28.3 Europe: a.d. 1301 to 1400  (Page 4/12)

Central europe

Germany

The Hanseatic League, originally established primarily by traders of the Netherlands and Flanders, now included some 52 towns, most of them German, including Bremen, Cologne, Danzig, Dortmund, Hamburg and Hanover. (Ref. 222 ) At this time Germany was essentially a federation of provinces, each ruled by secular or ecclesiastical princes acknowledging a limited fealty to the head of the Holy Roman Empire. Ludwig Wittelsbach of Bavaria made himself emperor and then battled with pope John XXII over the imperial succession and finally crowned his own pope. (Ref . 8). William of Occam, a Franciscan theologian and philosopher, took refuge with this Emperor Ludwig IV, after he had been excommunicated in England. He was important as a forerunner of Martin Luther, in attacking papal claims to temporal authority and appealing to the authority of the Bible. Bavaria was briefly united under the Wittelsbach emperor but at his death the imperial crown went to Charles IV of Bohemia. In this century, the Brandenburg rulers became members of the Electoral College which chose the German king and emperor, but Wittelbachs, Habsburgs and Luxembourgs all contested for the crown while papal intervention contributed to monarchial weakness. (Ref. 8 ) Additional Notes

Although it was a period of degeneration in some areas of Germany, there were also new ideas appearing that foreshadowed a more modern state. One of these was a growing territorialism, with the formation of Standestaaten, or states based on estates, without feudal arrangement and with the gradual establishment of non-noble, civil service, pointing the way toward more centralized communities. The second concept was that of bourgeoisie. In 1300 only 811 towns north of the Alps had a flourishing trade but by 1450 there were 3,000 such towns. Leagues of these were formed for mutual protection and the acme of this was the Hanseatic League, which reached its high point in this century. Salted herring made the merchants of this Hanse wealthy. Although the fundamental basis was economic, the League used war, if necessary to protect its interests. The merchant families formed a new class of patricians and guilds appeared for artisans and workmen. The still famous Loewenbrau brewery was started in Munich in 1383. Blast furnaces, which allowed iron to be cast, resulted in the transformation of European iron technology, a feature which, in turn, revolutionized warfare by decreasing the useful ness of castles and the value of chivalry. (Ref. 213 ) A final factor of importance in this era was the Teutonic Knight. Even by 1300 Germans had pushed beyond the Elbe, seizing the Baltic littoral and settling in Poland and Hungary. (Ref. 177 , 184 , 222 )

Cruel persecution of Jews reached a peak, with wholesale murders in Swabia, Bavaria and the Rhine as well as in Switzerland and Austria. Famine, followed commonly by the Black Death, reached almost every German village. Many felt that the epidemic was a judgment of God and they joined a fanatic religious movement, the "Flagellants", who turned on the Jews in many areas, accusing them of causing the plague by poisoning of the wells. Jewish persecution may have accelerated the eastward shift of the Jewish population in Europe and helped to populate Poland with Jewish merchants. Economically, wage and price patterns were disrupted, class conflicts were exacerbated and an increased personal mysticism appeared within the Christian religion. (260,140).