The Pictures of German Life Throughout History. Gustav Freytag
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The landed proprietors gave up the greater part of the claims which, according to the Polish law, they had upon men who dwelt on their property, and which were so exorbitant that they derived but little benefit from them. The princes granted the inhabitants as a favour, the right of founding cities and villages in accordance with German law, that is to say, free communities, and this privilege was eagerly sought after, especially by the ecclesiastical bodies, such as Cistertians, Augustines, &c.
A regular method was pursued in founding these communities; but the fate of the villages was very different from that of the cities in the latter part of the middle ages. In the cities, as the body politic continually gained fresh strength, their rights and independence increased; the burgesses acquired by purchase the mayoralty, with its rights and jurisdiction; whilst, on the other hand, the villages were unable to protect themselves from the exactions of the landed proprietors and the burdens laid upon them by their princes; they lost much of their freedom, and many rights they had possessed at their foundation in the thirteenth century were only restored to them in the beginning of this present one.
It was thus that after the beginning of the thirteenth century a new German race sprang up with a surprising rapidity, bordering on the Oder, between the Reisenberge and the plains of Poland. The emigration continued for a considerable period, and the quiet struggle between the German and Polish races lasted long after the former had gained the predominance; indeed, in some districts it has not yet ceased. But for the most part the pliant Sclave race of Silesia peaceably adopted the new customs, as it was very advantageous to put themselves under German law. And thus the new race showed in its dialect, manners, and education a new phase of the German popular character which one may perceive has arisen from the union of the German and Sclave races.
The people who thus sprang up were not destined to an easy life, and it required all the excitability they derived from the Sclaves, together with the higher capacity they inherited from the Germans, to preserve them from annihilation. Driven in like a wedge between Bohemia and Poland quite to the vicinity of Hungary, they contended with all these nations, dispensing blows and receiving them from their stronger neighbours. They were never able to attain to the independence of a united people. However strong particular communities and confederations became when it was a question of external enemies, the Silesians were almost always divided.
In the fifteenth century the country was visited by that terrible scourge the Hussite war. It is in that fearful time, when the fanatical warriors of the chalice burnt the Silesian villages and cloisters, and threw everything ecclesiastical into the flames, when the land was devastated for nearly a century by the horrors of war, that the peculiar Silesian character may be traced in contradistinction to that of the races dwelling in the adjoining country.
Whilst in the regions adjoining the Oder, and still farther off by the shores of the Baltic, the German race, proud of their recent conquest over the Sclaves, desired to improve themselves by union with Germany, a great Sclave population had arisen in the middle of the German states, the toughest and most stable of all that family: it was firmly incorporated in the Empire, and had long been under the influence of German culture. Prague in the beginning of the fifteenth century might have passed for a German city, for not only in its laws and commerce, but also in science and art it exhibited all the vigour and independence of German life. About 1289 the King of Bohemia rode as a German elector to the election of the Emperor, and waved the golden glass at the coronation; the Bohemian minstrels and chroniclers wrote in the Swabian language and style, and Bohemian artists painted pictures of saints and windows for the German churches. Under the Luxemburgers Bohemia became the centre of the empire. The Bohemian throne was adorned with the German Imperial eagle and crown, and the flower of Germany's youth flocked to the many-turreted Moldavian city, in order to win in the first German university a nobler patent of nobility than the sword could give. It seemed then for a considerable period as if this fine compact Sclave country, lying with its mountain ramparts in the midst of Germany like a gigantic fortress, was likely to become the kernel of a great united empire, spreading far beyond the Rhine on the west, and to the Vistula on the east, or even perhaps to the swamps of the Theis. But just at this time an energetic reaction of Sclave popular feeling was roused in Bohemia against the Germans, and a long struggle ensued which fearfully shook the political, religious, and social life of Germany, rent the unity of the Roman Catholic Church, weakened the empire and threw it into confusion, depopulated large districts by a war full of cruelty, and amidst the flames of burning cities and the waning of millions, gave the death-blow to the Holy Roman Empire of the middle ages. It was the peculiar destiny of Germany that this great struggle should first break out among the teachers and scholars in the halls of the universities, and that the funeral pile of a Bohemian professor should give a new direction to the policy of German princes and people.
The auto-da-fé of Huss did not appear to the Germans a very striking or blamable occurrence; people in those days were hastily condemned to death, and there hardly passed a year that the torch was not laid to the stake in every large city. However great the grief and indignation of the national party of Bohemia might be at these proceedings, the wild fanaticism of the people was first roused by another, and greater crime of the reckless Emperor Sigismund, who, at the head of the orthodox German fanatics, began the strife by the great massacre in 1420; this outrage gave the Bohemians the strength of despair, and was the beginning of the wars which raged between the Germans and the Sclaves to the end of that century. Even after dissensions had broken out amongst the Bohemians themselves, and after the death of Georg von Podiebrad, feuds continued, and predatory bands spread themselves over the neighbouring lands, the people and nobility of Bohemia as well as those of the suffering frontier lands became lawless, and a hatred of races, less passionate but more savage and more enduring, took the place of fanaticism.
No land suffered more from the terrors of the Hussite time than Silesia, and it must be confessed that the Silesians showed to less advantage in this century than at any other period of their history; by the division of their country they were politically weak, and quite unfitted to withstand by their own strength the attacks of powerful enemies; when danger approached a feeling of the helplessness of their position came over them and disheartened them; but whenever they could breathe more freely, they became overbearing and full of high-flown plans which generally ended in nothing. As neighbours they were bitter enemies of the Bohemians, and from hatred to them, zealous in their orthodoxy; they were actively engaged in the first disgraceful devastation of Bohemia, and thus, by breach of faith, brought down on themselves the vengeance of the Bohemians. As in the Roman time the truth of a Carthaginian was a byword, so now in Silesia was that of a Bohemian; but the Silesians had no right to reproach the Bohemians with breach of faith. Their dangerous position did not make them more careful, and they allowed their possessions and cities to be destroyed from the want of timely succour; they were always irritating their enemies and causing fresh attacks by their insolent witticisms and small perfidies. Their vigour and elasticity, however, were most enduring; as often as the Bohemians burnt down their cities and villages, they rebuilt them, and patched up whatever would hold together; they never tired of irritating the heretical Girsik, as they called Georg von Podiebrad.[4] If, however, they were in need of his assistance, they tried to appease him by a present of a hundred oxen. After a time, however, their hatred became more manly; they took up arms and fought him valiantly; and when at last he sank into the grave, they had the satisfaction of feeling that they had embittered the life and thwarted the ambitious plans of this determined character by their perpetual opposition.
It is the beginning of this unhappy period which is described in the following narrative. It is taken from the report of a merchant in Bolkenhain,[5] named Martin, the fragment of his notes which we possess, published by Heinrick Hoffman (in Scriptores rerum Lusaticarum I., 1839).
"In the year of our Lord 1425, the Hussites appeared one Saturday evening before the town of Wünschelburg. On Sunday, about the time of vespers, they made breaches in the walls, and by their overwhelming force gained an entrance. The people flew to the house of the mayor,[6] which was a high stone building. When all the men and women had arrived there, they set fire to the city from the mayor's house, and thought thereby to save themselves; but the Bohemians waited till the fire had burnt out, then rushed in a powerful body against the stone house, endeavouring to storm and undermine it. Then followed a parley: the mayor