Looking northwards, we see Germany, in the middle of the twelfth century, still administered, although uneasily, under the ancient system of the four nations, Saxony, Franconia, Swabia, and Bavaria; four distinct nationalities which refused permanent combination. This system was, however, in its last decay. Its completeness was everywhere broken in upon by the great ecclesiastical principalities which the piety and policy of the emperors had interposed among the great secular states, to break the impulse of aggressive warfare, to serve as models of good order, and to maintain a direct hold in the imperial hands on territories which could not become hereditary in a succession of priests. Not only so; the debatable lands which lay between the great nations were breaking up into minor states: landgraves, margraves, and counts palatine were assuming the functions of dukes; the dukes, where they could not maintain the independence of kings, were seeing their powers limited and their territories divided. Thus Bavaria was soon to be dismembered to form a duchy of Austria; Saxony was falling to pieces between the archbishops of Cologne and the margraves of Brandenburg: Franconia between the Emperor and the Count Palatine; Swabia was the portion of the reigning imperial house, the treasury therefore out of which the Emperor had to carve rewards for his servants. Between the great house of the Welf in Saxony, Bavaria, and Lombardy, and the Hohenstaufen on the imperial throne and in Franconia and Swabia, subsisted the jealousy which was sooner or later to reach the heart of the Empire itself, to supply the force which threw the dislocated provinces into absolute division. [Sidenote: The intermediate provinces. ] [Sidenote: France.]