and light were drowned by the beat of the drum and the blare of the trumpet; and methods of blood and iron supplanted the forces of reason. No ideas, it was found, in religion or politics, could survive unless they were cast in the hard material mould of German territorialism.
The triumph of this principle is really the dominant note of the period. Territorialism ruined the Empire, captured the Reformation, crushed the municipal independence of the cities, and lowered the status of the peasant. The fall of the imperial power was perhaps inevitable, but it was hastened by Charles V. In the first place, his dynastic and Spanish policy weakened his authority as a national monarch; in the second, his adoption of the cause of the Church threw the Reformers into the arms of the territorial Princes. The success of the Reformation thus meant that of the oligarchic principle and the ruin of German monarchy. The Reformation of the Empire became incompatible with the Reformation of the Church; and the seal on Charles' failure was set by the Diet of Augsburg, which, besides concluding a truce of religion, removed the Reichskammergericht, the organisation of the Circles, and the preservation of the peace from the sphere of imperial influence. Henceforward Germany was not a kingdom, but a collection of petty States, whose rulers were dominated by mutual jealousies. From the time of Charles V to that of Frederick the Great, Germany ceased to be an international force; it was rather the arena in which the other nations of Europe, the Spaniard, the Frenchman, the Swede, the Pole, and the Turk, fought out their diplomatic and military struggles.
The Kaisertum was but one of the Princes' victims; the Bürgertum also fell before them. The vigorous city life of the Middle Ages was a thing of the past; in many a German town the representative of the territorial sovereign domineered over the elect of the burghers, interfered in their administration, and even controlled their finances. On the shores of the Baltic the destruction of town independence involved the loss of Germany's maritime power, and not till our own day has this eclipse begun to pass. With the decay of civic life went also the ruin of municipal arts and civilisation, and in its stead there was only the mainly formal culture of the petty German Court. No age in Germany was more barren of intellectual inspiration than that which succeeded the Peace of Augsburg. The internecine struggles of the reign of Charles V had exhausted all classes in the nation, and an era of universal lassitude followed: intellectually, morally, and politically, Germany was a desert, and it was called Religious Peace.
