had won privileges in English markets, for we find in the code of Ethelred ‘the Rede-less’ the following statement: ‘The people of the Emperor have been judged worthy of good laws like ourselves.’

Later, ‘steelyards,’ or depots somewhat similar to the Flemish ‘staple-towns’, were established for the convenience of imperial merchants; and owing to the energy of the Hanseatic League these became thriving centres of commerce, respected by kings of England if jealously disliked by their subjects.

Protection of the merchants belonging to ‘the Hansa’ while in foreign countries soon represented, however, but a small part of the League’s duty towards those who claimed her privileges. The merchant must travel safely to his market by land and sea; but in North Germany he had not merely to fear robber knights but national foes: the hostile Slav tribes that attacked him as he rode eastwards to the famous Russian market of Nijni-Novgorod to negotiate for furs, tallow, and fats: or even more dangerous Scandinavian pirates who sought to sink his vessel as he crossed the Baltic or threaded the Danish isles.

One of the chief sources of Hanse riches was the fishing industry, since the law that every Christian must abstain from meat during the forty days of Lent, and on the weekly Friday fast, made fish a necessity of life even more in the Middle Ages than in modern times. Now the cheapest of all fish for anxious housekeepers was the salted herring, and as the herring migrated from one ocean-field to another it made and unmade the fortune of cities. From the middle of the twelfth to the middle of the fifteenth century it chose the Baltic as a home of refuge from the North Sea whales, and in doing so built the prosperity of Lübeck, just as it broke that prosperity when it swam away to the coasts of Holland.

For two months every year the North German fishermen cast nets for their prey as it swept in millions through the narrow straits past the coast of Skaania; but here lay trouble for ‘the Hansa’, since Skaania, one of the southernmost districts of modern Sweden, was then a Danish province, and the Danes, who were warriors rather than traders, hated the Germans heartily.

In early mediaeval times we have noticed Scandinavia as the home of Norse pirates; as the mother of a race of world-conquerors, the Normans; under Cnut, who reigned in England, Norway, and Denmark, as an empire-builder. The last ideal was never quite forgotten, for as late as the Hundred Years’ War King Valdemar III of Denmark planned to aid his French ally by invading England; but the necessary money was not forthcoming, and other and more pressing political problems intervened and stopped him.

Valdemar inherited from his Norse ancestors a taste for piracy that he pursued with a restless, unscrupulous energy very tiring to his people. Sometimes it brought him victory, but more often disaster, at least to his land. ‘In the whole kingdom’, says a discontented Dane, ‘no time remained to eat, to repose, to sleep—no time in which people were not driven to work by the bailiffs and servants of the King at the risk of losing his royal favour, their lives, and their goods.’ Because of his persistence Valdemar was nicknamed ‘Atterdag’, or ‘There is another day’: his boast being that there was always time to return to any task on completing which he had set his heart.

Valdemar’s chief ambition was to make Denmark the supreme power in northern Europe, and in endeavouring to achieve this object he was always forming alliances with Norway and Sweden that broke down and plunged him into wars instead. The Hanse towns he hated and despised, and in 1361, moved by this enmity, he promised his army that ‘he would lead them whither there was gold and silver enough, and where pigs ate out of silver troughs’. His allusion was to Wisby, the capital of Gothland, that under the fostering care and control of North German merchants had become the prosperous centre of the Baltic herring-fishery. Under Valdemar’s unexpected onslaught the city, with its forty-eight towers rising from the sea, was set on fire and sacked.

Since Gothland was a Swedish island, vengeance for this insult did not legally rest with the Hansa, but, recognizing that the blow had been aimed primarily at her trade, she sent a fleet northwards to co-operate with the Swedes and Norwegians. This led to one of the greatest disasters that ever befell the Hanseatic League, for her allies did not appear, and her fleet, being outnumbered, was beaten and destroyed.

Valdemar, delighted with his success, determined to reduce the North Germans to ruin, and continued his policy of aggression with added zest; but in this he made a political mistake. Many of the towns, especially those not on the Baltic, were apathetic when the struggle with the Danish king began: they did not wish to pay taxes even for a victory, and angrily repudiated financial responsibility for defeat. It was only as they became aware, through constant Danish attacks, that the very existence of the League was at stake, that a new public opinion was born, and that it was decided at Cologne in 1367 to reopen a campaign against King Valdemar, towards which every town must contribute its due.

‘If any city refuse to help’, ran the announcement of the meeting’s decisions, ‘its burghers and merchants shall have no intercourse with the towns of the German “Hansa”, no goods shall be bought from them or sold to them, they shall have no right of entry or exit, of lading or unlading, in any harbour.’

The result of the League’s vigorous policy was entirely successful, and compelled the unscrupulous Valdemar, who found himself shortly in an awkward corner, to collect all the money that he could and depart on a round of visits to the various courts of Europe. He left his people to the fate he had prepared for them, and during his absence Copenhagen was sacked, and the Danes driven to conclude the Treaty of Stralsund that placed the League in control of all the fortresses along the coast of Skaania for fifteen years.

The Hansa had now acquired the supremacy of the Baltic, and because the duty of garrisoning fortresses and patrolling the seas required a standing army and navy, the League of northern towns did not, like those in South Germany, Italy, or France, melt away as soon as temporary safety was achieved. Each city continued to manage its own affairs, but federal assemblies were held, where questions of common taxation and foreign policy were discussed, and where those towns that refused to abide by decisions previously arrived at were ‘unhansed’, that is, deprived of their privileges.

Even Emperors, who condemned leagues on principle from old Hohenstaufen experience, respected if they disliked ‘the Hansa’ that carried through national police-work in the north of which they themselves were quite incapable.

The Emperor Charles IV, when he visited Lübeck, addressed the principal civic officials as ‘My lords!’ and when, suspicious of this flattery, they demurred, he replied, ‘You are lords indeed, for the oldest imperial registers know that Lübeck is one of the five towns that have accorded to them ducal rank in the imperial council.’ The chronicler adds proudly that thus Lübeck was acknowledged the equal of Rome, Venice, Florence, and Pisa.

In the latter half of the fourteenth century the Hanseatic League stood at the height of its power; for though the political genius of Queen Margaret, daughter of Valdemar III, succeeded in uniting Denmark, Norway, and Sweden by the agreement called ‘the Union of Kalmar’, and also forced the Hansa to surrender the fortresses on the Skaania coast; yet even the foundation of this vast Scandinavian Empire could not shake German supremacy over the Baltic. Under Margaret’s successors the Union of Kalmar degenerated into a Danish tyranny; and because it was the result of a dynastic settlement and not of any national movement it soon came to shipwreck amid general discontent and civil wars.

The Hanseatic League itself, though it lingered on as a political force through the fifteenth century, gradually declined and lost touch with the commercial outlook of the age. The decline may be traced partly to the fact that there was no vigorous national life in Germany to feed the League’s vitality, but also to a steady tendency for towns to drift apart and become absorbed in the local interests of their provinces.

The real blow to the prestige of the League was, however, the departure of the herring-shoals from the Baltic to the coasts of Amsterdam. ‘The Hansa’ had concentrated its commercial interests in the Baltic, and when the Baltic failed her she found herself unable to compete with the Dutch and English traders, who were already masters of the North Sea.

Other and more adventurous rivals were opening up trade routes along the African coast and across the Atlantic; but the Hanseatic League, with her rigid and limited conception of commercial interests, was like a nurse still holding by the hand children that should have been able to fend for themselves. Once the protection of her merchants, she had degenerated into a check on individual enterprise, and so, belonging to the spirit of the Middle Ages, with the Middle Ages passed away.

Another mediaeval institution, destined also to decline and finally vanish, was a close ally of the Hanseatic League, namely, the Order of Teutonic Knights. Transferred, as we have noticed,40 on the fall of the Latin Empire in Asia Minor to the shores of the Baltic, the Order had there justified its existence by carrying on a perpetual war against the heathen Lithuanians and Prussians, building fortresses and planting colonies of German settlers, as Charlemagne and his Franks had set the example.

While there still remained heathen to conquer the Knights were warmly encouraged by the Pope, and their battle-fields were a popular resort for the chivalry of nearly every country in Europe, competing in their claim with the camps of Valencia, Murcia, and Granada.

Nearer home the Order found less favour. In Poland, for instance, that had at first welcomed the Knights as a bulwark against northern barbarism, the unpleasant knowledge gradually dawned that the crusaders, by securing the territory of Livonia, Curland, and Prussia, had cut her off from a lucrative sea-trade.

Poland was the most easterly of those states that in mediaeval times owned a nominal allegiance to Holy Roman Emperors. She had received her Christianity from Rome, and was thus drawn into the network of western life—unlike Russia, or the kingdom of Rus as it was called, that was converted by missionaries from Constantinople, and whose princes and dukes were subject to Mongol overlords in Siberia from the middle of the thirteenth to the middle of the fifteenth century.

The Poles were brave, intensely devoted to their race, persistent in their enmities, and in none more than in their dislike of the German Knights, whose military genius and discipline had so often thwarted their ambitions. Quarrels and wars were continuous, but the most mortal wound dealt by the Poles was the result not of a victory but of a marriage alliance.

In 1387, soon after the death of Louis ‘the Great’, who had been King of both Hungary and Poland, the Poles offered their crown to Duke Jagello of Lithuania; on the condition that he would marry one of Louis’s daughters and become a Christian. The temptation of a kingdom soon overcame Jagello’s religious scruples, so that he cast away his old gods and was baptized as Ladislas V, becoming the founder of the Jagellan dynasty, that continued on the thrones of Poland and Lithuania right through the Middle Ages.

The conversion of the Lithuanians, who, whatever their beliefs, were driven at the spear-point to accept Jagello’s new faith, completely undermined the position of the Teutonic Order that, surrounded by Christian neighbours, had no longer a crusade to justify its claims. Popes ceased to send their blessing to the Grand Master, and talked instead of the possibilities of suppression; while tales of immorality and avarice such as had pursued the Templars were everywhere whispered into willing ears.

Within their own territory also the influence of the Knights was waning; for the very nature of their vows made their rule merely a military domination; and, once the fear of heathen invasion had been removed, German colonists began to resent this. Condemned to celibacy, the Knights could train up no hereditary successors in sympathy from childhood with the needs of the Baltic province; but, as they grew old and died, they must yield place instead to recruits from distant parts of Germany, who could only learn anew by their own experience the manners and traditions of those whom they governed.

In the stress of these new conditions the good work that the Teutonic Order had done in saving North Germany from barbarism was forgotten. Weakened by disaffection within her own state, she fell an inevitable victim to Polish enmity, and at the battle of Tannenberg her Grand Master and many of her leading Knights were slain. The daring and determination of those who remained prevented the full fruits of this victory from being reaped until 1466, when, by the Treaty of Thorn, Poland received the whole of western Prussia, including the important town of Danzig, that gave her the long-coveted control of the Vistula and a Baltic seaport, beside hemming her enemies into the narrow strip of eastern Prussia.

Poland’s southern neighbour was the kingdom of Hungary, with which she had been for a short time united under Louis ‘the Great’, ‘the Banner-bearer of the Church’ as he was styled by a grateful Pope for his victories over the Mahometans. Besides fighting against the Turks, Louis had other military irons in the fire. One of his ambitions was to dominate Eastern Europe, and with this object he was continually attacking and weakening the Serbian Empire, that appeared likely to be his chief rival. He also fought with the Venetians for the mastery of the Dalmatian coast, while we shall see in a later chapter that he aimed at becoming King of Naples on the murder of his brother Prince Andrew, husband of Joanna I.

So successful was Louis in his war against the Venetians that he was able to take from them Dalmatia and exact the promise of a large yearly tribute. This in itself was achievement enough to win him a reputation in Europe, for the ‘Queen of the Adriatic’ was a difficult foe to humble; but Louis also gained public admiration by his enlightened rule. Recognizing how deeply his land was scarred by racial feuds, such as those of the Czechs and Magyars, that have carried their bitterness far into modern times, he set himself to think out equitable laws, which he endeavoured to administer with impartial justice, instead of favouring one race at the expense of another. He also made his court a centre of culture and learning, where his nobles might develop their wits and manners as well as their sword-arms.

One of the chief supporters of Louis in this work of civilization was the Emperor Charles IV, whom we have noticed paying compliments to the citizens of Lübeck. The friendship lasted for several years, until some of the princes of the Empire, weary of Charles’s rule, began to compare the two monarchs, one so sluggish, the other a military hero, and to suggest that the overlord should be deposed in favour of the famous King of Hungary. Louis indignantly repudiated this plot; but Charles, who would hardly have done the same in a like case, could not bring himself to believe him, and in his anger began petulantly to abuse the Queen Mother of Hungary, to whom he knew her son was devoted. This led to recriminations, and finally to a war, in which Charles was so thoroughly beaten that he sued for peace; and outward friendship was restored by the marriage of the Emperor’s son, Sigismund of Luxemburg, with Louis’s daughter Mary.

When Louis died, Poland, that had never wholeheartedly submitted to his rule, gave itself, as we have seen, to King Jagello of Lithuania; while the Hungarians, after some years of anarchy, chose Sigismund of Luxemburg as their king.

The House of Luxemburg was in the later Middle Ages the chief rival of the Habsburgs, and provided the Empire with some of her most interesting rulers. One of these, the Emperor Henry VII, belongs to an earlier date than that with which we have just been dealing, for he was grandfather of Charles IV. He was a gallant and chivalrous knight, who, but for his unfortunate foreign policy, might have proved himself a good and wise king.

Dante, the greatest of Italian poets, who lived in the days of Henry VII, made him his hero, and hoped that he would save the world by establishing a Ghibelline supremacy that would reform both Church and State. It was Henry VII’s undoing that he believed with Dante that he had been called to this impossible mission; and so he crossed the Alps to try his hand at settling Italian feuds. Germany saw him no more; for soon after his coronation at Rome he fell ill and died, poisoned, it is said, in the cup of wine given him by a priest at Mass.

Discord now broke out in Germany, and it was not till 1348 that another of the House of Luxemburg was chosen King of the Romans. This was Charles IV, a man of a very different type of mind to his grandfather. For Charles Italy had no lure: he only crossed the Alps because he realized that it increased the prestige of the ruler of Germany to be crowned as Emperor by the Pope, and he did not mind at all that he was received without any pomp or respect, only with suspicion and begging demands. As soon as the ceremony was over he hastened back to his own kingdom, turning a deaf ear to all Italian complaints and suggestions.

This hurried journey was certainly undignified for a world-Emperor; but Charles, who had run away in his youth from the battle-field of Creci, was never a heroic figure. Neither the thought of glory nor of duty could stir his sluggish blood; but as far as obvious things were concerned he had a good deal of common sense. At any rate, in sharing Rudolf I’s conviction that Germany should come first in his thoughts he was wiser than his heroic grandfather.

To the reign of Charles IV belongs the ‘Golden Bull’, a document so called from its bulla or seal. The ‘Golden Bull’ set forth clearly the exact method of holding an imperial election. Hitherto much of the trouble in disputed elections had arisen because no one had been sure of the correct procedure, and so disappointed candidates, by arguing that something illegal had occurred, were able to refuse allegiance to the successful nominee. Now it was decided that there should be seven Electors—three archbishops and four laymen—and that the ceremony should always take place at Frankfort, the minority agreeing to be bound by the will of the majority.

Besides these main clauses the ‘Golden Bull’ secured to the seven Electors enormous privileges and rights of jurisdiction, thus raising them to a much higher social and political level than the other princes of Germany, who were merely represented in the Imperial Diet or Parliament. The Electors became, in fact, more influential than the Emperor himself, and Charles has often been blamed for handing over Germany to a feudal oligarchy.

It is possible that he did not foresee the full results or permanence of the ‘Golden Bull’, but was determined only to construct for the time being a workable scheme that would prevent anarchy. There is also the supposition that he was more interested in the position of the kingdom of Bohemia, his own hereditary possession, which he raised to the first place among the electing territories, than in the rôle of Emperor to which he had been chosen. Whatever Charles’s real motive, it is at any rate clear that he had the sense to see that the Empire as it stood was an outworn institution, and thus to try and mould it into a less fantastic form of government. Like Edward I of England and Philip IV of France, though without the genius of the one or the opportunities of the other, he stands for posterity as one of those rulers of Europe during whose reign their country was enabled to shake off some of its mediaeval characteristics. Charles wore the imperial crown longer than any of his predecessors without arousing serious opposition—a sign that, if not an original politician, he yet moved with his times towards a more Modern Age.

Supplementary Dates. For Chronological Summary, see pp. 368–73.