Transformations in the conditions of production, exchange and finance, that were brought about especially by the discovery of America, and the discovery of the passage to India, resulted in a great social reaction for Germany. Germany ceased to be the center of European commerce. The German trades and manufactures declined. At the same time the religious reformation had destroyed the political unity of the nation. Under the cloak of the reformation, the German princes sought to emancipate themselves from imperial rule. On the other hand, these princes oppressed the nobility and favored the cities to serve their own ends. Some of the cities voluntarily placed themselves under the rule of the princes, driven to this step by conditions that were steadily growing worse. The bourgeoisie upon seeing their income threatened, tried to make the restrictions that were intended to guard them against undesirable competition more and more rigorous, and the princes willingly conceded their demands. The ossification of conditions increased, but the general impoverishment increased likewise. Another result of the reformation were the religious struggles and persecutions--used by the princes to serve their own political and economic ends--that raged in Germany with some interruptions for over a century, and finally ended with its complete exhaustion at the end of the Thirty Years’ War. Germany had become a vast field of corpses and ruins. Entire countries and provinces had been devastated, hundreds of cities and thousands of villages partly or completely destroyed, and many of them had been wiped from the surface of the earth forever. In many places the population had been reduced to a third, a fourth, a fifth, even an eighth or a tenth of its original number. Such was the case in Nuremberg, and in the entire Franconian province. In this utmost need, in order to increase the population in the depopulated towns and villages, the unusual measure was occasionally resorted to of permitting one man to have two wives. Men had been decimated by the wars, but there was a superabundance of women. On the 14th of February 1650, the Franconian district council at Nuremberg decreed that “men under 60 should not be admitted into monasteries”; it furthermore decreed that “those clergymen who were not members of an order should become married.” Moreover, “every man should be permitted to wed two wives, but the men should be frequently reminded and exhorted from the pulpits to employ good judgment and discretion, that a married man who ventured to maintain two wives should not only provide well for both of them, but should also endeavor to avoid ill feeling between them.” So even the pulpits were employed to make propaganda for the double marriage and to lay down rules of conduct for the men.