From the preceding survey will be clearly perceived the important role which the new jurisprudence played on the Continent of Europe in the gestation of the new phase which history was entering upon in the sixteenth century. Even the short sketch given will be sufficient to show that it was not in one department only that it operated; but that, in addition to its own domain of law proper, its influence was felt in modifying economical, political, and indirectly even ethical and religious conditions. From this time forth Feudalism slowly but surely gave place to the newer order, all that remained being certain of its features, which, crystallized into bureaucratic forms, were doubly veneered with a last trace of mediaeval ideas and a denser coating of civilian conceptions. This transitional Europe, and not mediaeval Europe, was the Europe which lasted on until the eighteenth century, and which practically came to an end with the French Revolution. FOOTNOTES: [15] One silver groschen = 1-1/5d. [16] The authorities for the above data may be found in Janssen, i., vol. i., bk. iii., especially pp. 330-46. [17] _Zur Geschichte der deutschen Gesellenverbaende._ Leipzig, 1876. [18] C. 1/5d. The denarius was the South German equivalent of the North German pfennig, of which twelve went to the groschen. CHAPTER VI THE REVOLT OF THE KNIGHTHOOD We have already pointed out in more than one place the position to which the smaller nobility, or the knighthood, had been reduced by the concatenation of causes which was bringing about the dissolution of the old mediaeval order of things, and, as a consequence, ruining the knights both economically and politically--economically by the rise of capitalism as represented by the commercial syndicates of the cities; by the unprecedented power and wealth of the city confederations, especially of the Hanseatic League; by the rising importance of the newly developed world-market; by the growing luxury and the enormous rise in the prices of commodities concurrently with the reduction in value of the feudal land-tenures; and by the limitation of the possibilities of acquiring wealth by highway robbery, owing to Imperial constitutions, on the one hand, and increased powers of defence on the part of the trading community, on the other--politically, by the new modes of warfare in which artillery and infantry, composed of comparatively well-drilled mercenaries (_Landsknechte_), were rapidly making inroads into the omnipotence of the ancient feudal chivalry, and reducing the importance of individual skill or prowess in the handling of weapons, and by the development of the power of the princes or higher nobility, partly due to the influence which the Roman civil law now began to exercise over the older customary Constitution of the empire, and partly to the budding centralism of authority--which in France and England became a national centralization, but in Germany, in