ayence, proceeded together down the
river, convoyed by a fleet containing armed men, and thus they thought
to win through to Cologne, and so dispose of their goods. But the robber
Barons combined also, hung chains across the river at the Lorely rocks,
its narrowest part, and realizing that this fleet could defeat any
single one of them, they for once acted in concert, falling upon the
boats when their running against the chains threw them into confusion.

The nobles and their brigands were seasoned fighters all, while the
armed men secured by the merchants were mere hirelings, who fled in
panic; and those not cut to pieces by their savage adversaries became
themselves marauders on a small scale, scattered throughout the land,
for there was little use of tramping back to the capital, where already
a large portion of the population suffered the direst straits.

Not a single bale of goods reached Cologne, for the robbers divided
everything amongst themselves, with some pretty quarrels, and then they
sank the boats in the deepest part of the river as a warning, lest the
merchants of Frankfort and Mayence should imagine the Rhine belonged to
them. Meantime, all petitions to the Emperor being in vain, the
merchants gave up the fight. They were a commercial, not a warlike
people. They discharged their servants and underlings, and starvation
slowly settled down upon the distressed city.

After the maritime disaster on the Rhine, some of the merchants made a
futile attempt to amend matters, for which their leaders paid dearly.
They appealed to the seven Electors, finding their petitions to the
Emperor were in vain, asking these seven noblemen, including the three
warlike Archbishops of Cologne, Treves, and Mayence, to depose the
Emperor, which they had power to do, and elect his son in his stead. But
they overlooked the fact that a majority of the Electors themselves, and
probably the Archbishops also, benefited directly or indirectly by the
piracies on the Rhine. The answer to this request was the prompt hanging
of three leading merchants, the imprisonment of a score of others, and a
warning to the rest that the shoemaker should stick to his last, leaving
high politics to those born to rule. This misguided effort caused the
three Archbishops to arrest Prince Roland, the Emperor's only son, and
incarcerate him in Ehrenfels, a strong castle on the Rhine belonging to
the Archbishop of Mayence, who was thus made custodian of the y