The fact of the matter is, that the system of money payments strengthened the central power so mightily and immediately, that even without the interposition of the agrarian upheaval, any resistance of the landed nobility would have been senseless. As is shown in the history of antiquity, the army of a central government, financially strong, is always superior to feudal levies. Money permits the armament of peasant sons, and the drilling of them into professional soldiers, whose solid organization is always superior to the loose confederation of an armed mass of knights. Besides, at this stage, the central government could also count on the aid of the well-armed squares of the urban guilds. Gunpowder did the rest in Western Europe. Firearms, however, are a product that can be turned out only in the industrial establishments of a wealthy city. Because of these technical military reasons, even that feudal landlord who might not care for the newly established luxuries and who might only be desirous of maintaining or increasing his independent position, must subject his territories to the same agrarian revolution; since, in order to be strong, he now before all else must have _money_, which in the new order of things, has become the _nervus rerum_, either to buy arms or to engage mercenaries. A second capitalistic wholesale undertaking, therefore, has come into being through the system of payments in money; besides the wholesale management of landed estates, war is carried on as a great business enterprise--the condottieri appear on the stage. The market is full of material for armies of mercenaries, the discharged guards of the feudal lords and the young peasants whose lands have been taken up by the lords. There are instances where some petty noble may mount to the throne of some territorial principality, as happened many a time in Italy, and as was accomplished by Albrecht Wallenstein, even as late as the period of the Thirty Years’ War. But that is a matter of individual fate, not affecting the final result. The local powers disappear from the contest of political forces as independent centers of authority and retain the remnant of their former influence only so long as they serve the princes as a source of supplies; that is, the state composed of its feudal estates.