History of the Reformation - Thomas M. Lindsay

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and the rural districts, and safe outlets to foreign lands. It needed roads, bridges, and security of travel. The towns banded themselves together, and made alliances with powerful feudal nobles to secure these advantages. Such was the origin of the great Hanseatic League, which had its beginnings in Flanders, spread over North Germany, included the Scandinavian countries, and grew to be a European power.48 The less known leagues among the cities of South Germany did equally good service, and they commonly secured outlets to Venice, Florence, and Genoa, by alliances with the peasantry in whose hands were the chief passes of the Alps. All this meant an opposition between the burghers and the nobles—an opposition which was continuous, which on occasion flamed out into great wars, and which compelled the cities to maintain civic armies, composed partly of their citizens and partly of hired troops. It was reckoned that Strassburg and Augsburg together could send a fighting force of 40,000 men into the field.

      The area of trade, though, according to modern ideas, restricted, was fairly extensive. It included all the countries in modern Europe and the adjacent seas. The sea-trade was carried on in the Mediterranean and Black Seas, in the Baltic and North Seas, and down the western coasts of France and Spain. The North Sea was the great fishing ground, and large quantities of dried fish, necessary for the due keeping of Lent, were despatched in coasting vessels, and by the overland routes to the southern countries of Europe. Furs, skins, and corn came from Russia and the northern countries. Spain, some parts of Germany, and above all England, were the wool-exporting countries. The eastern counties of England, many towns in Germany and France, and especially the Low Countries, were the centres of the woollen manufactures. The north of France was the great flax-growing country. In Italy, at Barcelona in Spain, and at Lyons in France, silk was produced and manufactured. The spices and dried fruits of the East, and its silks and costly brocades and feathers, came from the Levant to Venice, and were carried north through the great passes which pierce the range of the Alps.

      Civic statesmen did their best, by mutual bargains and the establishment of factories, to protect and extend trading facilities for their townsmen. The German merchant had his magnificent Fondaco dei Tedeschi in Venice, his factories of the Hanseatic League in London, Bruges, Bergen, and even in far-off Novgorod; and Englishmen had also their factories in foreign parts, within which they could buy and sell in peace.

      The perils of the German merchant, in spite of all civic leagues, were at home rather than abroad. His country swarmed with Free Nobles, each of whom looked upon himself as a sovereign power, with full right to do as he pleased within his own dominions, whether these were an extensive principality or a few hundred acres surrounding his castle. He could impose what tolls or customs dues he pleased on the merchants whose heavily-laden waggons entered his territories. He had customary rights which made bad roads and the lack of bridges advantages to the lord of the soil. If an axle or wheel broke, if a waggon upset in crossing a dangerous ford, the bales thrown on the path or stranded on the banks of the stream could be claimed by the proprietor of the land. Worse than all were the perils from the robber-knights—men who insisted on their right to make private war even when that took the form of highway robbery, and who largely subsisted on the gains which came, as they said, from making their “horses bite off the purses of travellers.”

      In spite of all these hindrances, a capitalist class gradually arose in Germany. Large profits, altogether apart from trade, could be made by managing, collecting, and forwarding the money coming from the universal system of Indulgences. It was in this way that the Fuggers of Augsburg first rose to wealth. Money soon bred money. During the greater part of the Middle Ages there was no such thing as lending out money on interest, save among the Italian merchants of North Italy or among the Jews. The Church had always prohibited what it called usury. But Churchmen were the first to practise the sin they had condemned. The members of ecclesiastical corporations began to make useful advances, charging an interest of from 7 to 12 per cent.—moderate enough for the times. Gradually the custom spread among the wealthy laity, who did not confine themselves to these reasonable profits, and we find Sebastian Brand inveighing against the “Christian Jews,” who had become worse oppressors than the Israelite capitalists whom they copied.

      But the great alteration in social conditions, following change in the distribution of wealth, came when the age of geographical discovery had made a world commerce a possible thing.

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      The fifteenth century from its beginning had seen one geographical discovery after another. Perhaps we may say that the sailors of Genoa had begun the new era by reaching the Azores and Madeira. Then Dom Henrique of Portugal, Governor of Ceuta, organised voyages of trade and discovery down the coast of Africa. Portuguese, Venetian, and Genoese captains commanded his vessels. From 1426, expedition after expedition was sent forth, and at his death in 1460 the coast of Africa as far as Guinea had been explored. His work was carried on by his countrymen. The Guinea trade in slaves, gold, and ivory was established as early as 1480; the Congo was reached in 1484; and Portuguese ships, under Bartholomew Diaz, rounded the Cape of Good Hope in 1486. During these later years a new motive had prompted the voyages of exploration. The growth of the Turkish power in the east of Europe had destroyed the commercial colonies and factories on the Black Sea; the fall of Constantinople had blocked the route along the valley of the Danube; and Venice had a monopoly of the trade with Egypt and Syria, the only remaining channels by which the merchandise from the East reached Europe. The great commercial problem of the times was how to get some hold of the direct trade with the East. It was this that inspired Bristol skippers, familiar with Iceland, with the idea that by following old Norse traditions they might find a path by way of the North Atlantic; that sent Columbus across the Mid-Atlantic to discover the Bahamas and the continent of America; and that drove the more fortunate Portuguese round the Cape of Good Hope. Young Vasco da Gama reached the goal first, when, after doubling the Cape, he sailed up the eastern coast of Africa, reached Mombasa, and then boldly crossed the Indian Ocean to Calicut, the Indian emporium for that rich trade which all the European nations were anxious to share. The possibilities of a world commerce led to the creation of trading companies; for a larger capital was needed than individual merchants possessed, and the formation of these companies overshadowed, discredited, and finally destroyed the gild system of the mediæval trading cities. Trade and industry became capitalised to a degree previously unknown. One great family of capitalists, the Welser, had factories in Rome, Milan, Genoa, and Lyons, and tapped the rich Eastern trade by their houses in Antwerp, Lisbon, and Madeira. They even tried, unsuccessfully, to establish a German colony on the new continent—in Venezuela. Another, the Fuggers of Augsburg, were interested in all kinds of trade, but especially in the mining industry. It is said that the mines of Thuringia, Carinthia, and the Tyrol within Germany, and those of Hungary and Spain outside it, were almost all in their hands. The capital of the family was estimated in 1546 at sixty-three millions of gulden. This increase of wealth does not seem to have been confined to a few favourites of fortune. It belonged to the mass of the members of the great trading companies. Von Bezold instances a “certain native of Augsburg” whose investment of 500 gulden in a merchant company brought him in seven years 24,500 gulden. Merchant princes confronted the princes of the State and those of the Church, and their presence and power dislocated the old social relations. The towns, the abodes of these rich merchants, acquired a new and powerful influence among the complex of national relations, until it is not too much to say, that if the political future of Germany was in the hands of the secular princes, its social condition came to be dominated by the burgher class.

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      Culture, which had long abandoned the cloisters, came to settle in the towns. We have already seen that they were the centres of German Humanism and of the New Learning. The artists of the German Renaissance belonged to the towns, and their principal patrons were the wealthy burghers. The rich merchants displayed their civic patriotism in aiding to build great churches; in

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