The Crown of Wild Olive
states, for their own hand, or St. Adalbert's; partly for mere love of
fight, partly for love of order, partly for love of God. Meantime, other
Riders have been fighting wholly for what they could get by it; and
other persons, not Riders, have not been fighting at all, but in their
own towns peacefully manufacturing and selling.
Of Henry the Fowler's Marches, Austria has become a military power,
Flanders a mercantile one, pious only in the degree consistent with
their several occupations. Prussia is now a practical and farming
country, more Christian than its longer-converted neighbors.
* * * * *
Towns are built, Koenigsberg (King Ottocar's town), Thoren (Thorn, City
of the Gates), with many others; so that the wild population and the
tame now lived tolerably together, under Gospel and Luebeck law; and all
was ploughing and trading.
* * * * *
But Brandenburg itself, what of it?
The Ascanien Markgraves rule it on the whole prosperously down to 1320,
when their line expires, and it falls into the power of Imperial
Austria.
IX.
1320-1415.--_Brandenburg under the Austrians._
A century--the fourteenth--of miserable anarchy and decline for
Brandenburg, its Kurfuersts, in deadly succession, making what they can
out of it for their own pockets. The city itself and its territory
utterly helpless. Read pp. 180, 181 (129, 130). "The towns suffered
much, any trade they might have had going to wreck. Robber castles
flourished, all else decayed, no highway safe. What are Hamburg pedlars
made for but to be robbed?"
X.
1415-1440.--_Brandenburg under Friedrich of Nueremberg._
This is the fourth of the men whom you are to remember as creators of
the Prussian monarchy, Henry the Fowler, St. Adalbert, Albert the Bear,
of Ascanien, and Friedrich of Nueremberg; (of Hohenzollern, by name, and
by country, of the Black Forest, north of the Lake of Constance).
Brandenburg is sold to him at Constance, during the great Council, for
about 200,000_l._ of our money, worth perhaps a million in that day;
still, with its capabilities, "dog cheap." Admitting, what no one at the
time denied, the general marketableness of states as private property,
this is the one practical result, thinks Carlyle (not likely to think
wrong), of that oecumenical deliberation, four years long, of the
"elixir of the intellect and dignity of Europe. And that one thing was
not its doing; but a pawnbroking job, intercalated," putting, however,
at last, Brandenburg again under the will of one strong man. On St.
John's day, 1412, he first set foot in his town, "and Brandenburg, under
its wise Kurfuerst, begins to be cosmic again." The story of Heavy Peg,
pages 195-198 (138, 140), is one of the most brilliant and important
passages of the first volume; page 199, specially to our purpose, must
be given entire:--
The offer to be Kaiser was made him in his old days; but he
wisely declined that too. It was in Brandenburg, by what he
silently founded there, that he did his chief benefit to
Germany and mankind. He understood the noble art of
governing men; had in him the justness, clearness, valor,
and patience needed for that. A man of sterling probity, for
one thing. _Which indeed is the first requisite in said
art_:--if you will have your laws obeyed without mutiny, see
well that they be pieces of God Almighty's law; otherwise
all the artillery in the world will not keep down mutiny.
Friedrich "travelled much over Brandenburg;" looking into
everything with his own eyes; making, I can well fancy,
innumerable crooked things straight; reducing more and more
that famishing dog-kennel of a Brandenburg into a fruitful
arable field. His portraits represent a square-headed,
mild-looking, solid gentleman, with a certain twinkle of
mirth in the serious eyes of him. Except in those Hussite
wars for Kaiser Sigismund and the Reich, in which no man
could prosper, he may be defined as constantly prosperous.
To Brandenburg he was, very literally, the blessing of
blessings; redemption out of death into life. In the ruins
of that old Friesack Castle, battered down by Heavy Peg,
antiquarian science (if it had any eyes) might look for the
taproot of the Prussian nation, and the beginning of all
that Brandenburg has since grown to under the sun.
Which growth is now traced by Carlyle in its various budding and
withering, under the succession of the twelve Electors, of whom
Friedrich, with his heavy Peg, is first, and Friedrich, first King of
Prussia, grandfather of Friedrich the Great, the twelfth.
XI.
1416-1701.--_Brandenburg under the Hohenzollern Kurfuersts._
Book III.
Who the Hohenzollerns were, and how they came to power in Nueremberg, is
told in Chap. v. of Book II.
Their succession in Brandenburg is given in brief at page 377 (269). I
copy it, in absolute barrenness of enumeration, for our momentary
convenience, here:
Friedrich 1st of Brandenburg (6th of Nueremberg), 1412-1440
Friedrich II., called "Iron Teeth," 1440-1472
Albert, 1472-1486
Johann, 1486-1499
Joachim I., 1499-1535
Joachim II., 1535-1571
Johann George, 1571-1598
Joachim Friedrich, 1598-1608
Johann Sigismund, 1608-1619
George Wilhelm, 1619-1640
Friedrich Wilhelm (the Great Elector), 1640-1688
Friedrich, first King; crowned 18th January, 1701
Of this line of princes we have to say they followed generally in their
ancestor's steps, and had success of the like kind more or less;
Hohenzollerns all of them, by character and behaviour as well as by
descent. No lack of quiet energy, of thrift, sound sense. There was
likewise solid fair-play in general, no founding of yourself on ground
that will not carry, _and there was instant, gentle, but inexorable
crushing of mutiny_, if it showed itself, which after the Second
Elector, or at most the Third, it had altogether ceased to do.
This is the general account of them; of special matters note the
following:--
II. Friedrich, called "Iron-teeth," from his firmness, proves a notable
manager and governor. Builds the palace at Berlin in its first form, and
makes it his chief residence. Buys Neumark from the fallen Teutsch
Ritters, and generally establishes things on securer footing.
III. Albert, "a fiery, tough old Gentlemen," called the Achilles of
Germany in his day; has half-a-century of fighting with his own
Nuerembergers, with Bavaria, France, Burgundy, and its fiery Charles,
besides being head constable to the Kaiser among any disorderly persons
in the East. His skull, long shown on his tomb, "marvellous for strength
and with no visible sutures."
IV. John, the orator of his race; (but the orations unrecorded). His
second son, Archbishop of Maintz, for whose piece of memorable work see
page 223 (143) and read in connection with that the history of Margraf
George, pp. 237-241 (152-154), and the 8th chapter of the third book.
V. Joachim I., of little note; thinks there has been enough Reformation,
and checks proceedings in a dull stubbornness, causing him at least
grave domestic difficulties.--Page 271 (173).
VI. Joachim II. Again active in the Reformation, and staunch,
though generally in a cautious, weighty, never in a rash,
swift way, to the great cause of Protestantism and to all
good causes. He was himself a solemnly devout man; deep,
awe-stricken reverence dwelling in his view of this
universe. Most serious, though with a jocose dialect,
commonly having a cheerful wit in speaking to men. Luther's
books he called his Seelenschatz, (soul's treasure); Luther
and the Bible were his chief reading. Fond of profane
learning, too, and of the useful or ornamental arts; given
to music, and "would himself sing aloud" when he had a
melodious leisure hour.
VII. Johann George, a prudent thrifty Herr; no mistresses, no luxuries
allowed; at the sight of a new-fashioned coat he would fly out on an
unhappy youth and pack him from his presence. Very strict in point of
justice; a peasant once appealing to him in one of his inspection
journeys through the country--
"Grant me justice, Durchlaucht, against so and so; I am your
Highness's born subject." "Thou shouldst have it, man, wert
thou a born Turk!" answered Johann George.
Thus, generally, we find this line of Electors representing in Europe
the Puritan mind of England in a somewhat duller, but less dangerous,
form; receiving what Protestantism could teach of honesty and common
sense, but not its anti-Catholic fury, or its selfish spiritual anxiety.
Pardon of sins is not to be had from Tetzel; neither, the Hohenzollern
mind advises with itself, from even Tetzel's master, for either the
buying, or the asking. On the whole, we had better commit as few as
possible, and live just lives and plain ones.
A conspicuous thrift, veracity, modest solidity, looks
through the conduct of this Herr; a determined Protestant he
too, as indeed all the following were and are.
VIII. Joachim Friedrich. Gets hold of Prussia, which hitherto, you
observe, has always been spoken of as a separate country from
Brandenburg. March 11, 1605--"squeezed his way into the actual
guardianship of Preussen and its imbecile Duke, which was his by right."
For my own part, I do not trouble myself much about these rights, never
being able to make out any single one, to begin with, except the right
to keep everything and every place about you in as good order as you
can--Prussia, Poland, or what else. I should much like, for instance,
just now, to hear of any honest Cornish gentleman of the old Drake breed
taking a fancy to land in Spain, and trying what he could make of his
rights as far round Gibraltar as he could enforce them. At all events,
Master Joachim has somehow got hold of Prussia; and means to keep it.
IX. Johann Sigismund. Only notable for our economical purposes, as
getting the "guardianship" of Prussia confirmed to him. The story at
page 317 (226), "a strong flame of choler," indicates a new order of
things among the knights of Europe--"princely etiquettes melting all
into smoke." Too literally so, that being one of the calamitous
functions of the plain lives we are living, and of the busy life our
country is living. In the Duchy of Cleve, especially, concerning which
legal dispute begins in Sigismund's time. And it is well worth the
lawyers' trouble, it seems.
It amounted, perhaps, to two Yorkshires in extent. A
naturally opulent country of fertile meadows, shipping
capabilities, metalliferous hills, and at this time, in
consequence of the Dutch-Spanish war, and the multitude of
Protestant refugees, it was getting filled with ingenious
industries, and rising to be what it still is, the busiest
quarter of Germany. A country lowing with kine; the hum of
the flax-spindle heard in its cottages in those old
days--"much of the linen called Hollands is made in Juelich,
and only bleached, stamped, and sold by the Dutch," says
Buesching. A country in our days which is shrouded at short
intervals with the due canopy of coal-smoke, and loud with
sounds of the anvil and the loom.
The lawyers took two hundred and six years to settle the question