father, Wenzel I., Ottokar had added by marriage and diplomacy Austria, Styria, Carinthia, and Carniola, and thus held a secure predominance in south-eastern Germany. There were also three lesser families, as yet insignificant, and not regarded as belonging to the princely class, which were destined within this period to rise to importance in Germany, while two of them have taken a position among the greatest dynasties Europe has ever seen. The House of Luxemburg, in the thirteenth century the lords of a petty county near the western frontier, produced in the next century four Emperors, and founded a territorial power which survived the family which had created it. The Hapsburgs, hitherto known only as active and successful nobles in Swabia, within this period built up a considerable state in south-eastern Germany, and succeeded to the position which the Luxemburgs had founded. Finally, the Hohenzollerns, who in the thirteenth century combined scattered territories in Franconia with the office of Burggraf of Nürnberg, acquired the electorate of Brandenburg in the fifteenth century, and though their power grew more slowly than that of the Luxemburgs and Hapsburgs, yet it rested on a surer foundation, owed more to ability and policy than to fortune, and may prove in the end both more brilliant and more durable. Among the great territorial princes of Germany must be [Sidenote: The Bishops.] reckoned the very numerous ecclesiastical tenants-in-chief of the Empire. A large area of German soil, especially along the valleys of the Rhine and the Main, was held by bishops and monasteries. Of these clerical princes the most powerful and prominent were the Rhenish archbishops of Mainz, Köln, and Trier. In former times the bishops had been severed from the secular princes by class interests and traditions, and the separation had been encouraged by many of the Emperors, whose policy was to exalt themselves by playing one off against the other. But after the middle of the thirteenth century this distinction tends to become obscured. The rivalry between Emperors and Popes, though it does not disappear, ceases to be the dominant factor in German relations; and during the papal residence in Avignon (1305-1376) the German bishops become to some extent alienated from the Papacy. The result is that the German princes, both clerical and secular, come to form a fairly united class; and the most obvious interest which binds them together is the desire to strengthen their own independence, their ‘liberty,’ as they call it, by weakening the central power. On the other hand, the lesser tenants-in-chief below the princely rank, known in later history as the _Ritterschaft_, or knights, are impelled to cling to the monarchy for support against the constant danger of princely encroachments.