666 THE MIDDLE AGES. A.D. 1294-1517.
end stalls were limited to men of noble birth by Basel, 1474, Augsburg, 1475, Minister and Paderborn, 1480, and Osnabruck, 1517. The same rule prevailed in Mainz, Halberstadt, Meissen, Merseburg and other dioceses. At the beginning of the 16th century, it was the established custom in Germany that no one should be admitted to a cathedral chapter who could not show 16 ancestors who had joined in the tournament and, as early as 1474, the condition of admission to the chapter of Cologne was that the candidate should show 32 members of his family of noble birth. Of the 228 bishops who successively occupied the 32 German sees from 1400-1517, all but 13 were noblemen. The eight occupants of the see of Miinster, 1424-1508, were all counts or dukes. So it was with 10 archbishops of Mainz, 1419-1514, the 7 bishops of Halberstadt, 1407-1513, and the 5 archbishops of Cologne, 1414- 1515.1 This custom of keeping the high places for men of noble birth was smartly condemned by Geiler of Strassburg and other contemporaries. Geiler declared that Germany was soaked with the folly that to the bishoprics, not the more pious and learned should be promoted but only those who, " as they say, belong to good families." It remained for the Protestant Reformation to reassert the democratic character of the ministry.
A higli standard could not be expected of the lower ranks of the clergy where the incumbents of the high positions held them, not by reason of piety or intellectual attainments but as the prize of birth and favoritism. The wonder is, that there was any genuine devotion left among the lower priesthood. Its ranks were greatly overstocked. Every family with several sons expected to find a clerical position for one of them and often the member of tlie family, least fitted by physical qualifications to make his way in the world, was set apart for religion. Here again Geiler of Strassburg applied his lash of indignation, declaring that, as people set apart for St. Velten the chicken that had the pox and for St. Anthony the pig that was affected with disease, so they devoted the least likely of their children to the holy office.
1 Janssen, I. G89-(5(>(!, gives a full list of these bishops.
§ 73. THE CLERGY. 667
The German village clergy of the period were as a rule not university bred. The chronicler, Felix Faber of Ulm, in 1490 declared that out of 1000 priests scarcely one had ever seen a university town and a baccalaureate or master was a rarity seldom met with. With a sigh, people of that age spoke of the well-equipped priest of "the good old times."
From the Alps to Scandinavia, concubinage was widely practised and in parts of Germany, such as Saxony, Bavaria, Austria and the Tirol, it was general. The region, where there was the least of it, was the country along the Rhine. In parts of Switzerland and other localities, parishes, as a measure of self-defence, forced their young pastors to take concubines. Two of the Swiss Reformers, Leo Jud and Bullinger, were sons of priests and Zwingli, a prominent priest, was given to incontinence before starting on his reformatory career. It was a common saying that the Turk of clerical sensualism within was harder to drive out than the Turk from the East.
How far the conscientious effort, made in Germany in the last years of the Middle Ages to reform the convents, was attended with success is a matter of doubt. John Busch labored most energetically in that direction for nearly fifty years in Westphalia, Thuringia and other parts. The things that he records seem almost past belief. Nunneries, here and there, were no better than brothels. In cases, they were habitually visited by noblemen. The experience is told of one nobleman who was travelling with his servant and stopped over night at a convent. After the evening meal, the nuns cleared the main room and, dressed in fine apparel, amused their visitor by exhibitions of dancing.^ Thomas Murner went so far as to say that convents for women had all been turned into refuges for people of noble birth. ^ The dancing during the sessions of the Diet of Cologne, 1505, was opened by the archbishop and an abbess, and nuns from St. Ursula's
1 Janssen, I. 726. Bezold, p. 83, certainly goes far, when he makes the unmodified statement, that the convents were high schools of the most shameful immoralitj — Hochsch7ilen der grdnelichsten Unsittlichkeit.
2 Sindjetzt allgemein EdelUute Spital, Janssen, I. 724.