INTRODUCTORY

The close of the fifteenth century had left the whole structure of
mediaeval Europe to all appearance intact. Statesmen and writers like
Philip de Commines had apparently as little suspicion that the state
of things they saw around them, in which they had grown up and of
which they were representatives, was ever destined to pass away, as
others in their turn have since had. Society was organized on the
feudal hierarchy of status. In the first place, a noble class,
spiritual and temporal, was opposed to a peasantry either wholly
servile or but nominally free. In addition to this opposition of noble
and peasant there was that of the township, which, in its corporate
capacity, stood in the relation of lord to the surrounding peasantry.

The township in Germany was of two kinds--first of all, there was the
township that was "free of the Empire," that is, that held nominally
from the Emperor himself (_Reichstadt_), and secondly, there was the
township that was under the domination of an intermediate lord. The
economic basis of the whole was still land; the status of a man or of
a corporation was determined by the mode in which they held their
land. "No land without a lord" was the principle of mediaeval polity;
just as "money has no master" is the basis of the modern world with
its self-made men. Every distinction of rank in the feudal system was
still denoted for the most part by a special costume. It was a world
of knights in armour, of ecclesiastics in vestments and stoles, of
lawyers in robes, of princes in silk and velvet and cloth of gold, and
of peasants in laced shoe, brown cloak, and cloth hat.

But although the whole feudal organization was outwardly intact, the
thinker who was watching the signs of the times would not have been
long in arriving at the conclusion that feudalism was "played out,"
that the whole fabric of mediaeval civilization was becoming dry and
withered, and had either already begun to disintegrate or was on the
eve of doing so. Causes of change had within the past half-century
been working underneath the surface of social life, and were rapidly
undermining the whole structure. The growing use of firearms in war;
the rapid multiplication of printed books; the spread of the new
learning after the taking of Constantinople in 1453, and the
subsequent diffusion of Greek teachers throughout Europe; the surely
and steadily increasing communication with the new world, and the
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