whole nation; and during the contest between the
imperial and the papal powers, the destinies of Germany were chiefly in
the hands of the hereditary nobility. The literature, which before that
time was entirely clerical, had then become worldly and chivalrous. But
now, when the power of the emperors began to decline, when the clergy was
driven into taking a decidedly anti-national position, when the unity of
the empire was well-nigh destroyed, and princes and prelates were
asserting their independence by plunder and by warfare, a new element of
society rose to the surface,--the middle classes,--the burghers of the free
towns of Germany. They were forced to hold together, in order to protect
themselves against their former protectors. They fortified their cities,
formed corporations, watched over law and morality, and founded those
powerful leagues, the first of which, the Hansa, dates from 1241. Poetry
also took refuge behind the walls of free towns; and at the fireside of
the worthy citizen had to exchange her gay, chivalrous, and romantic
strains, for themes more subdued, practical, and homely. This accounts for
such works as Hugo von Trimberg's "Renner," as well as for the general
character of the poetry of the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries. Poetry
became a trade like any other. Guilds were formed, consisting of
master-singers and their apprentices. Heinrich Frauenlob is called the
first Meistersaenger; and during the fourteenth, the fifteenth, and even
the sixteenth centuries, new guilds or schools sprang up in all the
principal towns of Germany. After order had been restored by the first
Hapsburg dynasty, the intellectual and literary activity of Germany
retained its centre of gravitation in the middle classes. Rudolf von
Hapsburg was not gifted with a poetical nature, and contemporaneous poets
complain of his want of liberality. Attempts were made to revive the
chivalrous poetry of the Crusades by Hugo von Montfort and Oswald von
Wolkenstein in the beginning of the fifteenth century, and again at the
end of the same century by the "Last of the German Knights," the Emperor
Maximilian. But these attempts could not but fail. The age of chivalry was
gone, and there was nothing great or inspiring in the wars which the
Emperors had to wage during the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries against
their vassals, against the Pope, against the precursors of the
Reformation, the Hussites, and against the Turks. In Fritsche Cl