30.3 Europe: a.d. 1501 to 1600  (Page 6/29)

NOTE: Insert Map 57. Europe in 1556. The Habsburg Dominions

One of the very colorful and productive personalities of this period was Theophrastus Bombastus von Hohenheim, commonly called Paracelsus (d. 1541) He obtained a doctor's degree at Ferrara in Italy but then barnstormed Germany, denouncing the medical classics and their followers and actually adding something to pharmacology, although he still thought disease was caused by influences of the stars and planets. The "sweating sickness", leprosy and epidemic chorea, which had been prominent diseases of the preceding century, were beginning to disappear, but syphilis was common and gonorrhea rampant. These two venereal diseases were directly responsible for the suppression of communal baths, which had been popular in Germany. Also becoming more common were typhus, diphtheria, small-pox, measles and scurvy (among northern sailors). Ergotism reached endemic levels, bringing insanity and death to thousands who ate bread made from the infected rye. (Ref. 125 , 222 ) Meat was plentiful, with herds of up to 20,000 half-wild cattle coming into Germany at Buttsedt, near Weimar. Others arrived from Switzerland. Wild horses - that is, horses that had returned to a wild state, although not usually eaten - were well distributed all over Europe and particularly in northwest Germany, Alsace and the Vosges. There was an extensive copper mining industry at Mansfeld in Saxony. Because of the poor agriculture in the mountain regions of Swabia about Lake Constance, the peasants there had become linen-workers. (Ref. 292 )

The various German municipalities and states remained more or less independent under their own dukes or princes. The Margrave of Brandenburg ruled extensive territories between the Netherlands and Poland. The apparent precocity of some of these medievals can be a source of continued amazement to us in the 20th century. The Margrave's brother, Albert of Brandenburg, was in 1515, at the age of 25, Archbishop of Mageburg and Bishop of Halberstadt and trying to become Archbishop of Mainz, which would automatically make him one of the seven Electors of the empire, like his brother. To help him buy dispensations to obtain this Archbishopric, which was to cost 10,000 ducats, the pope issued an indulgence to anyone who contributed money for the building of a new cathedral in Rome - such indulgence to shorten the stay in purgatory for the contributor and all his relations. Secretly, half the money was to go, not to the cathedral, but to the Fuggers, who would loan Albert the fee for his Archbishopric. The duty of raising the money in Germany was entrusted to Johann Tetzel, about whom we shall hear more later. (Ref. 291 )

There was an increasing close connection between Brandenburg and East Prussia and in 1539 the Elector of Brandenburg (a Hohenzollern) was awarded the rights of co-vassalage over East Prussia, together with Albert of Hohenzollern, who had now become the Grand Master of the Teutonic Knights. Bavaria was already ruled by the Wittelsbach family. (Ref. 177 )