After the fall of the Landstuhl all Sickingen's castles and most of those of his immediate allies and friends were of course taken, and the greater part of them destroyed. The knighthood was now to all intents and purposes politically helpless and economically at the door of bankruptcy, owing to the suddenly changed conditions of which we have spoken in the Introduction and elsewhere as supervening since the beginning of the century: the unparalleled rise in prices, concurrently with the growing extravagance, the decline of agriculture in many places, and the increasing burdens put upon the knights by their feudal superiors, and last, but not least, the increasing obstacles in the way of the successful pursuit of the profession of highway robbery. The majority of them, therefore, clung with relentless severity to the feudal dues of the peasants, which now constituted their main, and in many cases their only, source of revenue; and hence, abandoning the hope of independence, they threw in their lot with the authorities, the princes, lay and ecclesiastic, in the common object of both, that of reducing the insurgent peasants to complete subjection. Some few of the more chivalrous knights, foremost among whom was Florian Geyer, retained their rebel instincts against the higher authorities, and took sides with the popular movement. They fought, however, in a forlorn hope. As we shall now see, provincial centralism, as in Italy, and not national centralism as in France, England, and Spain, was destined to be the political form dominant in Germany far into the modern period. The disasters and discomfitures of the Peasants' War, which we shall presently describe, removed the last obstacle to the complete ascendancy of the provincial potentates, the princes of the Empire; for this event was the immediate cause of the final disintegration of mediæval life, and the undermining of the last survivals of the free institutions of the communal village which had lasted throughout the Middle Ages. FOOTNOTES: [21] Franz said to the bystanders when the messengers of the Council appeared: "Look at these old fiddles of the _Regiment_; only the dancers lack. There is no dearth of commands, but only of those who heed them;" and turning to the nuncios themselves, he bade them tell the Imperial Stadthalter and the other gentlemen of the Council that "they might make themselves easy, for he was as good a servant of the Emperor as themselves. He would, if he had enough followers, so work it that the Emperor would be able to get far more land and gold in Germany than he could ever get abroad. He only meant to give Richard of Trier a slight drubbing, and to soak his crowns for him which he had gotten from France." [22] _Sämmtliche Werke_, vol. xxviii., 142-201. [23] _Corpus Reformatorum_, i., 598-599. CHAPTER VII. COUNTRY AND TOWN AT THE END OF THE MIDDLE AGES.