Holy Roman Empire / Germany: Notable Groups, Organizations, and Movements

1190 - Teutonic Knights (All Facts)

• Established for the defense of the Holy Land

• In 1230, they were invited into Prussia in the Holy Roman Empire to help with forcible conversion of the Prussians and Yatvags

• In 1242, they were defeated by Alexander Nevsky in the Novgorod Russians in the Battle of Lake Peipus / Battle on the Ice during the Northern Crusades, thus ending the Northern Crusades in Russia

1200s - 1500s - Beguines (All Facts)

• Religious lay order of women best known as “beggars” who served their communities by begging (some worked as textile workers)

• Communities of single women over thirty who chose to live together in peace and prayer

• They were easily identifiable by the black dresses and white veils that they worse

• They were committed to stay in the namesake place for six years after one year of initiation

• They were characterized by a theological independence demonstrated by their translations of the Bible and at their strict meetings

  • This worried the catholic establishment in France, Germany, and Belgium

• The Bishop of Mainz in Germany

  • initiated the second Church crackdown on the activities of the namesake group

  • accused them of being idle, gossiping vagabonds who refused to obey men under the pretext that God is best served in freedom

  • excommunicated the namesake beggars

  • threatened to evict the namesake beggars from their parishes

1200s - 1600s - Hanseatic League (All Facts)

• It was a medieval commercial and defensive network of merchant guilds and market towns in Central and Northern Europe that began as a collection of loosely associated groups of German traders and towns aiming to expand their commercial interests, including protection against robbery

  • The namesake German towns that formed the namesake association did so to protect their established trading network along the coasts of northern Europe from London in the West to Novgorod in the East, having become the most important commercial and military power for Germany at the time

• Trading Association which was extended by German merchants since the 1100s when they first established a colony at Wisby on the island of Gotland

  • From there, the namesake association, in the form of Wisby, became a link between Western and Eastern Europe in which it traded with Novgorod, the Slavs, Finland, and Flanders

  • It brought Eastern Europeans cloths, salt, and beer

  • It brought Western Europeans furs, hides, wax, and amber

• Trading Association which was firmly established at Lubeck

  • This was the focal point of Baltic commerce, Hamburg and Bremen, serving the North Sea and North Atlantic, and at Flanders, dealing with the river-borne commerce of northern Europe

  • It grew to include London and Bergen (in Norway) in its trading network, which was fast-growing

• Trading Association that allowed competition, but imposed severe penalties on any member that violated a common decision

• Trading Association which reached its peak in the commercial industry of fishing during the late 1200s and early 1300s, catching up to 13K tons of herring annually

• Trading Association which

  • grew increasingly politically powerful by the 1340s

  • re-established its trading rights with

    • Novgorod after a 4-year commercial blockade of the city in 1392

    • Flanders after an embargo on trade there in 1392 by Philip the Bold of Burgundy renewing their privileges

• Their privileges in England were abolished by the 1550s

1246 - 1878 - Welser Family (All Facts)

• Notable banking family in Germany / the Holy Roman Empire

  • They were second-rate rivals to the Fugger Family

  • They were based in Augsburg

• They were bankers to the Habsburgs and were financiers of Holy Roman Emperor Charles V

• They controlled large sectors of the European economy, and accumulated enormous wealth through trade and the German colonization of the Americas, including the slave trade

• They established a commercial and financial agency in Santo Domingo (Hispaniola) in the Caribbean

1388 - 1798 - University of Cologne (All Facts)

• School which had a large Dominican presence at once point

1477 - University of Tubingen (All Facts)

1502 - Martin Luther University Halle-Wittenberg (All Facts)

• Originally the University of Wittenberg founded by Frederick III of Saxony

1507 - 1806 - Fugger Family (All Facts)

• Notable banking family in Germany / the Holy Roman Empire

  • While they acquired far greater wealth than the Medici Family in Italy, they did not have as much political and cultural influence over Europe as the Medici family had

• They financed both Holy Roman Emperors Maximilian and Charles V

• They helped get Charles V elected as Holy Roman Emperor and King of Germany

  • Their money essentially bought King Charles of Spain the Holy Roman emperorship for himself

  • In exchange, Holy Roman Emperor Charles V gave them the right to exploit Silver and Mercury deposits in his colonies in Central America (as Charles was already the ruler of the Spanish Empire and its Central American colonies)

• Upon the death of their namesake founder Jakob II “The Rich”, their financial empire

  • was based largely on mining and the monopoly they had over the copper market

    • They thus obtained a monopoly on silver and copper mines in Tyrol and throughout much of eastern Europe

  • stretched from Lisbon in Portugal to Krakow in Poland and from the Baltic Sea to the Mediterranean Sea

  • acquired the right to

    • mine silver in the Tyrol from Sigismund of Tyrol

    • mint papal currency during the papacy of Pope Julius II

      • They were asked by Pope Julius II to sell indulgences to finance the work on St. Peter’s Basilica

    • control the biggest trade network on the European continent

  • was strictly entrepreneurial, and often vied with their chief rivals, the Welser Family over exploitation in the Americas, with their agents acting more like conquistadores than businessmen

1525 - League of Dessau (All Facts)

• Alliance of German Catholic princes in the north to fight the Protestant Reformation in the south

1526 - League of Torgau (All Facts)

• Alliance of Protestant German princes, including Philip of Hesse and John of Saxony, which was formed to oppose the Catholic League of Dessau

• It was eventually joined by most of the Protestant states in the Holy Roman Empire

1531 - 1547 / 1555 - Schmalkaldic League (All Facts)

• Military alliance of 8 Protestant (Lutheran) principalities and 11 cities within the Holy Roman Empire to defend the Protestant Reformation and Lutheran Church

• Military alliance named after the little namesake town which symbolically stood on the borders of the Holy Roman states of Hesse and Saxony, the league two’s most powerful principalities and in which the alliance was formed

• Military alliance founded primarily by Philip of Hesse and John Frederick of Saxony

• Military alliance of various principalities and cities alike including

  • Hesse

  • Saxony

  • Brunswick

  • Luneburg

  • Strasbourg

  • Lubeck

  • Magdeburg

  • Bremen

  • Ulm

• Military alliance, which upon formation affirmed that, “on all occasions that any of us is attacked for the Word of God and the doctrine of the gospel or for any other thing connected therewith, al the others will come to his aid at once”

• Military alliance that was

  • primarily religious in nature, the key factor being the result of the (Second) Diet of Augsburg

  • secondarily political in nature, as the German Princes had their own political reasons for wanting to resist the power of the Holy Roman Emperor Charles V as it would help them to do so

• By 1531, Bavaria, despite being Catholic, joined the namesake alliance

• In 1532, they signed the Peace of Nuremberg with Holy Roman Emperor Charles V

• In 1546, they were outlawed and later defeated a year later by Holy Roman Emperor Charles V and his imperial forces in the namesake league’s war and Battle of Muhlberg

1527 / 1533 - Anabaptists / Anabaptism (All Facts)

• Protestant Denomination which

  • believed (believes) in

    • believer’s baptism (credobaptism), or that baptism is valid only when candidates freely confess their faith in Christ and request to be baptized

      • It is thus opposed to the baptism of infants, who are not able to make a conscious decision to be baptized

      • They thus insisted that only true adult believers should be baptized

  • renounced popish worship and political affairs

  • did not bear arms

  • practiced polygamy (and used Old Testament scripture to justify their practice)

  • seized property (especially in their rebellion at Munster)

  • proclaimed world rebellion

  • killed anyone that was unbaptized (especially in their rebellion at Munster)

• Protestant Denomination which

  • began among the disciples of Ulrich Zwingli in Zurich in Switzerland after he had debated the validity of infant baptism

  • also owed itself to the ideas of Thomas Müntzer and Andreas Karlstadt

  • was first led in Switzerland by

    • Conrad Grebel

    • Balthasar Hubmaier

    • Felix Mantz

    • the peasantry around Zurich, where they effectively withdrew into communities of saints

• Protestant Denomination which

  • spread quickly to Holland (the Netherlands)

  • then took power in Germany, where they invaded and took control of Munster and formed their own government there six years after their founding in Switzerland

  • was first led in Germany by

    • Bernard Rotthman (German)

    • Jan Matthys (Dutch)

    • John of Leiden (Dutch)

  • rebelled against the Holy Roman Empire in their namesake Munster Rebellion in which

    • they gradually took over the town council of Munster

    • they tried to install their own government there in Munster

    • they made apparent their revolutionary tendencies

  • they were all forced into hiding or massacred by the holy Roman Empire as a result

1538 - League of Nuremberg (All Facts)

• Military Alliance of German Catholic Princes formed to counteract the already-established Protestant Schmalkaldic League

1540 - Jesuits / Society of Jesus (All Facts)

• Catholic Order established in Paris, France, by St. Ignatius Loyola of Spain and six of his companions

  • A papal bull of Pope Paul III confirmed its establishment

  • Order which began when St. Ignatius Loyola and his six companions took a vow to offer themselves to the pope to be sent wherever he wished to convert pagans and infidels, even the Ottoman Turks

• Its main object was “the propagation of the faith”

• It was they, above all, who had spearheaded the Catholic Counter-Reformation, to regain the religious ground from the Protestant Reformation

• Catholic Order which

  • does not require its members to say the daily office together, like monks, but only to pray silently

  • requires an essential vow of total obedience to the pope and to the Grand Superior (Loyola was the first Grand Superior)

  • requires one to prepare by training with, reading, and implementing St. Ignatius Loyola’s “Spiritual Exercises”

  • believed that subject themselves to this ascetic discipline will teach them to master the will and learn total obedience to their superior and to the church, being prepared to believe that what seems black to them is white if the church declares that it is

  • became a teaching order both at home and across Europe, establishing schools in the slums of Rome and providing education for the best families at their colleges and universities such as those in Rome and at Padua

  • was renown for their teaching methods

• They worked amongst the native Americans, hoping to establish permanent missions in (Spanish) Florida and what is now modern-day Georgia and South Carolina

• In 1544, they founded their first university in Germany at Cologne

• In 1571, eight of their members were on a mission in modern-day Virginia but were murdered by natives there who had pretended to be their friends

  • The native killers were led by Don Luis, a native who had been converted to Christianity, taken a Spanish name, and had even been a guest at the court of King Philip II

• In 1608, they founded Paraguay, their own religious utopian colony in South America

• In 1697, they founded Loreta, their first mission in California

1558 - Hamburg Stock Exchange (All Facts)

• Established during the reign of Ferdinand

1558 - University of Jena (All Facts)

• Established during the reign of Ferdinand

1560s - Mennonites (All Facts)