The reforms sketched by the Councils of Constance and of Basel had been utterly neglected by the Roman Curia, and in consequence several German princes, while they felt the hopelessness of insisting on a general purification of the Church, resolved that these reforms should be carried out within their own dominions. As early as 1446, Duke William of Saxony had published decrees which interfered with the pretensions of the Church to be quite independent of the State. His regulations about the observance of the Sunday, his forbidding ecclesiastical courts to interfere with Saxon laymen, his stern refusal to allow any Saxon to appeal to a foreign jurisdiction, were all more or less instances of the interference of the secular power within what had been supposed to be the exclusive province of the ecclesiastical. He went much further, however. He enacted that it belonged to the secular power to see that parish priests and their superiors within his dominions lived lives befitting their vocation—a conception which was entirely at variance with the ecclesiastical pretensions of the Middle Ages. He also declared it to be within the province of the secular power to visit officially and to reform all the convents within his dominions. So far as proofs go, it is probable that these declarations about the rights of the civil authorities to exercise discipline over the parish priests and their superiors remained a dead letter. We hear of no such reformation being carried out. But the visitation of the Saxon monasteries was put in force in spite of the protests of the ecclesiastical powers. Andreas Proles would never have been able to carry out his proposals of reform in the convents of the Augustinian Eremites but for the support he received from the secular princes against his ecclesiastical superiors in Rome. The Dukes Ernest and Albrecht carried out Duke William’s conceptions about the relation of the civil to the ecclesiastical authorities in their ordinances of 1483, and the Elector Frederick the Wise was heir to this ecclesiastical policy of his family. The records of the Electorate of Brandenburg, investigated by Priebatsch and described by him in the _Zeitschrift für Kirchengeschichte_(92) testify to the same ideas at work there. A pious prince like Frederick II. of Brandenburg removed unworthy Church dignitaries and reinstituted them, thus taking upon himself the oversight of the Church. Appeals to Rome were forbidden under penalties. Gradually under Frederick and his successors there arose what was practically a national Church of Brandenburg, which was almost completely under the control of the civil power, and almost entirely separated from Roman control.