If Protestantism contributed to strengthen the power of the sovereigns under whose lead it was carried out, yet the temporal estates also shared the gain which accrued from the defeat and curtailment of ecclesiastical interests; for by this means their own power became more firmly established. The restoration of Catholicism at a later period had a very different effect. The concessions which the Papacy voluntarily made to secure it, redounded mainly to the advantage of the sovereigns. The Popes themselves, in order to revive their ecclesiastical authority in every country, employed all the pecuniary resources which could in any way be raised in their newly conquered state, which now for the first time was entirely reduced to obedience. In Italy they created for themselves a new Grand Duchy, by the erection of which the rights of the municipalities comprised within it were entirely destroyed. The Spanish monarchy, which in this epoch played the most important part, had not, it is true, annihilated, but had kept down the independence of the provinces in the Italian as well as in the Spanish peninsula, which in earlier times had been so powerful; and as by the aid of American gold it had obtained a power independent of the good will of the Estates, the authority of the sovereign was asserted far and wide. These two agencies reacted most powerfully upon Germany. Even before the Thirty Years’ War the territories of the ecclesiastical and Catholic princes followed the example of Rome. During the war, and by means of it, the house of Austria brought into subjection the representative constitution of the kingdoms and countries belonging to it [A.D. 1637.] which had attached themselves to the principles of Protestantism. Frederick Elector Palatine stood at the head of these independent bodies, but they did not understand how to support him effectively. They fell with him. The same thing then happened in the central districts of Germany, where the combinations between sovereigns and estates were so weak from their rivalry with one another that they went to ruin. In France Catholicism had once helped the Estates in their struggle against the monarch, but this alliance could not be maintained. After the hereditary sovereign had reached throne by the going over to Catholicism, he still based his authority upon the maintenance of an equilibrium between the two religious parties. But for his successors this policy was no longer necessary. The Catholic portion of their subjects attached themselves to them without any regard to a title conferred by the Estates; and though the magnates then sought for safety principally in an alliance with Protestant interests, the result was that ecclesiastical and political independence sustained a common defeat at the hands of the sovereign and of the Catholic party. The power of the state assumed a deeper Catholic colour the more it aimed at absolutism.