le increasing, was
small.

With no imperial system of taxation, no professional army and no
centralized administration, the real power of the emperor dwindled.
Such as it was he derived it from the fact that he was always elected
from one of the great houses. Since 1438 the Hapsburgs, Archdukes of
Austria, had held the imperial office. Since 1495 there was also an
imperial supreme court of arbitration. [Sidenote: 1495] The first
imperial tax was levied in 1422 to equip a force against the Hussites.
In the fifteenth century also the rudiments of a central administration
were laid in the division of the realm into ten "circles," and the levy
of a small number of soldiers. And yet, at the time of the
Reformation, the Empire was little better than a state in dissolution
through the centrifugal forces of feudalism.

So little was the Empire an individual unit that the policy of her
rulers themselves was not imperial. The statesmanship of Maximilian
was something smaller than national; it was that of his Archduchy of
Austria. The policy of his successor, on the other hand, was
determined by something larger than Germany, the consideration of the
Spanish and Burgundian states that he also ruled. Maximilian tried in
every way to aggrandize his personal power, not that of the German
Nation. [Sidenote: Maximilian I, 1493-1519] The Diet of Worms of 1495
tried to remodel the constitution. It proclaimed a perpetual public
peace, provided that those who broke it should be outlawed, and placed
the duty of executing the ban upon all territories within ninety miles
of the offender. It also passed a bill for taxation, called the
"common penny," which combined features of a poll tax, an {76} income
tax and a property tax. The difficulty of collecting it was great;
Maximilian himself as a territorial prince tried to evade it instead of
setting his subjects the good example of paying it. He probably
derived no more than the trifling sum of 50,000-100,000 gulden from it
annually. The Diet also revived the Supreme Court and gave it a
permanent home at Frankfort-on-the-Main. Feeble efforts to follow up
this beginning of reform were made in subsequent Diets, but they failed
owing to the insuperable jealousies of the princes and because the
party of national unity lost the sympathy of the common people, to whom
alone they could look for support.

Maximilian's external policy, though adventurous and unstable, was
somewhat more