The Pictures of German Life Throughout History. Gustav Freytag

how to charm the gun, and had greater acquaintance with the infernal night-hunter than the pastor of the place thought right; he was considered as a trusty piece of old household furniture, and would assuredly have sacrificed his life without hesitation for his cousin; but he did not scruple to procure more wood for the peasant, with whom he drank at the inn, than was right; and if the old Junker had his couteau-de-chasse ornamented with silver, the origin of which was doubtful, the landed proprietor was obliged to wink at it.^[46]

      Thus passed the life of a wealthy landowner between 1650 and 1700. It was perhaps not quite so worthy as it might have been, but it may have transmitted to the next generation family feeling and kindliness of heart. Yet it must be observed that it was only a very small minority of the German nobility who were in so favoured a position in the seventeenth century.

      Those who wished to make their fortunes in foreign lands far from their families, were threatened with other dangers, from which only the most energetic could escape. The wars in Hungary and Poland, the shameful struggle against France, and a long residence in Paris, were not calculated to preserve good morals. The vices of the East, and of the corrupt court of France were brought by them into Germany. The old love of quarrelling was not improved by the new cavalier cartel, the profligate intercourse with peasant women and noble ladies of easy virtue, became worse by the nightly orgies of fashionable cavaliers, at which they represented festive processions with mythological characters, and draped themselves as Dryads, and their ladies as Venuses and nymphs.^[47] The old Landsknecht game of dice was not worse than the new game of hazard, which became prevalent at the baths and courts, and which foreign adventurers now added to those of the country.

      But there are two more classes of nobles of that period who appear to us still more strange and grotesque, both numerous, and both in strong contrast to one another. They were designated as city nobles and country nobles, and expressed their mutual antipathy by the use of the ignominious terms Pfeffersäcke and Krippenreiter.^[48]

      Vain and restless citizens strove to exalt themselves by acquiring the Emperor's patent of nobility. These patents had of old been a favourite source of income to needy German emperors. Wenzel and Sigismund had unsparingly ennobled traders and persons of equivocal character: in short, every one who was ready to pay a certain amount of florins. On the other hand, in 1416, at the Council of Constance, the princes and nobles of the Rhine, Saxony, Suabia, and Bavaria, had set up their backs, made a revision of their own circle, and cashiered the intruders. But the Emperor's patents did not cease on that account. Charles V. himself, who sometimes looked down on the German lords with galling irony, and willingly gave to his chancellor and secretaries the chance of perquisites, had the sad repute "of audaciously raising, for a few ducats, every salt-boiler to the order of nobility." Still more business-like were these proceedings under Ferdinand II. and his successor. For after the Thirty Years' War, not only the living, but the bones in the graves of their ancestors were ennobled, nay, the dead ancestors were even declared worthy of being admitted into noble foundations and to tournaments. At last, after 1648, this traffic of the Imperial court was carried on to such an extent that the princes and states at the breaking up of the Imperial Diet of 1654, and a hundred years later at the election of Charles VII., protested against the detriment which accrued to their own rights of sovereignty and revenues from such a privilege. The newly ennobled in the cities were therefore not to be exempt from the burdens of citizens, and the possessor of a property by villein tenure was not to be invested with the privileges attached to a noble estate. In vain did the Imperial court threaten those with punishment who would not concede the purchased privileges to its patents of nobility. Those also who were declared fit for tournaments and noble benefices, were not on that account received into any knightly order, or noble endowment, nor in any old noble provincial unions. The noble benefices generally did not take patents of nobility, as proofs of noble extraction; it was only the members of old noble families possessing no such patents who were admissible into these endowments. It was only exceptionally that these corporations gave way to a high recommendation. Even the court offices, those of chamberlain, groom of the bed-chamber, equerry, hunting and other noble pages, were privileges of the old nobility. The patents of nobility never forgot to celebrate the virtues and the services rendered both to the prince and commonwealth by the newly ennobled and his ancestors; but, as a zealous defender of the old nobility complains, it was too well-known that, in general, it was only for the "Macherlohn" (pay, for the making) that nobility was given.

      In the larger cities, which were not the residence of princes, the position of the nobility was very different. In Hamburg, Lübeck, and Bremen, the nobles had no political weight; on the other hand, at Nüremberg, Frankfort-on-the-Maine, Augsburg, and Ulm, the old race of nobility lived in proud isolation from the rest of the citizens. Worst of all were the Nürembergers, who considered it even degrading to carry on commerce. Of two noble societies of Frankfort-on-the-Maine, one, the house of Alten-Limpurg, required of every member who presented himself for admission, eight ancestors, and that he should keep out of trade; the other society, of the house of Frauenstein, consisted mostly of newly-ennobled merchants "of distinction." In Augsburg, the old patricians were more indulgent to merchants: he who had married the child of a patrician family, could be received into the noble society. The remaining commercial cities of note, Prague and Breslau, were most amply supplied with newly ennobled merchants. There was bitter complaint that, under the Emperor Leopold, even a chimney-sweeper, whose trade was then in particularly low esteem, could for a little money procure nobility, and that frequently tradesmen, with patents of nobility in their pockets, might be found packing up herrings for their customers in old paper.

      After the Thirty Years' War, officers also sought for patents of nobility, and they were often granted to them for their services, as also to the higher officials and members of the city administration in the larger cities.

      It was through families who had taken part in the literary and poetical culture of the time, that patents of nobility in this and the following century entered into our literary class. Many poets of the Silesian school, nay, Leibnitz, Wolf, and Haller, were placed among the privileged of their time by patents of nobility, which they themselves or their fathers had acquired.

      Wholesale traders were never esteemed in Germany, nor held in that consideration by the privileged classes of the people, which the great interest they frequently represented deserved. They had of old been mistrusted and disliked; this originated, perhaps, in the time when the astute Romans exchanged, among the simple children of Tuisko, the foreign silver coin, for the early products of the country. The feudal system of the Middle Ages required this disregard of wealth, and not less so Christianity, which commanded men to despise the riches of this world, and granted to the wealthy so little prospect of the Kingdom of Heaven. Since the time of the Hohenstaufen, after the nobles were constituted as a privileged order, the antagonism between the rich money-makers of the city and the needy warriors of the country, was more and more strongly developed. In the Hanse Towns of the north undoubtedly the warlike merchant obtained dominion and respect by his armed vessels, even in distant countries. But the rich and highly cultivated gentlemen of Nüremberg and Augsburg, were scarcely less distasteful to the people than to the princes and nobles who dwelt in predatory habits on the frontiers of their domain; it was not the Fuggers alone who were accused by the Reformers of usury and un-German feeling. After the Thirty Years' War, this enmity bore new fruit, and one can easily believe that the great merchants gave no little occasion to keep alive such antipathy. No human occupation requires such free competition and such unfettered intercourse as trade. But the whole tendency of the olden time was to fence in from the outer world, and to protect individuals by privileges; such a tendency of the time could not fail to make the merchant hard and reckless; his endeavours to obtain a monopoly, and to evade senseless laws with respect to the interest of money, gave the people, frequently with justice, the feeling that the gains of the merchant were produced by the pressure they exercised on the consumer. This feeling became particularly vigorous after the Thirty Years' War. Whilst in Holland and in England the modern middle classes were pre-eminently strengthened by widely extended commerce, German commerce--except in the larger sea-port towns--was prevented from attaining a sound development by the subdivision of territory, the arbitrary dues, the varying standard of money, and, not least, by the poverty of the people; on the other hand, there was constant temptation to every kind of usurious traffic.