For seven hundred years, from the treaty of Verdun (843), to Charles V. (1520), Germany had held the leading position in Europe as the head of the “Holy Roman Empire.” The reality had been gradually departing from that alluring title; and now, with the Peace of Westphalia, it was gone.

With a large body of its people accorded full rights, while they were engaged in open war upon the Roman Church, the last link binding Germany to Rome was broken. The Holy Roman Empire was now the German Empire.

And, in very fact, it was no empire at all, but a loose confederacy of miniature kingdoms, administered without any regard to each other, and in great measure independent of Imperial authority.

Great changes had taken place throughout Europe. Louis XIV. was King of France. In England Charles I. had lost his throne and his head, and Cromwell was laying the foundations of a power more enduring than that of Tudor or Stuart. Spain was rapidly declining, and the new Republic of Holland ascending in the scale. Sweden was supreme in the North, and Russia just beginning to be recognized as a power in Europe. Venice and the Italian republics were crumbling to pieces; while across the sea, on the coast of America, a few English, Dutch, and Swedish colonies were struggling into existence.

Richelieu was dead, but the fortunes of France were in the keeping of one quite as ambitious for her as was the Great Minister. There was a new aspirant for headship in Europe. When Ferdinand III. died, Louis XIV. tried hard to be elected his successor. He spent money freely among the Electors, and was only defeated by the sturdy opposition of Brandenburg and Saxony.

Of the people of Germany there is really nothing to tell in the years which followed the Peace of Westphalia. Spiritless and disheartened in their ruined cities, they seemed to have lost all national spirit and even religious enthusiasm. They languidly saw the Catholic Hapsburgs becoming absolute in the land, while the Court at Vienna and the smaller German Courts were absorbed in establishing servile imitations of the Court at Versailles. Churches and schoolhouses were in ruins, but palaces were being built in which the fashions of the French Court were closely imitated, and princes were trying to unlearn their native language and to install that of a cormorant French King, who was planning to devour their demoralized empire!

The one exception among the German rulers of this time was Frederick William of Brandenburg, the “Great Elector.” This incorruptible German lost no time in learning French. As soon as peace was declared he set about restoring his wasted territory. He organized a standing army and built a fleet, and he used them, too, to recover Pomerania from Sweden and to circumvent the French King, and so enlarged his boundaries and strengthened his authority that Brandenburg, now next in size to Austria, was treated with the respect of an independent power, and the name of Hohenzollern began to shine bright even beside that of Hapsburg.

From the year 1667 until 1704 Germany was the center of the Grand Monarch’s ambitious designs. In 1687, while Prince Eugene was leading a German army against the Turks, and while German princes, excepting the Great Elector, were engaged in copying French fashions, two powerful French armies suddenly appeared upon the Rhine, and the great war which was to involve all Europe had commenced.

It was not love for Germany which brought Holland, England, Spain, and Sweden into this war with France, but fear of the advancing power of a King who aspired to be supreme in Europe.

In the year 1700, an event occurred which intensified the situation. Charles II., the last of the half Castilian and half Hapsburg kings of Spain descended from Charles V., died without children, and that country was looking for the next nearest heir in foreign lands from which to choose a new king. Of the two it found, one was son of the Emperor of Germany and the other grandson of Louis XIV. It was a choice of evils for Europe; as in one case the German Empire with Spain annexed would be a preponderating power, as in the time of Charles V.; and in the other, the grasping Louis would be far on the road to the very end which Europe had combined to defeat!

Inflammable oil, poured on fire, does not make a fiercer blaze than did this question of the Spanish Succession at that time. The embarrassing thing for Louis was that, when he had married the Infanta, he had solemnly renounced the throne of Spain for her heirs! But the Pope, with whom the ultimate decision lay, had more need of the rising house of Bourbon than of the waning Hapsburg, so, after “prayerful deliberation,” he concluded that the King might be absolved from that little promise, and that Philip V. was rightful King of Spain.

There was rage in Vienna. The Emperor Leopold I. and his disappointed son the Archduke Karl declared they would wrest the throne from Philip and have vengeance upon Louis, who with swelling pride was declaring that “the Pyrénées had ceased to exist.”

When Leopold called upon the German states to arm, the Great Elector of Brandenburg was dead. But his son Frederick took advantage of the opportunity. He would assist the Emperor on one condition, that he be permitted to assume the title of King! An embarrassment arose in the fact that traditional custom permitted only one King among the Electors (King of Bohemia), and therefore the Elector of Brandenburg could not be also King of Brandenburg.

The difficulty was overcome by adopting for the new kingdom the name of his detached duchy of Prussia, that province which had been snatched from Russia by the Teutonic knights long before, and had then been appropriated by that masterful Hohenzollern who was then head of the Order, as his own kingdom. It was this high-handed proceeding which thereafter inseparably linked the name of Hohenzollern with that of Prussia.

So, in 1701, the Elector and his wife traveled in midwinter to Koenigsberg, almost in the confines of Russia, where he was crowned Frederick I. of Prussia, and then returned to Berlin in Brandenburg, which thereafter remained his capital. And so it was that Prussia the name of a small Slavonic people on the frontier became that of the entire kingdom of which Berlin was the capital.

England and Holland were in alliance with Leopold not for the sake of setting up the Hapsburg, but rather to put down the great Bourbon who began to wear the prestige of invincibility. England entered the alliance languidly at first, but when the French king threw down the glove by recognizing the exiled Stuart (son of James II.) as the heir to her throne, she needed no urging and sent the best of her army into Germany under the command of the man who was going to destroy that prestige of invincibility, and to hold in check the arrogant king.

Marlborough and Prince Eugene formed a combination too strong for Louis. Marlborough’s great victory at Blenheim in 1704 virtually decided the contest, although it continued for many years longer. He was created Duke of Marlborough and received the estate of Blenheim as his reward.

But the long war outlived the enthusiasm it had created. England grew tired of fighting for the Hapsburgs; there were court intrigues for Marlborough’s downfall, and finally he was recalled, and cast aside like a rusty sword. Louis, too, had grown old and weary, and so in 1713 the Peace of Utrecht terminated the long struggle. Philip V. was left upon the throne of Spain, with the condition that the crowns of Spain and France should never be united.

The disappointed Archduke Karl had now succeeded to the Imperial throne as Karl VI. If the life of a nation be in its people, there was really no Germany at this time. There was nothing but a wearisome succession of wars and diplomatic intrigues, and new divisions and apportionments of territory. Prussia was expanding and Poland declining, while Hungary and Naples, and Milan and Mantua, were fast in the grasp of Austria. Indeed, to tell of the territorial changes occurring at this period is like painting a picture of dissolving elements, which form new combinations even as you look at them.

At the North, too, there were these same changing combinations, where had arisen two new ambitious kings. Charles XII. of Sweden and Peter the Great of Russia were at war; and Denmark and Poland were lending a hand to defeat the Swedish King. Peter the Great was extending his Baltic provinces and preparing to build his new capital of St. Petersburg (1709); but Charles XII. was defeated by Prussia and Hanover, in his attempt to make of Sweden one of the great powers of Europe. His death in 1718 ended that dream.

Not since the infamous Irene’s deposition at Byzantium had there been a woman on the throne of the Caesars. When Karl VI. issued the decree called the “Pragmatic Sanction,” providing that the crown should descend to female heirs in the absence of male, he forged one of the most important links in the chain of events. This secured the succession to his little daughter Maria Theresa, who was born in 1717. The link had need to be a strong one, for there were to be twenty years of effort to break it. But it held.

At about this same time there was another important link forging in Prussia, where Frederick William I. had succeeded his father Frederick I. as king. By these two events the long spell was to be broken.

Volumes have been written about this fierce, miserly King Frederick William and his coarse brutalities. But his reign was the rough, strong bridge which led to a Frederick the Great, and the reign of the Great Frederick was that other bridge which led to a powerful and dominating kingdom of Prussia, from which was to spring a new German Empire!

If Frederick William was a tyrant of the most savage sort, on the other hand he organized industry, finance, and an army. If he was a miser in his family, he brought wealth and prosperity to his people. If he beat and cudgeled his own son for playing the flute, he left that son a kingdom and an army which were the foundation of his greatness.

His hatred for all that was French, for art, for the formalities and even the decencies of life, was an enraged protest against the prevailing affectations and artificiality of his time.

We can imagine how the polished and refined Court at Vienna must have regarded this Prussian King. Austria, entirely Catholic, in a state of moral and intellectual decline, sat looking backward and sighing for the return of the spirit of the Middle Ages. Prussia, altogether Protestant, had set her face toward a future which was to be greater than she dreamed.

In 1736 Maria Theresa was married to Francis of Lorraine. In 1740 she succeeded her father Karl VI., on the Imperial throne; and that very same year Frederick William of Prussia died, and was succeeded by his son, who was to be known as Frederick the Great.

Through the barren period succeeding the Thirty Years’ War some vital processes were going on; indeed that most vital of all processes, thought, was active. Broken into fragments as by an earthquake, the people had been left without one healing touch from the hands of their infatuated rulers. It was a sorry spectacle to see those German princes gayly arraying themselves in French finery while their country was a ruin. Did they not know that a wound might better not heal at all, than to begin by forming new tissue at the top!

Whatever capacity Germany had for being, was in those neglected fragments. If she ever developed into greatness it must be along the line of their elemental tendencies, and by being German, not French.

So a nation, helpless, broken, disorganized, out of harmony with itself and with others, could not act, but it could think. And in this time of chaos and confusion there commenced mighty stirrings in the thought of Germany. Slumbering in that chaos were the germs of wonderful music and a wondrous literature.

The gloomy and despondent Spinoza had found peace in discovering that the reality of things was not in political overturnings, nor in the disappointing facts and phenomena which we call life, but in the Eternal Order, of which we are all a part.

He might have discovered the same sustaining truth in religion; but Spinoza’s mind led him to seek it instead in a philosophical system which should harmonize the discordant facts of existence. This was the foundation of German speculative philosophy, which took possession of the German mind and which by progressive steps was to lead to a union with a science, founded upon the despised facts of life and finally, whether they wished it or not a harmonizing of both with RELIGION.

With deeply philosophical mind the great German, Leibniz, was investigating the truths of the natural world; and Handel also belongs to this time of soul-awakening during a period of national neglect and depression, while at this very time there was also borne in a stimulating wave from England, where Newton had revealed the fundamental law and the “ETERNAL order” of the physical universe.

It would seem like a dim twilight to us if we should go back to it now; but then these new lights were very dazzling, almost blinding people with their splendor.