were the signs.

The growing tendency towards centralization and the consequent
suppression or curtailment of the local autonomies of the Middle Ages
in the interests of some kind of national government, of which the
political careers of Louis XI in France, of Edward IV in England, and
of Ferdinand and Isabella in Spain were such conspicuous instances,
did not fail to affect in a lesser degree that loosely connected
political system of German States known as the Holy Roman Empire.
Maximilian's first Reichstag in 1495 caused to be issued an Imperial
edict suppressing the right of private warfare claimed and exercised
by the whole noble class from the princes of the empire down to the
meanest knight. In the same year the Imperial Chamber (_Reichskammer_)
was established, and in 1501 the Imperial Aulic Council. Maximilian
also organized a standing army of mercenary troops, called
_Landesknechte_. Shortly afterwards Germany was divided into Imperial
districts called circles (_Kreise_), ultimately ten in number, all of
which were under an imperial government (_Reichsregiment_), which had
at its disposal a military force for the punishment of disturbers of
the peace. But the public opinion of the age, conjoined with the
particular circumstances, political and economic, of Central Europe,
robbed the enactment in a great measure of its immediate effect.
Highway plundering and even private war were still going on, to a
considerable extent, far into the sixteenth century. Charles V pursued
the same line of policy as his predecessor; but it was not until after
the suppression of the lower nobility in 1523, and finally of the
peasants in 1526, that any material change took place; and then the
centralization, such as it was, was in favour of the princes, rather
than of the Imperial power, which, after Charles V's time, grew weaker
and weaker. The speciality about the history of Germany is, that it
has not known till our own day centralization on a national or racial
scale like England or France.

At the opening of the sixteenth century public opinion not merely
sanctioned open plunder by the wearer of spurs and by the possessor of
a stronghold, but regarded it as his special prerogative, the exercise
of which was honourable rather than disgraceful. The cities certainly
resented their burghers being waylaid and robbed, and hanged the
knights wherever they could; and something like a perpetual feud
always existed between the wealth