Part 342

The three cantons of Switzerland which are known distinctively as the Forest Cantons, namely, Schwytz (which gave its name in time to the whole country), Uri, and Unterwalden, had stood in peculiar relations to the Hapsburg family since long before Rudolph became Emperor and his house became the House of Austria. In those cantons, the territorial rights were held mostly by great monasteries, and the counts of Hapsburg for generations past had served the abbots and abbesses in the capacity of advocates, or champions, to rule their vassals for them and to defend their rights. Authority of their own in the cantons they had none. At the same time, the functions they performed so continually developed ideas in their minds, without doubt, which grew naturally into pretensions that were offensive to the bold mountaineers. On the other hand, the circumstances of the situation were calculated to breed notions and feelings of independence among the men of the mountains. They gave their allegiance to the Emperor—to the high sovereign who ruled over all, in the name of Rome—and they opposed what came between them and him. It is manifest that a threatening complication for them arose when the Count of Hapsburg became Emperor, which occurred in 1273. They had no serious difficulty with Rudolph, in his time; but they wisely prepared themselves for what might come, by forming, or by renewing, in 1291, a league of the three cantons,—the beginning and nucleus of the Swiss Confederation, which has maintained its independence and its freedom from that day to this. The league of 1291 had existed something more than twenty years when the confederated cantons were first called upon to stand together in resistance to the Austrian pretensions. This occurred in 1315, during the war between Louis and Frederick, when Leopold, Duke of Austria, invaded the Forest Cantons and was disastrously beaten in a fight at the pass of Morgarten. The victory of the confederates and the independence secured by it gave them so much prestige that neighboring cities and cantons sought admission to their league. In 1332 Luzern was received as a member; in 1351, 1352, and 1353, Zurich, Glarus, Zug, and Bern came in, increasing the membership to eight. It took the name of the Old League of High Germany, and its members were known as Eidgenossen, or Confederates.

Such, in brief, are the ascertained facts of the origin of the Swiss Confederacy. There is nothing found in authentic history to substantiate the popular legend of William Tell.

The questions between the league and the Austrian princes, which continued to be troublesome for two generations, were practically ended by the two battles of Sempach and Naefels, fought in 1386 and 1388, in both of which the Austrians were overthrown.

The Emperor Louis IV. and the Papacy.

While the Swiss were gaining the freedom which they never lost, Germany at large was making little progress in any satisfactory direction. Peace had not been restored by the friendly agreement of 1325 between Ludwig and Frederick. The partisans of neither were contented with it. Frederick was broken in health and soon retired from the government; in 1330 he died. The Austrian house persisted in hostility to Louis; but his more formidable enemies were the Pope and the King of France. The period was that known in papal history as "the Babylonish Captivity," when the popes resided at Avignon and were generally creatures of the French court and subservient to its ambitions or its animosities. Philip of Valois, who now reigned in France, aspired to the imperial crown, which the head of the Church had conferred on the German kings, and which the same supreme pontiff might claim authority to transfer to the sovereigns of France. This is supposed to have been the secret of the relentless hostility with which Louis was pursued by the Papacy—himself excommunicated, his kingdom placed under interdict, and every effort made to bring about his deposition by the princes of Germany. But divided and depressed as the Germans were, they revolted against these malevolent pretensions of the popes, and in 1338 the electoral princes issued a bold declaration, asserting the sufficiency of the act of election to confer imperial dignity and power, and denying the necessity for any papal confirmation whatever. Had Louis been a commanding leader, and independent of the Papacy in his own feelings, he could probably have rallied a national sentiment on this issue that would have powerfully affected the future of German history. {1044} But he lacked the needful character, and his troubles continued until he died (1347). A year before his death, his opponents had elected and put forward a rival emperor, Charles, the son of King John of Bohemia. Charles (IV.) was subsequently recognized as king without dispute, and secured the imperial crown. "It may be affirmed with truth that the genuine ancient Empire, which contained a German kingdom, came to an end with the Emperor Ludwig the Bavarian. None strove again after his death to restore the imperial power. The golden bull of his successor Charles IV. sealed the fate of the old Empire. Through it, and indeed through the entire conduct of Charles IV., King of Bohemia as he really was, and emperor scarcely more than in name, the imperial government passed more and more into the hands of the prince-electors, who came to regard the emperor no longer as their master, but as the president of an assembly in which he shared the power with themselves." "From the time of Charles IV. the main object and chief occupation of the emperors was not the Empire, but the aggrandisement and security of their own house. The Empire served only as the means and instrument of their purpose" (Dollinger).

The Golden Bull of Charles IV.

The Golden Bull referred to by Dr. Dollinger was an instrument which became the constitution, so to speak, of the Holy Roman or Germanic Empire. It prescribed the mode of the election of the King, and definitively named the seven Electors. It also conferred certain special powers and privileges on these seven princes, which raised them much above their fellows and gave them an independence that may be said to have destroyed every hope of Germanic unity. This was the one mark which the reign of Charles IV. left upon the Empire. His exertions as Emperor were all directed to the aggrandizement of his own family, and with not much lasting result. In his own kingdom of Bohemia he ruled with better effect. He made its capital, Prague, an important city, adorning it with noble buildings and founding in it the most ancient of German universities. This University of Prague soon sowed seeds from which sprang the first movement of religious reformation in Germany.

Charles IV., dying in 1378, was succeeded by his son Wenzel, or Wenceslaus, on the imperial throne as well as the Bohemian. Wenceslaus neglected both the Empire and the Kingdom, and the confusion of things in Germany grew worse. Some of the principal cities continued to secure considerable freedom and prosperity for themselves, by the combined efforts of their leagues; but everywhere else great disorder and oppression prevailed. It was at this time that the Swabian towns, to the number of forty-one, formed a union and waged unsuccessful war with a league which the nobles entered into against them. They were defeated, and crushingly dealt with by the Emperor.

In 1400 Wenceslaus was deposed and Rupert of the Palatinate was elected, producing another civil war, and reducing the imperial government to a complete nullity. Rupert died in 1410, and, after some contention, Sigmund, or Sigismund, brother of Wenceslaus, was raised to the throne. He was Margrave of Brandenburg and King of Hungary, and would become King of Bohemia when Wenceslaus died.

The Reformation of Huss in Bohemia.

Bohemia was about to become the scene of an extraordinary religious agitation, which John Huss, teacher and preacher in the new but already famous University of Prague, was beginning to stir. Huss, who drew more or less of his inspiration from Wyclif, anticipated Luther in the boldness of his attacks upon iniquities in the Church. In his case as in Luther's, the abomination which he could not endure was the sale of papal indulgences; and it was by his denunciation of that impious fraud that he drew on himself the deadly wrath of the Roman hierarchy. He was summoned before the great Council of the Church which opened at Constance in 1414. He obeyed the summons and went to the Council, bearing a safe-conduct from the Emperor which pledged protection to him until he returned. Notwithstanding this imperial pledge, he was imprisoned for seven months at Constance, and was then impatiently listened to and condemned to the stake. On the 6th of July, 1415, he was burned. In the following May, his friend and disciple, Jerome of Prague, suffered the same martyrdom. The Emperor, Sigismund, blustered a little at the insolent violation of his safe-conduct; but dared do nothing to make it effective.

In Bohemia, the excitement produced by these outrages was universal. The whole nation seemed to rise, in the first wide-spread aggressive popular revolt that the Church of Rome had yet been called upon to encounter. In 1419 there was an armed assembly of 40,000 men, on a mountain which they called Tabor, who placed themselves under the leadership of John Ziska, a nobleman, one of Huss' friends. The followers of Ziska soon displayed a violence of temper and a radicalism which repelled the more moderate Hussites, or Reformers, and two parties appeared, one known as the Taborites, the other as the Calixtines, or Utraquists. The former insisted on entire separation from the Church of Rome; the latter confined their demands to four reforms, namely: Free preaching of the Word of God; the giving of the Eucharistic cup to the laity; the taking of secular powers and of worldly goods from the clergy; the enforcing of Christian discipline by all authorities. So much stress was laid by the Calixtines on their claim to the chalice or cup (communion in both kinds) that it gave them their name. The breach between these parties widened until they were as hostile to each other as to the Catholics, and the Bohemian reform movement was ruined in the end by their division.

In 1419, the deposed Emperor Wenceslaus, who had still retained his kingdom of Bohemia, was murdered in his palace, at Prague. His brother, the Emperor Sigismund, was his heir; but the Hussites refused the crown to him, and resisted his pretensions with arms. This added a political conflict to the religious one, and Bohemia was afflicted with a frightful civil war for fifteen years. Ziska fortified mount Tabor and took possession of Prague. The Emperor and the Pope allied themselves, to crush an insurrection which was aimed against both. They summoned Christendom to a new crusade, and Sigismund led 100,000 men against Prague, in 1420. Ziska met him and defeated him, and drove him, with his crusaders, from the country. The Taborites were now maddened by their success, and raged over the land, destroying convents and burning priests. Their doctrines, moreover, began to take on a socialistic and republican character, threatening property in general and questioning monarchy, too. The well-to-do and conservative classes were more and more repelled from them.

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In 1421 a second crusading army, 200,000 strong, invaded Bohemia and was scattered like chaff by Ziska (now blind) and his peasant soldiery. The next year they defeated the Emperor again; but in 1424 Ziska died, and a priest called Procopius the Great took his place. Under their new leader, the fierce Taborites were as invincible as they had been under Ziska. They routed an imperial army in 1426, and then carried the war into Austria and Silesia, committing fearful ravages. Still another crusade was set in motion against them by the Pope, and still another disastrous failure was made of it. Then Germany again suffered a more frightful visitation from the vengeful Hussites than before. Towns and villages were destroyed by hundreds, and wide tracks of ruin and death were marked on the face of the land, to its very center. Once more, and for the last time, in 1431, the Germans rallied a great force to retaliate these attacks, and they met defeat, as in all previous encounters, but more completely than ever before. Then the Pope and the Emperor gave up hope of putting down the indomitable revolutionists by force, and opened parleyings. The Pope called a council at Basel for the discussion of questions with the Hussites, and, finally, in 1433, their moderate party was prevailed upon to accept a compromise which really conceded nothing to them except the use of the cup in the communion. The Taborites refused the terms, and the two parties grappled each other in a fierce struggle for the control of the state. But the extremists had lost much of their old strength, and the Utraquists vanquished them in a decisive battle at Lipan, in May, 1434. Two years later Sigismund was formally acknowledged King of Bohemia and received in Prague. In 1437 he died. His son-in-law, Albert of Austria, who succeeded him, lived but two years, and the heir to the throne then was a son, Ladislaus, born after his father's death. This left Bohemia in a state of great confusion and disorder for several years, until a strong man, George Podiebrad, acquired the control of affairs.

Meantime, the Utraquists had organized a National Church of Bohemia, considerably divergent from Rome. It failed to satisfy the deeper religious feelings that were widely current among the Bohemians in that age, and there grew up a sect which took the name of "Unitas Fratrum," or "Unity of the Brethren," but which afterwards became incorrectly known as the Moravian Brethren. This sect, still existing, has borne an important part in the missionary history of the Christian world.

The Papacy.—The Great Schism.

The Papacy, at the time of its conflict with the Hussites, in Bohemia, was rapidly sinking to that lowest level of debasement which it reached in the later part of the fifteenth century. Its state was not yet so abhorrent as it came to be under the Borgias; but it had been brought even more into contempt, perhaps, by the divisions and contentions of "the Great Schism." The so-called "Babylonish Captivity" of the series of popes who resided for seventy years at Avignon (1305-1376), and who were under French influence, had been humiliating to the Church; but the schism which immediately followed (1378-1417), when a succession of rival popes, or popes and antipopes, thundered anathemas and excommunications at one another, from Rome and from Avignon, was even more scandalous and shameful. Christendom was divided by the quarrel. France, Spain, Scotland, and some lesser states, gave their allegiance to the pope at Avignon; England, Germany and the northern kingdoms adhered to the pope at Rome. In 1402, an attempt to heal the schism was made by a general Council of the Church convened at Pisa. It decreed the deposition of both the contending pontiffs, and elected a third; but its authority was not recognized, and the confusion of the Church was only made worse by bringing three popes into the quarrel, instead of two. Twelve years later, another Council, held at Constance,—the same which burned Huss,—had more success. Europe had now grown so tired of the scandal, and so disgusted with the three pretenders to spiritual supremacy, that the action of the Council was backed by public opinion, and they were suppressed. A fourth pope, Martin V., whom the Council then seated in the chair of St. Peter (1417), was universally acknowledged, and the Great Schism was at an end.

But other scandals and abuses in the Church, which public opinion in Europe had already begun to cry loudly against, were untouched by these Councils. A subsequent Council at Basel, which met in 1431, attempted some restraints upon papal extortion (ignoring the more serious moral evils that claimed attention); but was utterly beaten in the conflict with Pope Eugenius IV., which this action brought on, and its decrees lost all effect. So the religious autocracy at Rome, sinking stage by stage below the foulest secular courts of the time, continued without check to insult and outrage, more and more, the piety, the common sense, and the decent feeling of Christendom, until the habit of reverence was quite worn out in the minds of men throughout the better half of Europe.

Rome and the last Tribune, Rienzi.

The city of Rome had fallen from all greatness of its own when it came to be dependent on the fortunes of the popes. Their departure to Avignon had reduced it to a lamentable state. They took with them, in reality, the sustenance of the city; for it lived, in the main, on the revenues of the Papacy, and knew little of commerce beyond the profitable traffic in indulgences, absolutions, benefices, relics and papal blessings, which went to Avignon with the head of the Church. Authority, too, departed with the Pope, and the wretched city was given up to anarchy almost uncontrolled. A number of powerful families—the Colonna, the Orsini, and others—perpetually at strife with one another, fought out their feuds in the streets, and abused and oppressed their neighbors with impunity. Their houses were impregnable castles, and their retainers were a formidable army.

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It was while this state of things was at its worst that the famous Cola di Rienzi, "last of the Tribunes," accomplished a revolution which was short-lived but extraordinary. He roused the people to action against their oppressors and the disturbers of their peace. He appealed to them to restore the republican institutions of ancient Rome, and when they responded, in 1347, by conferring on him the title and authority of a Tribune, he actually succeeded in expelling the turbulent nobles, or reducing them to submission, and established in Rome, for a little time, what he called "the Good Estate." But his head was quickly turned by his success; he was inflated with conceit and vanity; he became arrogant and despotic; the people tired of him, and after a few months of rule he was driven from Rome. In 1354 he came back as a Senator, appointed by the Pope, who thought to use him for the restoration of papal authority; but his influence was gone, and he was slain by a-riotous mob.

The return of the Pope to Rome in 1376 was an event so long and ardently desired by the Roman people that they submitted themselves eagerly to his government. But his sovereignty over the States of the Church was substantially lost, and the regaining of it was the principal object of the exertions of the popes for a long subsequent period.

The Two Sicilies.