History of the Germans Podcast

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To make it easier for you to share the podcast, I have created separate playlists for some of the seasons that are set up as individual podcasts. they have the exact same episodes as in the History of the Germans, but they may be a helpful device for those who want to concentrate on only one season.

So far I have:

Ep. 190: A (very) brief History of the German Universities

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Transcript

Hello and welcome to the History of the Germans: Episode 190 – A (very) brief History of the German Universities, which is also episode 6 of season 10: The Empire in the 15^th Century.

How could German universities rise to such dominance during the 19^th and early 20^th century from very humble beginnings? That is what we will look at in this episode.

But before we start, let me say that this is likely to be an episode that may ruffle some feathers. That is not intentional, I had planned this episode long before the events of last week (we are recording this on April 16^th, 2025). But it is one of the privileges of running a patron-sponsored podcast to be able to say whatever I believe to be factually correct, and for that I am extremely grateful to all of you, even if I cannot mention you all today. But I can mention Brock H., Mato Stun, Maurice S., Ian P., Edouard L., Daniel S, Colin B. and Martin L. who have committed to support the show on historyofthegermans.com/support.

And with that, back to the show

Last week we strolled through Heidelberg on our way to the Schloss and the history of the Counts Palatine on the Rhine. Just by the way, today someone kindly pointed out that the correct English term is Count Palatine not count palatinate. But then it is Elector Palatinate. Go figure, and thanks Peter K. for letting me know.

And on our way to the Schloss of the Count Palatine we passed the university square, and I promised to dive deeper into the history of German universities. I must say, I am not exactly regretting this, but I have to admit that I might have bitten off a bit more than I can chew.

To give you an idea, the most recent work on the topic, Peter Watson’s German Genius is a mere 850 pages excl. notes and references. The key reference book is “The history of the European University” edited by Hilde de Ridder-Symoens and Walter Ruegg, which comes in 4 volumes, each at 800 pages. Literally too heavy for me to take home from the ever-impressive London Library, let alone read it. And then I am aware that some of you work in academia and are much closer to the subject than I am.

We have only 40 minutes to cover all this, which means I will rush over important events, miss out crucial incidents and personalities and remorselessly simplify. And for that I beg your forgiveness. We will almost certainly come across Melanchthon, the brothers Grimm, Wilhelm von Humboldt, Winckelmann, Helmholtz, Ranke and all the others again and they will get the space on the show that they deserve. What I want to achieve here is to provide a story arch we can go back to later.

Enough on the preliminaries.

The first German university was founded in 1386 in Heidelberg by Ruprecht, at the time Elector Palatinate and later King of the Romans. Well, not exactly.

The university of Prague, as we know, had been founded in 1348 and there the German-speaking nations had the majority, so arguably the first German university opened there. And then there was the university of Erfurt that received its charter in 1379, 7 years before Heidelberg. But actual teaching started only in 1392. Vienna was even earlier in 1365, but that is Austria, so it does not count, or does it.

All these squabbles over which one is the oldest university is not only nitpicky but emanate the whiff of relegation battles. Because whether it was 1348, 1365, 1379 or 1386, it was shockingly late.

By that time the universities of Bologna, Paris and Oxford were already 300 years in operation. And by the time Heidelberg was founded, there were already 39 other universities in Europe, not just in Italy, France and England but also in Serbia, Spain, Portugal, Poland, Hungary and Albania.

Does that mean the German lands were an intellectual backwater. Not necessarily. Whilst there were no universities in the High Middle Ages, the monasteries and episcopal schools attracted eminent scholars, including Albertus Magnus and Thomas Aquinas. We did hear about the great Franciscan intellectuals, William of Ockham, Marsilius of Padua and Michael of Cesena who lived and worked in Munich. (episode 151 if you are interested).

Part of the reason that it took so long for a university to be established in the German lands was that Paris and Italy weren’t that far away. And as anyone knows who attended university, degrees have a lot in common with luxury handbags. The label matters a lot more than the content. Therefore, opening a university in a mid-sized German town made no sense as long as students could go to Paris or Bologna and come back to a hero’s welcome.

So, why did we suddenly see a whole wave of university foundations in the late 14^th, early 15^th century, Heidelberg 1386, Cologne 1388, Erfurt 1392, Leipzig 1409, Rostock 1419, Greifswald 1457, Basel in 1460, Ingolstadt/Munich 1472, Trier in 1473, Tubingen 1477, Wittenberg 1502 and Frankfurt an der Oder in 1506.

One important factor was the Great Western Schism. Heidelberg’s first rector came from the university of Paris where the debates over ways to resolve the schism had shifted from the scholarly to the political. Moreover, France stuck with the Avignon popes whilst the empire in the main looked to the Roman pontiff. Professors and students who were either convinced one way or the other, or who were looking for careers at the princely courts needed alternatives to Paris, creating an opening for new universities.

Many had gone to Prague, lured by the size of the great city and its splendid court. But when in 1409 the Bohemians, including our friend Jan Hus agitated for the reorganization of the university, breaking the monopoly of the German speakers, many of the leading lights of Karl IV’s great creation left for Heidelberg, Leipzig, Erfurt or Cologne.

Despite these supportive events, these new schools could not stand alone. Which brings in one distinctive feature of German universities, they are in the main funded by the state.

The very first university, the one in Bologna, that received its charter from Frederick Barbarossa in 1158 had been a self-sufficient community of teachers and students. The lecturers had established their own organization, usually with a rector, supported by deans of the faculties and the senate as the rule-making body. The whole structure was funded by the students, who often paid separately for each lecture.

These new universities could not attract enough students to pay for the lecturers. That is where the state came in. State in this context would be the local prince in the case of Heidelberg, Tubingen or Freiburg, or the city, in the case of Cologne, Leipzig and Erfurt.

Funding usually involved taking a monastery and giving the benefices of the monks to the lecturers. Hence a professor at the university in Tubingen would receive an income from the monastery of Sindelfingen that covered his expenses. And where did these monasteries come from? One case involves Mechthild of the Palatinate, granddaughter of the founder of Heidelberg University. She had a thing about higher learning and convinced her husband, Albrecht von Habsburg, to found the university in Freiburg. 20 years later she leant on her son, Eberhard im Barte, the duke of Württemberg, to found the university of Tübingen. One of her strongest arguments was that she would cover the costs, i.e., hand over the benefices of monasteries she controlled to pay the professors. Mechthild is therefore arguably godmother to two of Southern Germany’s most eminent universities. Do I need to mention that the official name of Freiburg University is Albrecht-Ludwigs Universität and the Tübingen one is named after Eberhard and Karl, no Mechthilds anywhere.

Despite being state funded, the universities nevertheless enjoyed far reaching autonomy in their organization and legal status. Like the medieval universities of Paris and Bologna, there were a senate, deans and a rector. The university was outside the jurisdiction of the city, same as in Oxford. When you come to Heidelberg and you do the full tourist tour, you will be shown the Karzer, the university prison, where unruly students were held at the Rector Magnificus pleasure, rather than in a police cell. This was presumably not something the princes and cities did voluntarily, but something they had to do in order to attract lecturers.

And why would these princes and Burgermeisters bear undergraduates spewing snakebite at the freshly painted walls of their palaces and town halls? One part is certainly bragging rights, but as we have seen last week with Friedrich der Siegreiche, the graduates, the law graduates in particular were extremely useful as civil servants, administrating outlying areas, organizing tax collection or swerving as ambassadors to other courts. Up until then this job had been done by clergymen who tended to blab to their bishop or archbishop. Having their own lawyers gave the temporal authorities the upper hand over the church.

To be a university, a studium generale, these new German universities had to be approved by the papacy. That in turn meant they had to follow a unified curriculum established by the church and applied all throughout Christendom.

Students would arrive very young, often just 15 or 16. They would spend the first two years learning the basics of what was called the trivium, i.e., grammar, rhetoric and logic, essentially learning to communicate in Latin. This was followed by an examination that awarded the title of bachelor. The next several years were dedicated to the Quadrivium, which comprised arithmetic, music, geometry and astronomy, though it could also often include ethics, metaphysics, and philosophy. If one managed to pass this exam, one was advanced to the title of magister artium, a Master of Arts. Only then would the student be invited into the higher faculties, namely theology, law and medicine. Medicine was always the smallest faculty; theology was the most prestigious and law the most practical. The title awarded to a magister who passed this course was the title of doctor.

And because this curriculum was the same across the medieval universities, people could move between universities and previous examinations would be mutually recognized. Someone like Ulrich von Hutten, the 16^th century poet and knight, moved between Cologne, Erfurt, Frankfurt an der Oder, Greifswald, Wittenberg, Rostock, Vienna, Pavia and Bologna as he was completing his studies. This may sound bewildering for Anglo-Saxons, but switching universities is not unusual in the German system, in fact it is often regarded as de rigeur. So, I studied in Freiburg, Münster and Kiel, my father in Würzburg, Bonn, Münster and Tübingen, my grandmother in Freiburg, Danzig, Innsbruck and somewhere else I cannot remember exactly.

Back in the 15^th century, a university was first and foremost a vehicle to disseminate knowledge. And that knowledge was derived from authorities, from Aristotle, the commentators like Averroes, the church fathers, St. Augustine, St. Jerome, St. Ambrose and Gregory the Great and the great scholastics, Thomas Aquinas, Abaelard, Albertis Magnus. That does not mean that there was no debate. In fact, it was the exact opposite. A medieval university was built on debate. The disputation was at its core. These were almost gladiatorial fights between two scholars over a set topic, each fiercely defending their case. A bit like the Oxford debating society today.

But where the medieval university differed was in the weighing of arguments. Being able to reference an authority, ideally the Holy Scripture itself would in principle override factual evidence. I say – in principle – because there were medieval scholars, Albertus Magnus and the members of the court of Frederick II who engaged in experimentation and observation of nature. Just look at Frederick II’s book on falconry (episode 84 if you are interested). But when it came to examinations and progression inside the university, these skills were not regarded as important. The point of it was to be able to argue points of theology or law with reference to established truths, not to discover new truths.

As you can imagine, these new universities in the German lands had a bit of a slow start. They were new, the greatest lecturers and most admired theologians were teaching elsewhere. So, these were what the brits call red brick universities, places where you get a solid degree, but not a label you wear on your t-shirt 20 years after leaving. Sometimes the prince had to ban his subjects from going to universities abroad to fill the places.

That changed fundamentally with the reformation. Students from all over europe flocked to Wittenberg to hear Martin Luther speak. And not only students, but some of the great minds of the time wanted to be there too. Most famous amongst them is Philipp Melanchthon. Melanchthon would teach in Wittenberg until his death in 1560. In this time, he reformed the system of education in much of Germany. He helped setting up secondary schools where students were to learn Latin, not by rote, but by speaking and formulating their own sentences. He invented forms, i.e., separated students by their level of attainment, meaning one could only move from one level to the next by achieving certain academic milestones. For our German listeners, he invented sitzenbleiben.

At the university he replaced the medieval church Latin with classic Latin and Greek, opened up the rigid curriculum of trivium and quadrivium and placed more and more emphasis on philosophy, including natural sciences. He was an enthusiastic supporter of the Reformation, which correlated with a lot of ideas he already had before Luther made his public.

Melanchthon, the Praeceptor Germaniae, Germany’s teacher was not only the high point of the early history of German universities, but also its end point. When he died in 1560, the movement to reform the church that Luther had kicked off had turned into permanent religious divisions. Universities became separated by confession. Where the local ruler was catholic, they became catholic universities, where he was protestant, they became either Lutheran or Calvinist. Many more schools were established, but Melanchthon’s push towards openness and natural sciences was forgotten and the organizations atrophied. There was no exchange of scholars between these confessional blocks. And even within the blocks mobility dwindled. Universities became local places of higher learning. In Heidelberg and elsewhere whole dynasties emerged where the professorship was passed from father to son. Students became more and more of a nuisance, the curriculum was simplified and rigidly tied to whichever was the prevailing religious orthodoxy. Examinations were lax and university degrees were no longer seen as a ticket to higher office.

This decline of the university may have been more severe in Germany due to the confessional fragmentation of the country, the minuscule size of some of these universities and the economic devastation following the 30-years war as well as the near incessant conflicts that followed. But it was something that happened all throughout europe. Universities simply weren’t where progress was happening. But progress did happen in the 17^th, 18^th and 19^th century, in particular in France and England.

In France king Louis XIII and his chief minister, the cardinal Richelieu had established the Academie Francaise in 1635 to protect and preserve the French language. Over the next 50 years a number of Academies were established looking after painting and sculpture, dance, literature, humanities in general, opera, architecture and of course science. These were established deliberately as research institutes. For instance, the Academy of Sciences publishes an annual document showcasing its latest discoveries. Being a member of an academy is and was a great honor that comes with a generous salary and a lot freedom to pursue enquiries in their respective field. Famous members include d’Alembert, Laplace, Lavoisier and Condorcet.

In England, intellectual and scientific progress happened outside the universities too. The Royal Society of London for Improving Natural Knowledge, otherwise known as the Royal Society, was founded in 1660. Other than the French Academies, this was a private initiative endorsed by a royal warrant but not controlled by the government. It is here that people like Isaac Newton, Hans Sloane, Charles Babbage, Sir Joseph Banks, Stephen Maturin, Michael Faraday, Charles Darwin, Lord Kelvin, Joseph Lister and so forth presented their ideas and published their research,

The German princely courts copied the academy model along French lines. For instance, the Preussische Academie der Wissenschaften was founded in 1700. Bavaria had one since 1759 and the Leopoldina, founded in 1652 in Schweinfurt and today the German Academy of the Sciences can claim to be the oldest continuously operating academy of science in the world.

Then and now these academies and societies are fantastic organizations, its members are often awe-inspiring scholars and researchers. But they also have their flaws.

Take the Royal Society and the list of eminent scholars I just recited. Many of them had to fund their research themselves. The Royal Society did not have the means to support actual research. That meant most of these men were independently wealthy. For instance, Charles Darwin’s voyage on the Beagle was funded by his father and his cousin Josiah Wedgwood II. Many made their living as country parsons, like William Stukeley who rescued Stonehenge and the chemist Joseph Priestly, who discovered oxygen.

The French Academicians did not have that problem. Academicians receive a generous salary and support for their research. But on the flipside, there are only very few of them. The French Academy of Sciences had always less than a 100 members, and it did not help that members were appointed for life, leaving young researchers high and dry.

But the really fundamental flaw was that to become a member of an Academie or a Royal Society, one had to already be a highly recognized scholar. What about all these 19-year-olds with dreams of great discoveries, where were they supposed to learn the methods and techniques of research?

That is where the German university model came in.

But I am jumping ahead.

The story starts with the foundation of four new universities, Halle in 1694, Breslau in 1702, Goettingen in 1737 and Erlangen in 1743. Why on god’s wide earth would anyone open up another university in Germany in the 18^th century? There were already 50 of them around and some, like Rostock with barely 500 and Paderborn, a shocking 45 students. Moreover, these last 100 years tertiary education had migrated from universities to Ritterakademien, knightly High Schools where the sons of minor aristocrats were trained in practical things like fencing, riding, mathematics, military tactics, law, administration and French conversation. Sensible stuff, useful for managing an absolutists state.

Still, a man I honesty have never heard of before, Gerlach Adolph von Münchhausen. No, not that Munchausen, another one. He was a lawyer who had made his career in the service of the Elector of Hannover. Well educated people that you all are, you will know that since 1714 the Elector of Hannover was also the king of England, Scotland and Ireland.

So Gerlach von Munchhausen rose up through the ranks and when King George II ascended both the English and the Hannover thrones, he found himself elevated into the Inner council, effectively the government of Hannover. He would later rise to be prime minister of the Electorate.

Munchhausen had studied in Halle and Utrecht before going on a Grand Tour to gain the polish necessary for a career as a courtier. When he came back, he was convinced that Germany deserved better. He lobbied Georg II and the estates of Hannover to let him open a university. But not one like the atrophied husks that were littering the academic landscape, but a new model.

One where theology was no longer the most desirable and most influential faculty. In particular he removed the right of censorship the theologians enjoyed in most German universities at the time. He expanded the faculty of philosophy to include the laws of nature, physics, politics, natural history, pure and applied mathematics, history, geography, art and modern languages. To make his new establishment at Göttingen even more attractive for ambitious young man keen to make their way in the world, university education included fencing, dancing, drawing, riding, music and French conversation.

He insisted that instead of conveying static knowledge, the purpose of study was to equip students with taste, judgement and intellect. I love the aspiration, in particular the idea of teaching 19-year-olds taste.

But Munhchausen, who did chair the university of Goettingen for 40 years did not just pronounce lofty aspirations. He also developed the vehicle to facilitate this change, the seminar. The seminar, as opposed to a lecture and a disputation, was a more intimate, smaller setting. Moreover, it did away with the Aristotelian, scholastic idea that there was one right way to think about something. Up until then universities taught students that they could understand and resolve any question if they only applied the correct logical sequence of arguments.

In Göttingen, they did away with that. Instead, they encouraged students to come up with new ideas, and new approaches to questions and to experiment. The role of the professor became to encourage and guide the student’s thinking rather than make him regurgitate a “correct” answer. Seminars quickly developed their own processes and structures. Students were asked to send in their essays a week beforehand, giving the lecturer and the other students time to come up with questions and challenges. Essays in the seminars were graded not on regurgitating the existing orthodoxy, but were rewarded for novelty, for breaking new ground. Outstanding contributions were rewarded with prizes and then published. Publications were reviewed and criticized by scholars at other universities. From that developed scientific journals overseen and edited by eminent researchers. And finally emerged the PhD that was more than an erudite reflection of all existing knowledge on a subject, but contained a thesis, a piece of research that led to a hypothesis.

And as we progress through time, more and more of that concept of a unified Aristotelian logic crumbled into dust. Different subjects required different approaches, different techniques and their unique way of presenting and debating results. As a consequence, the university faculties began to separate out into their specializations.

Whilst Göttingen flourished and many of Münchhausen’s ideas spread around the other German universities, to arrive at a new system of higher learning that would sweep the world, one more push was needed.

And that push came from the all towering figure of the 19^th century, Napoleon Bonaparte. Thomas Nipperdey opened his magistral history of 19^th century Germany with the words “And at the beginning there was Napoleon”.

The catastrophic defeat at Jena-Auerstedt and the subsequent rearranging of the German lands to suit French Imperial requirements had a profoundly shocking effect on all aspects of German life. And it opened the way for reforms that had been otherwise unthinkable.

And one of these was the reform of education, associated with the name of Wilhelm von Humboldt. Humboldt himself had never attended university but had become an accomplished linguist. He was also the brother of the explorer Alexander von Humboldt, he of the famous penguins

Wilhem von Humboldt was asked in 1809 to put together a fundamental reform of the Prussian education system. The defeat had shown that the existing system of knightly academies and military schools had failed to produce the kind of abilities required to defeat a revolutionary army.

At the heart of Humboldt’s concept lay the understanding that the world is constantly changing. Hence to be successful, be it as a carpenter or as philosopher, one needs not just the technical knowledge but also the ability to learn new things and adapt. He said that students should learn how to learn.

Further he believed that to be able to learn how to learn, one needed to have a certain degree of freedom, freedom to choose what to learn and from whom.

He devised the German education system that in much adapted form still exists today. And to understand it, one has to start at the top, the university level.

Humboldt, with support from King Friedrich Wilhelm III, founded the university of Berlin, today called the Humboldt university in his and his brother’s honour. As one would expect for a new establishment in the capital, he brought in all the greatest academics in Prussia. He even plundered the state academies and Prussia’s leading university at the time, the university of Halle.

And then he lets the academics shape the new university. These men, Fichte, Schelling, Schleiermacher and lots more had grown up in the system of seminars, of rating new ideas over ancient authorities.

And so, they flipped the script. The faculties that had held sway over the medieval university, Theology, Law and Medicine were relegated, to be on par with Philosophy. Philosophy, which included the natural sciences, philology, politics, physics, mathematics etc. were all subjects where the mind could roam free, experiment, develop new ideas and approaches unfettered from ancient authorities. Law and Theology on the other hand were subjects that dealt with ancient texts and authorities. They were Brotstudien, degrees that led to employment as vicars, surgeons, lawyers, judges and civil servants, whilst philosophy boldly goes where no man has gone before.

And this distinction is still in place. The degrees in Law, Theology and Medicine are awarded not by the university, but by the state. They are seen closer to vocational qualifications than true academic degrees. Which may also explain the relative leniency when it comes to awarding PhDs like the rather embarrassing slim tome that bears my name and is covering dust in the library of congress.

But pure research – unconnected to practical use – happened only in the philosophical faculty where PhD’s take years and years to complete, followed by the Habilitation, the German speciality of a second PhD that awards the right to teach as a full professor.

But despite the emphasis on research, Humboldt and his advisers are aware that this new university cannot be just another academy of science, that it needs to teach young men and later on women as well.

The question is now what to teach the students. If the ethos of the German university was to seek new knowledge, rather than disseminate old knowledge, how can that be reflected in teaching. The concept they came up with was Lehrfreiheit, which means the freedom to teach. Rather than delivering pre-determined content as had been the case in the past, the professor could choose to teach on topics that he was particularly interested in. And guess what, the things professors are most interested in are the things they are researching at the time. Students were hence not only given access to the very latest in academic research during lectures, but through the seminars they were also involved in testing and challenging the lecturer’s thesis whilst developing their own ideas.

The risk that comes with Lehrfreiheit, is that it grants the professors the right to drone on and on about whatever takes their fancy, boring their students to death. To avoid that, and hence to balance out Lehrfreiheit, the academic freedom to teach, they granted the students Lernfreiheit, i.e, the academic freedom to choose their lecturers. That meant the professor who set up a 12-part lecture series about his research into the nocturnal habits of the Hypogeomys Antimena, the Malagasy giant jumping rat, might find himself confronted with empty benches and pitying looks from his colleagues. And therefore, next term he may discover his inner David Attenborough to fill the auditorium.

Ok, that sounds great. The perfect power balance between academics wanting to teach something they like and students forcing content they want to hear about. But granting such a degree of freedom to students could also backfire. I can think of scenarios where literally no students would show up for lectures at all, even if they are interesting. For this system to work we need students that display a certain degree of maturity and have prior knowledge to be able to follow a lecture on the frontier of contemporary science. So, students needed to already have a grounding in a range of subjects before they show up at Uni and must have learned to learn.

Which is where the Gymnasium comes in. In Humboldt’s concept the Gymnasium was the place where the student gains the hard knowledge required to follow the lectures and develops the ability and desire to learn, to become a scholar. It is these two things the Gymnasium is to foster, curiosity and understanding.

If that is the objective than the teacher at the gymnasium has to be more than a disseminator of knowledge, but someone who can convey the basic techniques needed to develop a thesis, to test it and to defend it. And hence a teacher must have attended university himself to be able to impart these skills. Hence Humboldt established the requirement for schoolteachers to have a university degree and to have passed a state examination. That was in 1809, the UK introduced the graduate teacher requirement in 1972.

One thing Humboldt did not need to introduce was compulsory schooling, that had already happened in Prussia in 1763. Both Girls and Boys were supposed to go to school from age 5 to 13. And Prussia was by no means the first of the princely states in the empire to do that. The tiny principality of Pfalz-Zweibrücken, can claim to be the very first place in the world to introduce compulsory schooling for boys and girls in 1592. The UK waited until 1880 to make sure everybody in the country could read and write, whilst the US states introduced it between 1852 and 1918.

The next important point to make is that schools, gymnasium and university were state funded, meaning access to them was and by and large still is free. That created a huge funnel for talent. During the 19^th century, more children of underprivileged backgrounds were able to go to school, to Gymnasium and to university than in any other country in Europe.

And there were a lot more universities. Germany had about fifty in 1809, whilst England had two. Students had a choice, and because they had a choice, universities began to compete ferociously, by having the best libraries, laboratories, range of faculties, research output, eminent academics, scientific journals etc. That brought in the lecturers and students, who should the university administrators drop the ball, could move to another university halfway through their degrees without losing pace.

And it wasn’t that each state had its own elite university, Prussia for example had Berlin, Halle and then built out Breslau and created the huge university of Bonn from scratch. All of these competed then with Goettingen, Munich, Heidelberg, Freiburg, Tübingen and so forth and so forth.

Ok, now let me put on my banker’s hat. Where does all the money come from? This is expensive.

Sure, King Friedrich Wilhem III supported Humboldt and saw his project as a crucial stepping stone to rebuild Prussia. But he did not live forever, Napoleon disappeared to St. Helena, but the University revolution kept motoring along at ever higher revs.

Part of it was certainly its success. In 1892 the eminent French historian and educator Ferdinand Lot wrote quote; “The scientific leadership of Germany in all fields without exception is now acknowledged by all nations. It is a settled fact that Germany alone produces more than all the rest of the world put together; her supremacy in science forms the pendant to England’s supremacy in commerce and on the sea; and it is perhaps even greater.” End quote.

But it also spoke to German culture in the 19^th century. I think many nations have an aspirational avatar, a sort of personality they would like to be seen as. The most clearly discernible avatar is the English gentleman. If you have seen the first Kingsman film, you may remember Colin Firth playing the ultimate English gentleman. His catchphrase is “manners maketh man”. In the film he takes a young man, Eggsy, from a lower-class background and of modest education and turns him into a gentleman, a male sort of Eliza Doolittle story. And what makes Eggsy into a gentleman is not just the exquisitely tailored suits and upgrade in table manners, but the moral fibre, physical strength, and willingness to self-sacrifice for the greater good.

The German ideal, in particular in the 19^th century is “der gebildete Mensch”, someone who has Bildung. And Bildung is not just education in the sense of knowing lots of stuff, but being able to truly appreciate art, architecture, music, to constantly strive to improve oneself through reading philosophy and high literature aiming for a higher moral plane.

Where the gentleman is all about the interaction with the outside world, which explains the prevalence of team sports and debating in the traditional English education, Bildung is very much internal. It is not about improving society through action but about elevating the individual which then makes the world a better place. Bildung is such a vast subject that we will almost certainly get back to it at some point, most likely the point when I have found a way to better express it than I have just done.

But for the purposes of explaining why Germans were happy to see so much of their taxes being spent on education, Bildung is not a bad place to start. In the same way that British middle class families cough up tens of thousands of pounds in the hope the private school education would turn their kids into true gentlemen and ladies, 19^th century Germans saw their universities and general education system as a manifestation of their culture, giving Bildung to their children.

The German education system reached its high point just before the first World War. It was copied all over the world and today’s universities that combine research and teaching, that invention of Humboldt became the standard from Cape Town to Tromso and from Tokyo to CalTech.

Today, the German education system is however no longer the envy of the world. The place that “produces more than all the rest of the world put together” is the United States. Reasons are many, but one was seminal.

In the first two years the Nazis were in power, 1,600 scholars, about 32% of the total of 5,000 university teachers were dismissed. That rose to 39% after the Anschluss of Austria.

In 1936 the University of Heidelberg was 550 years old. At the celebrations Philipp Lenard, Nobel prize winner and party members since before 1933, unveiled Aryan Physics, which was set against Jewish Physics, the latter being marked by excessive theorising and relying on abstract mathematical constructions, like the theory of relativity.

By then Albert Einstein who had been a professor in Berlin and director of the Kaiser Wilhelm institute for Physics, today the Max Planck institute, had already fled to the United States. I initially wanted to recite a list of the most eminent German emigrees to the US that Peter Watson had put together, but it is too long and does not work well in a podcast format. If I have time later on, I will write it up and add it to the show notes.

That is now almost to the day 80 years ago. Sure, Aryan physics have long ago collapsed under its own weight – that is actual physic. And German scientists are again winning Nobel prizes (109 since 1945) and make important breakthroughs, like the mRNA based Covid vaccine. But it took Germany decades to climb out of the hole the wanton destruction of its’ universities has dug. Because a university is not just libraries, laboratories, faculties and journals. It is the people, the passing on, not just of knowledge, but of the joy of learning, the encouragement that a good teacher can bring. The common saying is that most great discoveries are made by people standing on the shoulders of giants, but the more appropriate metaphor is that they are holding the baton in an eternal relay race where every runner has made gains and passed them on to the next, encouraged by those who have run before and encouraging those that will run after them. Once the baton has been dropped it takes a very long time before that team comes back into contention.

When I went to university, there were hardly any foreign students felt attracted to come there. By 1998/99 that had improved to 9.2% foreigners, i.e. people without German passport, and that number has now risen to 16.4%, which is very reassuring, but still a long way from the UK, where 30% of the student body has come from abroad to get an education they presumably do not get at home.

In March 1945, the US 44^th infantry division received orders to shell the city of Heidelberg in order to dislodge German forces. The artillery commander, Brigadier general William A. Beiderlinden and his commanding officer major general William F. Dean took the decision to spare the city if they could. They contacted the city mayor, Dr. Karl Neinhaus, who, at significant risk for his own life, negotiated the withdrawal of the German troops in exchange for sparing them the bombardment.

When I lived in Heidelberg the story was that Beiderlinden and Dean had studied in Heidelberg, but that is not accurate. But still the name of the city and the fame of its university was so far reaching even amongst Americans who had not studied there, that they defied an explicit order to avoid its destruction.

That is it, our run through of the history of the German universities. Even though this is the longest episode to date, it is also the one that left me with more questions than answers. Next week we are back to our usual fare and continue the trip, going up the Rhine to Freiburg, cross the Black Forest and then turn north again to Tubingen and Stuttgart. I hope you will join us again.

And in the meantime, if you are so inclined, check out historyofthegermans.com/support to lend the show a hand.

Episode 187 – Johannes Gutenberg’s Pressing Matters

by History of the Germans Podcast on 27th March 202525th February 2026

The Invention of printing

This podcast is now well into its fourth year and I have established my process for research, script writing and recording. As for research, that usually means going to the London Library and bend down to the lowest shelf to dig up some age-old copy of a German language book that happens to be the one and only works that goes into the kind of detail on the topic at hand you guys have gotten used to.

Imagine my confusion when I started looking into Johannes Gutenberg and found not just a few books, but whole shelves of books in English, German, French, Italian and dozens more talking about even the most intricate details of the life and works of the inventor of the printing press.

Drowning in this avalanche of material, I realized that at a minimum this story requires two episodes, one about how Gutenberg came to achieve this breakthrough and then the impact his invention had on the world and on the Germans in particular.

Hence today’s episode is about the man and his invention, though about the man we know so very little….

History of the Germans

HotGPod is now entering its 9th season. So far we have covered:

Ottonian Emperors (# 1- 21)
– Henry the Fowler (#1)
– Otto I (#2-8)
– Otto II (#9-11)
– Otto II (#11-14)
– Henry II (#15-17)
– Germany in 1000 (#18-21)

Salian Emperors(#22-42)
– Konrad II (#22- 25)
– Henry III (#26-29)
– Henry IV/Canossa (#30-39)
– Henry V (#40-42)
– Concordat of Worms (#42)

Early Hohenstaufen (#43-69)
– Lothar III (#43-46)
– Konrad III (#47-49)
– Frederick Barbarossa (#50-69)

Late Hohenstaufen (#70-94)
– Henry VI (#70-72)
– Philipp of Swabia (#73-74)
– Otto IV (#74-75)
– Frederick II (#75-90)
– Epilogue (#91-94)

Eastern Expansion (#95-108)

The Hanseatic League (#109-127)

The Teutonic Knights (#128-137)

Hence today’s episode is about the man and his invention, though about the man we know so very little….

And here is a video that helps understnding how the machine works: How a Gutenberg Printing Press Works

And a book recommendation: The Gutenberg revolution : the story of a genius and an invention that changed the world : Man, John, 1941- : Free Download, Borrow, and Streaming : Internet Archive

As always:

Homepage with maps, photos, transcripts and blog: www.historyofthegermans.com

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So far I have:

Ep. 187: Johannes Gutenberg’s Pressing Matters

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Transcript

Hello and welcome to the History of the Germans: Episode 187 – Gutenberg’s Pressing Matters, which is also episode 3 of Season 10 – the Empire in the 15^th century.

Hence today’s episode is about the man and his invention, though about the man we know so very little….

But before we start just another reminder that the History of the Germans is advertising free and for good reason. It does not take a genius to notice that the way we communicate as a society has changed. We do spend a lot of time on electronic media of all kinds, not just social media, but podcasts, streaming, youtube etc. Most of this content is paid for by advertising. Advertisers, in the absence of better metrics, pay the platforms and creators on the basis of eyeballs or ear canals. And since our crocodile brains are still dominating the cerebellum, our eyeballs and ear canals always turn to the loudest and most eye catching. But that is not aways the information our frontal cortex wants and should feed on. We need stuff that may be less exciting, but more thoughtful. And that is not what advertisers can pay for. So we need at least a part of our information world that is funded by its users. That is why I have subscriptions to newspapers and libraries, am happy to pay for the BBC and for Netflix. And for some podcasts and Substacks too. And if you want to do the same and for some reason feel the History of the Germans is deserving your support, go to historyofthegermans.com/support and sign up as a patron. And thanks a lot to Marko P., James Zapf, Kenneth H., MarkV, Mark Young, Swin Purple and Jeff N. who have already done that.

Printing Like Gutenberg and Hand Casting Type

And with that, back to the show

Johannes Gutenberg was born sometime between 1393 and 1400 in Mainz. His family was comparatively well off, part of the 100 ancient families of the city, what we call today a patrician. The family lived mainly off annuities, financial instruments issued by the city that generated a solid and predictable income. We also know that his father was a companion of the mint, meaning he was on some sort of supervisory board of the archepiscopal mint that struck the Rhenisch Gulden, the most common currency in the Holy Roman Empire.

His name, Gutenberg, derived -as was customary – from his family home, the Hof zum Gutenberg in the city centre, next to St. Christopherus church. Gutenberg translates as “hill of the good people” but that was not its origin. Where it stood had once been the home of one of the largest Jewish communities in europe. That community had been subjected to pogroms ever since 1096, as we discussed in episode 38, but the great expulsion had come in 1349 when the Black Death struck. Allegedly 6,000 men, women and children chose to commit suicide by setting light to their synagogue rather than convert. Where they once lived, the Judenberg, was given to the city council and a patrician family built a house on the site. As memory of the atrocities faded, that house turned from Judenberg to Gutenberg, which in 1419 the family adopted as their family name.

Hof zum Gutenberg in 1835 (a baroque palais built after the original house was burned down in the 17th cnetury)

And that is all we know about his first 30 plus years. He may have gone to university, he may have trained as a goldsmith, or he may have just hung out in in bars and nightclubs for all we know.

In 1434 he moved to Strasbourg, a city that at that time was much larger and much richer than Mainz. Mainz had been going downhill due to mismanagement by the city council, internal conflicts, the endless fighting between the archbishops and their neighbours and the regular schisms between two contenders for the archepiscopal throne. It had not recovered its population from before the Black Death. Strasbourg on the other hand was thriving, reaching 25,000 inhabitants, a major hub in the wine trade that stretched all the way to Norway and Scotland. Its cathedral, one of the greatest achievements of gothic art was still rising up and the streets were lined with impressive stone houses of prosperous merchants and artisans.

What Gutenberg did in Strasbourg for the following 10 years is shrouded in mystery. Some argue he did already begin printing there in 1440, but no proof of such activity can be found. All we do know about this time is from court records, according to which he was engaged in the production of mirrors and some “adventure and art” that was kept secret.

He left Strasbourg in 1444, then disappears from the records before he returned to Mainz in 1448. Seemingly flush with cash he buys out his siblings and moves in the old family home. And that is where he starts his printing business for real. In 1454 he published his masterpiece, the Gutenberg bible.

That is it. He never wrote down what inspired him, how he developed the technology or what he wanted to achieve with it. All these books that have been written about Gutenberg’s life, and there are at least three available in English, are all conjecture. Well-argued and meticulously researched, but in the end more suitable for a true crime than for a history podcast.

But what we have is his magnificent innovation, according to Luther, “Gods ultimate and greatest gift”.

Johannes Gutenberg stands in a line with the world’s great inventors, the James Watts, the Thomas Alva Edisons, the Carl Benz and Louis Pasteurs. But as much as we would all love to read the story of the lone genius who had that one brilliant idea that propelled the world forward, we have to acknowledge that boring academic research has proven again and again, that there are very few if any instances where innovation happened that way. All these great advances were usually the culmination of multiple strands of developments that came together at a particular time and a particular place to be picked up by some determined individual who happened to be at the right place at the right time.

Let’s see whether printing with moveable letter was the same..

First up, Gutenberg did not invent printing. People have been printing things for hundreds if not thousands of years using wooden stamps. And since the late 14^th century the art of the woodcut was spreading cross europe, a technique that allowed to print images or a page of text multiple times.

*Madonna del Fuoco* (*Madonna of the Fire*,woodcut c. 1425), Cathedral of Forlì, in Italy

Gutenberg’s technology deviated from this technique first by using metal rather than wood. Metal is much more durable, allowing the production of a much larger number of copies before the stamps wear out.

The second downside of the woodcut was that to create a whole book would require to carve every single page first in wood, as a mirror image and then making an imprint. That was not only time consuming, but also left no room for error. If say only one letter was wrong, the whole woodcut had to be made from scratch again. Which is why nobody did that.

Gutenberg’s press used moveable type. So there would be a stamp for each letter and they would be assembled to form the respective words and sentences. If there was an error, all you need to do, was replace the letter and restart the printing.

That’s it. Genius! That is the invention. Let’s just go and start printing.

But hold on. Let’s think about that. If you want to print a book, you will need a lot of these individual letter stamps, called punches. And I mean a lot. For example in my scripts I use about 3,500 characters per page. The Gutenberg bible was a bit more generous with space and used only 2,400. But then he printed at least two pages on the same sheet of paper. That is 4,800 punches minimum per print run.

So, let’s take a look at how these punches could be made. Punches were originally created in coin making. Up until the modern days coins were made by creating a metal disk usually containing some gold, silver or copper. This disk is then struck with a punch to imprint the desired image, say heads or tails on to the disk. The punch consists of a handle like that of a chisel, a steel shank of a few centimetres’ length into which the punch maker had engraved an image. The coin maker would then carefully place this punch over the metal disk and strike it with a hammer. In a sophisticated mint, such as the mint in Mainz, there would be another die underneath the disk, called an anvil, so that both sides of the coin would be struck at the same time.

Now here is the rub. The anvil lasted about 36,000 strikes and the punch only about 20,000 strikes, A very large mint like Venice would produce about 20,000 coins a day, meaning the punch needed to be replaced every day. Mainz was certainly smaller, but still, the punches only functioned for a limited period of time.

So every day or every couple of days a punch maker needed to engrave a new punch. And this punch had to look exactly the same as the previous punch to make sure the coins looked identical. Then the coins were quite small the images however quite intricate. These minute images had to be engraved into a steel punch that had to be heated and cooled several times to harden it, but without becoming brittle. Then the engraving had to be done into the steel, with steel. There was no way you could get hold of a diamond cutter. So steel was used on steel to scrape off some minuscule curls of steel. I have no way of checking this, but according to John Man’s book The Gutenberg Revolution, a good punch maker could create letter on a scale of 0.01 millimetres, which is 6 times the resolution of a modern laser printer.

And a punch maker needs about a day to make one punch. So to make our 4,800 punches needed to print two pages would take, well 4,800 days, which given feast days and holidays meant it would take one punch maker 20 years to make all the punches needed for these 2 pages, or 20 punch makers a year. And Gutenberg did neither have 20 years nor the funds to employ 20 punch makers. Plus each letter would end up being just that tiny bit different.

So he needed a more efficient solution to make metal punches. And that solution was the hand mould. Now I have been warned to try to describe the hand mould. Someone called Joseph Moxton tried 200 years ago and when his 13 page description was reprinted, the editors wrote in the comments that “nobody should try to understand the hand mould by reference to this description”.

Type Foundry – Druckkunst-Museum Leipzig

But the idea is the following. You create one punch for each letter. Then you use the punch to create an imprint, called the matrix. The matrix is then inserted and fixed at the bottom of the hand mould. And then you pour metal into the mould which then creates a little rectangular stick with the letter at the top. Repeat again and again and hey presto one punch is turned into lots and lots of cloned punches. But there is still a problem, if you were to make these from say steel, it would take a few hours to cool naturally or you could cool it down rapidly using water or oil, which would add another step in the process.

Which gets us to the next bit of alchemy, the metal he used for these cloned punches. It was an amalgam of lead, tin and antimony. This alloy is not only liquid but has a habit of cooling extremely quickly. So, you can pour in the molten metal that was heated to 327 degrees Celsius and take out the new punch almost immediately, already cool enough to be handled. And bang, you take out the letter punch and you can use the hand mould again to make the next, and the next and the next.

Ok, great. Now you can make lots and lots of the 24 or 26 letters of the alphabet. But there is another problem. Gutenberg wanted to create a print that looked like a handwritten manuscript, just better. And that meant he needed a lot more than 26 types. There were various special signs that were used as abbreviations in the handwritten manuscripts around at the time. He needed these. And he wanted the flow from one letter to the next – again – like in a handwritten manuscript, which meant having to create multiple versions of each letter with different attachment points. In the end, his typefaces had between 220 and 290 different characters. All of which had to be cut into a punch and then moulded dozens, if not hundreds of times.

Great, now you have a pile of letters, but how do you turn this into a page of text? You need to fix them into something. Gutenberg’s solution was to create a frame into which the type setter would place the individual letters. To stop them from wiggling about they were placed into a frame. Sounds straightforward, but let’s think again. First up, not all sentences are the same length, whilst the frame is rectangular. Well, you can fill in the gaps with punch that have no letter, effectively creating a void. Or, you could create various versions of the same letters with just marginally larger or smaller width to end up with a perfectly justified edge to the text. And finally you could play around with little fillers to widen the gap between different letters. And all that has to be done in a way that does not make the text jerky, but flowing naturally, easy to read.

Then you have to make sure that all the letters are absolutely, 100% the same height. If not, you end up with one letter being bold and the next one faint. And we are talking of precision levels in the sub millimetre level.

So now you got your frame with all the letters firmly held in place, something called a “Forme”. The next question is what material you want to print on. The traditional material to write on in the Middle ages was vellum, made from calf skin. One calf skin produced about 3 pages of the highest quality or 6 pages if stretched out. Hugely expensive. It was a fairly easy to print on material, but if printing was to become as wide spread as it did, it needed another, a cheaper material.

Willkommen | Gutenberg-Museum

Paper had been around in Western Europe since the 11^th century as it spread from China via the Islamic world. But in europe large scale production only began in the 14^th century. One reason was that Chinese paper was fairly soft and absorbent, perfectly suited for Chinese calligraphy, but not ideal for illuminated manuscripts. The Europeans added animal glue to the mix, which hardened it, so it could take ink and paint. The first German papermill opened in 1390 in Nurnberg, but the most desirable paper came from Italy.

The next question was what ink to use. Handwritten manuscripts were written using Iron-gall ink, a black or brown mixture made from iron sulphate, tannic acid and gum arabicum. This ink was too watery, it ran off the types and smeared all over the pages. It was also acidic, so often faded through the paper to the opposite side.

Gutenberg therefore had to develop a new kind of ink, that, since he wanted his books to look like manuscripts, had to have a similar colour to Iron-Gall ink but was more viscous and sticky. Printer’s ink was based on oil paint a material only recently made popular by the early Netherlandish painters, the Jan van Eycks, Rogier van the Weyden and Robert Campin. During the 1440 and 1450s this technique was gradually coming up the Rhine river, finding an important centre in Alsace. In all likelihood it was there, in the workshops of one of these pioneers of oil painting in the Rhineland that Gutenberg first encountered oil-based paint, without which printing with moveable type was simply impossible.

Then we get to the last major technological component, the actual printing press. Woodcuts and other prints had been made by rubbing the paper onto the carved piece. That did work to a degree, but often left smudges of paint on the page. And Gutenberg needed to print both sides of the page, which meant he needed to fix the paper in exactly the same place twice. Which means we needed a way to fix both the frame with the letter and the paper into place and then apply the exactly accurate level of force on to it.

The solution for that was – the wine press. Mainz is in the midst of a wine growing region. The Gutenberg family owned a farm near Eltville, right in the centre of the Rheingau, source of some of Germany’s finest white wines. Wine presses work with screws and are calibrated to exert exactly the right amount of pressure to squeeze the liquid out of the grapes, but not smash them into pulp. Ideal for printing, where again precision was key.

That is the hardware, the letter types moulded in the hand mould, the frame they are fixed in, called the forme, the ink and the printing press. But that still does not make a book. We also need a process.

The first step is to carve the type, a job usually done by a gold or silversmith, ideally one with experience working in making coin punches. Then we have someone making the types by punching the matrix, fixing it inside the hand mould, first creating the special alloy and then pouring it into the mould.

Once we have the typefaces, they go to the setter who puts together the actual text by placing the respective letters inside the frame. He or she would usually have arranged the punches in two cases, one for the larger and one for the smaller letters, where we got our terms upper case and lower case from. This is a truly sophisticated job. For one, all the letters the setter sees are mirror image. And then he or she has to work out all the gaps and widths to fit the text on to the frame.

The frame is then taken to make a first simple imprint which is given to the corrector. That person will read through the first imprint and check for errors. This is again hugely important because the advantage of printing over handwritten manuscripts was not only cost, but even more, accuracy. Copyists made mistakes and these mistakes then compounded through the line of distribution, from one writer to the next. A printed copy was exactly the same as the next one, making sure only the accurate information is transmitted. But for that the information had to be accurate to start with.

Once approved, the forme then goes to the actual printer. Each printing press is operated by two people. One handles the formes and applies the ink. Application was done with two large leather balls which are covered with a film of oil paint and then banged vertically on to the forme. You do not want to rub it side to side because it would seep in between the letters and smear across the page. Doing that meant the banger often got the sticky oil paint on his fingers that was difficult to wash off. Hence you needed another person to handle the clean sheets of paper. The paper needed to be a bit moist to better absorb the paint, which was one part of the job. Then he had to fix it in place on the paper holder, then lower it over the forme. And finally he slid the forme and paper under the press, turned the screw, released it and slid everything back out. I put a link in the show notes for a video where you can see how that worked.

How a Gutenberg Printing Press Works

Then the paper and paint needed to dry, which meant it was brought up to the loft where it was hung up like washing.

Then the whole process was repeated, to print the back of the page. To make sure that the back and front aligned perfectly, the paper frame had two little pins that pricked the paper. When it came back down having dried in the loft, you put the paper through the same pricks when fixing it, and hey presto, perfection.

I hope you get what I am telling you here. The invention of printing was not some eureka moment where Gutenberg jumped up in his bathtub and went – that is how it works.

This was likely a decades long process of trial and error, developing each one of these specific instruments, the hand mould, the forme, the ink, the paper, the printing press and then going through hundreds or thousands of iterations to figure out which combination of materials and pressure worked best. Since Gutenberg left no records of his life apart from legal documents, we do not know how many iterations he went through. But to give you an idea, James Dyson went through 5,127 prototypes of his bagless vacuum cleaner before he finally released DC01, the product that would make him a billionaire. Elon Musk, not my favourite person, took 6 years before his rockets first reached orbit, after several exploded, and that was based on a technology that had already existed since the 1940s. The first reusable rocket, his true innovation, took another 7 years to develop. In other words, innovation is 10% inspiration and 90% perspiration, that was the case in the 15^th century and it still is the case today.

And it is also most unlikely Gutenberg did develop each of these tools and processes all by himself. Even if he had some goldsmith skills, for which there is no evidence, it is unlikely he could operate at the level of precision required to make the punches. We know he hired a goldsmith, Hans Dunne in Strasburg and kept him on when he moved to Mainz. As for all the other tools, let’s remember that from his days in Strasburg onwards, he had a team of 6 to 8 people working with him, many great artisans in their own right and staying with him throughout.

And then we have the time and place. Mainz and Strasburg in the first half of the 15^th century. Both cities lay on the Rhine river, at the time the trading super highway connecting north and south. There was a mint in Mainz and with it the specialists skills to make high precision punches. And Gutenberg knew about those given his father had been one of the board members of the Mint. It was right around that time that oil painting spread southwards along the rhine from Flanders to Alsace and then Italy. Paper had gained popularity and was making the same journey in the opposite direction. And Mainz lay in a wine making region with wine presses galore.

It is unlikely that Mainz in 1450 was the only place in the world where printing with moveable type could be invented, in large part because it was invented a few decades earlier in Korea and other forms of printing had been used in China for centuries.

But what moveable type printing did in the 1450s in Mainz was to catch on, which is something it did not do in Korea. And that had to do with two crucial elements every innovation needs, funding and willing customers.

If you look back at the history of Silicon Valley, it is quite obvious that this outburst of innovation and creativity did not come out of nothing. It was a combination of pentagon, mainly navy funded research in Northern California, Stanford university, and then starting in 1972, venture capital firms providing the funding for all that makes up our modern world, including the pinnacle of technological and creative achievement, podcasts.

Gutenberg too was dependent upon financial backers.

He found a first group of them when he moved to Strasbourg in 1434. He himself had about 350 gulden, enough to buy a substantial house, but not enough to create a business on the scale we are talking about here. So he invited three partners to join him.

And at that point he did not invite them to join them in a decades long chase to develop the printing press. The idea he brought them was to make mirrors.

Not posh glass mirrors, but small handheld mirrors. How do you get rich with mirrors? Well, that is something that could only have worked in the madness of the 15^th century. The black death and the recurring outbreaks of the Plague, the huge uncertainty caused by endless feuds, the absence of a central authority, the split of the church during the schism, the Hussite revolt, the threat of a Turkish invasion, all that left people utterly unsettled. They sought refuge in their faith, and in particular in the support they hoped saintly interventions could bring. This is a century of enormous pilgrimages, and one of the most significant ones was the pilgrimage to Aachen. Aachen cathedral does not only hold the bones of Charlemagne, a saint at least in the eyes of many, but some of the most revered of relics, relics that had touched Jesus himself and members of his family. These include the robe of the Virgin Mary, the swaddling clothes of the infant Jesus, the cloth in which the head of John the Baptist was wrapped, and the loincloth worn by Christ on the cross. Touching these sacred relics would transfer so much holiness, any illness, sadness or affliction would instantly dissolve.

Every 7 years these saintly objects would be taken outside the cathedral and shown to the people. Each of these 10 days would see 10,000 pilgrims descending on Aachen trying to catch a glimpse of Jesus’ loincloth. No way the canons would allow anyone to touch the precious objects, but they were so imbued with sanctity, they radiated goodness. So simply being in the presence and catching some of these rays would bring salvation from troubles.

But even though Aachen may see a 100,000 visitors over the 10 days of the festival, this was not enough to satisfy the demand. All those who stayed home, be it due to lack of funds or illness, were in dire need of deliverance. And there was a way to collect these rays of holiness and bring them back home to your loved ones. All you needed was a hand mirror that would capture the rays emanating from the sacred relics and contain them.

That is what these mirrors may have looked like

And these were the kinds of mirrors that Johannes Gutenberg intended to produce. And now take a breath, guess how many mirrors he intended to make? 500? A 1000? 10,000? No, 32,000 was the intended production run. Selling those at half a guilder each that would bring in revenues of 16,000 guilders. Production cost were – hold on – 600 guilders. A gross profit margin of 96% or a profit of 26x. That is more than say Facebook or Google Search, albeit not by much. Just to put all this into perspective. Gutenberg’s income was about 30 guilders and his net worth was about 300 guilders.

We do not know how Gutenberg intended to make these magic mirrors, in particular we do not know how he would produce them in such quantities. What he did find though was investors who were willing to support this venture with what turned out to be a lot more than 600 guilders.

At which point we hit on one of the greatest Gutenberg mysteries. What was it he did during his years in Strasburg. Sure, there were the mirrors, but his partners and he himself poured a lot more than the initially intended 600 guilders into this venture. And then there is the court case. Because, surprise, surprise, the scheme did not work out as planned. There was a court case at the end of it where the son of one of the partners demanded his father’s money back.

And what is weird about this court case is that no one, not the claimant, not the witnesses and certainly not the defendant Gutenberg was prepared to explain what exactly the venture was. They talk about an “aventur und kunst”, best translated as a venture and an art. And then they go on about presses and formes and secret arts. Something else beyond the making of mirrors had been going on.

Given all we heard about the complexity of printing and all the different technologies and processes that had to be developed, it is fair to assume that much of the money intended to make mirrors went into the R&D of printing. And then there is the fact that when he arrives in Mainz in 1348, he immediately sets out to print things using his printing press.

Having left Strasburg and his old business partners behind what he now needed was financing to scale up his business. And he found this financing from a man called Johann Fust. Fust was an important citizen of Mainz and a very wealthy man. He lent Gutenberg 800 gulden in 1449 to set up a printing workshop and would provide funding over the next five years to the tune of 4,500 gulden, the same as 12 substantial houses in the city.

Everything is now in place. Gutenberg has a technology and a process. He had brought along some members of his old team from Strasbourg and hired more. And he had financing.

All he now needed was customers. Who would want to own a printed book, or any printed material?

What he had going for him was a veritable explosion in literacy during the previous hundred years. Knowledge was no longer confined to within the walls of monasteries. By 1440 the German lands boasted 9 universities, up from none in 1370. Running a trading business had become more and more reliant on writing, on the exchange of letters and the drafting of contracts, hence the sons and sometimes the daughters of the city merchants went to newly opened schools. And even artisans and labourers keen to expand their horizons learned to read.

And what did they read, manuscripts. Along with the growth in literacy a whole industry of scribes had developed. Paper had been the killer application. Costing a10th of vellum and parchment, the material itself had become accessible. Entrepreneurs set up writing businesses where scribes would copy books, pamphlets, missals and breviers by the dozen.

In other words, books were more and more accessible.

But these handwritten books and documents had a serious weakness. They were written in haste and hence prone to errors. And for some books, errors were unacceptable.

A copy of a major theological treatise must not carry mistakes – imagine what happened if you misinterpret St. Augustine. Same goes even more for missals, the books that lay down in detail how each mass throughout the year is supposed to be celebrated. Any error there and the whole of the congregation may find itself falsely instructed.

But even more practical things needed to be accurate, like schoolbooks. The most widely used schoolbook of the 15^th century was the so-called Donatus, a 4^th century Latin grammar, a concise book aimed at young students. Again, it is self-evident that a student buying this book would be very badly served did he pick up a version with lots of errors.

So, this is how the history of printing begins, with a school book. The Donatus by Gutenberg probably came out in 1450 and remained a mainstay of his workshop throughout.

Another line of business came out of the political situation. The Ottomans kept progressing up the Balkans whilst at the same time threatening Cyprus and Constantinople. Pope Nikolaus V called for a crusade and to fund the endeavour offered full indulgences against pay.

Indulgences were not only spiritual offers, but they were also physical objects. About one page of dense text recording the exact wording of the papal bull granting the indulgence, its conditions and application. It also featured, of course, the name of the sinner, the name of the priest granting the indulgence and his signature on the receipt.

These pieces of paper could be presented at the next confession and led to automatic absolution of sins and reduction of time in purgatory. Again, this was not a document where spelling mistakes or – worse – the omission of whole lines of text was acceptable.

Coming to the rescue, Johannes Gutenberg and his printing press. Hence the second key output of the printing press were forms for indulgences, faithfully recording the papal bull, leaving space to add the names of sinner and priest and the signature.

Other products were more for daily use. One was the so-called Turk calendar, a calendar for the year with woodcuts and statements encouraging the reader to take up arms against the Turks, or even better, give money to those who wanted to fight. I will not go into another product, the so called sibylline prophecies that he may or may not have printed and what they meant. That is the kind of rabbit whole that has swallowed many a Gutenberg scholar.

An Admonition to Christendom against the Turks. | Library of Congress

So far , so seriously underwhelming. School books, calendars, indulgences – clearly not the kind of output that propels one to the European Pantheon of greats.

What Gutenberg needed was a best seller, a book that would display the absolute superiority of his innovative production process and that would hopefully make him rich.

Talking about rich, the print runs were going well, but cash flow was still a bit tight. The problem was the same that had felled so many innovative companies – payment terms.

By the time the first little scholar handed over his 2 shillings for the Donatus, Gutenberg had already paid all his suppliers of paper, metal and ink, his employees, his rent and the interest on his loans. And as demand for his print runs went up, so did his upfront expenditure, meaning he had a thriving business but every money that came in went straight out the door to pay from materials for the next print run. And that meant he did not have the money to make that one killer app, the kind of book that would divide world history into before and after.

So he went back to Johann Fust and asked for another loan, a loan needed to set up another, a second print workshop where he would produce that killer app.

And what was this killer app. Initially he had wanted to piggy back on an initiative to issue a new, revised missal for the whole of the enormous archdiocese of Mainz and all its suffragan bishoprics. If that had gone through, it would have been a gold mine. Gutenberg’s printing press was the only device that could guarantee that every single copy of the missal was identical. And every one of the thousands of parishes in the diocese would have needed to buy one.

But it did not come off. Both the archbishop and the Roman curia had sponsored the development of missals and neither could force the other to sanction their product. So no missal was agreed and betting on one winning out in the end would have been utter madness.

Exhausted with waiting for the missal, in 1452, Gutenberg decided to go for the big one, the whole bible.

To get an idea of the scale of the undertaking, the Gutenberg bible comprised 1,275 pages of text mostly in 42 lines. It was produced in an edition of 180 copies, some of them on vellum, but most on paper. Not any odd paper, but special, expensive Italian paper.

It was not just an accurate copy of the at the time most accurate copy of the vulgate, the Latin bible, it was also and still remains, one of the most beautiful books ever printed. Each letter is printed as sharp and as accurate as humanly possible. The entire text, in two columns is justified on the end, requiring an incredibly fiddly adjustment of individual letters until they all match.

In 1455 probably Fust, not Gutenberg, brought the bible to the Frankfurt fair, then and now the greatest trade fair in the German lands. And already at the time it had a section dedicated to books. And who would come to poke around the latest issues, than our friend, legendary composer of bestselling erotica and future pope Pius II, Silvio Aeneas Piccolomini.

And he got very excited, so excited he wrote back to his then boss, the Spanish cardinal de Caravjal: quote: “I did not see complete bibles, but quinternions [those five sheet, twenty page sections] of different books, written in extremely elegant and correct letter, without error, which your eminence could read with no difficulty and without glasses” end quote.

Piccolomini tried to buy a copy but was told that all copies had been pre-ordered.

Gutenberg had his best seller. He had produced a book that was not cheaper than a manuscript, but infinitely better, its letters sharper, its layout more beautiful and most importantly – error free.

Gutenberg stood on the verge of becoming immensely rich and celebrated as the man who invented the world’s most important new technology for a 1000 years. But as he stood there, Johann Fust pulled the rug from under his feet.

Gutenberg had never paid any of the interest he owed on all the various loans he had taken out. And right now, in 1455, with the bibles almost completed, but not sold for cash, he had no money, just debt. Sure, he knew that as soon as he dispatched the books, the funds, maybe as much as 9,000 gulden would be flooding in, but right now, he did not have a penny. And Johann Fust knew that too. He sued Gutenberg, Gutenberg was forced to hand over both his workshops with all the presses, the nearly finished bibles, the materials and everything else he had worked on for nearly two decades.

Johann Fust and his son-in-law, Gutenberg’s former assistant, Peter Schoeffer sold the bibles, made a Fortune, continued the workshop, and rapidly became the largest printing business in the Rhineland and publishing books almost as magnificent as the Gutenberg bible. Gutenberg himself kept going on a smaller scale, but would never have the resources to ever produce anything on the scale of the Gutenberg bible.

And that is where we will stop for today. Next week I will try to assess the impact of Gutenberg’s invention, a task that has defeated many a better man, but – like Gutenberg – I have embarked on this path and cannot stop.

And as usual my closing plea to support the show at historyofthegermans.com/support. All your help is very much appreciated.

Episode 172 – A World Event

by History of the Germans Podcast on 28th November 202426th February 2026

The Council of Constance Part 2

The Council of Constance, which took place from November 1414 to April 1418, became a monumental event in history, not just for its pivotal decisions like the election of Pope Martin V and the execution of Jan Hus, but for the dynamic and often chaotic atmosphere it fostered among its diverse attendees.

Over the course of three and a half years, the city transformed into a melting pot of intellectual exchange, as leading minds from across Europe converged to debate pressing issues of the time, including the rights of indigenous groups and the justification of tyrannicide.

Amid cramped living conditions and a thriving entertainment scene, scholars exchanged ideas and manuscripts, paving the way for the Renaissance. The presence of 718 licensed sex workers also highlighted the social complexities of the gathering, reflecting the era’s attitudes towards prostitution and morality, even among the clergy.

The Council served as a critical juncture that would shape not only religious but also political landscapes in Europe for years to come.

In November 1414 30,000 academics and aristocrats, bishops, blacksmiths and bakers, cardinals, counts and chefs, doctors, dancers and diplomats, princes, prelates and public girls descended on a town in Southern Germany built to house 6 to 8,000 people. They planned to stay a few weeks, 2-3 months max. But 3 and a half years later most of them were still there.

What did they get up to? The great tentpole events, the trial of John XXIII, the burning of Jan Hus and the election of Martin V is what the council of Constance is remembered for, but what about all that time in between?

This world event was so much more than a papal election and the trial of a heretic. For 3 years Constance became a never-ending G20 summit, the greatest academic conference of the Middle Ages, a permanent imperial diet and the centre of the catholic church. Everybody who was anybody was there either in the flesh or had at least sent a delegation.

Issues and concerns were brought before the council that still plague people today. Is it ever right to kill a tyrant, and if so, when can it be justified? What rights should be guaranteed for indigenous groups, in this case Pagans, and how should their dignity be protected? Other attendees sought justice for crimes committed against them or their families in a world where political murder had become commonplace. Others still demanded their reward for years of service, making the house of Hohenzollern the margraves of Brandenburg.

Living cheek by jowl in tiny Constance the leading minds from across Europe, from the ancient universities of Paris, Oxford and Bologna as well as from the newly founded seats of learning in Krakow, Prague, Heidelberg and Vienna shared their ideas, opinions, books and discoveries, paving the way for the intellectual shift we call the Renaissance.

Enough, me thinks to provide 30 minutes of great historical entertainment….

Chapters:

00:13 – The Council of Constance: A Gathering Like No Other
03:31 – The Council of Constance: A Gathering of Minds
08:16 – The Gathering of Intellectuals at Constance
12:57 – The Role of Book Hunters in the Renaissance
24:23 – Political Violence in the 14th and 15th Century
29:56 – The Debate on Tyrannicide at the Council of Constance
35:21 – The Council of Constance and Its Impact

As always:

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So far I have:

To listen on Spotify – click here

Ep. 172: Council of Constance (1414-1418) – A Gathering of the (Christian) World

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TRANSCRIPT

Hello and welcome to the History of the Germans: Episode 172 – The council of Constance Part II, also episode 9 of season 9 The Reformation before the Reformation

When I began working on this episode, I had planned to move straight to the showstoppers. I think I said something to that effect at the end of the last episode. But when I dug deeper, I realised that this world event was so much more than a papal election and the trial of a dissenter. For 3 years Constance was at the same time a never-ending G20 summit, the greatest academic conference of the Middle Ages, a permanent imperial diet and the centre of the catholic church. Everybody who was anybody was there either in the flesh or had at least sent a delegation.

Issues and concerns were brought before the council that still plague people today. Is it ever right to kill a tyrant, and if so, when can it be justified? What rights should be guaranteed for indigenous groups, in this case Pagans, and how should their dignity be protected? Other attendees sought justice for crimes committed against them in a world where political murder had become commonplace. Others still demanded their reward for years of service or simply wanted their rights recognised.

Enough, me thinks to provide 30 minutes of great historical entertainment….

But before we start here are the customary 90 seconds of pleading for support. Let me keep it short – no I do not own a mattress from the internet, or have a razor subscription, nor do I put my precious mental health into the non-existent hands of a disembodied voice on Zoom. And if I did, you would not hear about it. Because the History of the Germans is advertising free. And to keep it that way many of you have already made a one-time donation or have subscribed on historyofthegermans.com/support. In particular we thank Thomas Barbeau, Robert K., James P., CC, Mit S., and Beau W. for having signed up already.

Constance: A Cultural Hub

The Council of Constance lasted from November 1414 to April 1418. All this time the participants had to live in incredibly cramped conditions. The great cardinals and imperial princes stayed in the splendid mansions of the patricians, Bishops and counts in the local inns or living with the more prosperous members of the artisan’s guilds. But the 5,000 prelates and hundreds of knights had to move into bedsits and further down the food chain we hear of simple folk moving into empty wine barrels.

Much of their time was taken up with building consensus within and between the nations, a process that was drawn-out and laborious. Position papers were exchanged, academic essays published, sermons reported, letters sent back and forth between the representatives and their principals and much backroom work undertaken, not dissimilar to modern day political gatherings.

But that still left room for other pursuits. The city and the various princes and prelates called on the hundreds of buglers and pipers, dancers and acrobats to put on entertainments. Tournaments were held.

But sometimes one had to breathe some fresh air. Many ventured out of the overcrowded city in their spare time, often to the spa town of Baden near Zurich. There, you could find hot springs that had been enjoyed since Roman times. And much like today, foreigners would write home in astonishment that the locals enjoyed their sauna in the buff.

Talking about the delights of disrobing, there is one topic that comes up in the lore of the council again and again and even made it into a symbol for the city of Constance, and that are the sex workers coming to service the councillors. I think this needs to be seen in context. Prostitution in the Middle Ages was largely tolerated, even by the church, and for simple pragmatic reasons. It was better men went to prostitutes than ending up messing up marriages or even worse raping women. Ok, the church also thought that it was better than masturbation and homosexuality, but let’s leave that to one side. Thomas Aquinas put it best when he said that if you remove the latrines from the palace, the staterooms will start to smell. There is the well documented case that the bishop of Winchester ran the brothels of Southwark in London. Clergy too used prostitutes, for instance in Dijon, about 20% of the brothel customers were members of the clergy. Attitudes to clergy using prostitutes are hard to gage. We have preachers who railed against the hypocrisy of priests demanding moral standards of their flock whilst building a special gate to facilitate their tete a tetes. But there are also reports of people believing that sex was a natural urge and that it was better the vicar went to the bathhouse than seducing the members of the congregation. And we have to remember that a lot of men and women had taken vows of chastity who weren’t necessarily that pious. Many a second son or daughter were sent to monasteries because there weren’t enough funds to provide a living or a dowry. For ambitious men from humble backgrounds the church provided the only route to wealth and status and many an archbishop had been lifted into the post by his princely father purely for political reasons. None of these had signed up to the lifestyle that Bernhard of Clairvaux or St. Francis expected. That is why Rome had one of per head largest populations of prostitutes.

What made the story of the whores of Constance so famous was for one the sheer scale. 718 licensed sex workers in a town of 6-8,000 are pretty visible. It would be the similar to the Las Vegas night entertainment crowd coming in force down to Bismark, North Dakota for a the National Party Conference. Nothing against Bismark. I have been there and loved it, even got myself an UffDa hat, but if such a thing happened, we would talk about it for a century.

And then the story of fornicating prelates made good copy in support of the Reformation agenda, further embellished by prudish 19^th century writers.

What definitely did not happen was that there was a great courtesans called Imperia who steered council proceedings from her bedchamber as Balzac imagined. The reality was more likely grim. When I mentioned people living in upturned wine barrels for three years, that story referred to one of these prostitutes.

Constance was more than a place for powerful lords and bishops to gather (sometimes naked). It was first and foremost a place for the leading intellectuals of the Late Middle Aged to congregate. The universities sent their most prominent professors, the theologians and canonists of the papal court were out there in force and the chancellors and lawyers of the temporal princes joined in as well. And they did what intellectuals do to this day, they researched, they wrote and they debated.

But one thing was different. In a world before printing, intellectuals also came together to swap books. Not just to read, but also to copy, or to have copied by one of the hundreds of scribes who now lived in the city. Smart entrepreneurs quickly realised that this was a great opportunity and brought in books from all across Europe. Council participants went to the local monasteries to sift through their ancient libraries. Two of the oldest and greatest were nearby, Reichenau and St. Gallen, centres of learning, art and culture since the 9^th century.

These works were read and copied over and over again, so much so that the libraries of europe filled with manuscripts that bear the postscript “Compilatum Constantii tempore generalis concilii”, compiled during the general council at Constance.

The Swedish prelate Tore Andersson copied theological works for his monastery at Vadstena as well as Cessolis’ book on chess. The city scribe of Brunswick copied legal documents, the bishop of Ermland in Prussia collected copies of the classics, of Florus and Vitruvius that are now in the library of Krakow. The cardinal Filastre, who we met before, developed a passion for cartography. He obtained a copy of Ptolomy’s Geography from Manuel Chrysoloras, the envoy of the Byzantine emperor. Later Filastre would encourage the Dane Claudius Clavus to create his map of the Nordics, the first map ever to show Iceland and Greenland, places Clavus had actually visited.

Leonardo Bruni who had arrived with the now deposed pope John XXIII made a living from his translations of the works of Plato and Plutarch.

Early Humanists finding ancient Roman and Greek texts in monasteries

But more than writing and copying, book hunting was the supreme discipline that early humanists engaged in. What they sought was the wisdom of the ancients, the long lost Greek and Roman texts that would open up a new perspective on the world, a world that was to replace the medieval certainties that were gradually fading away.

The reason so much of the ancient texts were lost was simply the material they were written on. Plato, Aristotle, Ovid and Virgil wrote on papyrus and parchment, organic materials subject to decay unless they are preserved in the dry soil of Egypt.

The only reason we can still read the works today is because for hundreds of years monks in their scriptoria or Islamic scholars in their libraries had copied them, not once but four, five , six times over the millennium since the fall of Rome.

Hence, for a 14^th century humanist the only place where he may hope to find, say Catullus poem 16 or Ovid’s metamorphoses was an ancient monastery or a cathedral library. One can only wonder what these pious scribes must have thought when faithfully copying some lurid tale or materialist philosophy. But we must be grateful that they did revere these ancient works enough to not let them disappear for ever. That being said, they did not put them on the eye level in their libraries, forcing the book hunters to bend down in the search for the intellectual treasures. Echte Bückware.

Book hunters have been uncovering these works since Charlemagne seeded the idea that ancient civilisations could hold the key to knowledge. And much has been recovered. You may remember Einhard wo used Suetonius “Lives of the Caesars “ as a model for his life of Carolus Magnus in the 9^th century, Widukind who drew on a wide range of Roman sources when he produced his chronicles in the 10th, the scholastics dug up Aristotle and took inspiration from Muslim scholars in the 12^th. By the late 13^th and early 14^th century hounding Italian monasteries in the search of relics from the Roman or Greek past had become a preoccupation of the likes of Petrarch and Dante. The aforementioned poems of Catullus for instance came to light in 1305 at the cathedral library of Verona.

One of the most prolific book hunters was Poggio Bracciolini. He had come to Constance in the service of John XXIII, but once his master was convicted and deposed he found himself at a bit of a lost end. He was a notary and had worked in the papal chancery for 11years. Since his career was tied to the church and the church had pretty much in its entirety decamped to Constance, he had to stay to find a new job.

And in between jobhunting and networking, he visited monasteries all across the German speaking lands and even in France. And my god did he bring in a great haul: lost speeches by Cicero, Quintilians 12 volumes on rhetoric, poems by Statius Silvae, the histories of Ammian, handbooks on civil architecture, grammar and early theology.

Two finds made him famous across europe, the first was Lucretius De Rerum natura, a didactic poem explaining the main tenets of epicurean philosophy. Lucretius wanted to release humanity from its fear of the wrath of the gods. He postulated that the world was made of atoms that veer randomly through time and space, leaving it up to us humans to use free will to determine how we wanted to live our lives. As I said, not very much in line with the faith of the copyist who might have spent months writing these 7,400 hexameters down thereby preserving a whole school of Greek philosophy.

The other find was a complete copy of Vitruvius the Roman architectural writer and theorist. One of Bracciolini’s copies ended up in the hands of Leon Battista Alberti. Alberti then used Vitruvius as a basis to write his De re aedificatoria that became the textbook of Italian renaissance architecture. In 1459 he was commissioned to build the first planned city in Europe since antiquity, the city of Pienza for Enea Silvio Piccolomini the pope Pius II. The circle was closed by the personal physician of pope Pius II, Andreas Reichlin von Meldegg. Meldegg picked up his patient’s architectural ideas and when he returned to his hometown of Űberlingen just across the lake from Constance, he built his family palace, arguably Germany’s first renaissance building.

The elevation of Friedrich of Hohenzollern as margrave of Brandenburg

Talking about palaces, what made life in Constance during the council so uncomfortable for even the most eminent cardinals and bishops was that they had to compete for suitable accommodation with the imperial princes, the dukes, counts and even lesser nobles.

What brought them there was in part the church council. Since there was no acting pope for almost two years it was the council that decided whether their younger sons would get into an attractive benefice, how to resolve a long-running conflict with the neighbouring bishop or whether to place the local monastery under their direct control.

But it wasn’t just matters of the church that brought them there. Constance had also become the seat of the imperial court. Sigismund stayed in Constance from December 1414 to July 1415 and then again from January 1417 to the end of the council in April 1418.

The Holy Roman Empire famously never had a formal capital. The ruler was perennially on the road and would occasionally call the princes to an imperial diet that would last a few weeks and would take place on different locations.

But when Sigismund was in Constance, he had most of the participants of an imperial diet right on hand. As we mentioned last week, all of the Prince-electors not only the three archbishops of Mainz, Cologne and Trier but also the duke of Saxony, the king of Bohemia and the count palatinate were in the city either in person or represented by an envoy. On top of that we have various dukes, of Bavaria, Austria, Schleswig, Mecklenburg, Lothringia and Teck as well as hundreds of lesser nobles who had taken up residence in the city.

So whenever an issue relating to the empire came up that would normally require a full assembly, one could be called immediately. As we heard last week, Sigismund was able to place duke Friedrich of Austria under the imperial ban and raise an imperial army within just 10 days, not in months as would normally be the case. These few years were by far the most proactive of Sigismund’s reign as emperor.

One of the main roles for an imperial administration to perform was to enfeoff vassals and to receive their oath of allegiance. These were splendid events that celebrated the power of the empire and the emperor, all lavishly depicted in Richental’s illustrated chronicle.

One of these elevations would have implications far out into the future. Smart observers may have notice that there was someone missing in my list of prince electors – the Margrave of Brandenburg. That was not an oversight. Because the margrave of Brandenburg was Sigismund himself. You may remember that he had received the electorate in his inheritance and then pawned it to his cousin Jobst to fund his wars in Hungary. Jobst died in 1411 and that was when Sigismund took his margraviate back.

But he did not keep it. Instead he enfeoffed a certain Frederick, Burgrave of Nurnberg with the mark of Brandenburg. Why give it away.? His father had paid the astronomic sum of 500,000 silver mark for this precious principality that came with one of the seven votes in the election of an emperor and was to be the second centre of Luxemburg power alongside Bohemia. And then why give it to Friedrich, the Burgrave of Nurnberg.

His family name was Hohenzollern, I guess you have heard that name before. Just a recap on who the Hohenzollern were. They are originally from Swabia, where they were first mentioned as counts of Zollern in the 11^th century. Their ancestral castles at Hohenzollern and Sigmaringen still stand.

They had a knack of staying close to the imperial family, whichever it happened to be. Emperor Frederick Barbarossa rewarded their loyalty by making them burgraves of Nurnberg, the city they had so actively sponsored. You heard that another Frederick of Hohenzollern had been instrumental in the election of Rudolf of Habsburg as king of the Romans in 1272. This brought rich reward in Franconia, the area surrounding Nurnberg.

In 1331 they acquired Ansbach and in 1340 Kulmbach, gradually building a asizeable land holding in Franconia. That brought them on the radar of emperor Karl IV who was keen to build a land bridge from Bohemia to Nurnberg and from there to Frankfurt and Luxemburg. The land of the Hohenzollern was right in this corridor. Hence Karl IV regularly offered marriage alliances to the Bruggrave and even though these never materialized, the two houses remained closely associated. This alliance survived the death of Karl IV and was inherited by both Wenceslaus and Sigismund.

Therefore, it was not a surprise that when Sigismund regained the margraviate of Brandenburg after his cousin Jobst had died, he turned to Frederick of Hohenzollern to be his governor in these lands. At the time Brandenburg was still an absolute mess. Though in Luxemburg hands for nearly forty years, the owners had rarely visited and left the place to its own devices. Local families had taken over the countryside, without being able to suppress the robber barons or becoming robbers themselves. The cities had thrown off any semblance of princely overlordship and bishops and abbots hardly took notice of the margrave.

Frederick of Hohenzollern embarked on a campaign of reconquest that would take his family a good fifty years to complete. From Sigismund’s perspective Brandenburg was a money sink. Whatever revenues these lands generated – all was ploughed back into Frederick’s military campaigns. And as long as the Hohenzollern was just a governor, Sigismund was the ultimate bill payer. And paying bills was not his strong suit. So, in April 1417 Sigismund could no longer prolong the inevitable. He enfeoffed his friend and governor with the margraviate. Making him not just an imperial prince but a prince elector in one fell swoop.

The Hohenzollern had arrived in the top flight of imperial society. From here they would build out their lands, become archbishops and grand masters of the Teutonic Order. The latter post was most important since Albrecht of Brandenburg ended up being the last of the grandmasters. He turned Prussia into a secular state in 1525 that would later be inherited by the margraves of Brandenburg and the rest is a history we will spend a lot of time with in the future. If you want to double check on the transition of Prussia from the Teutonic Knights to the house of Brandenburg, check out episode 137.

The feud between Heinrich the rich of Landau and Ludwig the Bearded of Ingolstadt

Having all these imperial princes to hand meant that Sigismund could also convene the imperial lawcourt, the Hofgericht much more often. The court went through more cases in this period than it did during the remainder of Sigismund’s long reign.

One case became notorious. The duke Heinrich of Bavaria-Landshut had fallen out with his cousin Ludwig of Bavaria Ingolstadt, over – what else – but the inheritance of another cousin, the duke of Bavaria-Straubing. If there was one tradition amongst the Wittelsbachs, it was to constantly squabble amongst their cousins.

These two took family feuding to new heights, even by Wittelsbach standards. Heinrich who everybody called ‘the Rich’ tried to put together an alliance of interested parties against his cousin Ludwig, who everybody called the Bearded.

This creation of a league against him irritated Beardy and he went before the entire imperial diet in Constance and said something exceedingly rude about his cousin’s mother that cast serious doubt about him being his cousin in the first place.

You can imagine how that went down. The rich duke hired 15 henchmen to attack the bearded one on his way home from a council meeting. Ludwig the Bearded was severely injured but survived. The imperial court was ready and on hand and was willing to convict Heinrich the Rich of attempted murder. Only by paying a fine of 6,000 guilders to king Sigismund and the intervention of his son-in-law Friedrich of Hohenzollern could he retain his freedom. Heinrich and Ludwig did get their war in the end, which devastated their lands and destroyed any future hopes of putting a Wittelsbach on the throne for the next 400 years.

Heinrich the Rich’s attempts to murder his opponent wasn’t an isolated incident. As the 14^th century gave way to the 15^th political violence had become a fact of life. Hungary had always been a particularly rough place where the killing even of anointed kings had happened on regular intervals. But not only there. We have encountered attempts at poisoning several times in these last few episodes. You remember king Albrecht of Habsburg who was saved from poisoning by hanging upside down for days until his eye had popped off? Our friend Sigismund had to undergo a similar treatment but luckily kept his eye. Then there was the last of the Premyslid kings of Bohemia, Wenceslaus III who was stabbed to death by an unknown assassin, and Sigismund’s half-brother Wenceslaus IV who was also poisoned but survived.

Political murder was even more common in Italy where the local lords had taken power in military coups. That made them vulnerable to both internal rivals vying for their position, idealists who wanted to revive the institutions of their ancient commune and outside forces trying to dislodge them. This is the world that bred a Cesare Borgia and his admirer, Machiavelli.

In England we even had a genuine regicide when Richard II ran into a red hot poker – backwards – allegedly.

The tyrannicide decision on Jean Petit

But it was a political murder in France that became the case that triggered a debate over tyrannicide, the question under which circumstances it was acceptable to murder the ruler of a country. The murder in question was the killing of Louis of Orleans, the brother of King Charles VI on November 23^rd, 1407 by henchmen of the duke of Burgundy, John the Fearless.

You remember John the Fearless, famous for a feckless foray into the fierce fire of the Janissaries at Nikopol. And you may remember Louis of Orleans, one of the many rivals of Sigismund for the inheritance of Hungary

The disagreement between these two men had however nothing to do with Hungarians of Ottomans. This was over control of France itself.

The reigning king Charles VI had experienced ever more severe bouts of mental illness. He once attacked his own men, forgot who he was or who his wife and children were and towards the end famously believed he was made of glass, terrified to shatter at the lightest touch.

France was ruled by a regency council made up of the royal uncles of Berry, Anjou and Burgundy, the queen, the gorgeous Isabeau of Bavaria, and Louis of Orleans, the brother of the king. To say the members of the regency council struggled for consensus does not quite cover it. They constantly tried to outmaneuver each other, used the hapless king, the royal children, the administration of France, the schismatic church, even the English enemies, anything they could get hold of to get one over their opponents. And on this fateful November night, in the rue Vielle du Temple in Paris backstabbing became front-stabbing. The duke Louis of Orleans lay dead in a ditch, courtesy of his cousin John the Fearless, the duke of Burgundy.

John’s plan did however not work out and the party of Louis of Orleans, the Armagnac’s regained supremacy in the council. But the infighting had weakened the French side so much that King Henry V, Bolingbroke of England saw his opportunity and attacked. The result was the battle of Agincourt that took place in 1415, in the middle of the Council. And that was followed by the Burgundians allying with the English against the king and then the dauphin of France, who was saved by Jeanne d’Arc..etc., etc., basically 100 years war Shekespeare and all that.

What brought this case before the council of Constance was that immediately after the attack on Louis of Orleans a Dominican friar, Jean Petit, had publicly proclaimed that the murder was justified because it was a tyrannicide. In consequence the court granted an amnesty to John the Fearless for the killing. That was later withdrawn when the Burgundians had lost influence and a synod of the French church condemned Jean Petit’s defense of the murder. The Burgundians then appealed to pope John XXIII which is how the council in Constance found itself discussing one of the most famous political murders of the Middle Ages..

One of the great voices at the council, Jean Gerson took a strong interest in this question. He believed the church had to take a stance against this proliferation of political murder and in particular against those who defended it. He asserted that the killing of a ruler, in particular a legitimate ruler was always prohibited, even if the ruler may have acted as a tyrant.

This thesis was opposed for obvious reasons by the Burgundians, but also made many other delegates feel queasy. After all the son of the man who had Richard II killed was now king of England. Equally many Italians had supported the murder of the duke Gian Maria Visconti of Milan a few years earlier.

The Council of Constance was too divided to make a clear decision. It refuted the statement of Jean Petit that tyrannicide was not only allowed but demanded by faith, but even that decision was later withdrawn.

So the church failed to weigh in on political murder as Jean Gerson had hoped. It is doubtful whether they would have been able to reign in on the brutality that was ever faster spiraling out of control. But it would have been nice if they had at least made an effort, in particular because the topic came back before the council concluded.

The debate about the Teutonic Order

The reason the council had to look at tyrannicide again had to do with the Teutonic order. In 1410, four years before the council opened, the Knight Brothers had experienced the utterly devastating defeat at Tannenberg /Grunwald.

Being defeated by the Poles was bad enough. But what turned it into a life threatening calamity was that the chivalric brothers had also lost their raison d’etre the moment Jogaila, the grand prince of Lithuania, had converted to Christianity in order to become king of Poland. The now Christian ruler of Lithuania made it his job to convert those of his subjects who were still pagan. And reports were reaching Constance that his peaceful approach had been a lot more successful than the conversion by fire and sword propagated by the Teutonic Knights.

That meant there was nothing left of their mission to defend Christendom in the Baltics. Moreover, the Reisen, the chivalric adventure trips they had organized for the European aristocracy to play at crusading had stopped. And with it the warm rain of cash and free soldiers the order had enjoyed disappeared.

Sigismund had offered them to relocate to the Hungarian-Ottiman border to defend Christianity there, but the brothers declined.

Instead, they went all out on Jogaila and his cousin Witold. They argued these Lithuanians were fake Christians, their conversions had just been a show and their souls still black with pagan beliefs. And that they had made alliances with heretics, aka the orthodox rulers of Moscow and Novgorod. And then the usual rundown of depravity and cruelty that was the stock-in-trade when talking about people of a different faith.

Sigismund was trying to find a compromise between the Poles and the Teutonic order, both of which had sent large delegations to Constance. But the discussions led nowhere. There was no real compromise possible. If the order admitted that Lithuania was now being converted peacefully by the Jagiellons, then they had to either find a new job or call it a day. If the Jagiellons admitted that they had only converted to gain the crown of Poland, then they had to give it all up again.

And even a negotiation genius like Sigismund could not build a bridge between these positions….

But there was a second leg to it. Another Dominican, a somewhat deranged man called Johannes Falkenberg had fully embraced the Teutonic Knight’s position, even though he was neither a brother nor did he have a close relation with the order before 1412. For some reason he published a treatise where he called Jogaila a worshipper of false idols, all Poles he declared were idolaters, shameless dogs who had returned to their ancestral pagan religion. Hence it was an obligation for all good Christians to oppose these vile stains on the mantle of the faith, all the princes were called upon to raise armies to wipe them from the face of the earth.

This was plain silly. It did not need the extraordinary skills of the rector of the recently founded university of Krakow, Paulus Vladimiri to refute this pile of false accusations. In February 1417 the council formed a commission investigating Falkenberg’s claims and easily dismissed them as heretic. Falkenberg was captured and put in prison.

Meanwhile his opponent, the Polish envoy Paulus Vladimiri made an impressive speech to the council where he argued that pagans and Christians shared the same humanity. Their beliefs he argued was no justification to kill, hurt, or destroy their lands, as long as they lived peacefully alongside their Christan neighbors. And then he cited multiple cases where the Teutonic knights had killed, hurt or destroyed the lands of the Lithuanians and Samagitians without provocation.

If that had become church law and the atrocities could have been proven, the Order of the House of St. Mary of the Germans in Jerusalem would have had to be dissolved. Which is why that did not happen.

If you want to get deeper into the Teutonic Knights and the issue of their behavior in Prussia and Lithuania, we have produced a whole series on their story. Check out episodes 128 to 137.

A hundred years later the Spanish Conquistadors arrived in South America and destroyed the Mayan and Aztek civilizations, Paulus Vladimiri’s ideas of peaceful co-existence had by then been comprehensively forgotten outside Poland. The Dominican Bartolomea de Las Casas who pointed out the horrific crimes committed against the indigenous population did not reference Paulus Vladimir’s attempts at getting the church to do the right thing.

Conclusion

And that is all we have got time for today. Next week we will go on to the two events that have made the Council of Constance famous, the election of pope Martin V that ended the Western Schism for good. And the crucial moment in Czech history that is commemorated in the dead centre of their capital, the Teyn square in Prague’s Old Town, I speak of course of the condemnation and execution of Jan Hus and Hieronymus of Prague which triggered the Hussite uprising and paved the way for a very different approach to organize religion. I hope you will join us again.

And before I go, just a last reminder that if you want to support the show, go to historyofthegermans.com/support where you can make a one-time donation or link to the Patreon website where you can make a longer term commitment – jus make sure to not do it on the Patreon iPhone App.

Episode 127 – Art and Culture of the Hanse

by History of the Germans Podcast on 2nd November 202326th February 2026

Our history of the Hanse has come to an end, not with a bang but with a whimper. Of the things that have remained we have already talked a lot, the ideal of the honourable Hanseatic merchant, the cultural and political links to Scandinavia and the stories. The stories of the famous pirates, Klaus Störtebecker and Hans Benecke, the heroics of the wars fought with Denmark and the antics of Jurgen Wullenwever.

But there is something that reminds us of the days when traders speaking low German fed Europe fish, beer and grain. And that are the cultural achievements, the town halls, weighing houses and stores that became symbols of civic pride, the artists whose works adorn churches and palaces across the Baltic sea and last but not least the brick churches that shaped the way these cities still appear..…let’s have a look.

History of the Germans

HotGPod is now entering its 9th season. So far we have covered:

Ottonian Emperors (# 1- 21)
– Henry the Fowler (#1)
– Otto I (#2-8)
– Otto II (#9-11)
– Otto II (#11-14)
– Henry II (#15-17)
– Germany in 1000 (#18-21)

Salian Emperors(#22-42)
– Konrad II (#22- 25)
– Henry III (#26-29)
– Henry IV/Canossa (#30-39)
– Henry V (#40-42)
– Concordat of Worms (#42)

Early Hohenstaufen (#43-69)
– Lothar III (#43-46)
– Konrad III (#47-49)
– Frederick Barbarossa (#50-69)

Late Hohenstaufen (#70-94)
– Henry VI (#70-72)
– Philipp of Swabia (#73-74)
– Otto IV (#74-75)
– Frederick II (#75-90)
– Epilogue (#91-94)

Eastern Expansion (#95-108)

The Hanseatic League (#109-127)

The Teutonic Knights (#128-137)

And since podcasting is a most unsuitable medium to talk about visual art, I have added a few images to the episode webpage which you can find at Episode 127 – Art & Culture of the Hanse • History of the Germans Podcast

As always:

Homepage with maps, photos, transcripts and blog: www.historyofthegermans.com

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So far I have:

To listen on Apple Podcast – click here

Ep. 127: The Hanseatic League (1143-1669) – The Art and Culture of the Hanse

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TRANSCRIPT

Hello and welcome to the History of the Germans: Episode 127: The Art and Culture of the Hanse.

And since podcasting is a most unsuitable medium to talk about visual art, I have added a few images to the episode webpage which you can find at historyofthegermans.com/127-2

But before we start it is my privilege to thank all the patrons who have signed up on patreon.com/historyofthegermans or on my website, historyofthegermans.com. Your help is much appreciated. And for those of you who are still on the sidelines, come and join. You can become a knight of the realm for the price of a cappuccino per month, equally stimulating, less calorific and much more prestigious. And here are the names of four amongst your number who have already taken the plunge: John C., Ole S., Luis-Felipe M. and Edward B. Thanks you guys so much.