Satisfied with these assurances Charles intimated that he would take the government into his own hands, appoint a Regent and a fresh Kammergericht, forbid the imposition of the obnoxious tax, and prohibit the Regiment from dealing with monopolies without again asking his consent. The first great blow at the national government had been struck by the Emperor at the instigation of the German cities; another was at the moment being struck by the German nobility and a section of the German Princes.
Of all the disorderly elements in the German Empire the most dangerous was the Ritterschaft, a class whose characteristics are not adequately denoted by the nearest English equivalent, "knights." Their bearing towards the government and towards the other Estates of the realm recalls that of the English baronage under Stephen and Henry II, and another parallel to their position may be found in the Polish nobles or "gentlemen" whose success in reducing the other elective monarchy in Europe to anarchy would probably have been repeated by the German Ritterschaft but for the restraining force of the territorial Princes. Like the English barons and the Polish nobles they recognised no superior but their monarch, enjoyed no occupation so much as private war, and resisted every attempt to establish orderly government. They had special grievances in the early part of the sixteenth century; the development of commerce was accompanied by a corresponding agricultural depression; and while wealth in the towns increased and prices rose, the return from rents and services remained stationary unless they were exploited on commercial principles. In France and in England under strong monarchies the lords of the land saved their financial position by sheep-farming, enclosures, and other businesslike pursuits, but in Germany pride, or inadaptability, or special facilities for private war kept the knights from resorting to such expedients, and their main support was wholesale brigandage. They took to robbery as to a trade and considered it rather an honour to be likened to wolves. Like wolves, however, they were generally hungry; the organisation of territorial States and the better preservation of peace had, moreover, rendered their trade at once more dangerous and unprofitable; and in 1522 there were knights who lived in peasants' cottages, and possessed incomes of no more than fourteen crowns a year.
To their poverty fresh burdens were added by the reforms of the> national government; the prohibition of private war, the supersession of their ancient feudal customs by the newly-received Roman law, the constant pressure of their powerful neighbours the Princes, drove them into a position of chronic discontent; and iaHhe summer of 1522 the knights of the middle and upper Rhine provinces assembled at Landau and resolved to repudiate the authority of the Reichskammergericht on the ground that it was dominated by the influence of their natural foes, the Princes. They found a leader in the notorious Franz von Sickingen,
