Vain and restless citizens strove to exalt themselves by acquiring the Emperor's patent of nobility. These patents had of old been a favourite source of income to needy German emperors. Wenzel and Sigismund had unsparingly ennobled traders and persons of equivocal character: in short, every one who was ready to pay a certain amount of florins. On the other hand, in 1416, at the Council of Constance, the princes and nobles of the Rhine, Saxony, Suabia, and Bavaria, had set up their backs, made a revision of their own circle, and cashiered the intruders. But the Emperor's patents did not cease on that account. Charles V. himself, who sometimes looked down on the German lords with galling irony, and willingly gave to his chancellor and secretaries the chance of perquisites, had the sad repute "of audaciously raising, for a few ducats, every salt-boiler to the order of nobility." Still more business-like were these proceedings under Ferdinand II. and his successor. For after the Thirty Years' War, not only the living, but the bones in the graves of their ancestors were ennobled, nay, the dead ancestors were even declared worthy of being admitted into noble foundations and to tournaments. At last, after 1648, this traffic of the Imperial court was carried on to such an extent that the princes and states at the breaking up of the Imperial Diet of 1654, and a hundred years later at the election of Charles VII., protested against the detriment which accrued to their own rights of sovereignty and revenues from such a privilege. The newly ennobled in the cities were therefore not to be exempt from the burdens of citizens, and the possessor of a property by villein tenure was not to be invested with the privileges attached to a noble estate. In vain did the Imperial court threaten those with punishment who would not concede the purchased privileges to its patents of nobility. Those also who were declared fit for tournaments and noble benefices, were not on that account received into any knightly order, or noble endowment, nor in any old noble provincial unions. The noble benefices generally did not take patents of nobility, as proofs of noble extraction; it was only the members of old noble families possessing no such patents who were admissible into these endowments. It was only exceptionally that these corporations gave way to a high recommendation. Even the court offices, those of chamberlain, groom of the bed-chamber, equerry, hunting and other noble pages, were privileges of the old nobility. The patents of nobility never forgot to celebrate the virtues and the services rendered both to the prince and commonwealth by the newly ennobled and his ancestors; but, as a zealous defender of the old nobility complains, it was too well-known that, in general, it was only for the "_Macherlohn_" (pay, for the making) that nobility was given.