2.—Results of the Reformation.—The Thirty Years’ War.

Transformations in the conditions of production, exchange and finance, that were brought about especially by the discovery of America, and the discovery of the passage to India, resulted in a great social reaction for Germany. Germany ceased to be the center of European commerce. The German trades and manufactures declined. At the same time the religious reformation had destroyed the political unity of the nation. Under the cloak of the reformation, the German princes sought to emancipate themselves from imperial rule. On the other hand, these princes oppressed the nobility and favored the cities to serve their own ends. Some of the cities voluntarily placed themselves under the rule of the princes, driven to this step by conditions that were steadily growing worse. The bourgeoisie upon seeing their income threatened, tried to make the restrictions that were intended to guard them against undesirable competition more and more rigorous, and the princes willingly conceded their demands. The ossification of conditions increased, but the general impoverishment increased likewise.

Another result of the reformation were the religious struggles and persecutions—used by the princes to serve their own political and economic ends—that raged in Germany with some interruptions for over a century, and finally ended with its complete exhaustion at the end of the Thirty Years’ War. Germany had become a vast field of corpses and ruins. Entire countries and provinces had been devastated, hundreds of cities and thousands of villages partly or completely destroyed, and many of them had been wiped from the surface of the earth forever. In many places the population had been reduced to a third, a fourth, a fifth, even an eighth or a tenth of its original number. Such was the case in Nuremberg, and in the entire Franconian province. In this utmost need, in order to increase the population in the depopulated towns and villages, the unusual measure was occasionally resorted to of permitting one man to have two wives. Men had been decimated by the wars, but there was a superabundance of women. On the 14th of February 1650, the Franconian district council at Nuremberg decreed that “men under 60 should not be admitted into monasteries”; it furthermore decreed that “those clergymen who were not members of an order should become married.” Moreover, “every man should be permitted to wed two wives, but the men should be frequently reminded and exhorted from the pulpits to employ good judgment and discretion, that a married man who ventured to maintain two wives should not only provide well for both of them, but should also endeavor to avoid ill feeling between them.” So even the pulpits were employed to make propaganda for the double marriage and to lay down rules of conduct for the men.

Commerce and industry almost came to a standstill during this long period; in many instances they were almost completely destroyed and picked up but very gradually. A large portion of the population had become demoralized and brutalized and disaccustomed to all regular work. During the wars, troops of mercenary soldiers had crossed Germany from one end to the other, plundering, destroying, ravishing and murdering, a terror alike to friend and foe. After the wars countless numbers of beggars, robbers and vagabonds maintained the population in constant terror and made commerce and all traffic difficult or impossible. To the female sex especially it was a time of great suffering. In this period of dissoluteness the contempt of woman had increased to the utmost, and the general condition of unemployment weighed most heavily upon her shoulders. Like the male vagabonds, thousands of women populated the highways and forests and filled the alms-houses and prisons. All these sufferings were still increased by the forcible expulsion of numerous peasant families by the greedy nobility. Since the reformation the nobility had become more and more subjected to princely rule, and by holding court and military positions their dependence on the princes had constantly increased. Now they tried to reimburse themselves for the losses sustained through the princes by robbing the peasants. To the princes, on the other hand, the reformation offered the desired excuse to acquire the property of the church, which they proceeded to do on a large scale. Prince August of Saxony, for instance, had, at the end of the sixteenth century, acquired no less than 300 ecclesiastical estates.[42] His brothers and cousins, the other Protestant sovereigns, above all those of the House of Hohenzollern, did likewise. The nobility followed their example by appropriating the remaining communal property, and by driving both free peasants and serfs from hearth and home and taking possession of their estates. The unsuccessful peasant revolts during the sixteenth century gave them the desired pretext for such action, and after the attempt had once succeeded, new pretexts were constantly found to continue this forcible method. Various schemes and distortions of justice were resorted to, made easy by the Roman law which had been established in Germany in the meantime, to increase the property of the nobility by forcing the peasants to sell theirs at lowest prices, or by simply expropriating them. Entire villages and the farms of entire districts were usurped in this manner. To quote just a few examples: Of 12,543 knightly peasant estates which still existed in the province of Mecklenburg during the Thirty Years’ War, only 1,213 remained in the year 1848. In the province of Pomerania 12,000 farms were abandoned since 1628. The transformations in the methods of farming that took place during the seventeenth century gave a further impulse to the nobility to expropriate the peasants and to transform the last remnants of communal property into their private estates. The rotation of crops had been introduced, which provided for changes in the cultivation of the soil in definite periods of time. Tilled land was occasionally transformed into pasture which favored cattle-breeding and made it possible to diminish the number of workers.

In the cities conditions were not much better than in the country. Formerly women had been permitted to acquire the title of master-workman and to employ journeymen and apprentices without any opposition from the male craftsmen. They were even compelled to join the guilds to force them to meet the same conditions of competition. So there were independent women workers among the linen-weavers, the cloth-weavers, the carpet-weavers and tailors. There were female gold-smiths, girdle-makers, harness-makers, etc. We find women employed as furriers in Frankfort and the Silesian cities; as bakers in the cities along the Rhine; as girdle-makers and embroiders of coats of arms in Cologne and Strassburg; as harness-makers in Bremen; as cloth-shearers in Frankfort as tanners in Nuremberg; as gold-smiths in Cologne.[43] But as the circumstances of the craftsmen grew more and more unfavorable, a sentiment of ill will against the female competitors arose. In France, women were excluded from the trades at the close of the fourteenth century; in Germany, not until the close of the seventeenth century. At first they were forbidden to become master-workmen—with the exception of widows—later on they were also excluded from becoming assistants. Protestantism, by abolishing the ostentatious Catholic cult, had seriously injured or entirely destroyed a number of artistic crafts, and these were the very crafts in which many women had been employed. The confiscation and secularization of church property resulted in a decline of charitable work, and widows and orphans were the main sufferers.

The general economic decline that manifested itself during the sixteenth century, as a result of all the enumerated causes, and lasted through the seventeenth century, caused the marriage laws to become more and more severe. Journeymen and people employed in menial service (men and maid servants) were prohibited entirely from marrying, unless they could prove that there was no danger of their future families becoming a burden to the community in which they lived. Marriages contracted in opposition to the legal premises were punished frequently severely, sometimes barbarously. According to Bavarian law, for instance, the penalties were imprisonment and public flogging. Illegal marriages, that became more frequent as the marriage laws became more severe, were subjected to especially violent persecution. All minds were ruled by the prevailing fear of over-population, and to diminish the numbers of beggars and vagabonds, the various rulers enacted one law upon another, and each was more severe than the preceding one.