We have not yet concluded the important changes introduced into Europe by the consequences of the fatal campaign of Austerlitz. The Confederation of the Rhine,[221] which withdrew from the German empire so large a portion of its princes, and, transferring them from the influence of Austria, placed them directly and avowedly under the protection of France, was an event which tended directly to the dissolution of the Germanic League, which had subsisted since the year 800, when Charlemagne received the Imperial Crown from Pope Leo the Third. By the new Federation of the Rhine, the courts of Wirtemberg and Bavaria, of Hesse d'Armstadt, with some petty princes of the right bank of the Rhine, formed among themselves an alliance offensive and defensive, and renounced their dependence upon the Germanic Body, of which they declared they no longer recognised the constitution. The reasons assigned for this league had considerable weight. It was urged, that the countries governed by these princes were, in every case of war betwixt France and Austria, exposed to all the evils of invasion, from which the Germanic Body had no longer power to defend them. Therefore, being obliged to seek for more effectual protection from so great an evil, they placed themselves directly under the guardianship of France. Napoleon, on his part, did not hesitate to accept the title of Protector of the Confederation of the Rhine. It is true, that he had engaged to his subjects that he would not extend the limits of his empire beyond that river, which he acknowledged as the natural boundary of France; but this engagement was not held to exclude the sort of seigniorie attached to the new Protectorate, in virtue of which he plunged the German states who composed the Confederacy into every war in which France herself engaged, and at pleasure carried their armies against other German states, their brethren in language and manners, or transferred them to more distant climates, to wage wars in which they had no interest, and to which they had received no provocation. It was also a natural consequence, that a number of inferior members of the empire, who had small tenures under the old constitutions, having no means of defence excepting their ancient rights, were abolished in their capacity of imperial feudatories, and reduced from petty sovereigns to the condition of private nobles. This, though certainly unjust in the abstract principle, was not in practice an inconvenient result of the great change introduced.