The confessional age, 1555–1648

German society in the later 1500s

The changes that resulted from state building and the Reformation yielded little real benefit for ordinary people. Historians agree that the later 16th century was, for many, a time of economic hardship and social stress. Rapid increase in population (the European population rose by more than half between 1500 and 1700) and, secondarily, the influx of precious metals from the New World were the main causes of an inflationary trend that spanned the entire century and reached painful stages in Germany in the 1590s and early 1600s. Grain prices were especially affected, with the result that an ever smaller share of the ordinary person’s budget was available for the purchase of other products. This had several effects, which, at least in outline, are well documented. The quality of nutrition for all but the wealthiest became much worse than it had been in the late Middle Ages, when meat consumption was at an all-time high. Illness and epidemic disease were frequent as the nutritional deficiency was aggravated by a series of bad harvests, perhaps caused by unusually severe winters in the decades after 1560.

Cities and towns suffered loss of income as the market for their manufactured wares declined. In consequence, municipal guilds lost ground, not only economically but also politically, as their participation in urban policy making was curtailed. There were exceptions to this trend. Craftsmen specializing in the manufacture of luxury cloths and arms found lucrative markets at princely courts; but overall the position of artisans declined. Journeymen could no longer anticipate becoming masters. Artisans employed in traditional handiwork felt the pressure of the putting-out system favoured by merchant capitalists, whereby much production was moved from the town, where artisanal guilds protected their members, to the countryside, where merchants could hire cheaper labour. Division of labour increased, gradually transforming self-employed craftsmen into dependent workers.

In the agricultural sector, high grain prices and rising land values improved the lot of peasant proprietors, but the greatest beneficiaries were landowning nobles and urban patricians with investments in agriculture. Society was polarized by these developments. A minority of rich peasants lived amid struggling smallholders hard-pressed by feudal lords who maximized their profits by increasing labour and tax burdens (the period has been called a “second serfdom”), and in the cities an upper crust of wealthy merchants and landed aristocrats faced a proletariat, whole sections of which were pauperized by the end of the century. The populous cities, once the glory of Germany, began to play a smaller role, as economic troubles and the centralizing policies of territorial princes decreased their prosperity and sapped their political strength.

The highly visible contrast between rich and poor and the animosity of the weak against the powerful created tensions among groups and classes. Political and economic power was more concentrated than ever before. Its new centres in Germany were the splendid courts of secular and ecclesiastical princes, whence it was distributed to favoured groups: the nobility, rising in importance again but finding its function limited to the service of rulers, and the upper bourgeoisie, shifting its loyalty from guild hall to palace. For ordinary people, administrative centralization and politically sanctioned Reformation had the effect of imposing more rigid control over their lives. A host of mandates flowed from centres of government, seeking to promote an ethic of order, productivity, and morality by shaping working and domestic activities as well as private habits and attitudes. These inroads caused resentment, and there is evidence of widespread resistance, most of it passive. Under these circumstances, the Evangelical Reformation seems to have made but slight impact on the populace at large, whose effective religion continued to be a mixture of traditional Christianity and folk magic.

Most people were worse off near the end of the 16th century than at its beginning. The lot of women, in particular, had deteriorated. About 1500 many German women had been at work in numerous urban occupations. But a century later they had been crowded out of all but the most demeaning trades as economic pressures, reinforcing ancient prejudices, eliminated them wherever they offered competition to male craftsmen. In this light, it is not surprising that the period from the 1580s to the 1620s also witnessed a surge of persecutions for witchcraft in Germany (mainly in the southwest and Bavaria). As elsewhere, the witch craze in the empire seems to have been a reaction to the strains of a time of troubles, the actual causes of which, fairly clear now to historians, were hidden from contemporaries.