ally, of the debasement of the coinage due
to the unscrupulous practices of these notables and of the Jews. The
only sympathy the other estates vouchsafed to the plaints of the
cities was with regard to the right of private war, which the higher
nobles were also anxious to suppress amongst the lower, though
without prejudice, of course, to their own privileges in this line.
All the other articles of the Act of Protest were coolly waived
aside. From all this it will be seen that not much co-operation was
to be expected between such heterogeneous bodies as the knighthood
and the free towns, in spite of their common interest in checking the
threateningly advancing power of the princes and the central Imperial
authority in so far as it was manned and manipulated by the princes.

Amid the decaying knighthood there was, as we have already intimated,
one figure which stood out head and shoulders above every other noble
of the time, whether prince or knight, and that was Franz von
Sickingen. He has been termed, not without truth, "the last flower of
German chivalry," since in him the old knightly qualities flashed up
in conjunction with the old knightly power and splendour with a
brightness hardly known even in the palmiest days of mediaeval life. It
was, however, the last flicker of the light of German chivalry. With
the death of Sickingen and the collapse of his revolt the knighthood
of Central Europe ceased any longer to play an independent part in
history.

Sickingen, although technically only one of the lower nobility, was
deemed about the time of Luther's appearance to hold the immediate
destinies of the empire in his hand. Wealthy, inspiring confidence and
enthusiasm as a leader, possessed of more than one powerful and
strategically situated stronghold, he held court at his favourite
residence, the Castle of the Landstuhl, in the Rhenish Palatinate, in
a style which many a prince of the empire might have envied. As
honoured guests were to be found attending on him humanists, poets,
minstrels, partisans of the new theology, astrologers, alchemists, and
men of letters generally--in short, the whole intelligence and culture
of the period. Foremost amongst these, and chief confidant of
Sickingen, was the knight, courtier, poet, essayist, and pamphleteer,
Ulrich von Hutten, whose pen was ever ready to champion with unstinted
enthusiasm the cause of the progressive ideas of his age. He first
took up the cudgels against the o