Within the Empire, Electors, princes, nobles, and Imperial cities ruled their territories, with many gradations of sovereign rights. The greater princes were real sovereigns, their power only restricted by their states. Noble families, holding temporal principalities in heritable possession, strove incessantly to enlarge their power, to put down the smaller lords round them, and to limit the sovereign rights of the Emperor. In the fifteenth century they had reduced the Imperial power almost to a shadow. It was only by extending the power of his house that the Emperor Maximilian was able to maintain himself against them. We may easily perceive that there were two ways of remodelling this clumsy state edifice of the middle ages. In one case the power of the great princes might rise so high, that the temporal influence of the Pope and the supremacy of the Emperor would be overthrown; then Germany would be divided into a number of individual states, whose conflicts, wars, and destinies might for centuries throw the whole of central Europe into weakness and confusion, and which at last, in another state of development, might lead to new endeavours to restore unity to the Empire. It has been the fate of Germany up to the present time to follow this dangerous path. In the other case, the Emperor might have succeeded in adding to the old groundwork of his power, such real strength, that the opposition of all the ruling princes would be broken, and Germany gradually changed into a modern state, that would either enclose the individual governments in perfect unity, or at least concentrate all the highest powers of government in the hand of one ruler. To form such a state, the Hapsburgers of the sixteenth century, and with more wilful obstinacy those of the seventeenth, have striven to the injury of the German nation and themselves; yet in the year 1519, when Maximilian died, the prospect opened to an able prince was grand, though the power of his house was moderate.