of the
empire. Some months later he died in prison at Neustadt.

Of the victors, Truchsess and Frundsberg considered themselves badly
treated by the authorities whom they had served so well, and
Frundsberg even composed a lament on his neglect. This he loved to
hear sung to the accompaniment of the harp as he swilled down his red
wine. The cruel Markgraf Kasimir met a miserable death not long after
from dysentery, whilst Cardinal Matthaus Lang, the Archbishop of
Salzburg, ended his days insane.

Of the fate of other prominent men connected with the events
described, we have spoken in the course of the narrative.

The castles and religious houses, which were destroyed, as already
said, to the number of many hundreds, were in most cases not built up
again. The ruins of not a few of them are visible to this day. Their
owners often spent the sums relentlessly wrung out of the "common man"
as indemnity in the extravagances of a gay life in the free towns or
in dancing attendance at the Courts of the princes and the higher
nobles. The collapse of the revolt was indeed an important link in the
particular chain of events that was so rapidly destroying the
independent existence of the lower nobility as a separate status with
a definite political position, and transforming the face of society
generally. Life in the smaller castle, the knight's _burg_ or tower,
was already tending to become an anachronism. The Court of the prince,
lay or ecclesiastic, was attracting to itself all the elements of
nobility below it in the social hierarchy. The revolt of 1525 gave a
further edge to this development, the first act of which closed with
the collapse of the knights' rebellion and death of Sickingen in 1523.
The knight was becoming superfluous in the economy of the body
politic.

The rise of capitalism, the sudden development of the world-market,
the substitution of a money medium of exchange for direct barter--all
these new factors were doing their work. Obviously the great gainers
by the events of the momentous year were the representatives of the
centralizing principle. But the effective centralizing principle was
not represented by the Emperor, for he stood for what was after all
largely a sham centralism, because it was a centralism on a scale for
which the Germanic world was not ripe. Princes and margraves were
destined to be bearers of the _territorial_ centralization, the only
real one to which the German peoples were to atta