In accordance with an agreement reached by a Diet held at Worms in 1521, the Council of Regency was created. Most of its twenty-three members were named by, and represented the interests of, the German princes. Here might be the starting-point toward a closer political union of the German-speaking people, if only a certain amount of financial independence could be secured to the Council. The proposal on this score was a most promising one; it was to support the new imperial administration, not, as formerly, by levying more or less voluntary contributions on the various states, but by establishing a kind of customs-union (_Zollverein_) and imposing on foreign importations a tariff for revenue. This time, however, the German burghers raised angry protests; the merchants and traders of the Hanseatic towns insisted that the proposed financial burden would fall on them and destroy their business; and their protests were potent enough to bring to nought the princes' plan. Thus the government was forced again to resort to the levy of special financial contributions,--an expedient which usually put the emperor and the Council of Regency at the mercy of the most selfish and least patriotic of the German princes. [Sidenote: Nationalism among the German Knights] More truly patriotic as a class than German princes or German burghers were the German knights--those gentlemen of the hill-top and of the road, who, usually poor in pocket though stout of heart, looked down from their high-perched castles with badly disguised contempt upon the vulgar tradesmen of the town or beheld with anger and jealousy the encroachments of neighboring princes, lay and ecclesiastical, more wealthy and powerful than themselves. Especially against the princes the knights contended, sometimes under the forms of law, more often by force and violence and all the barbarous accompaniments of private warfare and personal feud. Some of the knights were well educated and some had literary and scholarly abilities; hardly any one of them was a friend of public order. Yet practically all the knights were intensely proud of their German nationality. It was the knights, who, under the leadership of such fiery patriots as Ulrich von Hutten and Franz von Sickingen, had forcefully contributed in 1519 to the imperial election of Charles V, a German Habsburg, in preference to non-German candidates such as Francis I of France or Henry VIII of England. For a brief period Charles V leaned heavily upon the German knights for support in his struggle with princes and burghers; and at one time it looked as if the knights in union with the emperor would succeed in curbing the power of the princes and in laying the foundations of a strongly centralized national German monarchy. [Sidenote: Rise of Lutheranism Favored by the Knights and Opposed by Charles V]