the above data may be found in Janssen, i.,
vol. i., bk. iii., especially pp. 330-46.

[17] _Zur Geschichte der deutschen Gesellenverbaende._ Leipzig, 1876.

[18] C. 1/5d. The denarius was the South German equivalent of the North
German pfennig, of which twelve went to the groschen.

CHAPTER VI

THE REVOLT OF THE KNIGHTHOOD

We have already pointed out in more than one place the position to
which the smaller nobility, or the knighthood, had been reduced by the
concatenation of causes which was bringing about the dissolution of the
old mediaeval order of things, and, as a consequence, ruining the
knights both economically and politically--economically by the rise of
capitalism as represented by the commercial syndicates of the cities;
by the unprecedented power and wealth of the city confederations,
especially of the Hanseatic League; by the rising importance of the
newly developed world-market; by the growing luxury and the enormous
rise in the prices of commodities concurrently with the reduction in
value of the feudal land-tenures; and by the limitation of the
possibilities of acquiring wealth by highway robbery, owing to Imperial
constitutions, on the one hand, and increased powers of defence on the
part of the trading community, on the other--politically, by the new
modes of warfare in which artillery and infantry, composed of
comparatively well-drilled mercenaries (_Landsknechte_), were rapidly
making inroads into the omnipotence of the ancient feudal chivalry, and
reducing the importance of individual skill or prowess in the handling
of weapons, and by the development of the power of the princes or
higher nobility, partly due to the influence which the Roman civil law
now began to exercise over the older customary Constitution of the
empire, and partly to the budding centralism of authority--which in
France and England became a national centralization, but in Germany, in
spite of the temporary ascendancy of Charles V, finally issued in a
provincial centralization in which the princes were _de facto_
independent monarchs. The Imperial Constitution of 1495, forbidding
private war, applied, it must be remembered, only to the lesser
nobility and not to the higher, thereby placing the former in a
decidedly ignominious position as regards their feudal superiors. And
though this particular enactment had little immediate result, yet it
was none the less resented as a blow struck at the old knightly
privilege