Early History

•  Germanic tribes originated from a mixture of peoples along the Baltic Sea coast and  inhabited the northern part of the European continent
•  By 100 B.C., they had advanced into the central and southern areas of present-day Germany.
•   presence of warlike tribes beyond the Rhine prompted the Romans to pursue a campaign of expansion into Germanic territory.
•  conquest of Roman Gaul by Frankish tribes in the late fifth century ; it was the Franks  became the founders of a civilized German state.
  

 Medieval Germany
-- The Merovingian Dynasty, ca. 500-751

• Clovis, a Salian Frank belonging to a family supposedly descended from a mythical hero named Merovech, became the absolute ruler of a Germanic kingdom of mixed Roman-Germanic population in 486.
•  He consolidated his rule with victories over the Gallo-Romans and all the Frankish tribes, and his successors made other Germanic tribes subjects of the Merovingian Dynasty. The remaining 250 years of the dynasty, however, were marked by internecine struggles and a gradual decline
•  During the period of Merovingian rule, the Franks reluctantly began to adopt Christianity following the baptism of Clovis
• The most notable of the missionaries responsible for Christianizing the tribes living in Germany was Saint Boniface (ca. 675-754), an English missionary who is considered the founder of German Christianity.

-- The Carolingian Dynasty, 752-911

• Charlemagne inherited the Frankish crown in 768. 
•  he subdued Bavaria, conquered Lombardy and Saxony, and established his authority in central Italy. 
•  his kingdom, later to become known as the First Reich (empire in German), included present-day France, the Netherlands, Belgium, and Luxembourg, as well as a narrow strip of northern Spain, much of Germany and Austria, and much of the northern half of Italy.
• Charlemagne, founder of an empire that was Roman, Christian, and Germanic, was crowned emperor in Rome by the pope in 800.
•  The Treaty of Verdun (843) restored peace and divided the empire among three sons,  future territories of Germany, France, and the area between them, known as the Middle Kingdom. 
• The eastern Carolingian kings ruled the East Frankish Kingdom, what is now Germany and Austria;
•  the western Carolingian kings ruled the West Frankish Kingdom, what became France. 
• The eastern Frankish tribes still spoke Germanic dialects; the language of the western Frankish tribes, under the influence of Gallo-Latin, had developed into Old French. 

-- The Saxon Dynasty, 919-1024

•  the dukes of the East Frankish Kingdom they elected a German to serve as their king once the Carolingian line expired. 
• The election of Conrad I (r. 911-18), Duke of Franconia, as the first German king 
• Conrad's successor, Henry I (r. 919-36), Duke of Saxony, was powerful enough to designate his son Otto I (r. 936-73) as his successor.
•  Otto was so able a ruler that he came to be known as Otto the Great. He overpowered other territorial dukes who rebelled against his rule 
•   he failed to establish the principle of hereditary succession
•  and the German dukes continued to elect one of their number as king. 
•  Henry, Otto, and the later Saxon kings also encouraged eastward expansion and colonization,  extending German rule to parts of the Slavic territories of Poland and Bohemia. 
• In 962 Otto, who had also gained control of the Middle Kingdom, was formally crowned king of the Romans.
•  The possessor of this title would, in time, be known as the Holy Roman Emperor.
•  Because German kings were so often in Italy, the German nobility became stronger. In addition, the presence of German kings in Italy as emperors soon caused them to come into conflict with the papacy, which did not hesitate to seek allies in Italy or Germany to limit imperial power.
  

 -- The Salian Dynasty, 1024-1125

• After the death of the last Saxon king in 1024, the crown passed to the Salians, a Frankish tribe. 
• The four Salian kings--Conrad II, Henry III, Henry IV, and Henry V--who ruled Germany as kings from 1024 to 1125, established their monarchy as a major European power. 
• Their main accomplishment was the development of a permanent administrative system based on a class of public officials answerable to the crown.

-- The Hohenstaufen Dynasty, 1138-1254

• Following the death of Henry V (r. 1106-25), the last of the Salian kings, the dukes refused to elect his nephew because they feared that he might restore royal power. 
• they elected a noble connected to the Saxon noble family Welf (often written as Guelf). This choice inflamed the Hohenstaufen family of Swabia, which also had a claim to the throne. 
• Although a Hohenstaufen became king in 1138, the dynastic feud with the Welfs continued. The feud became international in nature when the Welfs sided with the papacy and its allies, most notably the cities of northern Italy, against the imperial ambitions of the Hohenstaufen Dynasty.
•  Frederick I (r. 1152-90)  struggled throughout his reign to restore the power and prestige of the German monarchy, but he had little success.
• During Frederick's long stays in Italy, the German princes became stronger and began a successful colonization of Slavic lands. 
• Offers of reduced taxes and manorial duties enticed many Germans to settle in the east as the area's original inhabitants were killed or driven away. Because of this colonization, the empire increased in size and came to include Pomerania, Silesia, Bohemia, and Moravia.
•  Growing out of this courtly culture, German medieval literature reached its peak in lyrical love poetry, the Minnesang, and in narrative epic poems such as Tristan, Parzival, and the Nibelungenlied.  
• Despite the political chaos of the Hohenstaufen period, the population grew from an estimated 8 million in 1200 to about 14 million in 1300.
  

 -- The Empire Under the Early Habsburgs

• The Great Interregnum ended in 1273 with the election of Rudolf of Habsburg as king-emperor. 
• After the interregnum period, Germany's emperors came from three powerful dynastic houses: Luxemburg (in Bohemia), Wittelsbach (in Bavaria), and Habsburg (in Austria). These families alternated on the imperial throne until the crown returned in the mid-fifteenth century to the Habsburgs, who retained it with only one short break until the dissolution of the Holy Roman Empire in 1806.
• The Golden Bull of 1356, an edict promulgated by Emperor Charles IV (r. 1355-78) of the Luxemburg family, provided the basic constitution of the empire up to its dissolution. It formalized the practice of having seven electors--the archbishops of the cities of Trier, Cologne, and Mainz, and the rulers of the Palatinate, Saxony, Brandenburg, and Bohemia--choose the emperor, and it represented a further political consolidation of the principalities. The Golden Bull ended the long-standing attempt of various emperors to unite Germany under a hereditary monarchy. Henceforth, the emperor shared power with other great nobles like himself and was regarded as merely the first among equals. Without the cooperation of the other princes, he could not rule.
• Despite the lack of a strong central authority, Germany prospered during the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries. Its population increased from about 14 million in 1300 to about 16 million in 1500, even though the Black Death killed as much as one-third of the population in the mid-fourteenth century.
• Germany became a noted manufacturing center. Trade and manufacturing led to the growth of towns, and in 1500 an estimated 10 percent of the population lived in urban areas. Many towns became wealthy and were governed by a sophisticated and self-confident merchant oligarchy.
•  Several universities were founded, and Germany came into increased contact with the humanists active elsewhere in Europe. The invention of movable type in the middle of the fifteenth century in Germany also contributed to a more lively intellectual climate.
•  Religious ferment was common, most notably the heretical movement engendered by the teachings of Jan Hus (ca. 1372-1415) in Bohemia.
  

 The Protestant Reformation
  

• Maximilian's reforms were not enough to cure the ills of the empire, and relations between it and the princes and ecclesiastical states often were tense.
• Charles V (r. 1519-56) was elected emperor in 1519 only after he paid large bribes to the seven electors and agreed to many restrictions on his powers
•  Although Lutheranism had powerful supporters, its survival was by no means certain. Its main opponent was the Habsburg emperor Charles V who hoped to restore the unity of the German Empire by keeping it Roman Catholic.
•  Charles had been out of Germany between 1521 and 1530, and when he returned he found that the new religion had won too many adherents to be easily uprooted.
•  In 1531 Protestant leaders created the League of Schmalkalden to oppose him. By 1545 northeastern and northwestern Germany and large parts of southern Germany had become Protestant. Despite the significant victory over the Protestants at the Battle of MЭhlberg in 1547, Charles still was not powerful enough to impose his will on the German princes.
  
  
  

 The Thirty Years' War, 1618-48

•  resulted from a local rebellion
• In 1618 Bohemian nobles opposed the decision of Emperor Matthias (r. 1608-19) to designate his Catholic cousin Ferdinand king of Bohemia.
•  Instead, the nobles elected Frederick of the Palatinate, a German Calvinist, to be their king.
•  In 1620  imperial armies and the Catholic League under General Johann von Tilly defeated the Protestant Bohemians at the Battle of White Mountain near Prague. 
• The Protestant princes, alarmed by the strength of the Catholic League and the possibility of Roman Catholic supremacy in Europe, decided to renew their struggle against Emperor Matthias. 
• They were aided by France, which, although Roman Catholic, was opposed to the increasing power of the Habsburgs, the dynastic family to which Matthias and Ferdinand belonged. Despite French aid, by the late 1620s imperial armies of Emperor Ferdinand II (r. 1619-37) and the Catholic League, under the supreme command of General Albrecht von Wallenstein, had defeated the Protestants and secured a foothold in northern Germany.
• After the triumph of the Spanish army over Swedish forces at the Battle of Noerdlingen in 1634, a truce was arranged between the emperor and some of the German princes under the Treaty of Prague. 
•  Because of French participation, the war continued until the Peace of Westphalia was signed in 1648.
  

The Age of Enlightened Absolutism, 1648-1789

• Although the Holy Roman Empire no longer had a significant role in European politics after the Thirty Years' War, it remained important in Germany, providing a framework for the many German states' and cities' conduct of their public affairs. 
•  On occasion, votes were taken to remove incompetent or tyrannical rulers of member states. The empire's most important service was that it provided a measure of security to Germany's many small states and free cities
• For nearly a century after the Peace of Westphalia, the main danger to German states came from abroad. 
• France was the chief threat, seizing parts of southwestern Germany in the late 1600s, among them the city of Strasbourg in 1681. 
• French troops also fought on German soil during the War of the Spanish Succession (1701-14). 
• In addition to these military actions, France formed alliances with some German states, most significantly with Bavaria, which sought support against neighboring Austria.

German Confederation, 1815-66

• The Congress of Vienna (1814-15), convened after Napoleon's defeat, sought to restore order to a Europe disrupted by revolutionary and imperial France. 
• The congress made no effort to restore the Holy Roman Empire and its 300-odd states. Instead, it accepted the disappearance of many small states that had occurred since 1789 and created the German Confederation. 
• The confederation consisted of thirty-eight sovereign states and four free cities and included the five large kingdoms of Austria, Prussia, Saxony, Bavaria, and Wuerttemberg. The confederation met at a diet in Frankfurt, with an Austrian always serving as president.
  

  Imperial Germany

• The German Empire--was often called the Second Reich to distinguish it from the First Reich
•   the king of Prussia and the rulers of the other German states, who agreed to accept him as the Kaiser (emperor) of a united Germany, provided they could continue to rule their states largely as they had in the past. The second was the agreement among many segments of German society to accept a unified Germany based on a constitution that combined a powerful authoritarian monarchy with a weak representative body, the Reichstag, elected by universal male suffrage. 
•  the Kaiser controlled foreign policy and the army through his handpicked ministers
• The government  bargained with parties, granting them what they sought in exchange for votes. A last means of taming the Reichstag was to spread rumors of a possible coup d'etat by the army and the repeal of the constitution and universal suffrage. 
•  As more-democratic parties came to dominate in the Reichstag, governing became more difficult for the Kaiser and his officials. During the later decades of the reign of Wilhelm II (r. 1888-1918), the empire's governing system experienced such difficulties that some conservatives advocated scrapping it, and democrats argued for a new, truly parliamentary system. 
• A fear of these drastic choices and their possible effects caused Germany to muddle through with the existing system until the disaster of World War I culminated in that system's abolition.
  

   The Third Reich: Consolidation of Power

• Hitler rapidly transformed the Weimar Republic into a dictatorship. 
• The National Socialists accomplished their "revolution" within months, using a combination of legal procedure, persuasion, and terror. 
• Hitler used the Enabling Act to implement Gleichschaltung (synchronization)- the policy of subordinating all institutions and organizations to Nazi control.
•  Local and state governments were reorganized and staffed with Nazis. Trade unions were dissolved and replaced with Nazi organizations. 
• Once the regime was established, terror was the principal means used to maintain its control of Germany.
• Police arrests, which had focused originally on Communists and Socialists, were extended to other groups, most particularly to Jews. This systematic use of terror was highly effective in silencing resistance. Some enemies of the regime fled abroad.
•  The regime's chief victims--Jews, Communists, Socialists, labor leaders, and writers--generally had not been close to the churches, and their persecution was witnessed in silence. 
• The regime soon achieved its desired consolidation. Many Germans supported it, some out of opportunism, some because they liked certain aspects of it such as full employment, which was quickly achieved. 
• The regime also brought social order, something many Germans welcomed after fifteen years of political and economic chaos. Many were won over by Hitler's diplomatic successes, which began soon after he came to power and continued through the 1930s and which seemed to restore Germany to what they saw as its rightful place in the international community.