It meant, indeed, a new map of Europe, the minimizing of England's influence on the Continent, the permanent neutralizing of both Austrian and Prussian power, the exclusion of Russia from the councils of western Europe. The means by which it was brought about were as astute as the measure was momentous. Among the German princes who had lent their presence to the splendors of Napoleon's coronation was the only ecclesiastic who had maintained himself amid the changes incident to the general secularization which took place after the treaty of Lunéville--to wit, the Archbishop Dalberg, Elector of Mainz, who had formed the ambitious plan of securing that unity and efficiency of the German Church which both the Pope and Napoleon desired. Of an ancient and noble line, he found no difficulty in putting himself at the head of an extensive movement among the Roman Catholics of western and central Germany, who desired to restore the Church in Germany to a position of influence, and to secure her purity and power in a way similar to that which had been followed in France through the Concordat. The rulers of France had for more than a century been desirous of establishing between their own territories and those of the great German states, Prussia and Austria, a belt of weak states, to serve as a bulwark against their enemies and as a field for the extension of their own influence. Napoleon, making use of the malleable temper produced in Europe by the fires of Austerlitz, proceeded to realize the project. To the Pope he said that, since his authority was not sufficient to bring order out of the ecclesiastical chaos in Germany, he would intrust the task to Dalberg as primate.