Purchase of this book includes free trial access to www.million-books.com where you can read more than a million books for free. This is an OCR edition with typos. Excerpt from book: CHAPTER III. THE SAXON REVOLT. ]N considering the social and political con- ditions antecedent to the Reformation, the universal unrest prevalent in Germany was pointed out. The peasantry of that land were chafing under their burdens, the lesser nobility were dissatisfied with their threatened loss of lawless independence, the cities were displeased with the limitations on trade and the narrow-minded exclusiveness of their guilds and wealthy families, the greater nobility were fretted with quarrels and contests for local sovereignty, and the emperor and his counsellors were hampered by the slight respect shown to imperial authority, the difficulty in collecting imperial taxes and enforcing imperial judicial decrees. All elements in the land had some special cause for ferment; but in regard to no evils were complaints more united than those which grew out of the oppressive administration of the Roman curia. The attempts to reform the government of the empire? little successful as they were?were accompanied by protests against papal interferences and attacks on papal taxes. At the Reichstag of 1510 a list of complaints against abuses of papal administration in Germany was formulated, and the keen-eyed Italian ecclesiastic, Girolamo Aleandro (Aleander), soon to be Leo X. s nuntius at the German imperial court, reported to the incredulous Roman authorities, in 1516, his opinion that there would be a rismg of the Germans against the papal see if a voice was lifted against Rome. Such voices were, indeed, being heard early in the sixteenth century, but none that had as yet widely caught the public ear. The humanistic movement in Germany was taking on a more radical and anti-churchly tone. The elder German humanists, like Jakob Wimpheling (1450-1528), the friend of schoo…
